Gooners are going to destroy everything they touch, and also women.
I thought the article linked was well-written and fairly middle-of-the-road - what was so revolting and disturbing about it?
I'm still talking about the constitutional crisis, but I'm really struck by what I'll call active misogyny. As opposed to misogyny of omission. Not only do they not want efforts to promote women (quotas or otherwise). They want affirmative action for male perpetrators of sexual assault.
2: It is! I don't actually have a problem with the 2024 version of the author. It's more the reality of the thinking of young men that bothers me.
It's this: If I saw the negative comments under the SS photo, I'd assume that these are depressed, angry men who are taking their anger out on the internet. Not an average guy, but an angry guy who also causes problems for those around him.
This guy's honesty implies to me that it's much more pervasive than just frothing angry men - it's fairly normal men who just haven't questioned the ramifications of their beliefs about how women's bodies must look. That's what's so upsetting and disturbing to me.
3 they'd like to make it a requirement, the return of the old boys club (see also Diego Gambetta)
4 makes sense. And I agree on the disturbing nature of the comments - when the Princess of Wales was ill earlier this year, I was really unsettled by the kind of comments popping up even here. Really unpleasant, obscene suggestions about what might have happened to her, in a kind of jolly, vicious, detached tone.
Even public people's bodies should not be public property outside a few very specific cases like football fans debating the state of someone's anterior cruciate ligament or whatever.
Hypothesis: In 2016, despite running against a white woman, the next four years demonstrated a lot more acts of racism than misogyny, in backlash to Obama. (All the deportations, kids in cages, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, etc.)
In 2024, despite running against a black woman, the current atmosphere has more misogyny than the first administration seemed to. Abortion was not able to carry the election for Harris, misogyny seemed to partly turn Hispanic men out for Trump, etc. Obviously it's too early to fully know.
(Also, ¿porque no los dos?)
Also Kloster, the new head of the OMB, apparently relishes describing himself as a raging misogynist.
See also Darren Beattie appointed as the acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the State Department*.
He has tons of problematic stuff (was fired from Trump admin in 2018 for being too extreme...). Bu tthis seems to sum it up:
Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
*So yeah, public diplomacy. Under "normie" Marco Rubio confirmed unanimously.
7: I like that hypothesis. I wish someone could have gotten Trump on criminal sexual assault charges and not just civil ones.
I think 7's right in that it's too early to tell, but his cabinet picks etc do seem to be a lot less white this time than they were the first time? Or am I misremembering? Rubio, Patel, Gabbard and so on...
our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
Well, he's half right; I'm a competent white man and his entire national ideology is making me pretty bloody demoralised. Can't see much coddling going on, though.
This is the kind of thing that you can only truly show in a safe space, because it's a smart critique* of why DEI initiatives have been implemented so poorly over the past five years or so. Now is certainly not the time to be saying publicly, "Well actually, a lot of DEI initiatives were shitty!" but there's a lot of truth in that, and it's nice to hear someone articulate why they were so bad.
*Unfortunately it's a video, but it's captioned so you at least don't have to play anything outloud.
16: I haven't clicked through (and I will) but I'm imagining the line from "Yes, Minister" of, "We have to do something, and this is something."
I had not heard of "DEI" until the 2024 campaign. I'd obviously heard of that kind of effort, but it was never called "DEI". It was like secular humanism, which I thought was something Reagan's people invented until I heard a coworker talk about her secular humanist meetings.
We hired a VP of DEI in 2021, which is when I heard the acronym catching on as a corporate way to say woke.
A lot of "DEI" at the corporate level was a slightly updated gloss on sensitivity training.
The high-octane, poorly implemented version of DEI at my workplace keeps changing its acronyms but the longest-lasting one was DEIBJ. The BJ stood for "belonging and justice" but oh the jokes did not stop.
That said, I think at least 90% of the backlash would be there no matter the quality of DEI programs people might experience - it's an attempt to rehome racism in the public space. Look at the mayor of Baltimore being called "DEI mayor".
The university had a lot of training, but most of it wasn't sensitivity training. It was research ethics and data security. My guess is that Musk likes that kind of training a much as he likes sensitivity training.
We had "diversity and inclusion" training which was largely about bullying, harassment and discrimination and all fairly actionable. This is what discrimination is, it's illegal, if you see it happening then here's what to do about it.
I wonder if the video in 16 is telling only part of the story, and there's also a sense in which DEI sessions are the answer to the question "but we've already got a sensitivity programme in place, and everyone gets training about how to deal with bullying, harassment and discrimination. So why do we need to pay you this consultancy fee?"
Fuckers made me stay up late last night. One of the clients for my side hustle is a federally funded judicial agency in Heebie's state, and they sent me an urgent request to delete all the passages on race and queerness from their online publications, and then (this part took the longest) renumber the endnotes to remove evidence of gaps.
The video in 16 is really good, and I hate instagram. If I'm going to watch a video I want to be able to let it play in a different tab (while I make a comment about it on unfogged) and it won't.
when men expect physical perfection from women, they're ultimately left lonely because they can't find a woman who achieves that standard
I wonder if it isn't just that they want to be assholes so they use physical traits as a way to do that and they are lonely because they are assholes.
16 is interesting, but it's not my experience of (corporate) DEI. Lived experience as substitute for subject matter expertise is a thing that can happen, sure, but most DEI training I've had has been guided by consultants or professionals with experience in this area. Of course, this guy says he's a subject matter expert, so.
Corporate DEI stuff is somehow the rare case where both the practitioners and the opponents are awful.
It's mostly consultants scamming and upper level leadership doing power grabs. DEI was the reason deans and provosts used to explain why it was critically important that you use some new computer system that allows them to block most of the department from looking at files and allow the Deans to make hiring decisions themselves, until Trump got elected and then they all pivoted away as fast as possible to anti-DEI also being the reason for all the same things!
It's critically important that the provost gets to weigh in on which white guy you hire on the basis of their skill at writing a DEI statement!
Some of my best friends are white guys.
I'm not a bigot or sexist or anything, but you have to admit white guys are a problem.
Not you. You're one of the good ones.
> Not you. You're one of the good ones.
And this is the point of DEI statements in hiring, it lets you pretend you're doing something by hiring white guys who are the "good ones," which is a hell of a lot easier than actually making any progress! And you get to do a big power grab while you're at it, and after all it's always good to do power grabs!
I have not ever worked in a place where a significant portion of the senior people weren't women. Except for the summers where I did construction.
And it's usually been multiracial, though not in the sense of having lots of black people.
16, 28: Yeah, it resonates with me too. My workplace hasn't gone far down the DEI path- the HR videos (for workers) every year or two have been mostly about harm prevention, anti-bullying and sexual harassment, etc. The leadership track does have further training that might go further into building inclusive workplaces or running a diverse team.
DEI both at Heebie U and Heebie City Council workshops is exactly like he describes. Full of bland statements that I never know how to implement. Things like "Are you assuming some students come from a deficit background? Or are you recognizing that diverse backgrounds produce different strengths than just white people have, and are you pulling out those assets in the classroom?"
I understand the premise, but I need some concrete examples before I can apply this to Cal III.
Wisely, no one has ever considered me for leadership so I don't know what they get trained in. Except that they get taught to use "circle back."
...are you pulling out those assets in the classroom
The sexual harassment training said never do that.
the longest-lasting one was DEIBJ. The BJ stood for "belonging and justice" but oh the jokes did not stop.
Wow. (If DEIBJ lasts more than four hours, consult your physician.)
Another major problem with DEI is that somehow it became off-limits to talk about class. If you're strictly talking about middle and upper class people of color, that's a very different conversation than DEI in a town or university, when you're actually talking about both class and race in complicated ways.
Why on earth is it off-limits to talk about class in these settings?!?
I have a pet theory that as DEI becomes illegal in these strange times, academics and policy-makers will pivot to talking about class instead.
In a lot of cases, it could actually improve dialogues because you can be more explicit about privilege and connect it to white people's problems as well, and it's compatible with our collective kleptocracy anger at the moment.
I was on a job search committee last year and one us had to be the DEI officer or whatever it's called. The only function of the role was to ensure the application pool was sufficiently diverse which wasn't an issue probably due to the part of the world we're located in, also plenty of women probably due to the position (librarian). In fact I dont think we had a single white guy apply so maybe I should have complained.
Why on earth is it off-limits to talk about class in these settings?!?
Because we're dismantling public education and making it very difficult for intraclass mobility to happen.
I also like the elite capture thesis on DEI.
43, 45: I think part of it is an attempt to rule the "Affirmative action is bullshit because it only benefits people like Malia Obama, and she's way more privileged than some Appalachian white guy from up in a holler" critique out of bounds. Which is stupid, even though that critique is basically always being brought in bad faith, because as you say you lose more in coherence than you gain by not talking about class.
I mean, white people bringing that up are usually doing it in bad faith, but you hear the exact same critique for example from African-Americans vis-a-vis Black international students and Black immigrants from Nigeria and the Caribbean (i.e. that affirmative action at the elite level does not benefit slave-descended African-Americans) where I don't think it's exactly in bad faith, though it's certainly a complicated issue.
At the end of the day elite places like Harvard want to admit future elites, and from that viewpoint it absolutely makes sense that they'd rather admit Malia Obama than another Black kid who really needs it. It also makes sense that they want to admit more Black people, because there are a number of elite positions of power which are likely to go to Black people (President of Howard, the Black seat on the Supreme Court, etc.) and they want to admit those people. They just also want to lie about their motivation, because lying about their motivation helps that attract another set of students that they want (say future UNESCO directors-general).
RE: class vs DEI
What, no mention of the Fields sisters or Walter Benn Michaels & Adolph Reed Jr.? Harumph!
Sasha and Malia Obama may not need affirmative action -- like Upetgi says, presidents' children are major benefits to an institution rather than vice versa -- but Michelle Robinson and her older brother Craig certainly gained a lot from whatever extra consideration Princeton may have given them back in the day. They were middle-class Black kids from the South Side of Chicago, grandchildren of the Great Migration and descended from slaves. If Princeton & Co are only open to the sons and some daughters of the Thurston Howells, that's bad for America, and giving applicants like Craig and Michelle a leg up to balance their lack of Howellness is a good thing. Like Marian Robinson said, there are a lot of Craigs and Michelles out there, people just have to want to open their eyes to find them.
The "DEI" being demolished right now is actually "DEIA" where the "A" is for accessibility, and it has been distressing to me how little traction that aspect seems to be getting anywhere. The white house's website had taken down its ASL videos (just, like, ASL explainers about history, on pages that are otherwise still up) within days. They've fired all the interpreters and press conferences are no longer interpreted, despite the previous administration losing a lawsuit about this specific issue. Trump has repeatedly accused disabled employees of causing the plane crash- like, he says that the reason there was a crash is that disabled people are allowed to have jobs.
I'm extremely worried that VRS is going to be one of the efficiency savings and that I will then literally be unable to call an ambulance, because Montana doesn't have emergency services texting. It was already nearly impossible to get an in-person interpreter for anything in Montana; if the phone service quits working I think I'll just have to move.
Among other things I'm extremely worried about, obviously, and far from the most worrying. But I wasn't expecting to have to be worried for my own self quite so soon.
51: Yes, the accessibility and accommodation part is really concerning. I've seen this noted on Bluesky, but that 's not mainstream. Trump did say out loud that the FAA had been ruined by their giving air traffic control jobs to people with intellectual disabilities.
6: Even public people's bodies should not be public property outside a few very specific cases
Hard agree. Maybe it's tied up with growing up as the grandchild of a person with Still's Disease, but I feel like decent people are brought up not to trot out commentary on bodies not their own. The vast majority of the time that sort of thing has to do with aspects of people's bodies outside their direct control, so then it's just stupid. I don't even hold with the RFKJr/parasitic worm stuff. So what? I'm sure many people who have had that same experience are not sleazy antivaxxers, so why bring it up?
My experience is similar to heebie's, in that the training took concepts like "stereotype threat" and "deficit mindset" and watered them down to corporate-ese maxims. The advice winds up being "don't be a bad caricature of a bad teacher" but doesn't actually give guidance beyond that. I have to assume that students don't know things! That's why they're in classes, to learn the things!
45: We're about a decade, I think, from a resurgence of 'we need agile generalists' who have read the humanities, right after we've predetermined that only the elites get to read the books.
57: The worm was a lie in an attempt to get out of child support and deserves mockery.
giving applicants like Craig and Michelle a leg up to balance their lack of Howellness
People definitely have anecdotes about job searches* where that specific job seems very likely to go to someone of a specific background, but my understanding (including my one experience being on an admissions committee) is that "giving applicants a leg up" is not how diversity works in admissions. Some of the programs that were outlawed in the 70s or 80s seem to have worked that way.
What I've seen is more on the side of encouraging a broader application pool, more support for understanding the application process, and sort of neutral encouragements like saying: "Every department gets X number of admits, using the same criteria for everyone. But if you have admits who are in [some categories], then you can admit a few more students." In my specific experience, there were way more qualified candidates than places for admission, so if you admitted 52 instead of 50 because you got a couple of extra spots, no one got a leg up or anything, you just got 2 more highly-qualified people. There was no requirement that the "extra" spots go to members of any specific group.**
*I have not personally experienced this.
**I also saw a case of, "well, this person can pay the full tuition so they wouldn't be taking away a scholarship, so even though they're clearly not going to get admitted if we stuck to the criteria being applied to everyone, we'll admit them without funding." That was the only clear case of privilege in the admissions process I saw close up.
64: Pretty good surmise - the only reason we know about it is he testified to it in his divorce, specifically in the alimony-determining phase.
Yes. Apologies for the Slate link, but this is a clear story on the worm. The worm is part of the calculated cruelty he used in a divorce.
This reminds me that I suspect a great deal of the Trump vote among men my age is motivated by divorce in general and being forced to pay child support in specific. This isn't actually a novel observation, but it is on topic. I think a certain type of white guy (college educated and rich) mostly only comes up against the coercive part of the state when collecting child support.
62 Mutual condolences and commiserations all around!
Is everyone going to leave the obvious joke to me?
If I were the sort of person who believed that the worse things got quickly, the sooner we are to have a solution, I'd be really cheerful right now.
Ugh that's awful. Has anyone actually read Project 2025, is rolling back ADA in there? Or is this like a new terrible surprise?
Trump has found a novel way to prevent Isreal from taking over Gaza.
72: Not in Project 2025, not a surprise. Trump has always been cruel to those with a disability. Musk is enough of a Nazi to want eugenics.
67 is interesting. And there's divorce on both sides : Trump has obviously been divorced twice, Harris is her husband's second wife. Neither has happened before I think?
Well, Washington was his wife's second husband, but she was a widow, not a divorcée.
Trump has found a novel way to prevent Isreal from taking over Gaza.
I saw that - even if he's sincere, which he almost certainly is not, I'm not sure he'll be able to get it through Congress though. He's talking about a truly massive multi-year US aid package to rebuild the Strip and clear all the UXO - no idea how much that would cost but $100 billion is probably not a bad starting point? And that'll have to come from the US government. I can't see private US capital wanting to get involved, purely on risk/reward grounds, far less any Middle Eastern states.
Does he need to get it through Congress? or can he just send Elon over to start logging onto all the computers?
16: I did like that video. I mostly have seen his comedy shtick on tiktok. It's funny! You can tell he's smart. But I had no idea he actually had some expertise.
Looking forward to bringing my authentic white, straight, male self to work. And telling him he's misogynistic garbage.
80 confused me for a bit, but I assume that the two paragraphs are meant to be entirely separate, and that the "him" in the final sentence is SA's authentic white straight male self?
||
Bouie is excellent
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html
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Trump is obviously sincere about wanting to acquire territory. The local news sites have their stupid teaser polls and right now the one I see most is "Will Canada become the 51st state?". Right there like they used to ask who should start at quarterback for the Steelers on Sunday. And Trump is most certainly not talking about any kind of aid for Gaza or rebuilding it. He's talking about clearing out the current owners.
He's talking about both, I think -
"I don't think people should be going back to Gaza. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative... If they had an alternative, they'd much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that's safe," he told reporters in the Oval Office."If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that's for sure. I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza," he said..."The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. ...If it's necessary, we'll do that, we're going to take over that piece, we're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it'll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of."
And he is almost certainly lying, don't forget.
I don't think he's lying about the ethnic cleansing part and kicking out the Gazans.
76: I am not sure what you were specifically saying had not happened before 9divorce on both sides?), but Reagan was divorced and remarried before he ran
85: I do. Sure, he'd like it, and if it was easy and possible, like "press a button and they're moved" easy, he'd do it, but he's not actually going to start negotiating with Egypt or Jordan or whoever over ceding some big chunk of land where he can build housing for 1.8 million people, let alone spending billions of dollars building a city from scratch.
Yeah, lying seems more organized than the kind of untrue Trump's bullshit is; maybe fantasizing is closer. He seems sincere about what he'd like to do, it's just unclear whether he has any idea about what it would take or how to do it, and how much effort he's going to put into accomplishing it.
86: ah, thanks - I had forgotten that about Reagan.
83: Ethnic cleansing mixed with property development. "We're gonna make it the Rivera of the Middle East"?
He picked a secretary of defense who openly encourages war crimes. He's got some ideas as to what is needed.
Well, he said El Salvador agreed to accept US convicted criminals from any nation, not just their own. They mentioned Venezuela but also that they would be willing to take US prisoners for a fee. Maybe that won't fly but how do you stop them from taking the Venezuelans to a different country. There have been people deported under cover of darkness before. This would just be on a bigger scale.
88: Yes, all of Trump's words are generally "transactional"* and only intended for perceived current or future gain (sometmes an actual hateful "true" thought slips out and there is a need to retcon a bit). It takes a second level of analysis to attempt to tease out actual intent. In this case I think it is a fantasy of his that aligns with Kushner's occasional musings on the subject--seafront property just waiting for nice, rich people to vacation at and have second homes. The only takeaway is his contempt for the current residents.
*This is one of those where I ding various savvy reporters and the Times/Haberman in particular. Haberman, for instance, is smart and close to that world, and has oh so patiently explained to people when he is just saying unhinged stuff that really should not be evaluated on a truth/falsehood scale. But then a number of big "scoops" have consisted of reporter's giving Trump words and asking him whether he agrees and then trumpeting his response as if it is a thing he actually believes and arrived at on his own. Two notorious ones from the first term were Thrush/Haberman getting him to say that he thought Susan Rice had committed a crime "surveilling" his campaign, and Michael Schmidt getting him to say that Mueller looking at finances would be a red line. Both things completely supplied by the reporters and which became a significant part of the discourse for a few weeks. A similar thing happens when reporters turn some word salad of his into an actual thought.**
**One of my hobbyhorse, let show it to you rereatedly.
In short, it is hard to get a grip on the words of a demented criminal. Some are criminal, some are demented, and some are both.
Here's a plan; let's put him in charge of the most powerful nation on earth and see what happens. Fun and games*.
*Bok rec, if you want to immerse yourself so deeply in nastiness to maybe come out the other side: Norman Spinrad's relatively obscure The Men in the Jungle which I believe concludes with a character saying just that at the end as they leave after a particular bit of nastiness leads a planet to self-destruction. Of course for a more topical Spinrad: The Iron Dream, which would be to upsetting for me to read right now.
New Yorkers please call your Senators to ask them to slow business to a crawl. Refuse all requests for unanimous consent, vote against all nominees.
I should reread some Spinrad. There are short stories of his that have stayed vivid for me for decades.
https://bsky.app/profile/davidmenschel.bsky.social/post/3lhfua5f3vk2c
96, 97: Done on Monday. Does anyone have a sense of the best practice for repeat calls? Daily, weekly, or no way to know?
The DEI/sensitivity training we had in my current job (can't remember exactly what label it was given) explicitly included class. Possibly because Brits are more comfortable talking about class in general, and possibly because journalism is (these days) notoriously classist.
We call it IDE with the intent to put inclusion first because it's meant to help everyone be better collaborators and managers, not just increase numbers of underrepresented groups. It's been handled pretty well and avoided the more scammy types of training anecdotes you hear about. It's also open to adaptation based on feedback from the employees- eg we added a neurodivergent support group which is pretty helpful in a highly technical field.
Our leadership has been vocal that they're not changing policies in response to all this, and so far we haven't attracted attention from any of the usual assholes.
There's this framework of five steps corporations take- first do what's legally required, then recognize multiple forms of diversity (racial, ability, economic), then start to integrate those effectively, then have wider adoption as a workplace culture, then use it as a competitive advantage. A lot of training is strictly step 1 ass covering.
75: "I love 69, Count Fosco."
The list of West Point disbanded clubs is disheartening, including the Society of Women Engineers which group has existed since 1950 (not sure when they got to west Point--first class of women 1980).
I saw some report that Republican women are upset that gender representation is being hit too because they thought it was just about racial diversity.
The leopard was unavailable for comment because it was busy eating so many faces.
Trump's Gaza is about "common sense," and it's the kind of thinking that endears him to regular folks -- it's the attribute that he actually shares with them. Having trouble with border control? Build a wall! Federal government spending your hard-earned dollars? Fire everybody!
(Saddam was awful. We're nice. Surely if we topple him, we will be regarded as liberators.)
And the people in Gaza? Looking at the devastation there and the prospects for the future, how can you even argue against moving them elsewhere? It's just common sense.
Aga Khan, let me rock you
Let me rock you, Aga Khan
Let me rock you, that's all I wanna do
108- Yglesias' bullshit "common sense manifesto" was my last straw for entirely stopping reading anything he writes. Common sense is often stupid!
And the people in Gaza? Looking at the devastation there and the prospects for the future, how can you even argue against moving them elsewhere? It's just common sense.
There is a bit of dissonance between the assertion that Gaza, even pre-war, was an enormous open-air concentration camp whose inhabitants lived in the worst conditions imaginable, and the assertions that they don't want to leave to go anywhere else and it would be wrong to make them, or even encourage them, or even allow them to do so.
Not for me, I should say - makes perfect sense. But to the people pf is talking about in 108.
111 many did leave, I know many personally. But there is no cognitive dissonance here, for years Israel limited food imports strictly in order to keep the population on the edge of malnutrition, they routinely forbade medical evacuation, importation of materials critical for infrastructure for water, sanitation, etc. This has been reported on before
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/gazas-food-crisis-began-long-israel-hamas-conflict
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/14/gaza-israels-open-air-prison-15
It's also quite natural for people who have been oppressed to resist, and remaining on their land is resistance. Not to mention attachment to the place of one's birth, to the land. Surely one can relate.
Not to mention attachment to the place of one's birth, to the land. Surely one can relate.
Gaza's population is overwhelmingly refugees, though. The vast majority of them live in refugee camps (1.4 million out of a total population of 1.8 million). Gaza isn't the land they're attached to; the land they're attached to, as we keep hearing, is the places in what's now Israel from which they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents fled or were expelled. Hence the need for a right of return!
The attachment can be twofold, to the land of one's birth for those refugees born in Gaza and to the land of one's birth, and of one's parents' and grandparents' birth for those who were ethnically cleansed from it. And there's the refusal to let such a thing happen again. I agree with you on the need for a right of return, a right internationally recognized for refugees everywhere but those from Palestine.