I did have the thought that one possibility is that this helps push him into some ugly Horowitzian trajectory.
Since they're playing the Super Bowl in Arizona, they can test how the temperature-ball pressure hypothesis fares in a warmer climate.
Boston has a well-to-the-left mayor now. Oughta be worth something.
2. Physics, how does it work?
I thought it was some component of elevators instead of blenders.
Man, when Belle brings it, she damn well brings it.
A cynic might observe that both sides of the Chait-killed-my-dog-and-is-Satan issue have in common a desire never to be criticized.
I have to confess that this internet wide circle jerk of self congratulation (creeping up on 1 week) is starting to make me cranky, despite the fact that Chait's article is just as cringeworthy as everyone says.
There's a third alternative: that Chait could wise up and acknowledge, if only to himself, that he hadn't thought this through.
It makes me sad that ogged is correct in ignoring this as even a hypothetical possibility.
8: Isn't one of Chait's complaints against PC the doomed vapidity of cringing honky apologies that are never sufficient anyway? It would be pretty funny to watch him try to revise and extend his remarks which were taken out of context in order to spend more time with his family.
7: lulz ur butthurt.
The Mahmood case is vaguely interesting. On one hand, the piece is well within the norms of undergraduate satire (and the Daily, from which he was fired) is the official student newspaper, not an independent lefty alternative); on the other, the Daily also has a rule that you can't write for the other paper without prior permission from the editor in chief, and Mahmood was fired after he refused to resign from the Review. Funny: the vandals changed into their identity-obscuring outfits...on camera. This is the kind of cunning foresight one expects from wolverines.
Who, unlike some universities, didn't win a national championship this year.
I thought this from Mic/helle G/oldberg last year in The Nation was interesting, along the lines of the "If someone would like to write an intelligent, detailed article about stifling political correctness in a specific online milieu of twitter users and feminist tumblrs, or whatever, WITH LINKS, they should do that, and then we can talk about that" Belle requested. I don't remember it being talked about much at the time.
7: Chait represents a very common strain of human ignorance; he isn't some fringe figure. He's talking about important stuff, and for many people, it isn't obvious how full of shit he is. The rebuttal has been, and continues to be, instructive and interesting.
This is how people learn. (Not Chait, but other people.) Readers have watched Chait make the strongest possible case for a particular kind of racism, and watched that case be demolished. Sure, it would have been nice if the previous Chait/Coates debate had rendered this one unnecessary, but that didn't happen.
As for the circle-jerk of self-congratulation, well, hey, there are issues adjacent to the ones that Chait raises that well-meaning people find genuinely difficult. It's only natural that people find it gratifying that they can get together and say that we all understand that this, at least, crosses a line.
13: My crankiness doesn't amount to more than minor annoyance. It's along the same lines as why I don't read P.Z. Meyers' site much anymore, despite the fact that I probably agree with 99% of what he says. Beyond a certain volume "Yay rah! Go us! Woo woo!" gets tiresome.
That said, I get that Chait is an especially deserving target. The measured public discussions he claims to long for are difficult to have largely because of him and his cronies, with their persistent "Come. Let us have a civil and reasonable debate about whether Africans are genetically inferior" trolling.
Ogged linked Henley's "Rule of Buts the other day, and I keep finding it a valuable analytical tool. Were it not for Henley, I'd have to spend a lot of time pondering exactly what it was that bugged me about this post from deBoer.
15.1 is sort of why I stopped wishing people a happy birthday on Facebook. Also, in real life, if they are over 12 or under 100. But without Facebook, there's no way I'd ever know.
15: But isn't Myers different? I mean, Myers is just batshit crazy on some issues, and on others - the ones where he is essentially correct - he completely lacks empathy for his interlocutors.
I'm sure there are people like that who are responding to Chait, but I haven't seen them. Belle, for instance, expends a great deal of energy trying to get inside Chait's head to understand how he arrived where he did. And in comments, she gets a lot of pushback from people who think that Chait did kinda sorta have a point - there's hardly unanimous agreement on this issue, and that's why the conversation continues. If people were just patting each other on the back, the whole thing would have ended in a timeframe that you would have found satisfactory.
Heck, it would have ended with Coates.
18: I wasn't reacting specifically to Belle Waring's posts. Due to my usual cycle of procrastinating while grant writing, I've been wasting time on the internet more than usual this week, and it seems like everywhere I go people are doing a little victory dance over the Chait thing. It's the cumulative effect that started to irritate.
I mean, I agree that when you deliberately troll the entire reading public the way Chait did, you pretty much deserve what you get. I don't disagree with what people are saying. That's why I brought up Meyers. I also agree that creationists are wrong. Still by the 10,000th time you hear "Creationists are wrong and we're right!"...
Still by the 10,000th time you hear "Creationists are wrong and we're right!"...
I think that, ultimately, people who are already atheists aren't the important audience for the likes of PZ Meyers. There are a lot of people out there coming from fundamentalist backgrounds who need a certain amount of deprogramming, and its important they have access to content that is strongly oppositional to their deeply engrained worldview. Creationist take-downs really don't interest me at all, but I am glad they are out there and are available to people who may be able to benefit from them.
It's also worth it to have someone hammering away at this more or less constantly and not letting it slip back into the shadows. Think of it like antibiotics! If you wander off and stop calling out these people they'll build up strength and make another stab at it. You need to keep kicking them continually, even when they're down. Otherwise you get the equivalent of "but everyone knows so-and-so is a sexual predator so why would new-person fall for that?" stuff, where the answer is that everyone stopped saying it once they felt like everyone knew. And then someone who didn't know showed up.
This seems like the right thread to say that The War On Christmas is real!
I was informed today that the unnamed star of the linked story is an English teacher at my daughter's school, previously identified by her as an incredible twerp, leftier-than-thou bully variety.
21,21: I'm certainly not saying that Meyers should stop writing. I was just noting why I personally don't read him much these days. I suppose I should know better than to violate the analogy ban, but I was trying to give an example of how you can get a bit tired of hearing something even when you agree with it.
To address the original post, I don't think Chait will go full conservative. The space to his right is too crowded for him to be a big presence, and the niche of "even the liberal..." contrarian is still a very lucrative one. He'd be a fool to give it up.
22. What a tosspot! I suppose, if you were a devout adherent of some non-Christian religion, you might get pretty riled over time at being wished a merry Christmas all the time, but he didn't even have that excuse. Just being a jerk for the sake of it. I daresay Ric/har/d Da/wki/ins would see him as a kindred spirit.
I suppose, if you were a devout adherent of some non-Christian religion, you might get pretty riled over time at being wished a merry Christmas all the time, but he didn't even have that excuse. Just being a jerk for the sake of it.
Right, so there are a couple of problems with this...
A) It puts the onus for objecting on the members of the non-Christian religion. When you're already sick of it, it kinda sucks to have to have the same conversation over and over and over again. Plus it's uncomfortable to object, even if you do it politely. Most people don't like to make a scene, and it's really easy to self-censor in situations like this. And no matter how polite you are, a lot of people will get angry at you for objecting.
B) People are more likely to dismiss your objection if you're a member of a non-Christian religion, because after all you only want special treatment and you should just accept that the majority of people are Christians and have no problem with it.
Not to say that there aren't leftier-than-thou bullies. And nobody likes a scold. But the problem is that even mild criticism or objection gets transmuted into bullying and scolding by the people on the receiving end.
Yeah, from the stories my daughter has told, this guy legitimately is a bully and a scold. The version of the story she got, as he told to it to his class, was that he was trying to get the flight attendant fired. (She did very well in the class, by not picking fights and by regurgitating his opinions back to him, but students who failed to do so got very hostile treatment.)
I spent the year she was in his class gently reminding her that there are horrible people on every side of every issue, and they should be regarded as stopped clocks -- you don't rely on them, but you also don't automatically jump in the opposite direction.
Dilma, whoever she may be, makes an excellent point (which I will adopt as though I had made it myself) about horrible people, which is where I get stuck on the DeBoer/Goldberg reaction to Chait.
That is, while I'm not in a lefty enough milieu that I ever see PC bullying (well, the kids give Buck a hard time sometimes, but other than that), I completely believe that it happens and it's awful. What I don't see any real reason to believe is that it's got any particular connection to the goals of PC or the content of leftwing politics, rather than just being the amount of bullying that happens in any social circle, adapted to the mores and standards of that circle.
What I don't see any real reason to believe is that it's got any particular connection to the goals of PC or the content of leftwing politics, rather than just being the amount of bullying that happens in any social circle, adapted to the mores and standards of that circle.
Precisely. And at least in de Boer's case I don't think he's perceptive enough to see the other kinds of bullying that go on.
28: The Goldberg piece was in no way a reaction to Chait and was written a year ago. Just to be clear.
I just realized that. Didn't she also react to the Chait thing? I thought I'd just seen a link to something she'd written about it somewhere else, and assumed yours was the same thing.
This is Goldberg on the Chait thing.
But the piece you linked is more interesting.
I'm not in the world she's talking about -- I'm not involved in leftist activism and I'm not involved in social media (beyond lurking on FB). But reading it, I wonder if there's an innately bad interaction between a politics that values (rightly) respect for the opinions and input of people in marginalized groups based on their lived experience, and the low context/"on the internet nobody knows you're a dog" nature of social media.
That is, if you've got a strong principle forbidding you from dismissing or objecting to criticism, even if it seems unjustified to you, if it's from someone in a marginalized group whose political goals you generally agree with, in a medium where you don't have context for the people you're interacting with, you can't meaningfully respond to criticism at all, and the discourse can be overwhelmed by people just being jerks.
32: Goldberg is making an honest effort to weigh the different interests here, but I don't think she gets it right. Speaking of the democratization of public comment on the Internet, she says,
There is value, of course, in the new regime. The price of bigotry is much higher, the ethical blind spots concealed by clubby consensus are much more easily exposed. But the pressure to conform is also far more intense. The distance between what writers--or, at least, some writers--say to each other and what they say publicly is growing. That's not oppression, but it is a loss.
The ethical blind spots aren't just blind spots, they are a result of "pressure to conform." The fact that there's an Internet out there to mock Chait does, indeed, place pressure on him, but it's a countervailing pressure. He has always been subject to considerable pressure to ignore marginalized people. With the Internet, some of this pressure is relieved.
Under the new regime, Chait has much more freedom to avoid idiocy. Chait has not chosen to avail himself of this opportunity, but whose fault is that?
the discourse can be overwhelmed by people just being jerks
That's certainly true, and I'll even go so far as to be sympathetic to anyone who tries to communicate in the public sphere without a pseud. (And often, even with a pseud.)
But gosh, compare Chait or Rosin with, say, Sarkeesian. I can explain (and indeed, Goldberg explains) the problem with Chait and Rosin. What did Sarkeesian do to deserve dismissive rebuttals, much less the actual bullying she was subject to?
Reading this thread made me realize that the OP should be retitled* "Belle-ing the Chait." That is all
*(unless I decide to steal the title from meself for a forthcoming post of my own).
As between Chait and Sarkeesian, you're absolutely right. But did you read the Goldberg piece O. linked in 12? She's talking about left-on-left social media reactions, and she's plausibly talking about an interesting problem (although not one I have any direct experience of.)
Is Frowner around? Trying to think of who's activisty in an online, and might therefore have a more informed response to Goldberg.
35.2: Sure, but "Not as bad a the gamergaters" is setting the bar pretty low.
In the comments section of one of Belle Waring's posts someone linked to a blogger at Tigerbeatdown talking about how nasty the social justice blogging scene can get. So people do acknowledge this stuff in "private".
Obviously, discussions about improving online SJ communities are completely separate from Chait whining about how when war criminals get 6 figure fees for speaking at college graduations the students complain and that's just the most oppressive thing ever. But doesn't mean those discussions shouldn't happen.
This is just me being cranky again, but I'm not sure we should all dislocate our shoulders in our rush to pat ourselves on the back.
I still haven't, probably won't, read the Chait piece, and haven't read Goldberg on Chait, but I did read the Goldberg piece oudemia linked to. I thought it was a good piece and identified some things that are real problems in activist communities. I get the impression that the Chait piece is taking those same types of things and declaring them to be a problem of mainstream discourse overall, without much evidence that it really is a problem at that level.
Something like #cancelColbert is more of an issue for people who have to decide whether to join in or risk ostracism within their community for not joining in than it is for Stephen Colbert himself.
I can't even remember what that one was about.
The Goldberg piece linked in 34 is very good.
IMO, and as I've said before, the problem (ie, the real problem, not whatever Chait is talking about) is largely a structural phenomenon generated by social media and Twitter. Links wisespread sharing and 140 character comments lead inexorably to treating arguments with maximum lack of charity and pile-ons. The mistake is seeing this as particularly a problem of the racial-and-gender-politics left -- the same dynamic can be true for, I dunno, sports commentary or weightlifting or whatever. It's true that "the left" is particularly fratricidal but in this case I thinknthays a cery secondary factor.
Goldberg's also right that the world of magazines could use (and abuse) a baseline expectation o limited readership and presumptive good faith and need for a timely response, which made a "provocative" article a different kind of thing. Now if you're wrong you're going to get called out on it immediately and aggressively; this has its good sides but I can definitely seeing it leading to people taking fewer risks and relying ever more heavily on those twin underpinnings of Gawker media, consensus belief and snark.
I've spent more time with this thing than I ordinarily would with an internet kerfluffle -- I blame Netflix for not have more seasons of Archer on streaming -- and find myself a bit conflicted.
Chait is a resource worth having in the struggle with the right, which has recently taken complete control of the US Congress. I worry that his losing encounters with folks to his left get more clicks.
The zealous to the point of rudeness activist has always been a fixture, and indeed the term PC was coined to mock such people. It's always the Judean People's Front. I don't doubt that deBoer's examples of undergraduate conduct are real -- the problem (and its solution) isn't a national issue, but one hopes that people on the wrong end of such things could be a little more charitable.
Language policing is a project that's worth doing, but, like any policing, can be done in a non-productive manner. And it's always up to the policeman (officer, I guess) not the criminal, to see to it that it's done correctly.
38. Also, "For Whom the Belle Trolls," come to think of it.
the same dynamic can be true for, I dunno, sports commentary or weightlifting
Dammit, Ripper, you know that if the week begins on a Sunday it has to also end on a Sunday because Sunday to itself is zero days.
Should have added "the possibility of immediate gratification of man's eternal desire for attention" to 42.1. The new technology rewards both trollery and pile-ons and extremely aggressive statements of conventional opinion. All are rewarded with the immediate gratification of the "like" or the "share." So people are driven to seek attention by publishing an endless shitstream of amateurish bullshit* and others seek attention by easily snarking at the amateurish bullshit or picking up a few free "likes" by demonstrating belief in the consensus and a link to the snark. And so the gigantic cycle of wasting everyone's time with hysterical "discourse" that teaches nothing and accomplishes nothing continues, repeated forever and ever until the Internet dies.
*hey. Who are you looking at?
I, for one, thank God that there are brave souls out there standing up for American mottos for American states. E pluribus unum!
12, 33, 37: Yeah, the prior Goldberg piece is more thoughtful and useful. I wasn't interested in talking about that because I'm not really competent to talk about it. I don't have any skin in that game, whereas I believe I understand both where Chait is coming from, and what motivates the reaction to Chait.
Now one way to look at this is to say that I'm being silenced by my fear of weighing in on the substance of that piece, and that would be correct. I'd worry about inadvertently offending people. I'd be concerned that my comments would reflect my own background and worldview in a way that is ignorant of others' experiences.
But of course, that's a good thing. Sure, the fear of being seen as an idiot inhibits people, but one of the main things it inhibits is being an idiot.
Goldberg struck me as shallow, mainstream, too conciliatory, generalist.
Now This is honest self critique, the Tiger Beatdown article referenced at 39
Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and bloodshed ...Flavia Dzodan, supported by Sady in comments.
Within the context of call out culture, I *must* show my allegiance to one cause and one cause only. Nuance and intersectionality be damned. Because, as we have established above, the person being called out is obviously "the worst person ever" and nothing they have ever said and nothing they will say from this point forward has any value whatsoever.There is this taboo behind call out culture as well. Because those who have been at the receiving end of a call out and its most visible consequence, the pile-on, will not speak of what happened to them in the aftermath. They will silently hope that the "audience" moves on and forgets the whole affair, which has usually been painful and emotional. But to say something of the phenomenon might trigger a whole new round of abuse. It might initiate a new round of pile ons, and further call outs, and further re-enactment of outrage in a never ending cycle. And I suspect one of the reasons it is taboo to speak of what happened is because "call out culture" is perceived as being "owned" by the oppressed, in the sense that the people initiating these call outs will, of course, do so because "they are being oppressed" by the "problematic" statements. That, right there, obturates any possible discussion: who would deny that a person who is oppressed has the right to react to their oppression in an expeditious manner?
Neoliberal "possessive individualism," is part of it, wherein self-ascribed identity, your tribe or community, becomes something that belongs to you to use, rather than you belonging to it. In that case, it does have more profound cultural and political impications and consequences.
Do we have to all stop commenting and pretend to care about football now?
American football, you pretentious s.o.b.
54: I screwed up the quote! I die of embarrassment.
The last time I can actually remember sitting down and attempting to watch the Super Bowl was the one with the Janet Jackson thing, which was 11 years ago (oy).
If the Patriots start getting humiliated, someone let me know so I can turn on the game.
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Former Red Power Ranger arrested for fatally stabbing his roommate with a sword in their Green Valley home.
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It has to do with the 5th Earl of Angus rising up against James III.
That's the guy who played Deker in a slightly less shitty iteration of the series.
Anyway, that's the most useful thing I've learned all week.
Actually, it's about ethics in sports journalism.
So... both teams take the field to music by English musicians? That's not very 'Murrican, Super Bowl.
66: Also, "Bittersweet Symphony"? Really?
Does the "home" team designation make a difference in outcome?
A friend of mine is the patriots DJ; they asked him to send along songs for various key moments. So he's the traitor you're looking for, Essear, is what I'm saying.
(On the other hand he also mocked "bittersweet symphony" on Twitter)
Damn it, the stupid NBC android app is broken. No Superbowl for me, I guess. Too late anyway.
What I can only assume is NBC's inability to sell streaming ads is really making clear how much of a football game is... not football. It's like little bursts of football and then it goes to the "Coverage will resume shortly" screen, over and over.
Did they have any video of the balls being tested for air pressure?
I don't even, and all that, but took a look at the stats. The Seahawks are playing rope-a-dope, right, trying to exhaust the Pat offense by making them have the ball all the time.
Nissan: the official car of negligent fathers.
74: Seriously. I have no idea why you'd choose that song for that commercial.
Wait, Belle and Sebastian as bumper music at the Super Bowl?
75: Because they took it completely non-ironically? How fucked up was that.
Marketing is a very serious and rigorous major.
77: Did you notice that the dad and the kid aged, but the mom didn't?
It's not like it's a nice enough car to justify avoiding your family so you can afford one.
Everyone in my room was also perplexed by the message "Mom, Nissan is tearing our family apart".
Chapin's death:
He swerved left, then to the right again, ending up directly in the path of a tractor-trailer truck. The truck could not brake in time and rammed the rear of Chapin's blue 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit, rupturing the fuel tank as it climbed up and over the back of the car, causing it to burst into flames.
Wait, Belle and Sebastian as bumper music at the Super Bowl?
The band that actually performed a song called "I Don't Want to Play Football."
The guy nearly died driving for Nissan. I don't understand why that is supposed to get you to want to buy one.
Nissan: Or His Death Will Have Been In Vain!
Actually I think "I Don't Want to Play Football" is pretty much B&S at their worst. It's exactly what people who've never listened to them would think they would sound like. Weird whiny falsetto.
Further to 73 -- it apparently worked.
No kid sitting alone at a dance has ever been overjoyed to be offered a dance by their parent.
Have they been playing "My Own Worst Enemy" after interceptions for a while and I just now figured the joke out?
87: I was about to say. This has turned out to be a more interesting game than it originally seemed.
88: So I shouldn't buy my son lap dances?
Why is Katy Perry traveling through the Aliens egg field?
Shark costumes? Dancing trees? This is not nearly weird enough. I want to see an Of Montreal halftime show.
Carlos Casteneda-themed halftime opening.
I bet that hovercraft is powered by eels.
I kind of liked the always commercial "like a girl".
73 is looking particularly insightful right now.
You know, it's unfortunate when the other team successfully pretends to give the ball to someone and then throws it to someone else in the end zone. But when the fake guy makes it in as well that's just embarrassing.
Okay, I'm not generally a rah rah American booster, but THAT SONG IS ABOUT AMERICA, YOU FUCKERS. Don't fuck with that song.
Oh, I liked it. Be affectionate to the whole world.
At my Canadian summer camp we sang another version. IIRC, from Buena vista, to the (something) islands. From the arctic circle to the Great Lake waters. And then of course there's the joke Israeli version.
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Apropos of pause/play, I'm sure you'll all be happy to read that I have moved on from nightmares about torture & murder to nightmares about wearing blue jeans on a non-jeans day at work.
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I liked the North Face one better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tll-4WONtg0&app=desktop
Maybe they deflated their balls right tonight after all.
Anybody else feel like the Seahawks decided that if they couldn't win the game, at least they'd give the league a PR headache?
It seems pretty clear that they actually could have won the game, though.
What, when the ball was on the 1-yard line? Even if they get the safety, they still have to go ~80 yards to get a touchdown.
I'm really glad I watched the last five minutes.
Oh, well, at that point yeah it was over.
Right, I was talking about the brawl, not anything else.
At least we know nobody will talk about the Seahawks in racially coded language tomorrow.
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Instead of watching the Big Game, I entirely unpretentiously sat my 3yo in front of The General, curious to see if trains and pratfalls could make up for sound, color and 21st century pacing. It went over pretty well I guess (there were trains!).
I'm trying to think of other movies that have a Confederate hero. All I can think of are Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, both of which are famously problematic. Nobody seems to fuss about The General. (There are no black people in it, which helps.)
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The guy who had "incredible catch followed by weird play calling leading to a Patriot win" in our office pool is going to be really smug.
Yes. Westerns were what I was thinking of.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Rooster Cogburn is a former Confederate. If we allow that, then the entire Western genre comes in with it. I haven't seen Josey Wales, but that sounds... troubling. (Have you heard the This American Life about Asa Carter?)
Cold Mountain seems incidentally relevant, like that one movie with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster that I can't remember the name of.
Former Confederates, bah! The plot of The General involves Buster Keaton sabotaging the Union army's battle plan and enabling a Confederate surprise attack. (And saving the girl. And driving a train.) He's not some piddling antihero with a tragic backstory.
128 - Haven't heard that TAL. (The Outlaw Josey Wales is magnificent as a piece of filmmaking, even if the politics are -- like many Eastwood movies -- basically indefensible. Like, I think Eastwood thinks he was making a straightforward movie about the horrors of war, but it's not remotely surprising to me that he bundled that up in Lost Cause pernicious Union stuff.)
But Unforgiven is still good, right?
I mean, Amazon made a show this very goddamn year about the Civil War where the focalizing character was a noble Confederate officer appalled by the evils of slavery -- he frees his slaves to their hosannahs! -- who nonetheless fought honorably his homeland of Old Virginny.
136: I think it's overrated as his best because it has so many insane stunts. I prefer Steamboat Bill.
This is the exact conversation in November I had after seeing The General!
The most interesting thing I learned during my November exchange is that a movie was made in the '50s that used the Union "special forces" as protagonists. It had kind of a downer ending, for obvious reasons, and isn't much remembered nowadays.
I'm not sure I've liked any of Keaton's features, but have liked most of the shorts I've seen.
I think the protags of Hell On Wheels are Confederates.
Buster Keaton was fine but no Harold Lloyd. #hottake
Buster Keaton's best movie was "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini". #slatepitch
I couldn't even get through one episode of that "Hell on Wheels" crap. Fuck Lost Cause narratives forever.
When will someone with a high pop culture profile say something to the effect of, "If we're such a post-racial society, maybe we should stop making Confederates the heroes of all of our Westerns and half our other movies"?
How many Westerns are there nowadays, about 1 per year since 1990? 1 every 2 years? I think we have bigger things to worry about.
Westerns are to America as really long poems about people related to various gods are to classical Greece.
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Been doing the OKCupid thing. Had a date with a very nice woman all lined up for Tuesday evening. Checked in today so I could send her my cell number so we could finalize things on the day. She deleted her account. I drove her off the dating scene. I feel strangely proud.
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Oh, and apparently CrazyBlindDate is coming back. I'll definitely give that a try when it returns, assuming I'm not entangled by then.
143: But the tropes keep getting reused; as noted above, Firefly isn't just Western-inspired, it literally uses Lost Cause mythology for its hero. That is so fucked up.
I don't remember Cowboys and Aliens having any Lost Cause mythology, but for that matter I don't really remember anything about it except the title.
Firefly is a pretty weak example. You take the romance and tragedy of fighting for your ideals in a losing war, transpose it to a different galaxy and remove the context of white supremacy and you end up with... an unproblematically romantic/tragic backstory. Tropes are tropes. Sometimes racists get to use them too.
The tropes themselves aren't necessarily bad, but from what I can recall Firefly was awkwardly close to just literally calling out the civil war. I mean, they didn't talk about slavery but neither do the lost cause people. And the rhetoric and imagery was uncomfortably close to neo-confederate stuff.
I mean, it's probably not a result of confederate sympathies on the parts of the writers, but they were echoing the old confederate-hero westerns really closely and probably could have spent more time thinking about what was going on with those movies.
149: Yes, it uses the Lost Cause mythology but has to create a whole new world where the losing side isn't evil to make it justifiable. (As far as I remember, the Browncoats were just rural folk who wanted to be left alone and didn't practice slavery or anything else onerous. It feeds into modern libertarian thinking so well.)
Has anyone written a Lost Cause pastiche about a Native American who, his nation having been forcibly pushed onto a reservation, heads further west to try his luck on the frontier? The whole "fought for a glorious cause and lost, on hard luck at the edge of society" trope plays well for a reason, and I think it's rescuable, even if not necessarily in a context as close to the source as Firefly.
On preview, basically what 152 said.
146: Wait, what happened to the 72 hour first date person?
155: 156 is correct. The romantic chemistry was not there.
42
It's true that "the left" is particularly fratricidal
I admit that I've only been skimming the whole Chait/Belle/DeBoer thing, but this is what I've been wondering about. I get that Twitter and similar stuff are new media and have their particularly toxic aspects, but hasn't the left's tendency towards a circular firing squad been a joke for a century? Literally a century, if you want to count arguments that far back as relevant to today's issues, and I know there are jokes in Monty Python about revolutionary movements fighting with each other more than the common enemy.
My point is, I'm curious whether this fratricidal stuff truly new, or old but increased or worsened in some way, or completely old and just looks new because of where it's happening.
158: I agree. I've been unconvinced by the "Oh it's just social media, it happens to everyone." line.
It might happen to everyone, but sure shows an increased tendency to happen on the left. The Judean Peoples' Front joke didn't come out of nowhere.
157: Has she stopped being guilt-trippy about the breakup too, I hope?
Deadwood is a good reimagining of the West.
Longmire is more conventional, but has native plotlines and some native actors.
Procedural liberalism as the lost cause of the defeated urbanite, how does that sound?
157: I thought "chemistry" was the thing that you'd need to spend 72 hours together.
159: That's the Peoples' Front of Judea joke.
163: According to the wikipedia page, it's actually Judean People's Front, and I misplaced the apostrophe. I'm a heretic!
Whether it's a valid trope or not, IMO the US needs to take a century break from anything that valorizes the South. I'm sure creative types can come up with a model that doesn't come with a century of evil baggage.
Is a lot of German art about how most Nazis were really just honest footsoldiers for a noble cause that happened to lose, so they had to live on the outskirts of civilization?
completely old and just looks new because of where it's happening.
In about 1985, on a bet, I tried to draw a flow chart of the splits and occasional fusions in Britain alone within just the Trotskyist movement since 1945, ignoring the Maoists, Anarchists, Radical Feminists and all the rest. By the time I got bored I had covered two sheets of paper in normal sized handwriting and I wasn't close to finishing. This stuff has been going on since the faction fights among the Levellers in the English Civil War.
I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that.
To the OP, and thinking in terms of #CancelColbert, I think what it comes down to is this: people with big megaphones need to accept the slings and arrows that are always attached. You can make an argument that a movie star or pro athlete shouldn't have to deal with a prying public (it's not 100% inherent to the job), but I can't see one that a public intellectual shouldn't have to hear criticism from the public. So, at a bare minimum, Chait just needs to grow a thicker skin.
On top of that, a public intellectual has a certain obligation to pay enough attention to criticism to know whether or not it's justified. A specific calling out may degenerate (or spin up) into a shitstorm, but if the underlying issue is real, you've got to step up, whether it's a simple apology or a deeper reconsideration (e.g., was it a lazy/insensitive joke, or was it a real blindspot?). Easier said than done, of course, but this is what it means to have a big megaphone - with great power, &c.
168: Well, in truth there are clearly lots of narratives about "innocent" footsoldiers, but AFAIK the mainstream ones don't hint at a Lost Cause so much as ascribe the individual's motivations as being simple patriotism.
The thing is, unless you're talking about a kid or oldster conscripted in the closing months of the war, pretty much any soldier's story is going to start with invading someone else, so it's hard to tell a purely "patriotic" story. I was reading today (part of BdL's WW2 Liveblogging) the story of a soldier running from the Red Army, and it includes a note as he crosses the post-Versailles German/Polish border about how they'd first crossed it 3 years previous expecting to conquer the USSR. It's a memoir, not a novel, but I think you'd be telling a pretty unbelievable story to elide that sort of thing.
Slacktivist describes Judean People's Front splitting behavior among right-wing evangelicals. Garrison Keillor describes it among tiny Lutheran communities. A trait of idealism, rather than leftism per se.
We've done 152 before. 154.2 is great-- paging Felix Gilman? Maybe the tragic hero should go as far as South America, or Russia (also having its calico-clad settler expansion then).
172.1 seems right to me. There's a reason why the Judean People's Front joke also works* for the Life of Brian specifically, i.e. tiny Christian or proto-Christian communities.
*LOB is not actually my sense of humor, at least not laugh-out-loud.
166: I'm in complete agreement that whatever value it might have is totally moot when used in service of idolizing barbarity. And even if that's not the intent, it's better to deploy such tropes carefully.
172: Those sorts of situations are fine-grained filters for very small differences in idealism/pragmatism. (See also 174.1) I'm tempted to claim that leftism, going back to the original topic, is worse than usual in that there's the privilege dynamic, but there are probably correspondences in other idealist settings.
The thing is, unless you're talking about a kid or oldster conscripted in the closing months of the war, pretty much any soldier's story is going to start with invading someone else...
In the common case, this is only true of roughly 50% of the soldiers. The other half get to be brave patriots defending their homeland.
175.2: They were mustering on our border! We marched only in self-defense!
We've done 152 before.
Yeah, there was a really good thread here about this a few years ago. I don't remember the specifics, but I found the critics of Firefly and the like very convincing.
More religious splitting (Emo Philips)
If you read the Acts of the Apostles carefully, you can see that they were at it within the lifetimes of most of the original twelve honchos. The author of Acts tries to play it down, but it doesn't quite work.
The video linked in 103 is really, really good if you're into that sort of thing. Even has the lesser-known last two verses.
Isn't it likely that, to the extent that the Left really does split more, it's because Lefties/liberals/progressives are advocating change, which can come in infinite forms, while conservatives tend to either look backwards or else stand athwart? CHANGEBAD doesn't require fine-grained debate about which changes are bad, because they all are.
That's a gross simplification, and an important truth is that alleged conservatives are often innovating (while pretending they're not), but I think the overall tendency is probably right. All those assholes in tricorner hats weren't arguing with each other over which Founders, exactly, were the correct ones, because they all agreed that the Founders would agree with them that taxes are bad and negroes shouldn't be President.
172. Splitting behavior is also good if you are trying to create a "pure" vanguard party that's ready to take power in a revolution. Worked for Lenin, anyway.
To follow up on 170, I'll say again what I said at the time, which is contra Chaitian whining about identity politics, I really appreciated the discussion here about the #CancelColbert stuff, not so much because of Ms. Cancel Colbert herself but because people on Unfogged really communicated the degree of off-puttingness, on a couple different axes, of the ongoing Colbert joke. It's sometimes not evident to me how these sorts of things read to non-white-guys and it was informative (and changed my mind!) to see people talking it out and getting the sense that the reaction wasn't just arbitrarily looking to pick a fight to raise one's profile.
Yeah, you hear the no trespassing sign verse pretty often hereabouts.
This band's rendition is the best I've heard for a long while -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Def5J2wQP9M -- but when I saw them they had John Paul Jones too, which, like adding bacon to most recipes, can't go wrong.
170, 185: If memory serves, Colbert's response to #CancelColbert showed the exact bit of awareness that Chait lacks. That is, Colbert understood that he wasn't threatened, and didn't respond with an attack on the originator of the hashtag.
#CancelColbert drew a lot of really interesting reactions, and that's the stuff that I'd like to discuss. On the narrow issue of whether Colbert had been offensive, my mind was changed by the thread here. But on the broader question - how ought one respond to that offense? - I think there is still a lot to be said. Or still a lot that I haven't figured out.
That said, I absolutely refuse, in the context of Chait's nonsense, to begin a conversation, "Yeah, Chait's a moron, but ..." Because Chait, in fact, did not raise any interesting issues. I think Belle Waring was too charitable to the prick in conceding him anything.
Obligatory link: Sharon Jones does a nice version of "This Land Is Your Land."
(Watching that video I wondered, for the first time, what emotion she feels about the opening line, ".. to the New York island" knowing that she worked as a corrections officer at Rikers Island.)
Album version which was used in the movie "Up In The Air."
A different performance in which her singing isn't quite as precise, but the band is smokin'.
Another version without the band -- I love how she sings it (more soul and less funk than the other versions)
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/1zkr18/who-s-attacking-me-now-----cancelcolbert
188: went to listen to one of the videos in 188, and the lead-in ad was the NASCAR Chapin one ...
Alcee Hastings giving an unsolicited opinion on the craziness of the state of Texas while speaking to a buttmunch congressman from Texas. "Well fine, then you don't have to listen; you can leave if you choose ..." "I'll apologize when hell freezes over."
181: the anti-immigrant/anti-Europe right over here is farcical, but not very splitty, partly because if you split off to form your own groupuscule you'd lose access to the funding from whichever millionaire it is.
? The hard right can be very splitty indeed. The BNP basically split itself to death over the last couple of years. Things like the FPO could be incredibly vicious internally.
What they don't do is cell-division. What they do do is really savage personal politics.
Not that I disagree with Hastings about Texas, but being from Florida should make one a bit more careful about calling another state crazy.
194: Hastings does acknowledge that, We did something almost as crazy--which was not expand Medicaid
It's hilarious that Virginia "Exactly As Crazy As A" Foxx was chairing that session.