Should I know these people? Like, names sound vaguely familiar. But who the fuck are these people?
Corey Robin is a relentless self-promoter who somehow self-promoted himself into becoming a poster at Crooked Timber. (He has other qualifications, too.)
Neera Tanden is heads up the Center for American Progress.
Maybe I should become a relentless self-promoter. There's money in that, right?
I could do that. Talking shit about neoliberalism makes me feel good.
Although I would imagine there is much more money to be made working for the pro-neoliberalism side.
The question is: would you want to be a poster at CT? I doubt there's any money in it, and the comments section is horrible, but it is a certain amount of prestige.
My phone goes ping when somebody mentions me on Facebook. Doesn't out work that way for everybody? I try to shut it off and but never successfully.
11: Mine doesn't. Or maybe I've never been mentioned on Facebook.
The question is: would you want to be a poster at CT?
I think it would be nice to have a platform like that, warts and all. Unfortunately, as a civil servant, my employer forbids me from expressing opinions on anything.
Somebody said that Robin was a grad student union organizer, I think at Yale. Can you imagine sitting in some office trying to grade or in some lab trying to do something and in comes Corey Robin trying to talk to you about the labor movement (in this scenario I am imagining, without evidence, him wearing a leather jacket -- but you know he was wearing a leather jacket). I would 100% accept shittier health care to not have to deal with Corey Robin.
Robin's written some things I thought were really good; I wonder if his social media presence is the cost of that. Like he just has to write and write and write.
I can't tell what NRLB is. New Review of Leftish Books?
Matt Groening (sic) works for the NRLB (sic)?
I didn't realize others who agree with his politics were annoyed by Corey Robin. What I find annoying is he seems to be always on a quest to prove other people are hypocrites. Which never works. And works even less when the conclusion of your argument is that EVERYONE is a hypocrite except the guy who figured it all out.
14: The key is for the administration to say: "Fine, we'll give you better health care, as long as we don't have to deal with him."
I seem to remember before I stopped following him on twitter that he said something like "Yale is horrible, but I love New Haven"*, so he was probably at Yale.
*I bet he didn't even own a tv while living there.
I get the impression that 100 years ago all the excessively logical and uncompromising disagreeable guys who loved to argue about politics were Marxists. Now they are all libertarians but we still have a couple like Corey Robin hearkening back to the old days.
What is the head of a powerful think tank supposed to be doing at 10 PM on a Friday? Is she supposed to be out boozing it up?
She's supposed to be getting some sleep so she can be up at 3:30 AM to check out some sex tape.
Yeah, of all situations to bring out the old "Get a life" retort. It's not like there's some major political event going on this month in which Neera Tanden might be involved.
It annoys how much he and Jedediah Purdy's public images have become entwined through their mutual admiration and promotion of each other on social media. I think Purdy has (over the last 5 years) consistently had more interesting and insightful things to say about American politics and culture, but most people probably just think of him as part of the gaggle of generic Sanders-Left trolls.
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It seems potentially merciful to interrupt this thread before 40 comments, even to remark that this sounds like an awful way to die. The writing may not be to my taste, but it's plenty vivid and gives me the fantods.
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28: My grandfather died from Lewy body disease four years ago. It is indeed a pretty rotten way to go.
I'm sorry to hear it. My own grandfather died of Parkinson's, also not much fun.
A friend's father, recently diagnosed with LBD, was in a bike accident that left him a quadriplegic. The father decided to have nutrition and hydration intake ended. It seemed like a sad but merciful end for all involved given the alternative.
One thing that had been comforting about my mother's Alz is that until a year and a half ago, she seemed pretty happy, with no idea that anything was wrong. LBD sounds terrifying.
My grandfather died of LBD too, though his trajectory was quite different from the one in the article; of the extreme, fatal dementias one might have, it seemed among the more merciful. (ie he wasn't particularly aware of his own deterioration which didn't involve much rage or sadness, and scraps of self would poke out even at the very end, e.g. briefly shucking catationia to respond to the smells of borscht and other foods from his childhood--that sort of made it easier on caretakers/family). I don't know how common this presentation is compared to others, and he was 85, I cannot imagine how horrifying this would be to see in anyone younger.
My grandfather died, mercifully, of heart failure at the age of 81, at an RC nursing home that had originally been founded as a "House of Refuge for the Irish Poor." At St. Patrick's Orphanage and Elderly Asylum, in other words. Of which I felt ashamed when I was a little girl, because I had already sort of figured out that St. Pat's was for poor people.
But reading some of the comments here, I realize that my grandfather got off very lightly indeed.
I can still sort of taste that sense of poverty and outsider-ness.
But I have zero sympathy whatsoever for anyone who supports Trump. F*** you, anyone who supports racism and anti-Semitism and white nationalism: You're just being an ar**hole, and your poverty is no excuse.
Boy, referencing Lady Macbeth to talk about a woman with power sure isn't a bad idea.
The rock-solid feminism of lefty men remains a strong tradition.
If only center-left women would stop asking their husbands to murder kings.
I am pro-Corey Robin. I like his essays, and I like him on twitter.
Robin is sometimes interesting and useful, but more often makes painfully stupid arguments. He's what de Boer would be, if de Boer had any redeeming qualities.
I feel about Corey roughly what Steve Albini or whoever said about the Red Hot Chili Peppers: whenever I start reading something quoted by a friend of FB and it makes me think, "What is this shit?", it turns out to be Robin.
Not literally true, of course, but close to it. He has a very distinctive voice that I find utterly insufferable.
I don't even know what Robin sounds like.