I was in a book group on the Kendi book and while he expands the concept of racism, he definitely is not saying "and anyone who advocates this way should be canceled." Rather, he notes the ubiquity of racism in his expanded sense, including among himself and Black people, and underscores everyone's responsibility to work on it.
Overall I think Saisegly is being a little clickbaity by transmitting some what these authors view as problematic (which may be overexpansive) accompanied with nothing about what the same authors see as the appropriate response.
(Kendi also spends some time in his book criticizing the DeGruy "intergenerational trauma" concept, so plenty of room for disagreement.)
Am I the only one who lived through the '90s and saw the parade of motley jackasses selling their anti-"political correctness" snake oils? Must we put up with all this pointless whining again?
Op-Ed's are such an awful format. Too long to be snappy or entertaining, but too short to be anything but glib.
Okun & Jones I hadn't seen but looks like pretty good guidance for everyone, and it is highly ameliorative in its approach: "develop a learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning; create an environment where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results." It seems a misreading for anyone to take away from it, say, "Anyone who instills an unnecessary sense of urgency is a white supremacist." But there Y. is, predicting workers will allege "certain ideas or statements make them 'unsafe'."
I don't think I remember ever running into an antiracism training at work. I think we're vaguely expected to be antiracist enough already?
Assume a spherical librarian who wants to rap.
7: lots of reasonable stuff in there. How does it relate to white supremacy, other than every manifestation of power being ipso facto white supremacy?
There's definitely something weird in the current moment at the intersection of White democrats being way to the left of Black democrats on race issues, lots of woke online people discovering anti-racism without ever spending any time in Black spaces, and overeducated people emphasizing elaborate language rather than actual actions as the key part of anti-racism. One part of it that really brings it home to me is that there's an awful lot of neighborhoods now that have a hundred times more BLM signs than actual Black residents. But I don't know that I've actually seen someone in the public debate articulate these issues in a very successful way. Saisegly is trying to stumble towards it, but I just don't think it plays well to his skill set or his life experience.
My first reaction is that the link in 7 was that bundling up reasonable improvements organizations can make into the umbrella of "White Supremacist Thinking" isn't very helpful, but then I remembered that what actually got me to be more proactive about going to doctors was RWM saying not going to doctors was anti-feminist and that this was more effective than just saying it's stupid. So maybe this is a helpful frame for some people?
10: I can guess, but I suspect that's not covered because the linked is a worksheet extracted from a larger work.
1: The problem with this is that, on the one hand, we live in a racist society and so we are all racists in one way or another, and, on the other hand, there are bad people that are racists and that shouldn't be tolerated, and since racist is only one word, that can be confusing.
14: I know I find this sentence to be confusing.
whether to cancel Lincoln
What a tiresome, disingenuous framing.
What makes it disingenuous? Given that part of his point is that there are excesses, nutpicking seems ok in this case.
Referring to the San Francisco school board school renaming thing, I assume. Which both seemed silly and like something that shouldn't have made it past the local news.
Lots of people get carried away in their efforts to be anti-racist and get stuff wrong. That's because lots of people get lots of things wrong all the time, not because there's something strange and problematic about anti-racism.
Not being from San Francisco, I'm unclear as to why I should give a shit about how San Francisco decides to name its schools.
Does the decision to rename a school really constitute "canceling" Abraham Lincoln? My understanding was that the SF school board had decided it would no longer dedicate one of its schools to his name, not that it was going to stop studying his presidency, or that it would cease acknowledging his contributions to American history.
We have received your petition to designate the Lor as a protected category for all future DEI programming. That we cannot do so at this time does not mean that you need to throw public tantrums and/or make common cause with retrograde fuckwits who, were the GOP not literally a death cult, would vote Republican.
These are the same people who renamed Washington National Airport to Reagan National Airport.
Sure, SF is goofy and it's easy to make fun of them. But it means something for a public entity to name a school (or a building, or a street) after a person. It makes sense to assess whether there's a race/gender imbalance in who gets commemorated, and whether the valorization of any particular individual is likely to make members of the community feel overlooked.
There are 100-odd schools in SFUSD, which means that a near-zero percentage of important historical figures have a school dedicated to their name. Abraham Lincoln is not in danger of being "canceled" just because he is not one of them.
25: This is obviously a local issue that shouldn't have been blown up into a big thing, but there's a difference between "we're changing the school names because we have a new, more relevant batch of honorees and only so many schools to name after them, so the old names have to go" and "we think the names of these schools should be changed because the people they are currently named after should not be honored, at least not in this way." You're sounding as if the process was the first, the impression I had from reading coverage (which shouldn't have been national) was the second -- was this another case where the coverage was actively misleading?
The Okun paper (if it is the one I'm thinking of) really gave me pause the first time I read it. My first thought was "but those are just good practices for getting stuff done" and then my second thought was "oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh no." I finally settled on "those things work well in our racist society and I'm also good at them". Reading that paper did help me see some of the phenomenon as it happens and maybe also loosen up a bit about how to accomplish stuff.
No, I agree that (at least from what I've read) your second framing sounds accurate. I'm just disagreeing that "canceling Lincoln" is an accurate description of what's happening, insofar as the term "canceling" has any meaning (as opposed to just being a term that's thrown around to express derision of lefties).
I'd feel better about the link in 7 if one of the bullet points was that bringing in outside consultants with fancy degrees to run seminars as your main response to problems in your organization was white supremacist thinking.
28: But "canceling" doesn't have any meaning. It's a bad-faith term used to create false equivalency between dumb and harmful episodes of anti-racist overreach and entirely appropriate responses to racism (including but by no means limited to the unintentional sort).
Spike: "These are the same people who renamed Washington National Airport to Reagan National Airport."
No, see, that's different, Reagan's a white guy.
Yglesias was good during the Trump era but it now seems like he may be falling back into glib contrarianism that isn't particularly helpful or informative.
There's something bizarre about reading guys whose dorm room blogs were contemporaneous with this one on the op-ed pages of the WaPo and NYT. Not sure we're sending our best, but then I'm not sure there is a best on those pages.
I'm curious, do y'all run into any of this in your own lives?
That's the question: To what degree, based on our experience, is Yglesias nutpicking? My answer: To a pretty large degree. To the extent he's identifying a genuine issue, it's one that exists on the fringes. (San Francisco suspended its effort to rename schools because of the kind of backlash Yglesias chooses not to mention and claims doesn't exist.)
In my career, I've never seen management that was concerned with racism in the misguided way that Yglesias is discussing. I know it happens, but the problem is obviously dwarfed by, you know, actual racism.
33: That's not the point.
To the extent he's identifying a genuine issue, it's one that exists on the fringes.
To the extent that he's identifying a genuine issue, its one that been offered in bad faith by the Hannities and Tucker Carlesons of the world and he's going and getting it printed in the pages of a respectable newspaper.
I still like reading Yglesias as a statement of what normie Democrats are thinking -- not the median voter, but sort of the median congressperson. You know, the maddeningly ineffectual ones. He's wrong about lots of stuff, but he's clear, and if he's expressing what Democrats in power are thinking, it makes it easier to understand what they're doing.
37: I'm not sure Yglesias is a good representative of the normie Democrat worldview; Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall seem like better examples of that class (and they're certainly more influential on Dems with actual power). Matt's an interesting read in part because of his idiosyncrasies, in fact.
This is a real thing, folks. I'm actually on the D&I committee at my job, where there's talk of building bots to police insensitive language in the company slack, and I'm like, hey, how about a checklist for managers so that every person, regardless of [pick your category] gets the same reminders and encouragement about raises, conferences, and promotions? Guess which one we're doing?
And when the Okun thing came up, I had to ask, what is supposed to follow from this? This isn't about whether "perfectionism is a manifestation of white supremacy," it's about how power uses whatever tools are at its disposal to entrench itself (FFS). If power is white and you're black, you can be either too lazy, or trying too hard; hell, you might be both. Who doesn't know this?! We're minority-owned, so the question of putting different people in management is kind of moot, but if there's a real problem, can we find some examples and come up with solutions that aren't about thought-work?
It all seems incredibly lazy to me. There's a shit-ton of racism, and we're effectively dicking around about symbols and pure thinking. I suppose this sounds like whatabouttery, but the fact is that any one person or organization's time and money are finite, so something we do is something else we don't do.
There is a school near us that is named for the street it's on. The street is named, although with a different spelling, after a wealthy person who lived on that street around the revolution. That person had a relative (father or uncle, not sure) with the same last name who owned slaves. They haven't renamed the school yet but it's under consideration.
there's talk of building bots to police insensitive language in the company slack, and I'm like, hey, how about a checklist for managers so that every person, regardless of [pick your category] gets the same reminders and encouragement about raises, conferences, and promotions? Guess which one we're doing?
But that's not cancel culture its technosolutionism.
I mean, its actually pretty genius... if you build a bot, then a human won't have to deal with the problem.
Don't the bots in those situations always end up as Nazis?
A poorly-written bot also provides ample opportunity for using it as an excuse to gripe about cancel culture. What better way is there to gamify conservatism than to give them random reminders of why they hate liberals and minorities? And the best part is you don't even need to target it, you can just set it to go off in the middle of random conversations. Poor targeting is a feature!
I didn't think we were talking about cancel culture.
Pay no attention to me, man, all the store had was indica so I'm a little off.
I thought the book was interesting, both as a fascinating tour of Kendi's personal history of understanding race, and for its arguments for the concept of antiracism, but the group with which I read the book started to suspect that the 'how to...' framing was thrust upon him by a marketing team, because the book doesn't say much in the way of how-tos. The main point is that there isn't a middle ground between being racist (what he acknowledges more or less maps on to what we'd call structural racism) and anti-racist; the action is either improving things, maintaining the racist status quo, or making things worse.
The problem is that figuring out what makes an anti-racist policy is hard, and the 'how to' framing makes it sound like there's an obvious how-to, and in a lot of cases there isn't. I don't think this is Kendi's fault, but it's one reason I think the term structural or institutional racism captured the problem better.
This isn't about whether "perfectionism is a manifestation of white supremacy," it's about how power uses whatever tools are at its disposal to entrench itself (FFS).
Ha, I think I said something pretty close to exactly this sentence in a meeting at work. I wish that piece were more explicit in its assumptions about the relationship of whiteness to power.
The current buzzword in education is "culturally responsive pedagogy". I'm part of a group that's looking to see if we can make any progress on leveling out the disparity in STEM-degree completion between minority students and white students.
It's a hard problem. The examples of culturally responsive pedagogy often seem too facile, because it's hard to come up with examples when no one knows how to do it right. From what I can tell, in the humanities, it has to do with honoring the knowledge that all students bring from varied backgrounds instead of privileging white UMC backgrounds, and focusing on how to teach critical thinking and the creation of knowledge instead of focusing on rote facts.
But in STEM there's this idea that the knowledge is canned and objective. Which is debatable, but certainly topics have some objective markers of knowledge. You need to cover a fixed amount of territory in an Intro to Biology class.
As far as I can tell, the answer has to involve at least some of the following:
- some reflection about which bottlenecks in the material are serving your purposes, and which ones are just there to generate a normal distribution of scores
- who has the authority to determine that? what motivates them? are they on board with this idea?
- more resources. An instructor needs a lot more time and training to deliver a rigorous class that will allow a driven but unprepared student to get an A. The instructor probably needs to be face-to-face extra hours, and extra attuned to the student's blind spots, to help construct situations that will illuminate. You can't just squeeze extra instructor-hours out of thin air.
- what are your expectations for the amount of motivation and drive from the student? There has to be a balance. You can't go down the rabbithole of putting Grit on a pedestal, but you also can't ignore the agency of a student and their role in the outcome in the course.
- Probably a bunch of other things.
But those are all more about underprepared students than about a cultural gap between students and faculty.
Some of the obstacles are definitely about race and culture. If people from different cultures are communicating well, it takes accommodation from both the speaker and the listener. Is it enough for a white instructor to be thoughtful and reflective about race? What if the success gap in their classes persists, despite being thoughtful and reflective about race? Can you assume it must be the difference in k-12 rigor, or do you have a blind spot larger than what you can get at through being thoughtful and reflective?
I haven't read the book, but the summary in 50 seems to me to be missing a whole huge category of actions, which is ones where it's not clear whether it improves or worsens the situation and reasonable people can and do disagree about which action is better. Which is really the heart of MY's article.
The examples of culturally responsive pedagogy often seem too facile, because it's hard to come up with examples when no one knows how to do it right.
And because too many people are trying to rap the Dewey Decimal System.
Guess which one we're doing?
Seriously, bots for insensitive Slack language? What kind of language are they looking for?
I still haven't figured out Slack. I make people text me like they have to text the rest of the elderly.
I just remembered that this was the subject of a Different Strokes episode. The boys failed a math test on a prep school entrance exam because they made different assumptions about the premise of the questions. They give the headmaster their own test to prove the point. I think one of the questions was something about how many people can live in a house with a certain number of bedrooms and beds per room and they point out the "white" assumption that everyone sleeps in a bed.
Speaking of Different Strokes, it's actually "Diff'rent Strokes" and also I just learned that Todd Bridges was on "Fish," the most Abe Vigoda-centered TV show ever.
The other thing I remember about the show is an SNL joke about how all the cast members were going to end up in jail which is another snapshot of problematic 80s TV.
What kind of language are they looking for?
We're not using these lists, but the standard ones are this and this.
That second list might be the most comprehensive list of American English profanity in existence, which, thankfully, we don't have to worry about, because we have a swear-friendly Slack.
I'll say this much: used very judiciously, it's a way to let people new to the org know what the expectations are around certain terms. It's emotionally easier to be called out by a bot than by a colleague. That said, bots are dumb, they don't understand use/mention, and it can get tiresome.
They don't really let me talk to the new people much. I'm not sure why.
39 just makes me think about the impossibility of doing a big audit on compensation equity. The only person I know who has seen wage gap information at companies where she's worked says it's pretty stark. But I guess you want inclusion, not Communism.
I have long suspected that I'm arbitrarily paid better than people I work with who have more experience, because of some weird situational stuff. I have also wondered for years how much it has benefited me to have a hard-charging male boss who was very aggressive about asking for large bonuses and raises for me-- at least, that's how he characterized it and maybe he was faking me out, but it did seem like he was somehow able to pull down stupid amounts of money. My prior female boss took it for granted that I should be ineligible for bonuses, judging by how quickly the new boss reacted when he saw that I and one other person were the only employees on our team not getting performance-based compensation. It has made me wonder if some female managers contribute to the underpayment of their direct reports, basically because they suspect nothing is amiss: they were treated the same way! I've never gone looking for robust data on this.
Bonuses are the best thing ever. I never knew what I was missing.
I think it's great that whoever went presidential stuck with the "Diff'rent Strokes" theme by selecting a guest star on that series.
Are entire bonuses commonly discretionary like that? I thought if you're a certain class of employee (full time, minimum amount of time at company) your contract lists some target bonus which adjusts up or down for performance. Having the option to entirely withhold a bonus for anything short of fireable performance seems like it's inviting discrimination like what's described. Not that you couldn't discriminate with the performance adjustment but at least there's some floor of protection.
67: in my case, I was initially not eligible for any bonus -- my salary was contractually just $N per year. When I changed bosses, the new boss requested that my salary be $N + $B, where $B was variable but usually around 5% of $N. But there was never a scenario where $B was stated in the contract but adjusted down to zero in practice, no.
compensation equity
We have full salary transparency. Everyone knows what everyone else makes, and this is absolutely the way to go, in my opinion. (You need clear levels, salary bands, and progression criteria if you go this route, but it removes a huge chunk of unfairness and emotional upset if you pull it off.) But if you haven't always had it, there's probably enough unfairness baked into your compensation that it would be difficult to reset publicly.
Everyone post your company's salary ladder and employee SAT scores.
Let's all give our SAT score, bonuses, and opinions on whether or not Yglesias is sufficiently leftist.
That's going to knock your commenter bonus down by a percentage point.
Did y'all see where Jason Stanley, big deal philosophy guy, had posted his SAT score at some point, and right-wingers were making fun of his score?
I still haven't figured out Slack.
Neither have I. My impression is that its primary use is as a convenient platform for scheming to get your coworkers fired. Is it good for anything else?
Slack is great for expanding an initially narrow conversation without blowing up everyone's inbox. Also, it's mostly used in a way that makes those conversation archives searchable by any subscriber. Helpful in places where people work in multiple roles IMO.
Literally all my favorite Dr. Seuss books just got cancelled...
It's because I like books about travel.
69 At my old law firm, the new compensation schedule for all the partners was distributed to the partners near the beginning of each year. This was known to associates as a good day to avoid contact with partners.
Every dollar of revenue has three claimants: the lawyer who has the client relationship, the lawyer overseeing the project, and the lawyer doing the work. The accounting stats easily capture the first and third -- they still have to be weighted to decide who gets what -- but the middle one, also a sine qua non for that dollar coming in, is less visible.
(The collections figures were released every month, so every partner could know every month how much revenue had been collected for each lawyer's work, and each lawyer's originations.)
Working for a publicly traded company, you know the salaries of a certain set of top executives. Never been exactly clear to me where the cutoff is for who has to be publicly reported. Then everyone knows their own salary. So people sometimes try to interpolate for the people between them and the publicly reported executives, but it's very non-linear.
... opinions on whether or not Yglesias is sufficiently leftist.
I find Yglesias valuable. He's changed my mind on a couple of things (I'm more YIMBY than I used to be; and on the D & I stuff I think he's right to argue that it's a mistake to spend too much attention on symbolic issues when there are practical changes that will have immediate benefits (the sort of thing ogged is talking about in 39).
When I disagree with Yglesias I often think he makes his points clearly enough that they're interesting to argue with. But I have been finding that, this year, the percentage of things he writes that I'm inclined to argue with has gone up -- but still under 25%.
The other thing to remember about nutpicking is that it can be used to support almost any point. A lot of the standard D & I training seems silly but, you could argue, that there's need for some of those avoiding racism basics to prevent things like this.
|| Holy shit, our house just voted down the right-to-work bill, 62-38. Huge union mobilization, lots of Dems calling people: party basically went to the mat. |>
I'm also pretty sure they're scapegoating obscure not particularly problematic Dr. Seuss books to try to deflect criticism while still publishing The Cat in the Hat. Here's the offending image in favorite: https://youtu.be/8mQirGbgZMs?t=478
84: Amazing. Implying you swung almost half the GOP?
87 Yes. The Rs only went 38-29 in favor. All 3 of the Rs representing rural hinterlands of this county voted no.
83: I find miyself irritated with him a lot lately. He tweeted a "provocative" suggestion that Democrats in Ohio should support Kasich (running as an independent) for the US Senate seat in 2022. I sort of think he must realize how stupid this is, but he just posts because he knows it will annoy people.
86. The one they seemed to really go off on was "If I Ran the Zoo," which has caricature Chinese people, Arab people, African people, Russian people, etc. "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" has a caricature Chinese person, complete with a rice bowl and chopsticks. Those two are the main ones I've heard mentioned. (I'm saying "caricature" instead of the usual "problematic" or "racist," btw.)
I forget what's supposed to be the issue with "The Cat in the Hat."
69 et al. My company has varied from lavish bonuses for specific awesome performance, to a banded system based on a rating from one's manager and peers, to people being able to nominate other people for bonuses, to no bonuses. Raises are tied in to the banded ratings as well and are dependent on how the company is doing. None of these methods are at all problematic, of course.
70. Forgot a point about salary transparency. It means workers can see who is getting big bucks but is actually a moron. Most companies hate that.
91:. That was a thing working at The University- a public institution with full salary transparency. We would get ourselves worked into a frenzy looking up the salaries of old-timers that had barely done a lick of work in a decade.
And then we we would calm down with the thought that at least we had job security.
"If I Ran the Zoo" was also a favorite of mine, but the problems with that one are quite clear. I also understand the objections to "To Think That a Saw It On Mulberry Street." But the objections to "On Beyond Zebra" and "Scrambled Eggs Super" which were my two favorite Seuss books by a lot seem really nitpicky. It's not racist that people in different living in different parts of the world wore different kinds of clothes.
The issue with The Cat in the Hat is whether the Cat himself is intended as a minstrel character.
92: I was too lazy to look up my profs.
Ogged's second list has to be a joke, right? I looked at it hoping to find new depths of American profanity, and there are some, but, also Africa, Australian, Baptist, Addict, and American. That, as you can see, without getting very far.
PS WTF is a "carruth"?
The fish the swims up your pee hole.
It also includes "failure", "violence", "sweetness", "European", "Israel", and "fear", as well as "cancer", "conservative", "clitoris", and "cigarette".
In work emails, we're supposed to "love button."
93.2. In that case we would need to cancel Mickey Mouse too.
||
Fuck, Texas just ended its mask mandate. Goddamnit, that makes me so angry.
|>
101:. In related news the sliding occupied/vacant signs by the restroom doors in my workplace were taken down today. We still have a mask mandate though.
In South Dakota, it's once again illegal to use a clean spoon in a restaurant.
101: Hmm, that seems like a terrible decision. Will your local authorities still require masks in public?
Re Dr. Seuss, I'd give "Mulberry Street" a pass for being of historical interest. It's a fun challenge to explain to a preschooler that when the book was written a "plain horse and wagon" was something really boring that you'd see every day, like an Uber, so of course you'd make up something interesting. Conversely, "a Chinaman who eats with sticks" (the offensive image) was something lots of people in the U.S. had never seen, not even on TV, which didn't exist.
Also, it's not necessary to cancel a 50 page book for one bad picture. Leave a blank spot on one page.
At least they're not cancelling Dr. Seuss completely.
104: Pretty sure that's something the state has been preempting local jurisdictions on already.
My daughter really liked "Mulberry Street" as a little kid, and I remember coming to that picture, being alarmed, and then quickly improvising "a guy running around eating noodles in the middle of the street! Have you ever seen someone eat a bowl of noodles in the street?" Something like that, anyway, possibly including the word "chopsticks" to make the rhyme work. I admit I had some faith that this image would not ineradicably prejudice her against Chinese people unless we fucked up as parents in a pretty serious way.
Now that I think about it, though, it's kind of crazy that the English word for the utensil is still "chopsticks."
Sorry about Texas, heebie. I guess that, on the plus side, there may be more out of state health care professionals available to fly in and deal with outbreaks?
What is so annoying is that the mask thing is pretty much the least intrusive countermeasure.
Ogged's second list has to be a joke, right?
They also provide scores on how likely each word is to be offensive (from 0, very unlikely, to 2, extremely likely). Note that the people explaining the list and scoring are Dutch, not American!
I think "toothpick" would be a better name for chopstick if it weren't taken.
To be super clear, anti-Asian racism is serious and I don't feel any particular attachment to Dr. Seuss at all. I just have a vivid memory of dealing with that particular image and trying to do something constructive with it, since you can't lecture a 2-year-old. I am no expert on the best way to deal with racism in kids' books, or in general. However, everyone here has been reading my shitty tone-deaf comments for years and if this is a good opportunity to ask me to leave, please feel very emboldened to do so.
I know exactly how to deal with racism in kids books in such a way that will keep everyone happy. I'm just too busy to write it all out now.
Now that I think about it, though, it's kind of crazy that the English word for the utensil is still "chopsticks."
What do you associate that with? Its etymology appears to be a semi-calque of the Cantonese word.
101: Hey, it's all about "personal responsibility."
Also: all businesses can reopen at 100% capacity?! This is madness.
113: Hmm, probably overthinking. There's a Language Log post on it too. It just sounds... dated? In some way? The kind of word that gets replaced by something more "proper" down the line. I can't pin that impression down to anything concrete, but I also can't think of a huge number of pidgin-derived everyday nouns still in use. (I'm sure there are a few obvious ones, though.)
115 May I suggest that you entertain an earworm of Iko Iko?
Here's a California-style slowed down version: https://archive.org/details/gd78-09-16.sbd.orf.2319.sbeok.shnf/gd78-09-16d2t03.shn
More classical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkX6JUXekXY
The primary purpose of MY's boring editorial is to be cited by right-wing shitheads in their future jeremiads.
The version of "Iko Iko" that I think of as definitive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OuC519ni1aE
119: I was going to post that one!
Of course I love the Belle Stars best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Nk0rUwEEI
119, 120 Yes. And there's a Neville Brothers/Dixie Cups video that I watched a couple of times, too.
Does everyone have the earworm?
115. more proper Erudite-sounding terms in biology are arguably pidgin, made-up greek or latin. Bryophyte, teleost, mitochondrion. The habit of doing this year in and year out (by people with real vision into the natural world) may have made monster words like television or homosexual seem natural. Pursuing "more proper" leads to the worst forms of language, most arbitrary
The Dutch would definitely need a bot to remind them that things can be offensive.
The Olive Garden has unlimited salad and foodsticks.
105. The Richard Scarry books got a redo with new illustrations and such around 10 or 15 years ago, due to (IIRC) not enough diversity and not enough characters in non-traditional roles. I see on the interwebz that the discontinued Dr. Seuss books are going for thousands of $$ on EBay and Amazon.
118: Thats one purpose, but I think what he sees as his goal is stopping the huge losses that Democrats are having with minority voters driven largely by Democrats moving too far left on race-related issues and messaging. We can't afford to keep losing minority voters the way we did in the last 2 years.
I have been having a weird thing lately, where people I agree with on most things are extremely negative about Yglesias and I find it disproportionately bothersome even thought I disagree with him about a lot of things, and I have been confused myself about why it bothers me. I think part of it just clicked for me -- this is going to be long, but if you're one of the people who can't stand him, see if you agree with my analysis of why you can't stand him even if you disagree with me overall.
As a starting point, there is a whole wild amount of bad faith on the centrist/right. Scott Alexander would be a nice example who's come up here recently -- personally super supportive of all the liberal causes, realio trulio! It's not his fault that his blog attracts neo-Nazis and the like, he's just so committed to free speech that he has to hear them out. And then behind the scenes he's sending emails explaining that while he'd never never say it in public, he thinks those people are probably right about Human Bio Diversity, i.e. the 'scientific' theory that some racial groups are genetically inferior. The whole "Who, me, agree with those people" schtick was complete conscious dishonesty.
And over the last ten/fifteen years or so, people on the left have gotten much more sophisticated about that sort of bullshit. Terms like sealioning, JAQing: people are very ready to look at someone claiming "I share all of your liberal goals, fellow leftist. Nonetheless, shall we together investigate the cold hard facts that establish that the only way to achieve those goals is cut corporate taxes and allow the police to execute people at will?" and respond with "Shut up, Nazi," rather than getting into a pointless, tedious argument with a bad faith interlocutor. Mostly, I think this is good -- the bad faith is real and common and there's no use pretending it isn't.
Where Yglesias comes in, is that is that I think he triggers that "shut up, Nazi" reaction in a lot of people I agree with generally, and I think it's a mistake about him specifically (this is where I would expect someone who can't stand him to call me hopelessly naive). Ideologically, I think he's somewhere to my right but still to the left of anything that elected officials in the US are ever likely to do in the near future. And he's an argumentative jerk, who likes framing questions in the most conflicty possible way rather than avoiding conflict. That comes out to a lot of "I share your goals, fellow liberal, but shall we investigate the cold hard facts about why what you're trying to do isn't working," which looks very much like the Scott-Alexander-esque bad faith I described above, but which I don't think is in bad faith at all in Yglesias's case. He's wrong a fair amount, but the arguments he's trying to start are in areas that I'm interested in (what are we plausibly going to get the government to actually do, as opposed to our ultimate goals) and I think they're in good faith.
To put it another way, I think 118 is wrong. I don't think Yglesias is either consciously or semi-consciously trying to provide aid and comfort to right-wing assholes who are trying to maintain white supremacy. I think he in good faith thinks some things being done in the name of anti-racism are counterproductive to the ultimate goal of reducing white supremacy and is arguing that they should stop for that reason. He might be wrong about the specifics or about the effects of bringing it up in a WP editorial, but I don't think he's on the wrong side.
If you're trading votes from Hispanic, Asian, and (to a lesser extent) Black moderates and conservatives for white college educated people living in de facto segregated communities (White flight suburbs), it should at least give you pause whether you've correctly identified what "White supremacist" thinking consists of.
Fucking Fox news asked Paski about fucking Dr. Fucking Seuss.
Since "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" was something I first encountered as a kid in my grandparent's attic it was always in the category of somewhat odd old book that needs to be viewed somewhat differently for me (for instance I think they had Sambo as well).. But later Seuss's I just took as "contemporary" kids books, but they are of course older now than Mulberry was when I first encountered it. Not sure how to effectively recreate the "grandparent's attic" aspect of older children's book other than having it emphasized by a parent/teacher/whomever. I can see why institutions (and people) get to "Fuck it, there are a lot of good newer children's books, why even fuck with it."
This is all sort of in the All Nostalgia Considered Harmful bucket. A legion of bad faith actors waiting in ambush--Make Kids Lit Great Again.
131: Not a Yggles hater (but find his hobbyhorses* generally annoying as fuck ), but I do think 129 is a decent analysis.
A big contrast with say, Andrew Sullivan, who on some issues like torture on which I agree, but who is mostly in first-describe mode (or worse in some cases).
what he sees as his goal is stopping the huge losses that Democrats are having with minority voters driven largely by Democrats moving too far left on race-related issues and messaging. We can't afford to keep losing minority voters the way we did in the last 2 years.
I did recently see a tirade by a Latino writer on how much they loathe "Latinx" and how Spanish is inherently gendered and it's insulting to erase that.
Just went to Twitter and Michael Hobbes had a pithy reaction to Yascha Mounk's reaction to the Seuss stuff.
The primary project of reactionary centrism is to steelman the arguments of the regressive far right. (Although I did have to look up "steelman".)
The whole thread is good:
"People are upset that their beloved childhood literature will no longer be published! How could anyone object to that?"
Ummm, because that's not what they're saying. The right is lying about this decision and comparing it to book burning.
Shor on detailed breakouts of the 2020 vote - in particular the decline in the Hispanic vote significant and not at all limited to Cuban-Americans. I don't take his interpretation on policing at face value, but it does seem plausible bringing up immigration by way of persuasion makes a significant subset of Hispanic/Latinx voters feel "they're using this as a cudgel to keep my vote without knowing anything about me." (Not that that's what most door-knockers have in their scripts, imx from the Central Valley.)
I don't know that anyone should assume that we're actually losing votes in, say, South Texas, because the SF school board wants to rename a high school. This sounds a whole lot more like an excuse than a reason.
Just how many people are there who are all 'I agree with you on all the important issues, but your indulgence of what I consider to be irrelevant trivialities makes me rather vote for people who take the opposite side on the issues I do care about.'
The narrative postulated by the MYs etc is 'first expel the people who like* this stuff from your coalition, then we'll decide whether we think you've pandered to us enough for us to maybe join you.' It's the same formula offered by some on the left, and it's equally untenable. Would expelling Manchin win us votes? Maybe, in Brooklyn. No, not in the US Senate.
* I don't think that anyone considers renaming this high school existential. Much of what these people (left, right, and center) like to disparage as 'culture war issues' *are* existential for people in our coalition. What kind of people do they want us to be to drop existential issues for people in our coalition -- in the case of women's reproductive issues, for people doing a whole lot of the work in our coalition -- in hopes that we might attract some voters who's stated position is that they don't actually care about these issues, and want us not to care about them either? What thinking politician alienates voters on spec?
I don't think that's right at all, or at least I think it's very confused about what you mean by "the people who like this stuff."
Meant to say his reaction was I think in line with LB.
Also 134.*: For instance in non-hobbyhorse stuff I think his quick political analyses are often d pretty spot on; noted that especially during the 2016 campaign.
I don't know that anyone should assume that we're actually losing votes in, say, South Texas, because the SF school board wants to rename a high school. This sounds a whole lot more like an excuse than a reason.
Not exactly, but see 135 - there's a softer version of this that can affect voters.
136 In that thread Michael Berube adds: I'd add only that the primary project of reactionary centrism is to steelman the arguments of the far right *and* to pretend not to know that that is precisely what one is doing.
I think this is correct.
139 There are people who want to rename high schools, as part of a social transformation they deem not merely pleasant but existential. Those people are, by and large, in our coalition, I think. That is, I don't think elected officials are pandering to them on spec. But even if so, I think it's a different calculation.
It's overly simplistic, yes, but the choice is more or less between 'I think the minimum wage should be increased, but if you rename high schools because those people want you to, I'm out' and 'I think the minimum wage should be increased, yes, but I also think it's important that you see me, and understand my concern that society sees me and people like me, given centuries of not doing so.' The moral choice this simplistic formulation presents isn't particularly complicated. MY and others want us to pander to the people in the first group, because he/they think the actual issue is naming the school, rather than taking the bigger concerns of the people who want to rename schools seriously.
138: I don't understand what you're trying to say here. There is no one for whom "Should a school in San Francisco be named after Abraham Lincoln" is an existential issue, pro or con. There's nobody for whom not reprinting Seuss books is existential, pro or con. A person whose big issue is "We shouldn't name a school after Lincoln" is not a useful member of any kind of political coalition.
135 It's certainly dumb and counterproductive for non-Hispanic white people to get out in front on insisting on the use of a term that has not indigenously evolved to the point of acceptance.
I think LB is right (and, again, I get value from reading MY).
The thing that drives me completely crazy about his post today is that he presents, "Democrats should be a big tent and embrace moderates who can win in more conservative districts" as a _new idea_ rather than a debate that's been going on for as long as I've followed politics.
145 I think I've given some more context in 144.
In a coalition, all voters matter. The ones who care about the symbolism of Lincoln matter too. But you have to sort between those who care about Lincoln for personally important reasons, and those using caring about Lincoln as an excuse to do something they want to do for other reasons.
In the case of Trumpism, it does sort of fold together. The essence of Trumpism is choosing bullying over empathy. Lots of people like that, and especially like bullying the kinds of people who think you can find someone better to name a high school in SF after than Lincoln.
Are there votes to be won from letting the bullies have their way?
144: CharleyCarp is cancel culture.
No, but seriously you're doing a thing that I don't have a name for because calling it cancel culture conflates it with the bad faith complaints coming out of the right. Pushing back against specific actions intended to be anti-racist because you think they're a bad idea for some specific reason is not trying to expel anti-racists from your coalition.
But if you say that it is the exact same thing, no one who supports anti-racist goals is going to want to talk about whether a specific anti-racist tactic is a bad idea, and more dumb and counterproductive stuff is going to get through in the name of anti-racism because it's too hostile to argue about tactics.
Changing the names of schools named after racists is a good thing, at the most general level. The SF school board, however, seems to have generated a messed-up list of names to change through a sloppy process. It shouldn't have been a national story, but it probably should have gotten more pushback from other anti-racists in the SF government who shared the school board's goals but had a better sense of tactics, and then it wouldn't have gone national and invited pushback from people who are actually in favor of white supremacy.
For example, here's something from Yglesias on confederate statues and why they should come down: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/16/16154738/lee-davis-washington-jefferson . It's fairly anodyne, but if it reads to you like someone who's opposed to eliminating honoring racism in the public sphere, and wants to expel people who don't want racists honored from his political coalition, you have to be assuming a lot of bad faith.
Actually, I'm very fond of Abraham Lincoln.
Actually, I'm very fond of Abraham Lincoln.
Elevating school renaming controversies to a national level, and saying the The Democrats have a problem because of high school renaming policies, is doing the right wing's work.
If you live in SF and think that SF is going to far with anti-racism, address the people actually making the decisions.
If you live in DC and think that SF is going to far with anti-racism, STFU.
I'm not saying that MY is a racist. He is a contrarian, though, and his business model involves a certain amount of shit stirring.
Charley, I'm having a hard time parsing your posts, the wording is getting a bit vague for me. Are you saying Yglesias wants to jettison people who are anti-racist in wrong, tail-chasing ways, and leftists want to jettison people who favor criminalizing abortion, and those views are equally mistaken? If so the jump to dubbing it a call for "expulsion" (formal or informal, e.g. ostracism or just severe disapprobation) seems a quick leap, on both sides.
And the broader supposition that if we just don't antagonize the bullies then maybe people will like us is just too speculative.
Yglesias thinks there is insufficient pushback on people who make unwise choices in renaming schools. This doesn't just seem wrong to me, it seems hallucinatory. In the face of opposition, San Francisco's school board president acknowledged screwing up and suspended the renaming process.
To be a bit more generous to Yglesias, maybe he thinks there is insufficient smart pushback against these things. That seems wrong, too, but I will concede that smart people are often going to believe they have better things to do with their time.
The idiots are fully capable of handling the issue of inappropriate school renamings. They don't need help from Yglesias.
155 Sorry about being vague. I see dismissal from every quarter of certain concerns as culture war issues that are distractions from the 'real' issues that 'real' voters care about. The implication is that is we didn't entertain these distractions, but instead only concentrated on the real issues, we'd win over real voters, who are now too offended by our willingness to entertain trivia to vote for us. I think this is wrong, both morally and politically, from every quarter.
You're still moralizing tactical arguments. Obviously, Yglesias didn't dig up the SF school board thing and make it go national, and if he had it would have been a very bad thing for him to have done. Once it's already a national story, I don't think talking about it as a misstep is the kind of thing that justifies saying he's trying to expel anti-racists from the Democratic coalition, unless you genuinely believe it's true.
If you think Yglesias is trying to build a Democratic party where anti-racists are unwelcome, you should certainly say that because it's very bad and he should be stopped. If you don't really think it's true, though, I don't think you should say it, because that kind of rhetoric makes talking about tactics harder.
To oversimplify, I've got two takeaways from Charley's comments: A bird in the hand is worth any number of imaginary Republican converts; and there are no enemies to the left -- except the ones on the left who want to be your enemies.
Something being a national story isn't binary, and the guy writing about it in a national publication (a) elevates and (b) continues what is imo generally a bad faith discussion.
I have to run, and have a particular (and fairly negative) view of the contrarian business model in general, so everyone should feel free to ignore me for the next several hours.
I do have to admit that I find myself judging people who I think of as "on my side" more harshly than people who I view in the same category as exotic insects, like Joe Manchin, or the Republicans. I also know a lot of people in the Bay Area and briefly lived there myself, so it seems more real to me than most places in the US.
But it's not just that renaming the schools for the reason they stated was bad tactics because it was bad press. It was genuinely stupid, in an objective "this is stupid" sense. Every single thing they said on the subject was infuriating. If you had told me a year ago that once people got rid of naming things after confederates they would turn on Lincoln next, I would have accused you of pushing right-wing propaganda, that it was a demented fever dream that completely misunderstood what people on the left wanted. And yet it happened.
Yglesias's column is not, notably, about appeasing the right, or even about political strategy. It's part of why I asked if people are experiencing this in their own workplaces, because that seems very much where he's coming from; even among ourselves, we have to be able to talk about this stuff in some good faith way, seems to me the main thrust here.
Something being a national story isn't binary, and the guy writing about it in a national publication (a) elevates and (b) continues what is imo generally a bad faith discussion.
Very good thread from John Holbo.
This generates a minor meta-dilemma. I don't want to forbid people debating the minor dilemma (just how harmful is it to small children that Seuss contains negative ethnic stereotypes?) just because voter suppression is more clear and consequential. Which it for sure is.
...
OK, here's a way to analyze what makes it such a tricky issue to frame. What should we WANT? What would the first-best solution be? Obviously a world in which everyone is doing kinda ok, everyone's rights are protected, the 'basic structure' of society is just.
In that first-best situation, you can let a bit of borderline Seuss sketchiness slide. You can point it out - because it's true! People can decide to read it or not read it to their little kids. It's not a Huge Big Deal. Which it really shouldn't be. Ideally.
Not having to get too fussed by old Seuss books, one way or the other, should be one of the many perks of living in a just society. All the old bad feelings and fears and resentments are kinda-sorta water under the bridge. Nerves of valid grievance aren't perpetually raw.
Unfortunately, we don't live in that first-best world. ....
129: I like that diagnosis of the Yglesias-haters. (I myself am not one.) And I think comparing Yglesias to Scott Alexander nicely illustrates the genuine loathing some smart people feel.
But Yglesias isn't a hypocritical, intellectually dishonest pig like Alexander. You know who Yglesias is sometimes like? He's like the neoliberals of the Bill Clinton era. He's like Larry Summers or (in an analogy more sympathetic to Yglesias) he's like Brad DeLong.
The neoliberals got a lot of really, really important stuff wrong. Market-based solutions often have huge practical and political problems, but they sure did look good in opeds. Everybody wants to help poor people and end racism. Everybody likes free markets. We all agree on goals and methods, so we just need the technocrats to get together and solve problems.
The people freaking out about San Francisco schools -- the people who nationalized that situation -- are anti-anti-racist. They don't care about San Francisco schools, any more than George W. Bush cared about poor people.
So Yglesias sometimes gets played by the assholes the way DeLong-types once did. The haters disagree with me on that -- they think Yglesias (and the neoliberals) aren't dupes at all.
165 I'm not a hater, but I don't think 'dupe' is an accurate description of someone who gets his 'have the anti-racists gone too far' take published in a national newspaper.
I understand and appreciate when publications like the NYT and WaPo say 'we're not actually on your side, so we're not betraying you when we fail to take your side' but there's still a social context that legitimizes contrarian takes in such publications. Even the [publication] agrees that The Left has gone too far.
I generally agree with Walt's 162.2. It's not The Left that is trying to rename schools. There's no Left. It's a big country, and there's someone who believes in pretty much every fool thing. Some people think Lincoln should not be honored in this way.* They're a tiny minority and already disavowed. But this isn't good enough for the anti-anti-racists and their contrarian friends: they need the disavowal to have preceded the controversy. Or they need an excuse to make some hay. It's one or the other.
* I'm pretty Lincoln-sympathetic, even if Taney got it right in Merryman. But one wouldn't ask certain Dakota communities to name schools after Lincoln. Nor, obviously, after Taney.
You are still missing the point.
There is an actual difference between "have the antiracists gone too far" and "have people trying to work towards antiracism gone in the wrong direction." The first is straightforwardly bad -- if you think it's possible for there to be too much antiracism, you think that some residual racism is a good thing, and that makes you, pretty much a racist. The second, though, is worth talking about -- is this thing being done in the name of antiracism a good thing to do, if antiracism is the goal? And if you don't let people talk about the second thing without accusing them of the first, you're going to get people doing more dumb things than necessary.
I think 167 is a good point, but at the same time there are a lot of folks that give opinions to the effect of (b) as much airing and attention as possible to let readers come away thinking of them as (a).
Right, that's the Scott Alexander problem: "we're all antiracists here, and in my antiracist way let me convince you that efforts to bring the lesser breeds into professions requiring intellectual effort will just make them unhappy." It's bad faith, and where you're convinced that's what's going on, responding with "shut up, Nazi" is perfectly fair. But not all tactical disagreement is bad faith.
169: I was thinking of cases where a person writes (b) in good faith but others use it for (a) purposes. Like, columns are probably easier to place when they can be summarized as anti-woke-but-from-the-left. And that's tricky for such an author because you want to say what you think without pre-denouncing other interpretations, but it's still a consideration.
Saiselgy today.
Yeah this is what I argued back in my April 2019 piece on the Great Awokening [that, "the "Great Awokening" has 1) pushed Democrats toward adopting a substantively better political agenda on race and redistribution but also 2) created some new political liabilities for the party that need to be more openly acknowledged"].
But two things have changed since then that I worry about.
One is that in 2020 we had some incidents that suggested it might no longer be possible to have frank discussions of tactics and tradeoffs even in spaces explicitly devoted to formulating political tactics.
The second is that while in 2019 I thought the substantive policies being elevated by the Great Awokening were basically all correct on the merits, we are now seeing more mainstream traction for views like "all standardized tests are bad" that I think are bad on substance.
I don't think he's wrong, in general terms, but that version of the argument (on twitter, admittedly) is kind of infuriating in that it completely begs the question about how much significance we should give to the fairly minor elements that he identifies as have changed his mind.
Wait, there are some of you who really think fluctuation/decrease in the Democratic share of the Black and Latinx vote is due to Democratic adoption of leftist messaging/beliefs on race?
Seriously? That's..... amazing.
173: I don't think that, I think Shor's evidence is flimsy (and of course Democrats haven'tadopted these ideas, that perception just floats about thanks to GOP), but I also don't have a great alternative explanation at the moment. It matches with a lot of Hispanic/Latinx people being more conservative than Dems at large.
I know from making calls that what people on the fence wanted to be told most often was that Biden didn't not want to defund the popo.
175: There were too many negatives in that sentence for me. They wanted to be told that Biden wanted to defund the police?
I don't recall being asked about anything but that and how to stop people from calling them so much.
170: Right, that's an issue too, but it's all a judgment call.
Also, MY may not intend to be a useful idiot for the right in this instance, but I stand by my claim that that will be the only practical outcome of having published this op-ed.
One thing he could do to counteract this effect is find some issue where his position is ridiculously lefty by mainstream standards, and spend enough time associating himself with that cause that the GOP shrinks back from citing him at all.
173: that's the contention of upetgi in 128 & 132, and one earlier comment... 11. I don't think anyone else has said directly that they think this, although Moby agreed with 128 and heebie noted that "Latinx" is controversial. So no, I wouldn't say this is a widespread belief.
For my part, I think the coalition that hates sanctimonious white progressives on a visceral, personal level is pretty broad and diverse, but I'm not sure the political effects are all that predictable.
I do more-or-less think that. More precisely, I agree with MY who said in the above linked thread "I mostly think white liberals need to pay more attention to the actual representative views of working class Black and Hispanic people and less to ideas coming out of a hothouse universe of foundations, non-profits, and academia." I think this failure to pay attention to the Democratic base is reflected in how White Democratic candidates and lefty pundits talk, think, and write about race, and that this is related to the huge losses that Biden suffered with minority voters. I think Lincoln is more popular with minority voters than any of our non-Obama politicians. I think Green Book was popular with most Black people. We need to be more middlebrow about race.
It seems wild that one would go to the explanation that the Democratic leadership has gone all-in on leftist positions on race, lacking any meaningful evidence of that, rather than looking to Trump's obviously insincere but apparently somewhat persuasive attempts to appeal to Black men especially on criminal justice reform and on entrepreneurship more generally.
Why do libs want to take away the flag?
Lots of guys have a deep need to know the exact delineation of the racist/non-racist border so they can hang out there just on the non-racist side and then they get pissy when the border changes.
184: Or, you know, the spread of Spanish-language disinformation that Biden was in league with Nicolas Maduro, or the (true! and in my mind, probably effective!) message that Trump was more committed to reopening the economy than Biden was, COVID be damned. Shor is always an interesting read to me and I certainly buy that the the culture war stuff largely cuts against non-college-educated Dem voters, but I don't see any particular reason to believe that it's these largely-manufactured Fox News tempests had any significant impact.
And I think the biggest issue is that Fox and the right *still* have a totally unimpeded ability to drive the news desks of America. "Dr. Seuss's literary estate decides to stop publishing six books" is not a national story worth asking the president about, and I saw literally a dozen stories about the completely inaccurate "Hasbro is taking away Mr. Potato Head's gender!" story that the AP invented.
I have a Mr. Potato Head from the 70s. He has a nine inch cock.
188: The outrage about private actors doing what they want with the IP they control, and in the Potato Head case doing nothing political at all, is astonishing bullshit. (I am very glad that the gross caricatures weren't in If I Ran The Circus. I never cared about If I Ran The Zoo, but I was attached to If I Ran The Circus.)
189: Right, but so did Mrs. Potato Head. How is this fucked up toy even still on the market?
(damn you LB for screwing up my timing)
That was the limited edition Lorena Bobbitt one.
Were all the baby-wetsy things female babies or could you buy one with a wang?
Tl;dr: Everybody says this stuff is racist, but it's really not. Except when it kinda is.
193: Until just now, I had forgotten the "All in the Family" branded anatomically correct boy baby dolls. The 70s were a different country.
Archie had hemorrhoids with pulsating action.
I mostly think white liberals need to pay more attention to the actual representative views of working class Black and Hispanic people and less to ideas coming out of a hothouse universe of foundations, non-profits, and academia
I agree with this, but I also think it's often overstated in bad faith. It's probably more effectively remedied with real people, not cartoon characters. A thinking human can be told by someone of appropriate standing (ie, certainly not me!) 'you know, Latinx is considered condescending by a lot of the people you're trying to respect by using the term' and let them work through how to deal with that.
There is an actual difference between "have the antiracists gone too far" and "have people trying to work towards antiracism gone in the wrong direction."
I'm not convinced of the truth of this. Especially, for example, with respect to naming a high school after Lincoln: we can all agree that an inner city Baltimore school can reasonably decide not to continue to be named after Chief Justice Taney. (Btw, have they taken that statue of him off the grounds of the Maryland statehouse? Surely). Can we all agree that Lincoln's conduct with respect to the Dakota people is enough to take his name off schools? We're not there yet. Might we someday be? I wouldn't bet against it. I don't see how this is 'the wrong direction' as opposed to how far we as a society should go in recognizing the damage that even revered figures have done.
Taking down statues of Columbus or Robert E Lee is a decent symbolic commitment, a tiny downpayment on the justice we have denied for so long. A decade ago, you'd get laughed off the internet for suggesting that statues of Columbus should be taken down, or the Columbus Day should be renamed. (Maybe 2 decades? I forget.) There will always be people standing athwart of this accounting yelling 'stop, don't come for my hero.'
I've boycotted the Potatohead family since they discontinued the real, literally metal version, around 1970. Back in the Golden Age, the eyes and ears and stuff were plastic pieces attached to sharp metal skewers. There was no crappy plastic potato in the box. You would attach the pieces to REAL RAW POTATOES, sold separately.
Also, potatoes were less uniform than they are now. In a 10 pound bag of potatoes, you could find enough different shapes and sizes to make a potato family! You might even find one with a cock-like appendage. If there were sweet potatoes in the house, you could create a rainbow family.
And after playing with [Mr.] Potatohead for maybe a minute, you're getting bored, so you take the props out, give the potato back to mom, and help mom make mashed potatoes! You whippersnappers never had the excitement of mashing up and eating your own toy.
We used an orange, but it was messy.
You whippersnappers never had the excitement of mashing up and eating your own toy.
I'm sure this is big on certain corners of OnlyFans.
David Brooks is getting in trouble because his OnlyFans contributions were all coming from Zuckerberg.
198: After today on Twitter I know too much about this toy. Apparently in the very early days they packaged a Styrofoam potato with it to avoid accusations of food wastage, although as you note it would seem unlikely for kids to get so attached to their potato it rotted, but who knows.
Honestly, I think my mom would have not cooked a potato we had used as a toy.
Yggles not helping his case with a weird take on a series of tweets from Ida Bae Wells re: "self-censoring." She was almost certainly referring to Bari Weiss tweet which used the term but MY chose to make it about McNeil.
Is this the concession that McNeil was in fact poorly treated by the Times?
Clearly true that he is not the first person in history to get a raw deal at work.
Oh, look who just promoted that David Shor article, Barack Obama.
I'm not saying MY is lazy, but his awful typos always made me think he was.
Is there something bad about Shor, that we should be skeptical of his findings? I just read the interview with him and it looked okay.
208: He's persona non grata in certain lefty activist circles because over the summer he tweeted about some academic research showing a political cost to Democrats from violent protests. I don't think there's been any concern about the quality of his analytical work.
I mean 174 in this very thread expresses concern about the quality of his analytic work.
People who talk about Rush Limbaugh, those people have a corpse in their mouths.
I was just trying for the recycled drugs.
So I saw that Glenn Greenwald called Tucker Carlson a true socialist, but I didn't hear whether or not Tucker decked him for it. (Have not investigated since much earlier today, to be fair.) I have so much to learn about kayfabe!