He still owes me for Phantom Menace.
My take: Neeson's career will be just as damaged as Brett Kavanaugh's has been.
My take: Neeson's career is over.
Maybe he could be Governor of Virginia.
No one's stopping Neeson from saying anything.
I>You should all know, these past 16 years, I've been writing posts in blackface
You're allowed to because you're Mexican.
Finally, Liam Neeson is getting a raw deal.
Nah.
"Liam Neeson is getting a raw deal" sounds like a tag line for one of his movies.
Turns out there are 2 movies titled Raw Deal, one from 1986 and one from 1948.
Liam Neeson doesn't appear in either one.
The knives are sharp here in Va. On the good news front, one of the local Commonwealth's Attorney's Scott Miles is serious about criminal justice reform.
But, he only won a special election so he has to run again this November. Anyone who wants to kick in some money for someone actually making a difference, a local Commonwealth's Attorney race is a great way to do it.
The thing about Liam Neeson is that I don't believe he was actually roaming the streets looking for revenge on black men for his raped friend. I think he's playing another tortured, revenge-crazed character and thought it sounded impressive to claim that he, the actor, was like that too. And he's a racist idiot to think it'd make him look impressively pain-stricken or something rather than terrifyingly antisocial.
Yes: also that when he grew up, Northern Ireland was full of young men roaming around looking for strangers of the wrong tribe to revenge kill. And almost entirely without black people.
He's like .4209 of a Mel Gibson. He'll be fine.
It turns out that I know a lot of people who personally know the VA lt. goverbor's accuser.
I bet Virginians miss having a governor whose worst quality was being bribable with a nice watch.
Yes, exactly to 15: it sounds shocking in a US context when he's talking about black people but if the young Liam had said "a friend of mine got raped by a Prod so I went out looking for a Prod to beat up" that would have been entirely culturally plausible.
13.1 could be incorrect without rendering the rest of 13 wrong. The same impulse that leads someone to brag now about acting out could have caused him to actually act out back then.
Liam Neeson is getting a raw deal. You gotta let people be honest, especially if they're doing self-critique.
It's interesting to think about where lines are properly drawn, and how we ought to think about people's personal history in changing times. In this case, I'm going to come down on the side of saying Neeson is being a dick. He did acknowledge that his (purported) actions were fucked up, but the tone of it sounded to me much more like, "Look at what a deep, tortured soul I am," rather than, "Can you believe what a racist asshole I was?"
Like Neeson, Terry Crews puts himself at the center of the narrative, but I think he does so more instructively: "Reminds me of a time I got provoked by a rich white guy I didn't know. Hoping I would do something."
On the other hand! The NYT went through the yearbooks for Eastern Virginia Medical School:
One photo featured a professor holding a mug that read: "We can't get fired! Slaves have to be sold."
And the Times published the photo.
I do feel badly for the professor. He thought he was making a joke about academia, not slavery.
I fear the key distinction between the professor and Neeson is probably that I can imagine, 30 years ago, doing something as dumb as what the professor did. Neeson's conduct -- both his self-described actions decades ago and his recounting of that behavior now -- is dumber than I am. My approach here may not be the best for discerning universal principles.
I've been struck repeatedly over the last few years by my own moral luck, in the sense that when I was a fucked up and miserable adolescent I would have been helpless against a lot of the most destructive ideologies in the world today. I can't see myself as an actual Nazi, but some kind of Bannonite prick - yes, I can see that as a possible expression of rage and alienation. I think the urge for status will lead young men to terrible crimes. So one of my impulses when I see people making dreadful choices is "Thank God I was never presented with their opportunities".
Some of this I think is exogenous gloom. My mother is either dying or just convinced she is. Either way, her mind is eroding in a very distressing way. Someone who is together enough to say "I wish someone would just bump me off" and then laugh when I say it won't be me -- but who is still unable to rise from he chair for fear of falling, and who cannot remember anything said more than two minutes ago, makes an exhausting conversation partner.
But some of it is genuine self-knowledge.
I'm sorry you're going through that. It sounds really rough. Watching a mind erode from close up is a horrible thing.
Liam Neeson should be finished, for the reasons given below, but probably will not be.
1. There is a social cost to just randomly sharing fucked up and evil thoughts, and it's not fair to put that on everyone. It's not like it's some revelation that white people believe in collective punishment for people of color, or that white men have violent racist fantasies, or that we live in a society where white people are socialized to be racist. We know all this.
For many people from marginalized groups, it's traumatic to hear yet another person recount how they, like, fantasize about murdering you. I am not surprised by the number of people who commit violence against trans people, for instance, but that doesn't mean I want folks to be telling stories about how they think about it all the time or something. It doesn't make me feel safer; it makes me paranoid, anxious and sad. If anything, it escalates my tendency to assume that people are biased against me, making my life actively worse.
2. Neeson lacks moral sense. If you respond to trauma by having vile impulses, that's something you work on with a therapist. Humans have harmful impulses, but that doesn't make us fascinating and it's not the world's job to help us process them.
3. Sharing fucked up and evil thoughts in a generic context normalizes them. "I fantasize about violence against marginalized people" is a super, super charged thing to say. Treating it like it's just part of the standard template of celebrity interview gives people the impression that, well, heck, everyone has these thoughts, and sure they're bad, but they're just human.
4. It sucks all the air out of the room. Once again, instead of talking about the actual consequences of racism, we're talking about some white guy running his mouth. Morally normal people should have the sense to deal with their privilege issues in private, whether with therapists, support groups, friends or at least obscure blogs where everyone has basically signed on for it.
People are talking like the issue is the thought, when the issue is actually the "I'm interesting, here are my sadfeels about my racism".
Seriously, when I went to therapy, one of the things I talked about was the anger, resentment and fear I sometimes felt in extremely "check your privilege" activist settings. I sought out a social-justice-warrior-competent therapist and we talked about that stuff, and it helped. I didn't stand up in the middle of a meeting and demand that everyone pay attention to my resentment of their needs and experiences.
#27 -- Yes, yes, YES.
Thank you. This is everything I wish I'd said.
I wonder if this helps get at why some of my family are so enthusiastic about, specifically, Three Billboards and Green Book. "The interiority of this overt racist is so compelling!"
What Frowner said. It's lynching logic.
27 is excellent, and I think it does a good job of framing the issues. I do have a question about this:
It's not like it's some revelation that white people believe in collective punishment for people of color, or that white men have violent racist fantasies, or that we live in a society where white people are socialized to be racist. We know all this.
I have the impression that there's a lot of people who think that, "yes many white people are socialized to be racist, but that's other white people, not me or my friends" and the reason why it can be valuable for people to talk about, "I was messed up and racist, and here's how that happened" is that putting a face to that experience can make it more recognizable. I don't know that Liam Neeson did that, but I think there can be value in people putting their own experience into that message.
Frowner said it great in 27. Here's Carvell Wallace saying much the same thing on Twitter.
It is not mine to choose, but I do think Gov. Northam could have done a public reconciliation that we haven't yet seen. A longer approach like, I was fucking stupid and racist then, because it was harmless for me then (with details). Since then, I've learned why that picture is so bad (solid explanation) and also tried to govern along with my new understandings (with details). Now I have to own both and I hope, on balance, to have been a force for good (details).
I don't think we've seen that yet, and it would be a worthwhile service, to let a prominent white guy do that conversation and work in public.
32: I, too, thought Northam had a window where he might demonstrate he deserved to keep his job. Seems like that window closed, unless he is prepared to say, "I have searched my soul and I want Virginia and the country to understand that I am no longer a man who could do what I did last weekend." Dumb fuck.
I think he's going to win on "lesser of four evils" grounds.
Actually, that seems too optimistic. I thin he's going to win on "lesser of N evils where N >=4."
34: He will probably win, because he's already governor, and he can just wait out the scandal. That everyone else in the line of succession is also tainted just makes this a little easier.
I feel 27 at the end sets an impossibly high bar. If *Frowner* has to go to a therapist to deal with their resentment that their own feelings must be ignored in favour of other, woker, people's this is admirable -- but it's not going to be widely copied.
What Megan says in 32 about Northam seems obviously right, but where is he going to get the space to do that?
Where is Neeson going to get the space to do that?
Suppose he were to make the effort - he'd only be attacked for sucking the oxygen out of the room by having us all talk about him and not about the effects of racism -- and that can't be the way forward: if you want to mitigate the effects of racism, you have to diminish the amount of racism in society, person by person, and offering models and examples of how people change is part of that process. You have to make other systematic changes, as well, but without mass changing of attitudes at a personal level they either won't be made or will prove ineffective.
Such changes of attitude are impossible without some rituals of repentance and forgiveness, and I think that, in Christian terms, some of the American Left is too Calvinist about this. Instead of expecting a certain level of sinfulness throughout the population (the Catholic attitude) we find society divided into the elect and the damned, with no half way house, and no obvious means for the damned to be promoted to the ultimately winning team.
If you want to change a society's morals you have to find ways for ordinary people of no heroic virtue to participate in this effort. Shaming transgressors, casting them out of all decent society and so forth is an effective means of social control but not an infallible or universally applicable one. It worked very well in small Puritan societies where ostracism meant there was nowhere else for the victim to go, and where people really believed in the threat or possibility of eternal damnation. But puritanism without the fear of hell to back it up has no teeth. Contemporary Americans do not believe in eternal conscious torment. They do believe in the possibility of reinvention, so ostracism doesn't work either.
Where is Neeson going to get the space to do that?
To make an obvious point, the rules are going to be different in public spaces (and for public figures) than it is in private with people who have, implicitly or explicitly agreed to be helpful and respectful to somebody working out their own issues.
I don't know what the appropriate way to bring this up in public would be, but the obvious place for Neeson to have begun talking about and processing his experience would be with a small group of friends (and if he did that first I think it would shape his public statements very differently).
That said, I partially agree with 37 that it's worth figuring out how to do a better job of having the public conversation, and I think the process towards involves grappling with the questions of, "does my bringing this up cause harm for the people whom I would like to be helping or expressing solidarity with."
37: It's not heroic to expect Neeson to be too ashamed of himself to brag about having wanted to kill black people. He can afford a therapist, he presumably has friends -- there's not a public benefit from starting a public conversation about his issues. That's not expecting superwokeness from him, just ordinary shame.
This is where my rule about never discussing my feelings really helps.
Obviously, it's mostly for dealing with people in my life directly, but it works for public statements, if I were to make one.
41: That will work as long as you don't misbehave. Once you misbehave you have to talk about your feelings so that every one knows that even though you did a bad thing, deep-down you are still a good person.
To put it another way, I fundamentally disagree with Ogged. If you hate someone and want them dead, there's no benefit to being honest about it, and expecting people to be forgiving if you are is unreasonable. Some feelings (say, wanting to kill black people for revenge) are wrong and shouldn't be shared openly other than in a controlled situation like therapy, because sharing them is (as Frowner said) an injury to the people who have to hear about them.
Northam is supposed to have some fucking skill, as a politician if not as a woke human. He could have scheduled an announcement in 24 hours, not said stupid shit in the interim, written a difficult speech with a mildly sophisticated understanding of becoming educated on race as a middle-aged white person who grew up in the South, run it by some experts and then given that speech. He had all the eyes, so he could have made that space for himself.
Dear Constituents:
You have now seen that awful picture on my yearbook page.
I did that because... Perhaps you remember feeling something similar.
Then I read some fucking books and was painfully educated by someone after I accidentally insulted them and I became aware. Here's why it is bad, proof that I now learned.
I wouldn't do that shit again. I'm sorry I did it. I was wrong to do that. As proof that I'm better now, I did these four things as governor, which help the people my picture insults.
Now that I'm even more super painfully educated, I'll be really extra good for the rest of my term, and besides, I'm not stepping down.
The end.
***
I still think we haven't seen that. We've seen, 'wasn't me'. Or, from Republicans, no real confession or consequences. Or, 'I'm really good underneath, in my heart.' Or, 'I'm sorry if it offends, you can't really mean that you'll fire me over this.'
42: Right. I was thinking of Neeson, not the Virginia people.
Yeah, the Virginia AG did pretty much that, and did it pretty well. (Of course, he also had a significantly less bad level of blackface to apologize for.)
Did he? I haven't been following closely enough.
Mark Herring's his name, and here's his statement: https://twitter.com/MarkHerringVA/status/1093187229533519872 . Almost exactly what you suggested.
Yeah, pretty much. I'd love to hear a little more about how he realized it was a dumb thing to do (I took a college class, I witnessed a friend's hurt when something like that happened, I got woke on Twitter). I think the details of that could be interesting and show that it wasn't a miracle of transformation (into the non-racist they were always meant to be!), but took some thinking and learning about.
We've seen, 'wasn't me'.
We've seen: 1.) Was me, I'm sorry. 2.) Wasn't me; couldn't possibly have been me because I would never dress like that 3.) Except that time I wore blackface. Wanna see me moonwalk?
People keep complaining about the impossibility of redemption for white men, but real apologies have almost never been tried.
I don't have any thoughts on how to improve Herring's effort. I bet it works out okay for him.
To me, the whole Northam thing is a real shark-jumping moment for the Democrats. The sheer number of words that have been spilled about the correct way to show contrition. It's an embarrassing picture from years ago. Sure, it makes him look bad at the age of 26, and his handling of it has been hilariously incompetent, but it's nothing compared to his actual public policy record. Who wants to be part of a political movement where the most important skill is how to apologize correctly?
My guess is that Herring doesn't have much of an evolution story -- his blackface thing seems to be really a dumbass kid not knowing it was offensive. Making up to look like a particular celebrity is offensive, and the apology is needed, but I buy it as pure ignorance in a way that can't possibly explain a blackface picture next to someone in a KKK outfit. So, the evolution probably comes down to "Either someone said or I read somewhere that a white person dressing and making up as a black person, even if it's just meant as a costume, connects to the offensive history of blackface and that made sense to me."
52: A necessary skill is not hurting people by being racist, and acting in a way so that they trust you not to hurt them by being racist, and apologizing is part of that. Someone who thinks a KKK outfit is a cute joke is presumptively untrustworthy, and if he doesn't apologize in a way that demonstrates he gets that, he's still untrustworthy.
I have no idea if Northam is a good governor of Virginia, or what his public policy record looks like. (I remember rooting for the other guy in the primary, but that's it.) But it was 25 years ago. Either he's trustworthy or untrustworthy on race, but either way something in his subsequent career should reveal it. We don't need to know what he thought was funny 25 years ago to assess him.
We need to know what he thinks about it now. If he can't say something sensibly apologetic about it now, that's not an isolated failure of skill in apologizing, that's a failure of being able to talk to his black constituents about the kind of behavior that is rationally frightening and upsetting to them. Part of the horror of racism is that people are polite to your face and out to get you behind your back. As an adult, he thought KKK outfits were entertaining: don't you think that puts him in a position of needing to prove to the African Americans who voted for him that they can rely on him not to screw them over? (And I'm not sure that's possible, but if it's not possible, those are the breaks. Some mistakes are unfixable.
I don't really think that gets at it. I wouldn't vote for somebody who thinks insulting me is funny (which is a certainly a part of the reason I'm more against Trump than I was against W). I don't expect anybody else to be willing to do so either.
Anyway, I'm all for voting on "No, you go fuck yourself" grounds and think making sure that major portions of the electorate don't have those reasons for casting votes against the Democratic party is a major portion of the job if you're a Democratic party elected official.
That said, maybe it's a good idea to wait a news cycle or two before calling for anybody to resign so you have time to check out the potential successor.
OT?: Before the headline changes, please consider looking at the front page of the Huffington Post.
When you make great art like that, it seems effortless and obvious in retrospect.
Somebody on twitter said it wasn't blackmail or extortion of the kind that can be prosecuted, but I'm guessing you can't get a picture of a billionaire's penis without breaking a law.
I never expected the Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope pulls down her pants* to be the most prescient in terms of America's political future.
*Ok, if you insist on pointing out there's two episodes where this happens, I mean the one where she's dragged into a scandal, not the one with the telethon.
I don't understand how it's not prosecutable as extortion. Just because there's no direct payment?
Based on my extensive reading of a Twitter thread I can't find again, I think the issue was a competent lawyer could make the threats using language that would make successful prosecution difficult enough most wouldn't try.
But could they go bankrupt during the lawsuit if, say, a person of wealth were bankrolling it?
You don't get to bankroll prosecutors. You can only bankroll plaintiffs.
I wonder if there's any way the National Enquirer could have made themselves look more guilty without hiring Giuliani.
69: Yeah, I guess the other question I have is if there's civil suit grounds.
I don't know. Are Carol Burnett's lawyers still working?
To me, the whole Northam thing is a real shark-jumping moment for the Democrats. The sheer number of words that have been spilled about the correct way to show contrition.
From what I can tell the primary thrust of the institutional Democratic response has been to call for resignation, not apology. (Including the state's entire Democratic congressional delegation.)
"dark eyes" is actually one of my favorite-tending dylan songs and the only good one from a long, fallow period. but I've never thought it was about fame--rather, it's about racism, or at least not giving a shit about third-world countries. all these things he's meant to care about that don't amount to anything, and a drum beating for the dead that rise. like, shit is serious, not just songs about love and beauty, and when you look off the well-lighted stage of your life all you see are millions of people staring at you, dark-eyed. however re-listening I can see maybe my interpretation is idiosyncratic while ogged (or al jolson as we call him) is right.
LB, 37 as an occasional interviewer I would say that you are trying constantly to get people to say things they shouldn't say in public. That's what makes a good interview from the journalistic PoV. It is one of the necessary falsenesses of the trade: you try to get people to talk as if they were on a small private blog and then you exploit and betray any trust they show. At the same time they are of course trying to use you for their own purposes. eg the present Archbishop of Canterbury has a rule to say nothing in public that doesn't get Jesus into the first three sentences or thereabouts. It's not quite the same as "boasting" in the ordinary sense.
In your favour, though, is the argument that nothing normally gets out of an interview with a star that big without his publicist approving. It's not uncommon for them to have copy approval. And if that was the case, yes, he was deliberately boasting and deserves what he got. There was then a calculated decision on his part to publish it. But I simply don't know if that was the case and so far as I can tell no one has asked the question.
FWIW, Megan's proposed apology seems exactly right.
60 is pure brilliance, worthy of the cover of private eye, but British readers may need an American VPN to see it because it doesn't seem to be on the front page of the british site, to which they will inexorably be redirected so their adblockers are rightly targeted.
the present Archbishop of Canterbury has a rule to say nothing in public that doesn't get Jesus into the first three sentences or thereabouts
It's a nightmare when he's down the shops.
Can someone please tell us what 60 said?
||
NMM to John Dingell. One of the good ones.
|>
60/79 should be in the headline hall of fame along with "Headless body in topless bar"
Who wants to be part of a political movement where the most important skill is how to apologize correctly?
LB handled this, but I'll add: Not being sorry for wrongdoing is a core Republican value. When Donald Trump brags about sexual assault, that's locker-room talk. If Barack Obama sits in the pew of a minister known for spewing out offensive truths, Obama needs to convey that he's sorry. This is built into the nature of the coalitions the two sides are attempting to create.
Republicans were lying when they said Obama went on an "apology tour," but as with many Republican lies, it draws on something authentic: Liberals are sorry that the world doesn't work better, and worse still, liberals often wish that they themselves were better people. Republicanism means never having to say you're sorry.
If you can't easily explain the difference between your current self and someone who is amused by a sheet-and-hood ensemble, then you're a shitty Democrat, even if you do get Medicaid expanded.
We live in a world where Jeff Bezos has become the sympathetic one.
Neeson had specifically been asked about finding motivation to play a character obsessed with revenge.
or al jolson as we call him
So we have...the same name. It was just a matter of time.
John Dingell and Frank Robinson in the same day is a bit of a double-whammie.
85 And now NMM to Albert Finney too.
82: And of course, the NY Post ran with it. I guess you can't sue for plagiarizing a headline?
https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1093853974275506179
74: I wondered if anyone else was interested in talking about the song. It's a favorite of mine too.
Ogged's interpretation works very well for those lines, but when you look at the whole song ... well, like many Dylan songs it seems to be about everything, and I would say it isn't possible to come up with a single coherent interpretation so that all the lyrics make sense. I don't think Dylan spends a lot of time worrying about that.
Unlike most (all?) I like this album and my ideas about the song are colored by its placement on the album after "When the Night Comes Falling" and "Something's Burning, Baby", both extremely tense songs that seem to set just prior to or during the Apocalypse, and the singer is desperately trying to find or save his lover that he suspects may have gone over to the Dark Side and so his quest for her may lead to his own damnation. And after that comes the utterly serene, "Dark Eyes". All the struggle and strife are over and he's on the other side -- "I live in an other world / Where life and death are memorized"
Northam is supposed to have some fucking skill, as a politician if not as a woke human.
No. He is awkward and dorky. He got better some bc he gave the same speech over and over again.
But he is and always be awkward. Plus, he went to VMI. Those guys were the worst.
He was also hurt bc 1. he has been seen (and is) unabashedly doing what Dominion Power wants for the pipeline; and 2. Fairfax was next in line.
Imagine a world where Cuccinelli was next in line.
he has been seen (and is) unabashedly doing what Dominion Power wants for the pipeline
Are there ANY pipeline companies that don't have deeply dodgy names? The two big East Coast oil lines are Colonial and Plantation ffs.
Associated with police incompetence and brutality.
Had Keystone XL been completed, sanctions on Venezuelan crude would be less painful to Gulf refineries and thus easier for the US to implement, thus possibly helping to alleviate the sufferings of tens of millions. Or possibly to make their suffering far worse. Also some Canadians would make more money. Shades of gray, man.
The original plan put the pipe very close to farmland owned by various Hicks.
Or just deeply concerned about groundwater.
Fertilizer is literally made out of crude oil. Missed opportunities.
"Alyeska" seems like a pretty benign pipeline company name. AFAIK it's just an alternative form of "Alaska."
It does sound vaguely Russian, so maybe that's dodgy.
It sounds vaguely like a startup, which is worse.
Are there ANY pipeline companies that don't have deeply dodgy names?
The name of Dominion Energy, like so many things, is ultimately the fault of the English:
In gratitude for the loyalty of Virginians to the crown during the English Civil War, Charles II gave it the title of "Old Dominion". The colony seal stated from Latin, 'Behold, Virginia gives the fifth", with Virginia claimed as the fifth English dominion after England, France, Scotland and Ireland.
The state of Virginia maintains "Old Dominion" as its state nickname. The athletic teams of the University of Virginia are known as the "Cavaliers," referring to supporters of Charles II, and Virginia has another state public university called "Old Dominion University".
OT: "Custom lottery system" is a new one on me. It means running numbers.
The colony seal stated from Latin, 'Behold, Virginia gives the fifth", with Virginia claimed as the fifth English dominion after England, France, Scotland and Ireland.
Changed to "Behold, Virginia takes the fifth" after the Stuarts got chased off the throne and the Whigs were rounding up collaborators.