comments to the linked thread are humorous. labs is getting rated as hott by students! ttaM is considering a pseudonym of some kind!
Even without the real life background to that novel it sounds douchey. Hot, rich barely legal girl falls in love with her Marty Stu English teacher which leads to much angsting and sexy times? How thick do you have to be to be taken in by that shit?
The book doesnt sound fearless. I agree with Martin. "hot rich girls fall in love/lust with their young teacher!". How original.
Is it clear whether Seabold and NYTBR knew about his past?
2 gets it exactly right.
OTOH, that plot gets him halfway to a Nobel Prize in literature by some accounts.
5: yeah, well, sucks to be me. I probably shouldn't even have posted on it, but this guy driving into douchetown in the douchemobile just sucked me in. in her voice? in her voice? god, what an epic douche.
That guy should get egged. And I thought I didn't support that sort iof thing.
whoa, whoa, benquo; don't let's get all violent.
I wonder if "Marie" has a cause of action under French law. Probably not--this being the birthplace of the roman à clef. But the French civil code is weirdly different from Anglo Saxon common law in matters like this, so who knows.
8: If you're going after him with a food product, why not pepper spray?
this post has been brought to you by "dudes. does the mysterious alameida hate and mistrust them too much, not enough, or exactly the right amount? pt. XXIV" I believe halford suggested some kind of impregnable fortress guarded by ninja-supermodel-hackers, maybe I should look into that. rob's been having trouble recruiting them, I know, but maybe I'm better placed to win their trust and their wicked-sharp swords. luckily I would trust my husband in an impregnable fortress of supermodel-ninja-hackers.
I was thinking for a moment that this guy probably buys into the idea that any sacrifice (of other people) is justified in the name of Art. But I thought again, and I bet it's worse than that. He probably thinks the student he had the affair with should be grateful. She should be honored that he turned her life into Literature. That's the vibe I'm getting from where he's getting reviews and from the kiss-off line that Marty Stu gets: "I still dream about him."
A creep and a cad.
Maybe she could write her own book? Unfortunately, it would be judged in literary terms, so unless it were a better book than his in that sense she'd still lose. If she fictionalized it she wouldn't have to worry about libel laws.
she could make his character be a giant, epic, black hole of douchiness that sucks all life out of all that is non-douchey.
I've mostly recovered my customary sang-froid. this just bugged me.
This sort of thing is better served in the lyric or aphoristic form. Long-form narratives written to make somebody else look bad tend to work out little better than books written to make oneself look awesome, even in French. Probably true even before comment threads (mumble Jezebel mumble the Erinyes roll their eyes mumble "A racist called somebody fat!" mumble), but the Internet manufactures what breeds contempt and subsists on what familiarity breeds.
Did you know that they have special fruit roll-ups that are like twisty ropes now? But mom says I can only have one a day because they're really expensive.
20: really? is the ToS sock-puppeting the dutch cookie?
18: bad as they may be, jezebel comment threads are clearly the least fucked-up things linked or alluded to in the post. I'm willing to agree that that's an overall sad verdict, however.
George Sand wrote a book about her relationship with Musset called Elle et Lui (her and him). Musset was dead, but his brother wrote a counter-book about the relationship called Lui et Elle. Sand also put Sandeau, her somewhat ridiculous ex, in the book Horace as the somewhat ridiculous title character. Everyone should read more George Sand.
Alameida is not a joto. What a thing to say.
Wikipedia says: JoTo is an Ancient Japanese word. Translated, it means "excellent; the best, very high class."
Seriously ToS, go eat a gun already.
Apo, dude. I couldn't agree more about being annoyed as fuck, but don't say it like that.
21: this is my first comment in this thread, al. And almost certainly my last, as I have a deadline staring me in the face. That staid, I do hate Jews.
13: The playing field is tilted far enough in favor of guys like this to look more like a ski slope. It's not just authors who think exploitation is justified in the name of Art -- it's also publishers, journalists, readers, male and female aesthetes of all stripes. I haven't read the book, but the following partial list of things that justify this particular exploit probably applies:
- art
- the existence of a power difference
- the man's self-reported charisma, which cannot be left out of a fictional account
- the girl's attractiveness and vulnerability
- the existence of a relationship
- the whiff of punishment for the girl at the end
- the man's writing talent, which IME has to be unbelievably deficient in order not to rate
- that he pwned the girl by writing and publishing first, easy for him to do given the power differential even if all else were equal
The book's title is especially hilarious, for certain values of hilarious.
Bah, I don't know. There's a form of argument that Tony Judt takes a lot in Postwar and elsewhere, alleging that support for Communist regimes among left intellectuals was in direct proportion to how much violence and terror those regimes used -- that these intellectuals were specifically supportive of the violence in the system. This is cynical and possibly falsifiable, in any event not provable. But even so, I think something similar goes on with the literature of sexual harassment -- it's not just that readers and critics excuse the harassment, they specifically value the art for disregarding the framework encoded in law, and exclusively on behalf of the figures who would be perpetrators. See (maybe I'll try to find the link later) Francine Prose's Blue Angel as exhibit A.
But as for 4, somehow I don't think this guy has written anything on the order of Waiting for the Barbarians or Life and Times of Michael K, nor will go on to write Elizabeth Costello. Turns out I can forgive almost anything under those circumstances. (Flippanter, just ooc: any chance you've read or encountered Coetzee's Giving Offense?)
things actually got sexual and I broke it off
Ouch!
I'm really not seeing how this compares at all to Disgrace. Coetzee's novel does anything but glamorize a bad-boy teacher who has an affair with his students. Sebold says Maksik lets the reader "thoroughly understand" the "non-monstrous" teacher. But the teacher in Disgrace pretty clearly is a monster, and Coetzee never lets you feel confident of anything, ever. Also, the self serving hot-for-teacher novel normally ignores all the political context for the relationship, while Coetzee's book is full of parallels between the teacher's relationship with a student, the relations between blacks and whites in South Africa, and the relationship between humans and animals. Disgrace is specifically a novel about exploitation.
31 is an excellent comment and one that I wholeheartedly endorse.
|| Emails that grate -- Fancy-Pants Professor Who Had Requested a Copy of a Paper of Mine and Whom I Do Not Know at All: Oudemia -- Can I say this paper is forthcoming *yet*? |>
The horror of having somebody want to cite you?
34: It is *not* forthcoming? I haven't looked at it in a year? They've asked this question before?
I know! I have all these clients up in my grill with, are the drawings forthcoming *yet*? I'm busy commenting, people! Either your drawings will complete themselves, or you'll get them in the distant future. Regardless, off my back!
Thus revealed: the real reason I went away, to make H-G think that I was diligently at work on her project.
Perhaps you could take this as a disguised bit of praise and encouragement to submit.
31: Disgrace is a great book. It never allows you to completely identify who the exploiter and the exploited are -- it captures in horrifying depth that sort of cannibalistic mutual predation, that chain of exploitation.
29: if the girl was as ruthless as the author and had beaten him to the publication then I'm sure she could have trumped him. Young hot girl writing about sleeping with her teacher has probably more publicity oomph than the reverse. But normal people don't think about exploiting their relationships in that way. I'm sure it was a more painful experience for her than him too.
Is this new psychodrama any better/more interesting than "Froky Doesn't Play Around Here Anymore"?
10 -- not at all clear that "Marie" couldn't sue here. I'd probably take the case, and it would sure be fun to rock this dude for his entire advance.
|| I'm not going to live comment, but the Seawolves of Stony Brook lead Sam Houston State at the half.|>
40: There is plenty enough disgust at female sexuality, and vengeance for attacking older-male-getting-it-off privilege, for that to be a unpleasant strategy for the young woman.
42: On what grounds? It is not illegal to write fictionalized accounts of real events. Could she claim libel?
45 -- False light, I'd say. It doesn't matter if it's fictionalized, it doesn't matter if it's fictionalized, if the people are identifiable.
Thus revealed: the real reason I went away, to make H-G think that I was diligently at work on her project.
Revisionist history! You had already left! We only hired you to guilt trip you into coming back.
Here's comment d to section 564 of the Restatement. The illunstration looks directly applicable:
A libel may be published of an actual person by a story or essay, novel, play or moving picture that is intended to deal only with fictitious characters if the characters or plot bear such a resemblance to actual persons or events as to make it reasonable for its readers or audience to understand that a particular character is intended to portray that person. Mere similarity of name alone is not enough; nor is it enough that the readers of a novel or the audience of a play or a moving picture recognize one of the characters as resembling an actual person, unless they also reasonably believe that the character is intended to portray that person. If the work is reasonably understood as portraying an actual person, it is not decisive that the author or playwright did not so intend. (See Comment f). The fact that the author or producer states that his work is exclusively one of fiction and in no sense applicable to living persons is not decisive if readers actually and reasonably understand otherwise. Such a statement, however, is a factor to be considered by the jury in determining whether readers did so understand it, or, if so, whether the understanding was reasonable.
Illustration: The A motion picture producing company produces a film based upon historical events but offered as a fictitious play. In the film, B, a young woman who was a participant in some of these events, is represented as having yielded to the hypnotic power of the villain. In spite of the deviations of the film from the exact historical facts, B's friends reasonably understand that she is portrayed in the picture. The film is defamatory of B.
Flippanter, just ooc: any chance you've read or encountered Coetzee's Giving Offense?
No, but maybe I'll order it. I've tried one or two of Coetzee's novels/stories and never found them particularly sympathetic. (I sort of think that white South African writers enjoy a little grade inflation in the U.S. and Teabagland, but that's probably unfair.)
Looking back at the OP, I hate to take issue with alameida while she's timezone-disadvantaged, but I am inclined to disagree with the statement that "his victim's feelings that she is being violated again by his book should be respected by not reviewing that shit in the NYRB or whatever, on moral principles." I wouldn't review the work described, and I probably wouldn't read it, without distancing, evaluating, aestheticizing decades between its creation and publication and me,* but I don't think that the risk, or the reality, of someone feeling bad or unhappy as a result of publication and publicity ought to weigh heavily against the at least notionally aesthetic judgments of publishers and critics.
That said, a critic would be perfectly within his or her purview to judge a book's quality or accomplishment as inadequate to overcome the author's "platform" (negative or positive, I guess). I wouldn't mind reading more reviews like that.
* Apropos recent reading, I disapprove of war and the glorification of war, and Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel -- even in later, revised editions -- has some ice-cold descriptions of killing British and French soldiers in the trenches and what Jünger thought about that, and for many decades after 1918 it was probably difficult or impossible for British or French veterans to read without anger or disgust, but it is a hell of a book that I, and I suppose the world generally, would have been poorer without.
||So what do you do when you've completed all the steps involved in becoming what you always wanted, but then don't actually want to do that anymore?|>
Is there something in particular that you'd really like to be doing?
I bet we could help Barack, actually. I know what my advice would be.
Engage in a technically legal but morally reprehensible affair. Write a roman a clef about it.
Cry, enjoy health insurance, cry, enjoy health insurance, masturbate, cry.
I'll stop now. I've been running on plan B, C, or D for so long I can't think of any useful advice. I'm not usually one to have useful advice, but in this case, I have a reason.
So what do you do when you've completed all the steps involved in becoming what you always wanted, but then don't actually want to do that anymore?
Bask in your superior normality, so different than the crappy normality of failures. There are only two types of people, and you are one of them.
50: The DE's kid just did that. He's switched careers and has been willing to pay the price in effort and money. My suggestion from the other side of the age range is (assuming your kids & pets won't starve) go for it. Life is really to short to be unhappy with a major portion of your life if you can avoid it.
|| http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=7312026 |>
Damn. Our friends don't want to hang out with us because or kid has been puking. Also our kid is pukey.
On the plus side, I had the foresight to change my sweater to match the pedialyte in case it all comes back up again.
I think it depends on whether there is something you want to do more, instead. (Beyond wanting to have the capital necessary to fund one's own endowed chair in pottering around and reading light fiction, that is.)
So what do you do when you've completed all the steps involved in becoming what you always wanted, but then don't actually want to do that anymore?
There's this great book you could read...
61, 64 -- Agreed: life's to short to spend a lot of it unhappy, but also too short to chase chimeras. Or chimerae.
This afternoon I saw six wild turkey in the city. Not in or near a park or open ground. Maybe they perfected the turkey lifestyle and decided they wanted something else.
A fair fraction of the time now I feel like 50, so tell us if you figure out the answer.
50: Hard out there for a dilettante.
I don't think I have it in me to be passionate about a career. Or I've never been lit up about anything enough, at least.
I could easily be unhappy in most jobs, though.
I'm on my iPad.
Steve Jobs: Micromanaging our orthography from beyond the grave.
Rudolph Hess switched careers at midlife. It worked out horribly except when compared to any other possibility.
44: I don't know, I think she'd probably get some sympathy if it were skillfully written (a big if, she was just a kid). After stuff like "The Surrender" and "The Kiss" this would barely even register as confessional.
50: I might switch careers if I had a strong positive motivation (i.e. something else I really wanted to do). I don't think a negative motivation alone is enough.
Whoa. That would have freaked me the fuck out.
They're totally fearless now that Thanksgiving has passed. Safe for another year!
81: A few years ago, I was walking home along a much busier street around 1 in the morning when I saw a pair of wild turkeys strutting back and forth at the corner (Aiken and Fifth, for the record). That freaked me the fuck out; now a half dozen by daylight is nothing.
82: We could still use them to make bourbon.
Those turkeys are awesome. Take that, humans! (They don't seem very scary, though, and I'm not sure I'd freak the fuck out as much as I'd laugh and laugh. What are you, city folk?)
Though I do actually worry about them a little bit. They are probably lost. Somehow.
The most dangerous thing about wild turkeys is my dog jumping from the back seat over my shoulder and out the window to chase them.
They don't seem very scary, though, and I'm not sure I'd freak the fuck out as much as I'd laugh and laugh. What are you, city folk?
I would have thought my fear of birds was well established by now, but people seem to keep forgetting it.
83: I was on Wilkins about where Aiken might be if Aiken went that far. I know some live in the bigger parks, but I didn't think they could keep feed outside them. IIRC, they don't fly very far or high enough to stay over buildings.
83.1: at that hour? They were almost certainly dealing drugs. You were right to be scared.
88: I got the impression that the male distrusted my intentions towards the hen. (Besides, everyone knows that the drug-dealers in Shadyside just hang out in the bars, like everyone else.)
87: Must be the same flock, then.
The flesh of the wild turkey is more highly colored and more perfumed than the domestic fowl.
86: I'd never noted it, apparently. I used to be wary of beings who could move about quickly and unpredictably -- see bees, larger spiders and beetle-like things -- but I've calmed down remarkably. I just keep an eye on them.
The bird problem I don't really get.
Brad DeLong was worried about turkey attacks a few years ago, but he lives in the boonie suburbs somewhere.
A friend of mine around here has seen 15+ turkeys in her front yard. They're a mild annoyance.
It's my understanding that turkeys and geese know when the hunting season is.
If you imagine 400 lb. 7' turkeys the dinosaur relationship becomes more convincing. Ostriches would be about right if they had slashing beaks.
We have large flocks/gaggles/squadrons of wild turkeys around here. They don't seem very menacing at all -- they're beautiful, actually, if a bit ungainly -- except when they dart out into the ride in front of my bike.
I might switch careers if I had a strong positive motivation (i.e. something else I really wanted to do). I don't think a negative motivation alone is enough.
Depends on how negative. What I'm doing sure isn't Plan A and wasn't even on my radar as a career ten years ago. But I do enjoy it and it's paradise compared to the time I did at ebay. A buddy of mine who was also ready to blow his brains out at ebay is now a union electrician. Neither one of us are living out childhood dreams or anything but we're both a hell of a lot happier.
The bird problem I don't really get.
There's nothing to get, really. It's basically a totally irrational phobia.
49:assuming it were actually a work of incomparable literary value, like he's fucking nabokov over here or something, I'd be willing to accept some reviewing which followed: a lot of sad frowny faces; open musing on whether the art of the evil can ever be considered truly beautiful (mumble leni riefenstahl mumble); frank comments to the effect that the reviewer wouldn't leave his own 8-year-old child in the same building with the writer for 10 nanoseconds, even if the writer were in a hannibal lecter-style series of restraints and there were some sort of panic room like jodie foster had that other time; extravagant apologies to "marie" for furthering her distress if that were the unintended result of the review; no, really, extravagant ones, with groveling and everything; lots of comments about how the true art in the book is in helping us understand something about the alien internal life of the epic douche; and perhaps a few more things along those lines.
but really, "I'm brave enough to admit I fucked my hot 17-year-old HS student?" not impressed. "he helps us understand how a douchey 30-year-old could fuck one of his hot HS students?" again, still waiting for the impressed. I'm not suggesting the book be banned or anything; I think editors should just treat it the way they would a "lightly fictionalized" book about serial rape and murder by a convicted serial murderer who didn't end up getting life. naw, fuck, male publishers and reviewers would get all contrarian about that shit too wouldn't they, in a misguided free mumia/found christ in prison way, as needed. fuck it. fuck all y'all. impregnable mountain fortress guarded by ninja-supermodel hackers.
Brad DeLong was worried about turkey attacks a few years ago, but he lives in the boonie suburbs somewhere.
My mom used to report gaggles/squadrons of turkeys in her vicinity in New Hampshire, and the basic idea was to admire them but stay generally out of the way if they were in the yard or wandering around in the middle of the road: you wouldn't want to hit them with your car, and they're kind of unpredictable, so admire from a distance, but otherwise, worry not. Check on the whereabouts of the cat or dog, maybe.
This seems like basic, obvious stuff. Wild turkeys! A good thing!
To give teo something to fear besides birds:
"The man woke up to a Sawzall blade vibrating on his neck, he told police."
Frank comments to the effect that the reviewer wouldn't leave his own 8-year-old child in the same building with the writer for 10 nanoseconds
Based on my studies, no one's daughter of any age would be safe with any of the great writers of the French 19th century. Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Gautier, Hugo, Zola, Dumas, Musset, the Goncourts, and who did I forget? Start with satyriasis and the virgin-whore thing, and then there are individual quirks too.
Baudelaire was relatively harmless compared to the others, also Nerval. George Sand was a nice lady and probably bi.
In other news, one of my Facebook friends married one of her HS teachers and is still married to him 35 years later.
99: The man woke up to a Sawzall blade vibrating on his neck, he told police....While the man checked the house for the intruder, he was struck by a hatchet. .... At some point during the commotion, he was struck on the head by what later turned out to be a mallet.
Mr. and Mrs. Slow Learner.
To bad he's probably not inclined to write a novel. I'd like to know what was going through his mind.
49: additionally I feel that your unstated implication that my views, if adhered to in the past, would have somehow deprived the world of jünger's storm of steel is tendentious at best. again, I'm just suggesting the people in charge of publishing, and of assigning the reviewing, and of doing the reviewing, exercise a little moral judgment and say, in essence: I wouldn't fuck that book with your dick.
I am aware that in reality no one cares about anything except money, and expecting the starving writers who keep themselves afloat freelancing to turn down the NYRB on hazy moral grounds is a little rich. nonetheless, as the title explains, even if someone is going to do a morally objectionable thing, that someone doesn't have to be you personally. or you could write a review and have the whole thing be about the event-horizon douchiness of the author.
in the US, high school student/teacher relationships are criminalized more or less regardless of age; the same doesn't appear to be true in france. again, however, it's not a legal question. a person can travel to malawi or what have you and have sex legally with 14-year-olds; nothing compels us to praise a lightly fictionalized account of said journey. I am not unaware that evil people can produce great works of art, I just a) massively doubt this qualifies b) don't think that obliges any of us to give the evil person a hand helping them scale the literary lights during their lifetime.
frank comments to the effect that the reviewer wouldn't leave his own 8-year-old child in the same building with the writer for 10 nanoseconds
Yeah, this is the thing that bugs me about a lot of these types of books.* I can't read the defenses of them without the strong feeling that people are abdicating human responsibility in a way that they would never do if the subject were closer to home for them. It's like the race/IQ discussion that's currently going on again -- the people who want to debate that topic as a bloodless, intellectually fun sparring match are somehow never ever ever the people who get hurt by it. And that *itself* should be a clue for them -- and yet it isn't.
I think a lot about how people get good at making a leap of imagination. Most people aren't born with it, I don't think. And yet some do develop it. They grow up and they realize that their fun little abstract debate is someone else's real-life nightmare and they stop.
*N.b. I have never heard of the book mentioned in the OP and haven't read any of the links.
It's like the race/IQ discussion that's currently going on again
I thought of that as well. (Sullivan seems to have begun to wring his hands over the professional decisions he makes. It's ... interesting.)
97: projection much? This guy violated trust and did bad stuff, but he is not your stepfather, he is not the photography teacher who by your account starting hitting on you when you were 12 (!), he is not anywhere close to a serial rapist/murderer.
the gist: an asshole teacher in france who was fucking one of his 17-year-old students wrote a lightly fictionalized account of it, and is being lionized as a literary genius. the exact same thing happened to me, but not in france, and my teacher was unable to find a publisher (because it probably was terrible, anyway) and thus I am annoyed on behalf of the victim in the french case. in addition to which, basic humanity, etc.
JE, you're absolutely right that many great artists in the past have been bad people (some of my favorites!), and that we enjoy their art nonetheless. if the book's that great, it can afford to wait a few more decades until it doesn't piss off the (now 20-ish) marie quite so bad. also, again, just because someone needs to be the agent for this guy's book (for some value of need and stipulating the world-historical greatness of the novel) doesn't mean we shouldn't heap opprobrium and scorn on whoever is the actual agent in question. that being contingent, if you follow me.
I also know people who started happy relationships with older men as teens, or participated in them, or whatever. that's not at all relevant here, though, since we have actual testimony from the girl in question that she felt herself to have been victimized and feels his newfound fame on the basis of exploiting her to be further injury. so we don't need to talk about whether such relationships can ever turn out well, since this one didn't, which we found out by having a reporter ask her. journalism!
106: if one is going to construct a hypothetical, one often makes it an extreme case to illustrate the principle.
105: he can never wring those hands enough. having the fucking orwell quote up there about seeing what is in front of one's face is humorous, though. given that it's been there the. whole. time. statistical debunkings have been available nearly from day one.
106: and dude, cut me a little slack on this one. I'm willing to admit I'm personally prejudiced against smarmy teachers in their 30s who have sex with their 17-year-old students and then write novels about it. and do you know why? because I'm racist.
108.2: Eh, if Ta-Nehisi got him to wring his hands, finally, I count it a win.
even if someone is going to do a morally objectionable thing, that someone doesn't have to be you personally. or you could write a review and have the whole thing be about the event-horizon douchiness of the author.
More reviewers ought to rise to the challenge of reviewing compromised or suspect works in moral or ethical terms without abandoning or abjuring aesthetic assessment. I'd like to see that, actually. I bow to no man in my appreciation of the blasting moral condemnation as literary and/or theological genre. However, condemning is not the same as dismissing something or somebody as "douchey" (or, Christ have mercy, "privileged") or, my personal favorite, dropping something off the bridge as "just bad/lazy/poor/unimaginative writing." Man, that one gets old.
I wasn't really defending satyriasis in the name of art. I actually have come to doubt those guys. I really don't think that you should expect wisdom from them, at a minimum. Except maybe Nerval and George Sand. And when you look at it, the realism of realism is fake.
I actually haven't been able to bring myself to read the whole thing. if ta-nehisi eked out some hand-wringing more power to him, but there's going to need to be a lot more ashes and sackcloth and public denunciations/recantations before I would ever regard sullivan in a positive moral light. again, because I'm racist, ovbs.
99: combines advance planning and moron-level idiocy in astonishing quantities. it's like she saw a csi show about arterial blood spray and the difficulty of cleaning it off every surface, and then was like, "I need a challenge!"
111: I can see that that must have been painful, but maybe the reviews for your next novel will be more favorable? hope springs eternal and all.
"The man woke up to a Sawzall blade vibrating on his neck, he told police."
I should hope that anyone who attempted to murder me would use a weapon without a stupid brand name. Cf. the ignominy of dying in Sansabelt slacks and a Drizabone raincoat.
112: eh, I'm not so committed to my views as to not enjoy works of art by bad people; I just think in the here and now there's no call to cast one's principles aside in the name of art if there is a living victim who feels the sting of the book's success keenly. especially because this sounds more marty stu-ish than joycean.
114: The Savage Sword of Pikachu will find its readership in paperback. Or on the Kindle.
115: don't get killed in a bret easton ellis novel. ian fleming, frankly iffy as well.
I'm not sure why 99 should be of concern to me personally.
112: OK, fine, Ms Bovary. Wait, I didn't say that.
113: before I would ever regard sullivan in a positive moral light
Nobody said anything about that.
120: If you ever lay down on a bed and hear plastic crinkle, I hope you don't think "I've hooked-up with a bed wetter."
99: "Christ, that sounds like a reciprocating saw. Please let there just be a dildo on the end of it."
"Honey, why is the orange extension cord in the bedroom?"
OT: I do not enjoy eyedrops. Particularly when one kind has to be applied hourly and makes the affected eye weep a milky tear or two each time and the other, twice-daily kind stings like a [very, very bad word]. And then there's the gel that has to be smeared under the eyelid at bedtime. Christ.
I suppose to determine whether the reviewers, publishers et al are abdicating their moral responsibilities in order to circulate and lionize a transparently Marty Stu-ish piece of borderline pedophilic tripe, one would need to read the actual book. Some of the reviews do rather seem to suggest that there's considerably more to the book than Jezebel's characterization of it, and that Alice Sebold is a literary editor with an extremely solid track record and reputation would also suggest at least the possibility that there's more complication in the novel than online polemics would like to admit.
On the other hand, whatever its aesthetic virtues or lack thereof, the knowledge that the book has sent the community that apparently inspired it into a tailspin would make reading the book, or indeed even mustering the interest to read it, pretty difficult. For me, anyway. Even if the novel were superb, I'd still find myself questioning the relationship to biography on every page, something I usually try to avoid doing with fiction but would be much harder to do in this case. (But then on the other, other hand, I suppose some readers might be drawn to read it by the controversy itself.)
111: Where's the NYRB piece on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Here. From the very end:
It is the ingenuousness and sincerity of Larsson's engagement with good and evil that give the trilogy its power to attract so many millions of people. There really is no suspicion in these books that his heroes' obsessions might be morbid. Certainly the reader will not be invited to question his or her enjoyment in seeing sexual humiliation inflicted on evil rapists. That pleasure will not be spoiled. It's not surprising, reading biographical notes, that as an adolescent Larsson witnessed a gang rape and despised himself for failing to intervene, or that in his twenties he spent time in Eritrea training guerrillas--women guerrillas, of course--and then much of his mature life investigating and denouncing neo-Nazis.
The work itself sounds to be pretty fucked up, and I thought when I first read the review, and continue to think, that it's clear-eyed in keeping that in mind while offering its best assessment of aesthetic value.
This is not quite the same as what 111 appears to be describing.
would be much harder to do in this case
would be much harder to avoid in this case
the book has sent the community that apparently inspired it into a tailspin
There was a community that inspired it? Cripe, I might have to read something about this after all. Oh -- is that, like, the town and/or neighborhood or something? Are you sure there's anything interesting in this?
If bob were around, I'm sure he'd cite Carl Schmitt in support of the proposition that communities arise only in opposition.
131: The community being the cohort of students -- Marie's contemporaries -- at the school where the author was apparently a teacher.
Also, in 128.1, I was confusing Alice Sebold with someone else. This is her first job and book as an editor; she's best known as a novelist and memoirist. Another interesting angle on this story: if Maksik's detractors indeed have the right of it, it would be very conflicting for her. One of her books is the memoir Lucky, a memoir about her recovery from a rape.
We have large flocks/gaggles/squadrons of wild turkeys around here. They don't seem very menacing at all -- they're beautiful, actually, if a bit ungainly -- except when they dart out into the ride in front of my bike.
Yeah, I saw two different flocks when in Davis a week ago, starting--coincidentally enough--the day after Thanksgiving. Then again, I only arrived on Thanksgiving, so it didn't take much of a coincidence.
I have pictures, but they're pretty blurry. I think my hands just shake too much for camera-phone photos to every come out okay.
My aunt said she's been menaced and indeed chased by them in the past. But never caught; so maybe they just wanted to say hi.
It's easy to believe that a turkey's idea of menacing and an aunt's idea might be different. They might have just thought she was funny-looking.
I once had a group of turkeys run me off a sidewalk.
Speaking of: so a girl I'm tutoring--a junior in high school--was asking me the other day about, basically, why all American history is about people being horrible to other people, what with the slavery and genocide and Jim Crow and all. Like, why do people do that? I wasn't sure what to say. I ended up suggesting she read Octavia Butler, especially "Kindred," and maybe Coetzee, since I find novels better for stretching one's empathetic imagination than non-fiction or movies, but that may just be me. (I'm starting to think the latter suggestion, at least, was a mistake; I'd only read "Disgrace", and that was ages ago, and now that I'm reading "Waiting for the Barbarians," I'm having an "is this really appropriate for a 16 or 17 year old?" reaction (one I'd have been pretty dismissive of as a 16 or 17 year old, but so it goes).
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other? Giving it a bit more thought, I suppose I'd emphasize how, when you have a cultural system built on mistreatment of others, dehumanizing them becomes psychologically necessary for normal, "decent" people, because otherwise they'd be forced to acknowledge their own complicity, or become radicals, and neither is easy. And then dehumanizing them makes it easier to inflict further degradation upon them, which then makes it still more necessary to refuse to acknowledge their humanity, &c &c. Other suggestions?
I actually find wild turkeys pretty interesting.
TURKEYS DON'T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT MENACING.
138: You're probably way gawky-looking, scary and unpredictable, essear. It's understandable.
I wonder whether Doris Lessing's memoirish stuff would be good on the topic. Luckily, I just DL'd a pirate copy of "Going Home," so maybe I'll find out and report back.
140: that was pretty interesting. I had no idea turkeys went from Mexico to Europe to the Eastern seaboard! Wacky.
139:
I'd emphasize how, when you have a cultural system built on mistreatment of others, dehumanizing them becomes psychologically necessary for normal, "decent" people, because otherwise they'd be forced to acknowledge their own complicity, or become radicals, and neither is easy. And then dehumanizing them makes it easier to inflict further degradation upon them, which then makes it still more necessary to refuse to acknowledge their humanity, &c &c. Other suggestions?
Not from me, that's pretty much the core of my analysis of race and racism.
139: Eric Foner, drawing on about a million other people, talks about the "American irony", which, in his view, means that historically when one group has done well -- especially seen an expansion of their rights and liberties -- their good fortune has usually come at the expense of some other group. So, for example, the relationship between American slavery and American freedom that Ed Morgan wrote about a million years ago. Or the way that the expansion of democracy for white men under Andrew Jackson pivoted on a massive contraction of rights for Native people and, again, African-Americans.
It could easily sound like Foner is positing something like a zero-sum game, and that's really not the case. It's a much more supple and subtle argument than that. Anyway, one part of the utility of the argument is that it allows for some sense that the United States hasn't always been and isn't now just an unalloyed shitshow. This country is and has been a very diverse place where some people have done and are continuing to do very well for themselves (and sometimes even very good for others). But the notion of American exceptionalism or a universally accessible American dream, for Foner at least, is pure bullshit.
I could say more about this, but as usual, I'm pretty bored by myself, so I'll leave it there.
139: why all American history is about people being horrible to other people
If the question was really about why all American history -- as usually taught -- is about that, I'd probably explain that most American history -- as taught -- is political history, which is mostly the story of struggle. As a counterpoint, I'd offer her some history of utopian movements, or maybe of Transcendentalism. Something like that.
But I gather she wasn't really asking why American history is taught that way, but why people are awful to each other. Right. 139.2 seems as good a start as any.
way gawky-looking, scary and unpredictable
It's too bad OkCupid got rid of that "list three adjectives describing yourself" feature.
If someone could take my name off 146 and put my pseud there instead, I'd be grateful.
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other?
Fear.
sorry about the eye infection, flippanter, that sounds horrid. trapnel: my children are much younger but I have the same problem to some extent; they know right away that slavery is wrong (in fact, girl x's first comment on the subject was "why did they think that was ok?") but it's harder to explain what motivated all that slave-owning amoung our ancestors/society at large. maybe books about less physically harmful wrongdoing (horrible bullying or whatever) could form a basis from which to, um, x trapnel-ate?
Eric Foner, drawing on about a million other people,
Is he the guy who writes on the faces of people who pass out at parties and then puts pictures on the internet?
Or maybe the guy who films himself naked writing on some woman's body.
Is he the guy who writes on the faces of people who pass out at parties and then puts pictures on the internet?
I'm glad I went to college before the Internet really got going.
148: Wild turkeys aren't going to ask you out no matter how you describe yourself. You'll have to switch gears entirely.
could form a basis from which to, um, x trapnel-ate?
Oh, wow. That was just ... wow. I hope this thread doesn't die before Stanley sees that beauty.
More seriously, Alameida, hrmm, that sounds reasonable, but I can't think of any good books about bullying off the top of my head.
I would think books about bullying would be way more traumatic than a reasonably concise description of the social, economic, religious and geographical forces that drove chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere. You don't have to go into gory detail about the rapes and maiming after all, though they'd probably warrant a few mentions.
On the other hand, maybe if you were like "This Eric Foner/Gunnar Myrdal/Frederick Douglass book has all the answers to your questions, but I'd really like you to read this book on bullying instead" would be a pretty clever reverse psychology ploy to get them to do most of the legwork on their own.
Thanks for the pointer, VW, though I think that her bafflement is more about the social-psychological question, rather than the specifically American aspects of it. Or maybe not; I may have heard it that way due to my own preconceptions. Well, I can always ask her.
This is a junior in high school, who probably knows all about bullying; I'd think that the bullying example would just be to analogize to a broader impulse that can lead to e.g. slavery, genocide, Jim Crow etc. Except that I don't think that covers it. On a larger scale, it's not just people being mean to others; it's that they don't realize they're being mean.
Trapnel, you're the go-to guy on the centrality of institutions: slavery et al. were institutionalized -- sanctioned and codified, backed up by state force. If anyone can talk about the way in which that works, you can. If you really have to answer *why* people wind up in societal structures like that, I'm casting about for a way not to say that it's resource competition. Also see what VW says about Foner upthread.
139: I ended up suggesting she read Octavia Butler,
Wouldn't be my first pick. Octavia Butler was great at articulating fury but really very weak on why people are horrible to each other. (Not that understanding the motives for seemingly alien or evil viewpoints is a common strong point for many authors.)
Probably the best place to look is in the kind of work that skilfully dissects a society through a number of different characters and angles. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; Joyce's Dubliners; Toni Morrison's Paradise. Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, but it's a bit of a tome. All of which might be rather strong fare for a high-school junior, though, and very contingent on what their reading level is. Likewise, one could recommend almost anything by Jose Saramago, a virtuoso at this sort of thing. But it's hard to tell whether a student that age would be able to get into him.
Honestly, one of the most vivid examples of this kind of multifaceted study really is Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, pop culture baggage and all; that Welsh successfully breathes life into and humanizes characters ranging from the pacifistic slacker Spud to the psychotic thug Begbie is quite a feat. But recommending this book to a student would probably be complicated.
There are other writers who're good for incomplete but still valuable insights. Le Guin is good for stories and books that present seemingly alien societies and subsequently unpack their motives and inner truths, and can manage this brilliantly, but she also has blind spots. Likewise Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible does a great job with the viewpoints of its female cast and to an extent of making a strong case for ecologically-based situational ethics, but the fundamentalist patriarch-missionary who drives a great deal of the narrative remains a cipher.
her bafflement is more about the social-psychological question
You could blame capitalism.
You could blame capitalism.
Or the patriarchy. Or humorless feminists. Or David Broder. Or hippies. Or something.
Flippanter also has a point in 150.
I would have thought teenagers would have a perfectly good sense of the intrinsic awfulness of people.
165: Whatever your name is, those things aren't nearly as plausible as capitalism. Sheesh.
If anyone can talk about the way in which that works, you can
Heh. I appreciate the sentiment, but fear it's unwarranted. Or rather, as with talking to fish, sure, I can talk about that stuff, but that doesn't mean I can communicate effectively.
And thanks for the pointers, LC. Hmm.
Oops, fucked up that link. Meant to be to that other thread. Oh well.
... although that was kind of a bad comparison, since the issue isn't (as with fish) a lack of understanding, but poor ability to communicate clearly (like here! how meta!). Oh well.
163.--I was thinking LeGuin as well. The Tombs of Atuan is a great, simple novel of indoctrination into fear and hatred, and an escape outwards. It may not be an appropriate response to a student query about American history, unfortunately. (You could suggest LeGuin's parents' book Ishi, on the last native Californian?)
I was pretty surprised when I learned (a while ago) that LeGuin was Alfred Kroeber's daughter. In retrospect I'm not sure why I found it so surprising.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better novel than it usually gets credit for, though it's still kind of hard for me to think of reading it as non-work. (I read it for a class.)
LeGuin's brother Karl Kroeber was a professor at Columbia until his recent death. He specialized in Romantic (18th and 19th English) and Native American literature. His seminars were an absolute trip.
My favorite moment was during our round-table discussion of the shipwreck-cannibalism scene of Byron's Don Juan, where he demanded that each of us answer whether we would "eat the tutor" (a starvation hypothesis with a lots-drawn victim). It was all very cordial platonic inquiry until someone declared that she would no because she kept kosher. I'll never forget Karl Kroeber's cackling at that.
It's been years since I've read The Word for World is Forest. Is it as good as I remember? I don't remember it well enough to say whether it would be helpful in any way. Edit to add: after a brief review, probably not, since people being horrible to one another when they don't define each other as fully human in the first place is already a given at the outset.
It really depends on the high school junior's level of sophistication, and the level on which she wants this question answered. You could talk about how life is nasty, brutish, and short, and we're just built to respond accordingly, with fear and aggression; or about group identification and the lengths to which people go to defend that; or about resource competition; or indeed about conflicting impulses toward so-called altruism on the one hand and egoism on the other.
I still say that a history focused chiefly on the ways in which we're horrible to each other is one-sided. There are as many stories to tell about people claiming solidarity. Okay, maybe not as many, quite.
Hrm, had forgotten all about Tombs of Atuan. Thanks.
I suppose the goal here is to inculcate some sense of identification with the oppressors: a willingness to recognize that, most likely, were she or I to have been born a planter's child, we'd be horribly racist and thoughtlessly cruel to the slaves even as we acted with utmost refinement, sympathy, and self-sacrifice in all matters concerning our friends, family, and peers, and that therefore, she ought to devote her life to burning shit down cutting up men non-violent institutional change.
I still say that a history focused chiefly on the ways in which we're horrible to each other is one-sided. There are as many stories to tell about people claiming solidarity. Okay, maybe not as many, quite.
They're also often the same stories. I take this to be Foner's point as described in 146, although I'm not sure it's particularly specific to America.
Not that I mean to rule out, through my html tags, a potential career path as one of Alameida's ninjas.
All I'm saying, or haven't quite said, perhaps, is that I have trouble getting started on this question without observing that, in many cases, they didn't think they were being horrible, at all. And that views of what counts as horrible change over time (institutionally, both formally and informally), so "Why are people so horrible to each other?" doesn't really get traction without that.
178 is oddly put, but on a third read not inscrutable. I'm not on board with Alameida's ninja crew, so I was momentarily confused.
oddly put, but on a third read not inscrutable
My own personal mouseover text.
By the way, exploring the notion of "what counts as" can be helpful. (Cavell and some other Wittgensteinians are on about this.) What counts as food? What counts as love, or marriage? What counts as human? Etc. It's pretty obvious material.
182: I'd assign that mouseover to Flippanter, actually. You're in the clear.
You could refer her to this diary-style memoir of a woman from New York who, among other things, married a man in Virginia who later became a Confederate soldier.
All I'm saying, or haven't quite said, perhaps, is that I have trouble getting started on this question without observing that, in many cases, they didn't think they were being horrible, at all. And that views of what counts as horrible change over time (institutionally, both formally and informally), so "Why are people so horrible to each other?" doesn't really get traction without that.
Well, yes. That said, by our current standards of what counts as horrible, there has been an awful lot of it over the course of history, much of it consisting of the actions of people who didn't think they were being horrible at all, by their own standards, in, e.g., owning slaves and so forth. See the link in 185 for a good example.
So the question then becomes, why didn't they think their behavior was horrible, when to us it's clear that it was? This is the hard thing to understand.
187: when to us it's clear that it was?
Huh? But many a thing has been written about this.
We should bear in mind that some people did notice that something was wrong.
Flip, you're cool. I really have to go to bed now.
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other?
Irony and pride. It's the only diagnosis that really shows respect and love. Soren K but this is a tough argument to do shorter. We are all saved, all graced, all good, and we know it. We have free will, so why are we bad? Why did Lucifer prefer to reign in hell? Love, expressed in opposition. Pride.
If bob were around, I'm sure he'd cite Carl Schmitt in support of the proposition that communities arise only in opposition.
Communities just arise. When communities define themselves as such, they do so in relationship to an Other. Makes no sense to have "Greeks" without "non-Greeks" Then you have politics.
But also Arendt. And probably Lacan:gaze, look, mirror.
Am working on the dialectic. The community by creating the Other both separates from and implies the possibility of union with the other. Reproduction and supersession.
You could refer her to this diary-style memoir of a woman from New York who, among other things, married a man in Virginia who later became a Confederate soldier.
How odd -- she reports the Emancipation Proclamation as having been issued on March 12, 1861, 8 days after Lincoln took office.
On Sullivan, Carlos Yu speaks for me:
The tension between his wingnut id and his somewhat more principled superego is interesting to watch. (At least for me, but I have notoriously tacky tastes.) I don't know why this makes him more *believable*. Something to do with the conversion narrative, I suppose: he STRUGGLES with his IDEAS! People, it's because he's not the brightest bulb on the tree. I see people STRUGGLING with MATH all the time, but I don't ask them to do my taxes.
139: It's a good age to read a classic book blaming capitalism.
187: So the question then becomes, why didn't they think their behavior was horrible, when to us it's clear that it was?
And thence, what's the value of its being "clear" to "us" that it was? And for that matter, what is "clear" to whom, and who is "us," and what are "our" blindspots as to what is horrible, and to whom among "us" are they actually blindspots, and so on.
In short, this poor kid is bound to become a philosophy student.
176: It's been years since I've read The Word for World is Forest. Is it as good as I remember?
YES! If you remember it being awesome.
I don't remember it well enough to say whether it would be helpful in any way. Edit to add: after a brief review, probably not, since people being horrible to one another when they don't define each other as fully human in the first place is already a given at the outset.
NO! It's very, very useful. To wit the viewpoint character's fascinating inversion of comfortable rationalist pieties about superstition, and her validation from within of a lifestyle we're led from the outset to think is pitiable and abhorrent (through the eyes of her recognizably-kinda-liberal mother).
(I hope I'm thinking of the correct story.)
No, I'm not thinking of the correct story. What I had in mind was "Solitude," from The Birthday of the World. Never mind.
180: you're still totally in the running. I just need pictures, and for you to not fuck the high school junior you're tutoring, and it's all good.
I think he meant for her, not for him.
I sometimes introduce a thought experiment in which, in the future, we can grow meat without harming animals, and people look back on our society with revulsion when they hear the horrible truths about how we mistreated living things so we could cut them up and consume them more easily and cheaply. how do we participate in the horrible mistreatment of animals now? we just go to the grocery store...
ah, yes, I see. definitely don't rule out burning shit down, then. or making unfair generalizations about men. or learning to ski.
to ski while throwing shuriken with deadly accuracy. totes cruce.
Why all American history is about people being horrible to other people
A place to start is to say that it's all human history, not just American history. American history is now taught revisionistically, against American exceptionalism and triumphalism and against a censored patriotic version of the past. Most prominent nations have skeletons in their closet, even the Swedes and the Dutch and the Belgians and the Portuguese and the Danes, and third world nations do too, if they ever were powerful.
And partly that's because that's how history is written. If some defined area went 200 years without war and oppression, that wouldn't be much of a story because the absence of war and oppression is uneventful.
The tension between his wingnut id and his somewhat more principled superego is interesting to watch.
No, it isn't.
Not least because (i) years ago someone compared Sullivan's "thought" "process" to "two kittens fighting over a ball of yarn named Michael Oakeshott," which was overcomplimentary at best but captured his bad-faith futility, and (ii) Sullivan's worse and better angels (or, less charitably, what he wants to say and what he thinks he can get away with if he couches it in TNR/Atlantic-esque double-talk) are dully, obtusely positioned on a flat horizon of Internet-tough-guy consumerism. I think I have said before that nothing Sullivan writes or says means anything but "I don't want to do honest work,"* and I stand by that still.
* Despite temptations, I don't think I've cast that particular stone at any other blogalist.
193: That's pretty great.
I have a hard time achieving the level of contempt for Sullivan that objectivity demands, in part because I really believe he's trying to figure things out.
I think the whole scientific racism thing is an exception, though. Usually, he's pretty good about giving space on his blog to his most effective critics; here, he just ignores their existence.
OT: I wish nature filmmakers would pay attention to my oft-repeated admonition that the proper ratio of, say, film of mother tigers with cubs to film of hosts/naturalists discussing same is 98:2, not 8:92.
You could go a totally different way and show that 'being horrible to each other' is just what animals tend to do and that we're just wise apes. Get her to read some primate biology/sociobiology/behaviour/ethology (have I covered them all?) and she'll understand that actually we're surprisingly non-violent. Or at least like to wrap our violence in politics.
I don't have any specific recommendations because I don't like most primates for this very reason. It's like looking into our naked souls.
I bet you don't like primates because you have a tail fetish.
86: Oh, look!, a whole thread about irrational fears and I missed it by years! (I'm a little bit afraid of that moment when someone points out to you that something you've said rhymes.)
What I hate is developing new fears. My old ones were stupid enough. Lately I get jumpy about being squished to death by crowds. I had never given this a thought until the Obama inauguration, but there we were in a street that was blocked off in segments and at some point people behind me started pushing and there was no way to move forward and no way to say to a surging mass of people "please do not squish!" and HELLO NEW FEAR! This was not a particular inconvenience until OWS.
And now I am developing a fear of responding to an early comment in a thread without knowing what the next 100+ comments are about.
205 is right. American history as a parade of horribles is a reaction to the ideology of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism has a real dimension to it, but it emerges not from any innate superiority but from the resource wealth and historical situation of the U.S. (Part of the resource wealth was being the first continental-scale nation to emerge without pre-modern political and class divisions restraining the exploitation of economies of scale).
If the kid is asking for some kind of theodicy, I do think you have to start with human nature and not America in particular. It's important to understand the normalcy of oppression and the way it is woven into interaction in general. Loving generosity, sadistic bullying, and fear -- for normal people, love is the most pleasurable, sadism comes next, then fear is actively unpleasant. But the order is reversed when it comes to the technology of maintaining hierarchy and power.
On "scientific racism", that pose of being a fearless truth-seeker censored by political correctness is just endlessly irritating. Anyone who actually dips into the scientific literature sees quickly (A) how flawed heritability and IQ are as measures of the genetic component of intelligence, (B) even if the entire IQ literature is accepted at face value, how small the impact of the genetic component of IQ is on adult economic success. There is an enormous scientific literature demonstrating this stuff. Herrnstein and Murray actively faked their analysis to conceal point (B). It's even more annoying because point (B) is quite obvious from everyday experience as well.
When the comment threads are degenerating into debates about scientific racism, it's time for another Penelope Trunk post.
I do hate the tail-less apes more! Spider monkeys are pretty cute. Chimps gives me the willies. Chimps dressed up like babies and treated like humans freak me out.
I don't think it's a debate really, we're just piling on.
214: Let's not do anything rash.
Why are people talking about The Bell Curve again now? I missed what set this whole thing off.
212.1 -- I think you have also to acknowledge the intentional nature of the US, unlike most other nations. John Winthrop wasn't suggesting the whole Citty upon a Hill thing because of the natural wealth of New England. While some of the participants (and all of the backers) of the Plymouth colony hoped to get rich, for a great many of the participants, this wasn't the point at all. Hooker didn't go to Connecticut for the fur trade. The founding principles of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, similarly, had utopian elements, in addition to economic motive.
And among your tired, poor, wretched refuse, there would have been some non-economic motivations in addition to the economics.
I'm not saying it's not a horror show from start to finish, just like all human history. I think, though, that we have a heritage of claiming higher purpose that makes the hypocrisy all the more obvious.
(Ok, that's why we don't do that. Because the intervening 100+ comments always turn out to have been about something different, substantial, and serious, and we look like an asshole. Q: Why do people oppress one another? A: Hey look at my funny phobia!)
I've found that putting the blogger bloggers (like Sullian) on my restricted list has been good for my sanity. Nobody can come up with fifteen interesting posts a day.
IQ discussions are genuinely difficult, though -- I don't blame even fairly sophisticated people for being confused. The point that 'to what extent do genetics versus environment determine IQ, stated as a percentage' is a meaningless question -- you can only meaningfully talk about to what extent genetics versus environment explains the difference in IQ between two identified people or populations (that is, if you're looking for an explanation of the difference in measured IQ between the human population of Toledo and a pack of wolves, that's going to be almost 100% genetic. Between two identical twins, the difference in measured IQ is going to be almost 100% due to environmental causes) -- is really conceptually difficult for people.
What I blame people like Sullivan for is not so much failing to understand the issues, as failing to accept that they don't understand the issues solidly themselves, so they should either stay out of the public dialog, or at least avoid endorsing positions being put forth by known racists. There's nothing wrong with agreeing with a racist on an issue where you understand exactly what the issue is, and you know that on that point, he's right. Once you're even a little confused, that's the time to stop taking a lead from bad people.
218: As far as I know, Andrew Sullivan started it with what I gather was a deeply boneheaded blog post. I started looking at an exchange between Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates here. TNC is/was pretty fucking pissed off, in his quiet way.
I never did work my way back to Sullivan's original post, just seen it excerpted. I gather Wm. Saletan later weighed in somehow over at Slate. Plus a bunch of other people.
What set this round off is Sullivan linking to this post, which claims that the PC police has shut down research into intelligence.
221 -- Five a day. Five a week is a tremendous achievement, and while some people can do this over a sustained period, it's a lot fewer than are trying.
219: yes, I agree. But you have to avoid having the loudly trumpeted intentionality blind you to certain realities.
222.1: But my point in 213 is that even if you accept the IQ/genetics literature and ignore all the assumptions and complexities, the relationship between the genetic IQ and adult earnings is simply not high enough to drive very much income inequality. This is flat-out ignored. You see endless stuff on the IQ/genes connection and very mention of the literature on the connection between childhood IQ and adult success.
Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God, for this end, wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekenes, gentlenes, patience and liberallity, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his owne people and will commaund a blessing upon us in all our wayes, soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome power goodnes and truthe then formerly wee have beene acquainted with, wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are going: And to shutt upp this discourse with that exhortacion of Moses that faithfull servant of the Lord in his last farewell to Israell Deut. 30. Beloved there is now sett before us life, and good, deathe and evill in that wee are Commaunded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another to walke in his wayes and to keepe his Commaundements and his Ordinance, and his lawes, and the Articles of our Covenant with him that wee may live and be multiplyed, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whether wee goe to possesse it: But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced and worshipp other Gods our pleasures, and proffitts, and serve them, it is propounded unto us this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good Land whether wee passe over this vast Sea to possesse it; Therefore lett us choose life, that wee, and our Seede, may live; by obeyeing his voyce, and cleaveing to him, for hee is our life, and our prosperity.
sorry, last sentence should have been "very little mention of the literature..."
226 -- Oh, sure. IMO, the intentionality imposes higher standards, and does not provide any excuse to deviate from them. This puts me firmly out of the mainstream of my time, I realize . . .
I recently read a blurb where they played around with some proteins around the portion of the genome of earthworms which affect lifespan. They saw longer lifespan effects two generations of worms later, giving evidence that the environmental context can affect how genes are expressed generationally, even in the absence of the original environmental context.
It kind of boggled my mind to contemplate how complicated the nature/nurture tangle must be with anything in people.
Even if you're agnostic on racial IQ, too many people imagine that IQ doesn't matter. I remember seeing Chris Matthews ask some Democratic mayors what to do for all the people who aren't going to go to college. What about them? Uh, well, more college. They should go to college too.
Guess what, somebody with a 90 IQ is not going to graduate from college. I had a roommate who seemed perfectly normal until I realized he couldn't divide $1515 by three without using a calculator. And if people like him and the other half of the bell curve can't compete with immigrants or the Chinese in the labor market, tough luck, they should have gone to college. That's the sort of thing you say if you've never thought about the consequences of IQ.
I had a roommate who seemed perfectly normal until I realized he couldn't divide $1515 by three without using a calculator.
This is the type of thing that most people need to be taught, actually.
I would even say most college grads would need to be taught that, at some point, unless they have a major that requires them to do computations on a daily basis.
I was just thinking the same thing -- if he seemed perfectly normal, he was perfectly capable of doing mental arithmetic on that level if he'd been taught.
222: The point that 'to what extent do genetics versus environment determine IQ, stated as a percentage' is a meaningless question [...] is really conceptually difficult for people.
Let's just say you're a lot more forgiving than I am.
230
There is now a well-established genetic mechanism for the heritability of environmental factors. Google "epigenetic inheritance". Lamarck lives!
197:
176: It's been years since I've read The Word for World is Forest. Is it as good as I remember?
YES! If you remember it being awesome.
I was interested to read in the Wikipedia entry on the story novella last night that the title was Harlan Ellison's idea. Go Harlan! (His Dangerous Visions series of anthologies is excellent.)
231: if anything, people think IQ is too important, especially the genetic component. I think the average IQ of college completers is about 105. So there are plenty of people with below average IQs finishing college.
Imagine two individuals. One is born to an uneducated single-parent family in the ghetto, but with a genetic IQ endowment of 110. The other is born to a two-parent family of upper middle class professionals, but has a genetic IQ endowment of 90? Which one will likely have the better life chances and the higher adult income? The answer is I think obvious. Really obvious.
I do think there are some crazy education policies out there that ignore differentials in learning capacity, but they also ignore environmental differences in both IQ and non-IQ tempermental variables (like diligence, future orientation, etc.). We need more paths to success that do not depend on college.
232 is right, that's as far away from "IQ" as you could get: it's practice and training.
On the "why did slaveholders...?" question, I can't imagine tackling it with anyone without pointing out that slavery and human trafficking still exist -- which shifts it away from "how did people not know what I know now?" and into "what changed and what didn't, and for whom?" Might help channel some of the outrage too.
49: one or two of Coetzee's novels/stories and never found them particularly sympathetic -- just to take you literally for a moment, "sympathetic" is almost the opposite of the point. But if (as I assume) you mean you didn't want to keep reading, sympathy-with-the-outlook and so forth, fair enough. I do think Barbarians, Michael K., and E. Costello are straight up genius, and Disgrace is pretty close. If you like memoir -- well, I've been told that I would like "Youth," and evidence suggests that my tastes may be diametrically opposed to yours; but it's won praise.
238:
This I can agree with: "We need more paths to success that do not depend on college."
Sullivan is a mark who thinks he's a smart. Sullivan really wants to speak truth to power, I'll grant him that, but he's not clever enough to follow the arguments or figure the truth out for himself, so he listens to the little Tory in his gut and inevitably spends years speaking truthiness to power.
I believe that the first two years of college is good for almost everybody - that most people aren't capable of learning how to write well until then, or think about complex relatedness between topics.
I don't believe picking a major and learning that major really well does much except support professors in that major, for at least half of college graduates.
(Therefore my personal opinion is that all colleges should offer an associative degree, which would be more affordable, and the state/federal government should fund those departments which would otherwise lose out under this plan.)
242 is right. We should start a collection of snappy 1-sentence descriptions of writers. Sullivan and Brooks down, who's next...
my personal opinion is that all colleges should offer an associative degree
"What does this diploma remind you of?"
I'm not sure why we're focusing on college. bjk (who's a Shearer-like troll) introduced it at 231.
Isn't it relatively well established by now that early childhood experience, parental income (and by extension nutrition, home stability, neighborhood milieu, and so on), and parental education level are the clearest predictors of future achievement? Where achievement is defined narrowly in terms of income-earning potential, I suppose.
Anyway, my impression had been that the US's national high school graduation rate is fairly dismal to begin with; that the factors mentioned above have a lot to do with that; and therefore that going on about the relative importance of college (whether for 2 or 4 years) rather misses the point. IQ doesn't have much to do with this.
I believe that the first two years of college is good for almost everybody - that most people aren't capable of learning how to write well until then, or think about complex relatedness between topics.
I agree, mostly -- it's especially true for people coming out of one of our many truly dreadful K-12 systems. I think 15 and 16 year olds are plenty able to think and write clearly, but not given the tools and lack of sustained, meaningful developmental work they currently get in many high schools.
The Obama administration is interesting on this -- he staked out that bold turf in his State of the Union a few years ago, and their rhetoric piggybacked on some of the good recent research about the value of postsecondary credentials (so-called "middle-skill jobs"), while the administration also did a lot to boost community college funding (unfortunately right as the states were eviscerating them) and access-and-success programs for people who traditionally were struggling to persist in higher ed.
But there has also been a lot of rhetorical muddling between industry-recognized credentials and "college," broadly construed. Stackable credentials are the big buzzword these days, and that's not a terrible idea, but there are still far too many fake career scams that nobody is policing well enough.
NYC has an awesome new public education campaign, though -- Know Before You Enroll. It's an outstanding example of aggressive consumer protection. I can only hope it's matched with enforcement.
Oh my, I just read the apparently originating article for this latest race and IQ round of 'debate', linked in 224. Wow, is that a bad article. I'm embarrassed for Alternet.
Isn't it relatively well established by now that early childhood experience, parental income
Yes. It's been a decades long campaign to gut the middle and lower classes and now the same people who spearheaded that campaign want to point the finger at teacher unions and "liberal schools".
Not that Dems have been any help with praise for stupid shit like Teach For America and NCLB. My wife's classes are often 30+ students of low income kids and we think this is going to get solved with mandatory tests and a bunch of fucking Ivy League twits doing a couple years in the system and moving on.
NYC has an awesome new public education campaign, though -- Know Before You Enroll. It's an outstanding example of aggressive consumer protection. I can only hope it's matched with enforcement.
I read about some law that went into effect about a month ago requiring all colleges to put their real tuition price someplace obvious on their website.
Both Heebie U and Heebie Grad School appear to be compliant.
246&249: Exactly so. The whole system has been fubared.
Not that Dems have been any help
Sadly, no, Sect'y of Education Arne Duncan has not been great. The Race to the Top program is not much better than NCLB.
Not a win for Dems on this one. Diane Ravitch is good on this.
The Obama administration has offered to grant waivers from the onerous sanctions of NCLB, but only to states willing to adopt its preferred remedies: privately managed charter schools, evaluations of teachers on the basis of their students' test scores, acceptance of a recently developed set of national standards in reading and mathematics, and agreement to fire the staff and close the schools that have persistently low scores. None of the Obama administration's favored reforms--remarkably similar to those of the Bush administration--is supported by experience or evidence.
It's because the testing industry - ETS/Kaplan/etc - spend tons of money lobbying and write the legislation themselves, and somehow have avoided having much of a negative presence in public opinion.
I guess. It's also because we believe too much in Science! as the answer to all problems. If we measure it, we can control it! Let's find a way to measure it ... uh, measure something, that is ... well, anything, really, just measure something.
we believe too much in Science! Capitalism! as the answer to all problems.
We blamed capitalism way upthread, gswift. That was last night.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.
Has this example of benign neglect been linked to yet?
256: No, it's the fault of antibiotics and the Gordian Knot solution before them. Now we're totally expecting a quick fix to every problem.
258: Gee, you mean that when a police department funnels enormous human and financial resources into grandstanding, real police work gets lost in the shuffle? Who coulda known?
I can't decide if it's reassuring or maddening to see how perfectly advocates' concerns reflected actual reality.
. . . why all American history is about people being horrible to other people, what with the slavery and genocide and Jim Crow and all. Like, why do people do that?
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other?
I'd add to what other people have said that it's worth complicating that summary a bit.
My first thought is that Studs Terkal (Working or Race? I haven't read either in ages) is good at all of the ways in which day-to-day life contains both conflict and generosity.
People have recommended Deer Hunting With Jesus as a contemporary book that tries to address those questions, but I wasn't impressed by it.
Instead of talking about racists and IQs, we could talk about my new bike.
I remember reading some Shearer comment and thinking, man, that's really deep. Deep for a comment thread, at least. So I won't take offense at "Shearer like troll."
262: it makes me sad that I can't see that.
You can't see the photo pool, or have I screwed up and not shared it properly?
It's there in the pool, so the problem must be with VW's access.
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other?
Depends on the context. If the question is about a specific kid, I try to evince empathy - X probably has been mistreated a lot, and passes it along. If the question is about a group, I try to emphasize that actually most groups have a lot of bad people in them - we're not perfect - and it's a mistake to think that Group X is uniformly better/worse than Group Y. And there's a certain allowance for "some people are just jerks, and it's all too easy for other people to turn aside". That last one leads into "which is why it's important A. not to be a jerk, and B. to try not to turn aside."
As we learned from Greenberg, the famous adage: Hurt people hurt people.
I believe heebie can fix that (as can Armsmasher and Ogged). Email them with your flickr account, and Bave's bike will be revealed.
Any suggestions, especially from those with kids, about what you say when someone asks why people are awful to each other?
My answers are basically (1) falling away from God and (2) capitalism. Attempts to explain this to the four year old have not proven very successful, unless by successful you mean "uh I'm going to turn away and play with stickers now."
speaking truthiness to power
Instant classic description of Andrew Sullivan. Right up there with AWB's all time great "a dumb man who thinks he's a smart man pretending to be a dumb man" description of David Brooks.
Or accept my Facebook request and you can see the bike there. And you can follow my future attempts to avoid studying for finals.
Don't accept the FB request, VW. It's a trick!
But he can look at pictures of my bike! It will be awesome!
Sullivan just strikes me as one of the normal bright opportunists who got on the conservative bandwagon after 1984 when they figured out which way the wind was blowing. Liberals still had some spirit after the 1980 election, but after 1984 all the air went out and all the rats left the ship. Once you decided to jump, you just had to package yourself for the transformed world: neo-con, neo-liberal, little-government libertarian, etc.
Of course, practically every other up and coming gut did the same. They're all shits, if you ask me, but who cares about that?
Facebook cannot be trusted. It once suggested I friend the Inst/apun/dit guy.
Several years back, Sullivan slandered a political science prof at my alma mater as a Christianist, when the truth was he was one of the few secular pariahs in a Christianist college. That itself wasn't a big deal; it's a blog, and people can get details wrong. But both the prof and I wrote him respectful emails that told him he had the situation backwards, and gently suggested he make a correction (what does a blogpost cost, anyway?). We got no correction and no reply. I became suspicious of him since then, and subsequent events lead me to think he is simply a fundamentally immoral person.
I mean, what kind of person looks at the race/IQ issue - something that requires galaxies more quantitative and specialised knowledge than Sullivan will ever have - and stampedes into the public sphere with strong, immutable positions on it? Who does that?
I don't wish the guy any ill, but the world would be an objectively better place if no one had ever heard of him.
I honestly don't know what Sullivan's story is; I'm not nearly as fascinated by him as some out there seem to be, though I admit that he's a tad different from the usual. He's not Ross Douthat + 20 years, for example. I don't know, maybe it's just that Sullivan takes surprising risks from time to time before he reverts and comes out with something bizarrely stupid. I suppose I'm ultimately with Carlos Yu quoted upthread in 193: Sullivan's been through enough in his personal life that he doubts some of his closely held precepts, and it's a constant struggle, I tell you what!
Caveat: I don't read Sullivan with any regularity at all.
After 9/11 Sullivan darkly suggested that there was an Islamofascist fifth column in the US. He didn't identify them, but it was more than just American Muslims and hardcore leftists. Everyone to the left of Sullivan was suspect.
His cartoon logo of himself makes him seem unbearable too: smug, plump, malicious, and smart enough to do real harm.
280: Who does that?
You're kidding, right? Anyone with access and 99.99% of the rest of the population if they could.
About the only thing I find interesting about Sullivan is his curious lack of self-examination and empathy. He's very nearly a Log Cabin Republican.
I believe that he's an ex-LCR. GWB destroyed that group, I think.
283: IME, people are usually pretty reluctant to take a controversial stance on an issue they have no expertise in - if they believe it's possible to have expertise in it. You do of course frequently get people who think a complex issue isn't really all that complex, and all it needs is a bit of 'common sense', but that doesn't apply in Sullivan's case.
He is an LCR. Or ex-, I couldn't say. Sullivan's a weird exercise in the way in which personal life experience (gay, hiv+, long-term non-American partner, from what I understand) is trumped by class. He should by rights be a Dem, or liberal, or something lefter than he is. Apparently he's strongly Christian. I have no idea whether that has something to do with his ... intellectual problem.
Another way of looking at it is that Sullivan is a normal prosperous, creepy moderate Republican, except that he's gay and gay-baiting is key to the overall Republican strategy, so he has no home to go to.
If you substitute some other X for gay, and X-baiting was key to the whole Repulican strategy, Sullivan would be a normal Republican, more moderate than most but basically supportive.
287: You know, he's an immigrant. Should you ever want a reason to build a fence in the Atlantic.
I have several friends who read and enjoy Sullivan. They're Obama Democrats, fairly well informed about politics but not in a deep way, further to the left on social issues than on economic ones.
so he has no home to go to
True that. Whenever I've seen him on a Sunday talk show, he eventually won't shut up about the gays, and the rest of the commentators are like, "Okay, Andrew, good point. Next up?"
None of this excuses the race-IQ idiocy. No, no I don't know why he can't figure out what he did wrong there.
Occasionally I wonder how these people who believe IQ tests are measuring something innate grapple with the Flynn effect.
I mean, what kind of person looks at the race/IQ issue - something that requires galaxies more quantitative and specialised knowledge than Sullivan will ever have - and stampedes into the public sphere with strong, immutable positions on it? Who does that?
Hahahaha. What kind of person moves to a foreign country and declares half the native population to be untrustworthy traitors? A pompous conservative blowhard, that's who. Exactly same kind of person who becomes a prominent conservative political pundit.
I don't find the Flynn effect particularly puzzling, as there are almost too many possible explanations. It's statements like this one (from Wikipedia):
During the 1960s, when some Virginia counties closed their public schools to avoid racial integration, compensatory private schooling was available only for Caucasian children. On average, the scores of African-American children who did not receive formal education during that period decreased at a rate of about six IQ points per year.
How can you argue IQ is innate when this happens?
I go back and forth on reading Sullivan. I end up reading him for stretches just because his posting rate is so satisfying. But it depends on what his hobby horse is at the time, when it's less annoying I read him, and when it's more annoying it's not worth it. I don't ever think he's worth really listening to, but sometimes there's nothing new elsewhere on the internet.
None of this excuses the race-IQ idiocy. No, no I don't know why he can't figure out what he did wrong there.
I think he honestly believes* that you can tell if something is likely to be true by seeing how badly it pisses off people he thinks of as irrational leftists. He's using a rule of thumb: the race/IQ stuff makes people angry; the people who are getting angry are people I feel good about disagreeing with; so it's probably true. Why he feels better about agreeing with racists than with liberals is an open question.
____________
*In the sense of honestly believing something that can still make you a bad person.
296: Huh. I didn't think it was that.* I thought he believed the racial IQ stuff was actually probably maybe true, or at least uncontested.
* I have a hard time believing that's it, actually.
296: I think a simpler but probably more accurate explanation is that Sullivan is a racist, like basically everyone on staff at TNR during that time period.
"Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother fuck him and John Wayne"
"Sometimes there's nothing new elsewhere on the internet....."
Jesus, with all the porn and lolcats and conspiracy theorists and Hollywood gossip on the web, no one even needs to sink as low as Sullivan.
In American politics anyone who is gay-friendly counts as a moderate, regardless of how obnoxious his other opinions are. That's a massive problem with American politics. Sullivan is not really very moderate. At best he's moderate on other issues the way Lugar and Hagel were moderate -- i.e., not batshit crazy and living in another universe.
297: Oh, I think he thinks it's true, it's just that he thinks you can figure out what's likely to be true by seeing what annoys liberals. He's 'honestly' seeking the truth -- his rules of thumb for getting there are just really screwed up. And, probably, he's at least fairly racist, which would make all the race-IQ stuff feel more probable to him.
Douchebag author in OT is probably honestly seeking the truth, by screwed-up rules. I like alameida's classic solution: let him have his appointment with Fame, a hundred years hence, in the graveyard behind the workhouse.
But it depends on what his hobby horse is at the time, when it's less annoying I read him, and when it's more annoying it's not worth it.
He sounded like a crazy person when his hobby horse was that Palin's baby was actually her daughter's. He was like a dog with a bone. (I've had brief fits of reading him.)
Somewhere online there's a debate about, oh, god and whatnot* between him and Sam Harris. Spoiler alert: they do not resolve the question of the existence of god, but Andrew Sullivan does kind of take a beating because, whatever else is thought about Sam Harris, and I seem to remember around here that is "not good things", he's a lot smarter than Andrew Sullivan.
*I have an inside joke between me and probably just me about tacking on "whatnot" to inappropriate things since going to social work school in the midwest and hearing phrases like "some pretty violent child abuse and whatnot."
303: whatever else is thought about Sam Harris . . . he's a lot smarter than Andrew Sullivan.
By the same token, Paris Hilton is a more talented musician than Kim Kardashian.
There is no way anyone on God's green earth has put in the work to determine the truth of 304. Even scientists know there are limits.
I thought 304 was a bit harsh until I read the Wikipedia entry on Harris. His tone-deaf criticism of Islam, combined with his endorsement of atheism, combined with his uncritical acceptance of spiritualism, has convinced me that he's, well, not dumb, but epically hypocritical when it comes to rational thought.
Huh. I had never heard of Sam Harris before this thread, and I now have no interest in learning any more about him.
Harris versus Sullivan is probably a good comparison (assuming Smearcase is right). Sullivan is genuinely fucking stupid. He has no idea that he doesn't understand the arguments against him. Dumb, but articulate. He's glib enough that he can spout off whatever comes into his head and sound like he knows what he's talking about. Harris, on the other hand, is like a parody of a blowhard. So we'll read Sullivan, and go to great lengths to avoid Harris.
So we'll read Sullivan, and go to great lengths to avoid Harris.
I understand avoiding Harris, but why read Sullivan?
I mean, I used to read Sullivan's columns in the NYT Magazine years ago, before blogs were a thing, but I don't see the appeal of reading him now, when there are so many better options.
139: why all American history is about people being horrible to other people, what with the slavery and genocide and Jim Crow and all. Like, why do people do that?
For understanding why people supported slavery, I've found it helpful to read Southern defenses of slavery from the eve of the Civil War, as long as they can be read critically. James F. Epperson's Causes of the Civil War web site is a rich source of documents on both sides of the conflict. Reading, e.g., the Open Letter of Gov. Joe Brown to the Legislature of Georgia, or William Holcombe's pamphlet, The Alternative: a Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South, I get a clear sense of fear as one of the major drivers of the defense of slavery: fear on the part of the white establishment of what it would mean to have large numbers of former slaves living among them with the same political and economic rights as whites. I think that fear drove both secession and later Jim Crow. Compare, e.g., to the anti-immigrant sentiment today in Arizona and elsewhere.
Andrew Sullivan is just a massive shit, immoral in both public (that enemies list alluded to above) and private life (trolling for unprotected sex when HIV positive) who is moronic enough to believe that the kind of people who read him because he dares to tell the truth about how backward those people are do not actually think he's a perverted sodomite who'd they'd rather kill today than tomorrow.
I think that it makes more sense to think of Sullivan as a type or a phase than as an individual. To me he's not really worse than Michael Kinsley or any of the various other TNR bright boys, or any of the various pop futurologists who described a futurological high tech free market neoliberal utopia.
This phase lasted from about 1984 (when the media strted to accomodate itself to Reagan and the DLC began the takeover of the Democratic Party) to about 2007 (when the reality and scope of the neoliberal disaster became apparent). And if you wonder why I'm terminally grumpy, those guys are why. Twenty-three years is a long time to sit around watching the creepy morons who run the world dance around and jeer.
His monotonously professed, contentless* Christianity isn't the only reason that I think Andrew Sullivan is full of bad faith, but it helps.
Sam Harris just seems a fairly typical voice of the Internet age (Oedipus with Asperger's), spiked occasionally with post-9/11 enthusiasm for violence.
* Mumble Teabagland as post-Christian state mumble parody display mumble.
You know, the Sullivan barebacking histoire was memorable not at all because it is somehow immoral for someone to look for sex on a website devoted to the kind of sex he was looking for -- it's not. (Sullivan's ad was completely upfront about his HIV status and sought other positive guys.)
What made it a scandal was Sullivan's cottage industry in lamenting/lambasting those terrible other faggots (not Sullivan! not he!) who did nasty things like troll for sex or go to sex clubs or wear leather and don't want to utterly assimilate to straight culture.
Relevant to the OP, this column: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/29/single-women-an-american-obsession?INTCMP=SRCH
Or rather, this bit from the NY Times, linked from the comments to the column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/fashion/weddings/andrea-catsimatidis-and-christopher-cox-weddings.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=weddings
I think this is possibly the Ur-creepy story.
"As a child, Christopher Cox would go to sleep listening to tapes of [his grandfather] President Nixon reading books...Mr. Cox [aged 29] appeared on a debating panel at the Hewitt School on the Upper East Side, arguing the Republican position against Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat. Later, Ms. Maloney had a Hewitt senior that she knew, Andrea Catsimatidis, ushered to the stage."
Reader, he married her.
"The proposal, with him on one knee, was caught on the school's security camera."
A child of mine would marry Nixon blood over my disassembled, crimson, cooling carcass.
I like "Oedipus with Aspergers". I liked the "two kittens with a ball of yarn called Oakeshott" too.
It's been a good thread for artful phrasing, in general.
318: The Oakeshott one isn't mine, if that wasn't clear -- can't remember who wrote it first.
319: A search for the quote brought up this obviously relevant video.
As a child, Christopher Cox would go to sleep listening to tapes of [his grandfather] President Nixon reading books
Books? Tapes, or it didn't happen!
One of the worst things about Sullivan is that he spent all that time being a poisonous warmongering shitbag and sucking up to Dick Cheney...right up to about five minutes after he received US citizenship. Then, suddenly, he had his Change of Heart.
320: If a cat video ain't "Cat mom hugs baby kitten", I ain't watchin'.
317: Flippanter is secretly a Graham.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Reivers
323: I knew there must be a reason I like tweed.
right up to about five minutes after he received US citizenship
As far as I know (Wikipedia and such) he still doesn't have it.
In all the Sullivan hate, nobody's mentioned that he was caught doing drugs on Federal lands (a national beach), which is the sort of thing that would disqualify someone (not Andrew Sullivan) from US citizenship. The gov't dropped charges, for mysterious reasons, though not hard to figure out.
311, continued: And if your high-school junior doesn't yet have the background to pick up on the oblique references to Haiti in those documents, they are referring to this. That's one of the reasons I pick up the distinct scent of fear from them. Basically, the southerners were implying that it was easy enough for Northern states to practice abolition, because there weren't enough slaves/former slaves there to make a difference in the structure of society, but in the South, especially the deep South, where slaves constituted a significant fraction of the population, they were scared shitless of what it would mean to give all those slaves political and economic rights at the expense of the whites.
in south carolina they were scared shitless just to have all those black people walking around not chained to each other, or big rocks, or something!