…not to put anyone off their breakfast…but…in further evidence of a thing we already have more evidence of than anyone should want
There is, I should note, no incontrovertible proof that Trump said all these things. (John Kelly hadn’t publicly commented on the allegations at the time of writing.) But the idea that the former president was creepy about his daughter in private isn’t hard to believe. There is, after all, plenty of evidence, going back decades, of Trump being creepy about Ivanka Trump in public. Remember when he told Howard Stern, in 2003, that Ivanka Trump has “got the best body”? Remember when he said that, if Ivanka Trump weren’t his daughter, “perhaps [he’d] be dating her”?
Ivanka Trump obviously isn’t the only woman that Trump has said a lot of crude things about. While a lot of Trump’s misogyny is in the public domain, Taylor claims there are plenty of sexist episodes that haven’t made the news yet. “There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced with the hands of Donald Trump at worst,” Taylor told Newsweek.
Gee, I wonder why they held their tongues? Could it be because they know that any woman who speaks out about Trump’s sexism will inevitably a face a vicious new torrent of sexism from his supporters? Could it be because they know that “naked sexism” has never damaged Trump – rather it seems to have turbocharged his career.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/01/donald-trump-ivanka-miles-taylor-book-claims
…it’s…well, it’s sickening…but…while putting people off the former guy seems pretty much fair game
Koch Network Raises Over $70 Million for Push to Sink Trump [NYT]
…along with sundry others
…& it remains pretty hard to deny that to fix that kind of problem…the crux of the thing would seem to demand a better class of men…&…there’s maybe a flip side we aren’t handling so well…I won’t quote the whole thing but (…honest…it’s not that it goes on in the pejorative sense…but it goes on a fair sight longer than the bits below) caitlin moran had a piece in the guardian that offered some perspective on some ways that…frankly…the boys are not all right
It was the response I got on social media that made me think I’d stumbled on to something bigger than I initially thought. On Twitter a few years ago, I asked what I thought was a pretty simple question: “Men – lovely men of Twitter. Hello! The last 10 years of feminism means we’re always discussing the problems of women on here. But what are the problems of men? What do you find makes your man-life difficult?”
[…]
But one type of reply came up time and time again. “Is this a trick?” “Are you asking this so you can laugh at us?” “Is this a feminist trap – are you going to retweet all of these, with the reply, ‘Look at the men complaining about nothing – while women continue to endure all the true suffering’?” Boys, and men, have become so used to being the conversational whipping boy, and the punchline to jokes, that they could not believe that a feminist writer was genuinely asking them to talk about their problems.I think my presumption – as a 48-year-old, fourth-wave feminist – was that straight white men were generally doing so fine that they were the one sociodemographic group you could lovingly … beat up on a bit. For people of my generation, and older, a wry attitude of, “Ugh, men!” seems like a long-awaited rebalancing of centuries of straight white male cultural dominance. This world of Michelle Obama, female Ghostbusters, lady Doctor Whos, Taylor Swift, Jacinda Ardern, feminist clubs at school, books like 100 Bad-Ass Women from History, features headlined “50 Women Who Are Changing the World”, and 13-year-old girls proudly wearing vagina-based merchandise from Etsy is so recent, it still feels like a mild, and quite marginal, corrective.
So what is the problem here? Well, it comes down to what the world looks like to teenage boys, whose entire lives have happened post Amy Schumer, #MeToo and the “The future is female!” slogan. “It feels like boys are losing,” my then teenage brother, Andrew, said to me, back in 2018. “I feel like feminism has gone too far now. Everything’s about women, isn’t it? And their problems. But, in the 21st century, I think it’s harder to be a young man than a young woman. What about men?”
[…]
“I’ve got some stats for you,” said one young middle-class boy, whom I would previously have guessed – mainly due to his Sonic Youth T-shirt – would have been a dyed-in-the-wool, leftwing feminist. He had quite long hair, and everything. “Boys underachieve at school, compared with girls. Boys are more likely to be excluded from school. Boys are less likely to go into further education. Boys are more likely to be prescribed medication for ADHD/disruptive behaviour. Boys are more likely to become addicted: to drugs, alcohol, pornography. Men make up the majority of gang members. Men are the majority of the homeless. Men make up the majority of suicides. Men make up the majority of people who are murdered. Men make up the majority of the prison population. Men are the majority of the unemployed. Men are the majority of those who die at work. Men are the majority of those who die in wars. Men are the majority of those who lose custody of their children in divorce cases.”
…it’s…complicated
As soon as I logged off, I got multiple texts from all the girls who’d been on the conversation, too.
“He was just being polite with you! You have no idea how he talks when he’s with his female classmates! Men have problems, yes – but on WhatsApp, he calls feminism ‘a cancer’, and feminists, ‘Feminazis’!” “He and his friends all make rape jokes – they say it’s banter, but it’s clearly never occurred to them that they know women who have been raped!” “You don’t know how boys talk when you’re not around. They blame it all on women. Why aren’t all the mums talking about this?”
…as she notes…they are…& not just mothers…or indeed women…the “appeal” of the likes of tate…or indeed the floridian fantasist…is one pretty much anybody sane wants to see diminished to the point of insignificance…while it stubbornly appears to find traction with people we wish would see it for what it is…rather than what they want
“Well, that’s why,” I said. “If he’s grown up hearing that straight white men are awful – if he’s been made to feel shame, and guilt, simply because of who he is – then of course he’s going to be attracted to the man who says, ‘Don’t be ashamed! Men are great! We need men! Fuck woke-dom!’ That’s a classic piece of dumb teenage rebellion against your parents. He needs a male role model who thinks men are awesome, because his job right now is ‘becoming a man’ – and Tate is currently the loudest voice shouting, ‘I can show you how.’”
[…]
Both celebrities and fictional characters in books, TV and movies, essentially work as an Argos catalogue for young people to work out who they want to be. That old saying, “I cannot be what I cannot see”, has been wheeled out a million times when discussing female role models, resulting in effective, organised campaigns to show young girls role models in politics, Stem, business, music, sport and space. But for young men and boys? I started to realise that the problem for them had begun in my own generation – their parents. Their mums and dads. Us.Like almost any other progressive, feminist woman with a public platform, around half of my “job” is doing Unpaid Feminism: retweeting reports, and petitions; doing talks; mentoring young women; responding to news stories or legislation that concerns women.
I don’t know of a single woman my age who hasn’t engaged with, say, the pro-abortion campaign in Ireland, the outpouring of women’s fear post Sarah Everard, the body positivity movement, menopause or the lack of pain relief for gynaecological procedures. This is what we do. It feels normal, useful and, ultimately, positive.
The men of my age, however? When I look at my roughly equivalent male peers – progressive, leftwing, liberal men with public platforms – there is no such culture when it comes to the issues that concern men and boys. There is no semi-organised, progressive movement that habitually raises, and then campaigns in support of, solutions for male problems: educational underachievement and exclusion; sky-high mental ill-health and suicide rates; porn-influenced strangulation; fatherhood being seen as the “lesser” parenting role; and the epidemic of loneliness in older men (nearly a third of men say they have no close friends.) There is no sense of these all being folded in together, under the subject “How things needs to change for boys, and men” in the way they have in feminism. And into this vacuum created by the progressive left: the advent of Tate, Jordan B Peterson and the “incel” movement.
…&…you could talk about a lady with a hammer seeing just another nail
Feminism. What men and boys need is feminism. And what women need is boys and men who use feminism. Feminism is still the only thing we’ve invented that exists solely to look at the problems of gender, and bring about equality between the sexes.
…but
Until now, feminism has worked on making women equal to men in power, safety, status, politics, relationships and the economy. But it now urgently needs to embark on the second phase – which was absolutely predicted by the word “equality”.
…I think that would be a failure to acknowledge the perspective she’s outlining
For men are not equal to women in numerous things: 1) Their ability to talk about their problems – instead, men have “banter”, which slaps LOL Artex over crumbling emotional walls. 2) Women have “The Sisterhood” – which knows it should, even though sometimes it doesn’t, spring into collective action whenever an issue is raised. 3) Women have thinktanks and charities and hashtags – they organise the fuck out of International Women’s Day, while International Men’s Day still gets less attention than International Steak and a Blowjob Day. 4) According to need, men are not equal in services for mental health, as that terrible suicide rate still shows. 5) I have never seen a single discussion about how to prevent boys being excluded from schools, kept out of gangs, kept out of jail, prevented from becoming addicted to pornography, or becoming homeless, that has received even half the traction that women and girls can get for doing “No Makeup Monday”.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/01/caitlin-moran-whats-gone-wrong-for-men-and-the-thing-that-can-fix-them
[…]
Being honest, breaking taboos, starting conversations, organising campaigns, forming alliances and supporting each other. These are the basic feminist tools women have used to improve their lives immeasurably in the last hundred years. Two – possibly three – generations of men have watched as their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and friends have changed what our idea of “being a woman” is, in the most joyous, amusing and liberating way possible.
…I’m reasonably certain that it isn’t a unique property of feminism to have found those basic tools to be invaluable
Moms for Liberty didn’t exist 3 years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker. [WaPo]
…at least in a day-to-day sense
This Moment Is the Culmination of a Decades-Long Backlash Against Affirmative Action [NYT]
…you might need a more “sophisticated” tool set to achieve the necessary corrective maintenance for more complicated mechanisms
That’s because one person’s fingerprints are all over these developments: the conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, the king of dark money. And based on Biden’s preliminary response to some of these new court rulings, it appears the president isn’t going to do anything to stop him.
As Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped build the conservative supermajority on the supreme court that killed Roe v Wade. As the Lever helped expose last year, Leo’s judicial activism was supercharged in 2021 when a conservative surge protector magnate secretly funneled $1.6bn to his new dark money fund – the largest known political advocacy donation in US history.
[…]
That includes the court’s rulings on affirmative action. In 6-3 and 6-2 decisions, the supreme court struck down affirmative action policies at both public and private universities. Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, which purports to be a “membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional”.But in truth, the group is funded by Leo’s sprawling network of opaque non-profits that are all trying to roll back protections deemed antithetical to a conservative way of life. In 2020, Students for Fair Admissions received $250,000, more than a third of its total revenue that year, from the 85 Fund, an organization steered by Leo.
Several other Leo-backed interests filed supreme court briefs backing Students for Fair Admissions’ fight to overturn affirmative action. That included Speech First, a non-profit that received $700,000 from 2020 to 2021 from the 85 Fund, as well as 19 Republican attorneys general. Leo’s network has long been the top donor to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), which helps elect Republican attorneys general across the country.
Leo also had a hand in the supreme court’s decision that a Colorado website designer was within her rights to refuse a same-sex wedding project. The decision has the potential to render anti-discrimination protections across the country as unenforceable.
The court ruled this way even though the designer’s lawyers never actually argued to the high court that she had ever been asked to do an LGBTQ+ project. The only time they apparently tried to make such a point was with an exhibit that appears to have been a fake website design request.
Once again, the effort is tied to Leo and his colleagues. At least six conservative groups that filed briefs supporting the Colorado suit have received millions in dark money contributions from Leo’s network.
[…]
Even the design of the student debt case reeks of Leo’s involvement, since just like the Colorado suit, it appears to have been based on DC machinations. As the Lever reported, the student loan servicer at the heart of the case – whom Republican attorneys general argued would be harmed by Biden’s student loan plan – would in reality face no financial harm at all.
…& it’s not that they aren’t trying to allow for that kind of fuckery
…but
From book bans to blueberries, here are some of the state laws taking effect July 1 [NBC]
…speaking as someone who doesn’t have several billion bucks burning a hole in my back pocket
…though
…I rather suspect that when it comes to a burning desire or two I might could give the bastards a run for their money
…it begs a pretty big question
Leo isn’t just doing this so he can spend long weekends with his arch-conservative buddies. As the Lever noted in May, this entire system is designed to stymie a historical trend of Republican justices getting more liberal as they get older:
In light of that, the money and gifts flowing to conservative justices can be seen not merely as cheap influence-peddling schemes to secure specific rulings in individual cases. It can also be seen as a grand plan to deter the ideological freedom that lifetime appointments afford.
In short, the largesse from billionaires and Leo – who helped assemble the supreme court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority as Trump’s judicial adviser – creates personal financial incentives for justices to remain doctrinaire ideologues and resist any deviation from the conservative line, even if they might once in a while have an inkling to dissent.”
For the most part, though, Leo’s dark money network has notched hugely consequential – and destructive – wins. The king of dark money now has nearly full control of the high court. Will anyone stop him?
The king of dark money effectively controls the US supreme court now [Guardian]
…or…for that matter…when it comes to checking the hand of “the man”
…where will it end?
How the killing of a teen fits into France’s history of police brutality [WaPo…by way of archive.ph]
France has ignored racist police violence for decades. This uprising is the price of that denial [Guardian]
…your guess is as good as mine, I guess
…but me some buts, even
…maybe a few home truths
Fortunately, Trump was wrong. There is no way, short of a constitutional amendment, to nullify the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Nor was there any question of its meaning and intent. After fierce pushback from legal scholars on both the left and the right, Trump dropped the issue.
But he didn’t forget about it. Earlier this year, Trump announced that if he were elected president again, he would ban birthright citizenship through executive order. Not to be outdone in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, said that he, too, would end birthright citizenship if elected president.
[…]
The attack on birthright citizenship is an attempt to stigmatize and remove from society an entire class of people. And the attack on so-called wokeness is an attempt to delegitimize and remove from society an entire way of understanding the world. Together, the attacks form an assault on two of the pillars of the egalitarian ideal.
[…]
With his 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, however, Chief Justice Roger Taney foreclosed the constitutional recognition of Black citizenship and defined the United States, in true Jacksonian form, as a white man’s country. Black people, he wrote, “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” They had no rights, he added, “which the white man was bound to respect.”The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, based on similar language found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was a direct response to and a rebuke of Taney’s reasoning. Having won the argument on the battlefield, the United States would amend its Constitution to establish an inclusive and, in theory, egalitarian national citizenship.
The authors of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what they were doing. In a country that had already seen successive waves of mass immigration, they knew that birthright citizenship would extend beyond Black and white Americans to people of other hues and backgrounds. That was the point.
Asked by an opponent if the clause would “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country,” Senator Lyman Trumbull, who helped draft the language of birthright citizenship in the Civil Rights Act, replied “Undoubtedly.” Senator John Conness of California said outright that he was “ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”
In 1867, around the time Congress was debating and formulating the 14th Amendment, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Boston where he outlined his vision of a “composite nationality,” an America that stood as a beacon for all peoples, built on the foundation of an egalitarian republic. “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said. “The outspread wings of the American Eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”
If birthright citizenship is the constitutional provision that makes a multiracial democracy of equals possible, then it is no wonder that it now lies in the cross hairs of men who lead a movement devoted to unraveling that particular vision of the American republic.
Embedded in birthright citizenship, in other words, is the potential for a freer, more equal America. For Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, that appears to be the problem.
www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/opinion/birthright-citizenship-trump-desantis.html
…still & all
Supreme Court to weigh right of accused domestic abusers to own guns [NBC]
…given how things are looking
…&
Investors charged with insider trading on deal for Trump media firm [WaPo]
…well
…how it looks
…when it comes to things going unnoticed
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/29/los-angeles-county-homelessness-unhoused-population
…it isn’t easy to come to a view if the facts are out of sight
…not least when they relate to a lot of people blowing smoke
Democrats say document from Trump impeachment probe rebuts GOP claims about a Biden bribery scheme [NBC]
…or the ones so upset about being upset that they lap up poison & call it a cure
In New Hampshire, I didn’t meet any loyal Democrats who were there just to scope out the alternatives. The 2020 Biden voters I encountered were dead set against voting for him again; some, disenchanted by vaccine mandates and American support for Ukraine, even said they preferred Donald Trump. Like Whitney, several people I spoke to didn’t vote at all in 2020 because they didn’t like their choices. Some attendees said they leaned right, and others identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
What brought them all together was a peculiar combination of cynicism and credulity. The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.
[…]
A Kennedy restoration, Eisenstein believes, would heal the corrosive injury that separates the people from their putative leaders, putting America back on the confident and optimistic trajectory from which it was diverted in 1963. In May, he joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign as a senior adviser working on messaging and strategy.
…it makes a difference what you think you’ve got coming to you
To those of us who see Kennedy as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick, one boosted by MAGA figures like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon to weaken Biden ahead of the 2024 election. But to many in his substantial following, it has a messianic cast, promising deliverance from the division and confusion that began with J.F.K.’s assassination and reached a terrifying apotheosis during the Covid pandemic. “We are in the last battle,” Kennedy said in a 2021 speech at a California church famous for defying pandemic restrictions. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”
In Kennedy’s campaign, this chiliastic vision is translated into a story about the renewal of a lost American golden age, before the murders of his uncle and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. In New Hampshire, his appearance was more than just a campaign stop — it commemorated the 60th anniversary of J.F.K.’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where the young president called on his countrymen “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
Standing before a row of American flags in that packed Saint Anselm auditorium, wearing a suit and a 1960s-style skinny tie, Kennedy reworked his uncle’s speech as a call to empathize with Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine. He cast American support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a continuation of our country’s forever wars, which he posited as the cause of American decline. As he often does, he mixed highly tendentious arguments — attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in part to “repeated deliberate provocations” by America — with resonant truths. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” he said. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.”
[…]
When the speech was over, the crowd was invited to join one of three breakout sessions. I chose “Peace Consciousness in Foreign Policy,” a dialogue led by Eisenstein. “You could say ‘manifest,’ or you can say ‘prophesize,’ but we need to see that this is possible,” a woman at the talk said about the prospect of a Kennedy presidency. “We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.” The people around her hooted and applauded.It is, in fact, possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/opinion/robert-f-kennedy-jr-coalition-supporters.html
…the third thing can throw things off track
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/science/3-body-problem-nuclear-china.html
…& that’s while the fallible intelligences at play are mostly organic…who err plenty
…some folks…aren’t fans of competitions that promise to embarrass them
…even the ones who seem to specialize in precisely that sort
https://econtwitter.net/@sysop408@sfba.social/110641529279780534
https://econtwitter.net/@sysop408@sfba.social/110641238127253410
@sysop408
https://econtwitter.net/@arensb@flyovercountry.social/110640820959174350
“—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out— One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
#TheExpanse #TwitterFail #TwitterDown #SelfDDOS
…though…there’s a lot of people yelling “bot”
Twitter bars unregistered lurkers from peeking at tweets for now [WaPo]
…one way or the other
…& while obviously one of them is a prime example of helioproctosis
Elon Musk says ‘cis’ is a slur. It’s basic Latin. [WaPo]
…there are real world consequences
Those 10,000 5-star reviews are fake. Now they’ll also be illegal. [WaPo]
…&…repercussions
Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it. [WaPo]
…one way
…or the other
A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing.
[…]
Discussions of A.G.I. are rife with […] apocalyptic scenarios. Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization. Mr. Altman, the face of this campaign, embarked on a global tour to charm lawmakers. Earlier this year he wrote that A.G.I. might even turbocharge the economy, boost scientific knowledge and “elevate humanity by increasing abundance.”This is why, for all the hand-wringing, so many smart people in the tech industry are toiling to build this controversial technology: not using it to save the world seems immoral.
They are beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as inevitable and, in a safe version, as universally beneficial. Its proponents can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.
But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence.
Unbeknown to its proponents, A.G.I.-ism is just a bastard child of a much grander ideology, one preaching that, as Margaret Thatcher memorably put it, there is no alternative, not to the market.
[…]
Yet neoliberalism is far from dead. Worse, it has found an ally in A.G.I.-ism, which stands to reinforce and replicate its main biases: that private actors outperform public ones (the market bias), that adapting to reality beats transforming it (the adaptation bias) and that efficiency trumps social concerns (the efficiency bias).These biases turn the alluring promise behind A.G.I. on its head: Instead of saving the world, the quest to build it will make things only worse. Here is how.
The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence [NYT]
…so…I am here for the dunking on musk’s husk…& if you can manage the oddities of the navigation for mastodon where you’ll find the rest of the explanation of the fault the dude found…there’s…a lot…like…a lot…& that ain’t even all of it…funny story…yesterday was also day one of the head up the ass at the head of the thing electing to further experiment with not paying his dues
Twitter resumes paying Google Cloud [Reuters]
…whaddya know…even when you don’t pay…dumbassery at scale doesn’t pay…but…that’s enough misery to be going on with…there’s still a lighter side…so…be aware…stanley tucci went on desert island discs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001nfz9
…oh…& people are still trying to remind you why twitter used to be kinda neat
…so…recharge what you can…& make the most of that long weekend…the other thing ain’t exactly biding its time?
That Caitlin Moran Guardian article about “the problems of and with men” was interesting. I’m not part of the grievance culture, so I don’t feel particularly oppressed, but I’m wondering how a “48-year-old fourth wave feminist” had a teenage brother in 2018. I guess dear old Dad dumped the first wife, or she dumped him, or died, and he managed to snag a much younger woman to procreate with. This is the problem with modern journalism. The devil is in the details, but the details go unexplored.
Meanwhile, I’ve been pondering this. I don’t know who writes this column any more, the original Dear Abby having been dead for years. When Better Half’s Mom died I came across a Green Book when we were cleaning out the house. It was fascinating. And it didn’t just cover the South. Oh no, there were entries from all over the place, including New York City. I went to a fascinating exhibit once about Louis Armstrong in New York. Once he hit it big he used to stay in Manhattan despite living in Corona (Queens) because it was more convenient to the clubs he was playing. Only one hotel would take him, or he only patronized one hotel. It was called something like the…it had Park or Central Park in the name. I can picture that hotel. I used to work around the corner from it. It was huge and stately and took up an entire block. Anyway, there was lots of memorabilia from his stays there, signed menus, notes he would leave to the staff, and that was in the Green Book.
I wanted to keep the Green Book but BH wouldn’t let me. “Well at least donate it to a historical society or a Black cultural society or something.” Nope. Down the memory hole it went, off to a dump, never to be seen again.
OMG that’s horrible. That is great 1st person history that got lost for no reason.
It was annotated and everything. What happened was both his parents had large extended families below the Mason/Dixon line but they met up in Boston. Not many of the family members could make it up for the wedding, so people sent them little amounts of money his parents pooled together and they drove around and stayed with them so they could get to know everyone. It must have been a fascinating trip.
Better Half prefers not to dwell too much on the racial divide in this country. Neither do I, personally. We’re moving forward, ever forward. He’s away right now, and we haven’t discussed the affirmative action ruling from the Supremes but I bet he’s all for it. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and if you can’t perform it doesn’t matter what color you are, you’re out and he’ll find someone competent who can actually deliver results.
The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling is 100% about locking in advantages for undeserving people.
It’s not even close. It’s all about quotas for C students at the expense of A students.
In what sense? If BH were the sole head of admissions at Harvard the student body would probably be 80 or 90% first- or second-generation Asian, from very underprivileged backgrounds. The country’s universities don’t need celebrity children, like USC and Brown specialize in. We need people who were taking college-level chemistry classes when they were barely pubescent.
That’s not true, but it’s also irrelevant to what the Supreme Court ruled.
They’re locking in a system to hand over the Ivies to Ivanka Trump. They want a permanent ruling class of conservative mediocrities.
It’s not even close.
Ivanka Trump? Even she started off at Georgetown, the Trump farm team (that’s where Eric spent his collegiate exile) before being allowed to transfer to Penn, where I’m sure she had an illustrious academic career.
I agree, though. Outlaw the legacies. My college friends have asked me to write rec letters for their children, and I’ve done it, since I’ve known those kids since birth and there is a spirit and ethos to these universities. I’ve also written personal recs to co-op boards attesting to the fine character of my friends, and been on the receiving end of not one but two calls from breeders inquiring if my friends were worthy of “adopting” (buying) their precious pure-bred show-pups. This I am more than glad to do. This is the social grease that makes the world go ’round. But it is a little exclusionary.
But if you want exclusionary: BH is out on Fire Island and is scheduled to attend some kind of house party this afternoon hosted by a couple of his good friends. Apparently, it is the hottest ticket out there and the couple have hired security to keep out the hoi polloi. I wouldn’t be surprised to read about it tomorrow somewhere. I don’t read much of the gay media but I bet they’ll be covering it.
Sigh. I was invited too, of course, but I stayed behind, barely mobile, with the Faithful Hound and my new best friend, the French dog walker. And you all of course.
It’s not just legacies, it’s prep school sports, it’s donors, it’s recommendation advantage, it’s a giant chain of networking advantages that work for a narrow subset of insider kids.
Every one of the six right wing justices is sitting on the court because of this feeder network, including Thomas and Comey Barrett, and they’ve ruled to maximize the power of the network to limit threats from more deserving people.
That, I’m afraid, is partly why my recommendations carry some weight. I passively donate to dear old alma mater where my university-branded credit card (which I’ve had since the mid-90s) purchases generate cash or something, mean something. Plus I am a faithful and enthusiastic reunion-goer. And people come sometimes to New York, so we meet at a restaurant, or something, and these student ambassadors and alumni office reps are on an expense account, or something, but I always insist on choosing the venue and paying for it. It’s awkward with the student ambassadors.
“Would you like a drink?”
“I’m under 21. I can’t drink.”
“Of course you can. This is New York and I am your father. I’m having a vodka soda.”
“I…I just want a seltzer maybe?”
“Suit yourself. When I was at [my/our university] the parties were legendary. And we weren’t drinking seltzer, believe me.”
I will weigh in on the affirmative action ruling. I am horrified by it. Having lived during pre-Roe and pre- affirmative action eras, in my opinion they were not the good old days. I think Blue Dog hit it on the head with the comment about the feeder network. I don’t like the old boy’s club in business or in education. As an aside, the relatively high cost of individual college applications is also discriminatory. One person’s negligible cost is another person’s choice between a basic need or applying.
There is something now called something like the universal application, or something, and you submit it online, I think, and the fees aren’t as onerous as they used to be. My nieces and nephews have done this.
As for affirmative action, and I can’t believe that I am parroting a Clarence Thomas talking point, and I am not speaking for Better Half but we’ve been together forever, so I bet he agrees with this:
Thomas went to Yale Law. To this day few people believe he actually did as well as he did or really deserved the degree, but it was some kind of consolation prize. There, he would have rubbed elbows with that 90s golden couple Bill and Hillary Clinton. I think Hillary was kind of at least middle class, but I’m sure Bill wasn’t, and yet he managed to go to Georgetown and then Oxford, where he didn’t inhale, and then Yale Law.
No one, not even the most virulent anti-Clintonistas, believes Bill and Hill didn’t deserve their diplomas. With Thomas. “Oh well, you know, but anyway he rules our way and that’s what we want, isn’t it?”
Can you imagine living your entire life under that cloud? I can, sort of, through BH, but BH is a half-generation behind them and has proved himself over and over and over again. It must be infuriating.
…sure…that part might be legitimately infuriating if you’re clarence…but he didn’t have to hook his wagon to ginny…or the baggage train that came with…or do all the fetching & carrying of other people’s water that’s been such a fixture of his career…& a detriment to the likes of anita hill…much less gin up illegitimate pretexts upon which to serve up compromised rulings from his sinecure of a position
…so my sympathy for him only extends so far…& it’s not nearly so far as he’s fond of reaching for justifications that ring hollow?
Well, leaving aside his lovely wife and “born again Catholicism,” which is a legitimate avenue of wonder to wander down. And then exit, very politely and very quickly.
…caitlin moran is…well…among other things…not backwards about coming forwards with the personal details…so if you’d care to dig into her childhood there’s a more abundant trove to pillage than you could say of most of us even in the age of social media…you can even watch a tv show that contains a fair bit of it one way or another
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(British_TV_series)
…but she’s written a lot between the books & the journalism…& she has…perhaps not a rare turn of phrase…but is rarely squeamish about the phrases she turns to…so there’s a good chance you’d enjoy a lot of it
…I think what she’s getting at in that one is valid & worthy of discussion…& even that feminism is a potentially useful lens through which to view some aspects of it…though rather like the later thing about the impact of a third nuclear superpower to that equation might be worth considering in light of the famously knotty 3-body problem…but that in a similar way to how the tools & principles in the one case aren’t unique to feminism any more than the 3-body thing is uniquely a matter for physicists to contemplate…the one thing doesn’t map perfectly to the other…& to the extent that it does you could claim it provides at least as good a fit for a host of others…& part of what makes talking about one thing by way of another is that there’s a lot of overlap & interconnected aspects to the things that make up the bigger picture…so while it’s useful to be able to narrow that focus to talk about one thing at a time so as to make it more digestible…if it blinds us to the possibility of also talking about all…or at any rate as much as we can stomach…of it all at once…that’s something of a handicap?
…not that it didn’t wind up being overlong anyway…much like my previous comment…but something @farscythe said the other day reminded me of something I meant to include somewhere up above…the brits are…in ways both good & bad…a welter of contradictions…as I imagine are pretty much any group of people if you get to know them well enough…but some of the better known stereotypes that are somewhat in contention would include both being as miserable as the weather…to the point of moaning about moaning(…think it’s somewhere in episode 3 of the 3rd season of the flying circus that monty python suggested that “if all you’re going to do is moan, they should take your teeth away”)…but(…I mean…monty python, fer cryin’ out loud)…are famous for their sense of humor(…if not about the scurrilous practice of dropping “u”s out of perfectly good words willy-nilly)…&…when it comes to perseverance in the face of calamitous prospects…have been known to take inspiration from the slogan “keep calm & carry on“…so…because a lot of them are more self-aware than the likes of piers morgan or nigel farage might suggest…there’s another CALM I aimed to mention…the organization & the acronym…which stands for
…so if you know any blokes who might be a bit miserable for their own good…it’s at least possible they might find that sort of thing worth a look?
All these awful people.
It’s crazy how we constantly get these articles about how the Kochs are turning against Trump, only to find out before too long that they’re funding his biggest boosters. This one from Maggie Haberman is the latest.
It’s overwhelmingly a shell game that they pulled in 2020 and 2022 too. Make a big PR splash how they won’t back Trump, then spend hundreds of millions for every other part of the GOP including his closest allies who are openly campaigning for him.
It’s not even a case of holding their nose and maneuvering in the background to push other options. They’re just throwing money at the worst pro-Trump groups and allies from the very beginning, while getting friendly outlets to help buff their reputation.
On the flip side, they directly punish parts of the GOP that don’t adhere to their orthodoxy. Somehow, those methods get witheld when it comes to team Trump, with a little handwaving about tactics or unity or whatever.
Because the reality is that the Kochs know Trump still owns the GOP, and they don’t have any problem with it.
…all true…I was kinda leaning on the seeming part, there…which is to say on the face of it even their money could go to a worthy cause…if, say, they put it where chris christie’s mouth is
…I’m not really any more of a fan of his than a lot of the people behind meidas touch or the lincoln project…but every buck that winds up with them is one less pouring into the coffers of the koch family & the multimedia brigades that march to that piper’s tune…or the myriad grifts that stand in for “campaign” finance up & down the (R) tickets all over the place
…so I thought the two paired appropriately & maybe hinted broadly enough at the implied emphasis on the works “seems” was doing
…what with it being a bit hard to believe that I need to make these posts longer & all…but I can see how it might look otherwise when it comes to these things
Remember the old Key and Peele skits about Obama’s anger translator? You should start looking around for your own Luther.
…I would love a luther of my own…but sadly I rather fear such things are above my pay-grade
…I’d also love a real-time translator for political double-talk…I’d almost be willing to swallow my distaste for a lot of the AI stuff if someone could knock up something along those lines
…if it went the way I imagine I should think whoever did might end up with politically-expedient depth of pocket, too…& I wouldn’t mind trying a set of those on for size, either?
As a non white male, I can understand some of their frustration but I also see other things like how white males still get preference in promotions over white women and anyone else who is a minority.
An Asian man who fucks up gets it way worse than a white man who fucks up. I racked up a lot of warning letters and a suspension because I had to call in (14-17 days paid) to babysit a fucking coke addict while a white guy in my dept got 55 unpaid days (for playing video games and jerking off) and never got a fucking any sort of grief from HR. The furious part is I told them my issues and they still tried to hang me. I watched a white guy who was too fucking lazy to go to college get promoted to supervisor (college required unless you’re a white male) while qualified females and non whites had to dance through hoops just to get a simdge of a promotion (including me for a whole ten months.)
What drives me nuts is the entitlement that some white males have (educated or not.) As much as I resented when my dad would lecture me about being an Asian in a white person’s world, he wasn’t wrong. He didn’t give me a sense of entitlement that I deserve things because I’m a man or even Asian. He flat out told me I had to bust my fucking hump to earn whatever I get. Women of all races get told the same. White males? I think the smart ones realize that they’re in the same boat as everyone else, but I think the whiners/stupids are being fed shit especially by older white males (dads.)
I suspect that a lot of those whiners aren’t actually earning it either.
The sad but also quite hilarious part is watching at work entitled white male managers fail because they think they’re entitled to success without doing the actual work. Most every project my former manager has worked on has been an increasingly bigger clusterfuck because that arrogant entitled motherfucker never follows up on his plans (which are stupid to begin with) and rarely adjusts when things go sideways and why doesn’t he? Because that dipshit doesn’t feel he has to (every fucking idea that comes out of his brain is brilliant, just ask him.)
I follow up which is the major reason why I can point to successful projects and he tries to pretend his clusterfucks don’t happen.
So I admit that sometimes it is hard to swallow the whinging of young white males or feel any sympathy.
I don’t have much of a tolerance for stupidity. At work I don’t care who you are, but what the hell you do.
…think when I first came across it it was outlined as a gender disparity…but if you throw in the bonus “white” part I suspect it applies a bit more broadly a bunch of the time…either way the largely unconscious advantage possessed by people who are effectively taught (implicitly or explicitly) that they might as well take a shot at a position if they fit some or any of the requested criteria (or in extreme cases none &/or actively disqualifying ones) because “you never know unless you try” when compared to it being made only too clear that you very much do know that unless you both meet & exceed all of them trying is a recipe for disappointment…is hard to exaggerate…not least when in at least a few cases the “put yourself forward anyway” approach can work for other-than-straight-white-guys…& some of the people picking them for some of those posts might really appreciate having another option
…it’s not exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy…but the two probably like to hang out since they share a lot of things in common when it comes to their background…so to speak?
Entitled white males are the grey squirrels where I live. The black squirrels are dominating over the grey ones and slowly taking over. Why? Because they out hustle the grey ones for food. Replace black squirrels with immigrants, non white citizens and women. Why? Because we have to.
I really wish their parents (who are also entitled shits) would wake up, but instead they go the stupid angry way and are used by smarter richer slimier shits like the Kochs to use their resentments to become footsoldiers for the right wing parties.
Note: I could have the grey ones mixed up with the black ones, but the analogy still stands.
…can’t speak to the way round the two should go…but I know growing up there was a whole campaign (that’s had some success in a few places, even – though the only one I can think of would be in scotland as it happens) to try to save the “red” squirrels in the UK from being wiped out by the invasive hordes of their grey brethren
…so if the grey ones are getting a taste of similar medicine the other side of the pond there’d be a certain poetic irony to it
…but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were the thugs in both equations?
I made it to Toronto! Having grown up mostly in Montreal but Summers in Toronto I would bet that the black squirrels are kicking out the grey ones. We used to only see greys ones in Montreal and black ones in Toronto. Now I see both in Montreal. So the black squirrel population must be growing and or migrating.
…that’ll learn ’em
…also…hurrah for getting where you’re going & hope it treats you well
Just to add something, the entitled white motherfucker recently saved himself by blaming the contractors who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing (but who picked them? The entitled white motherfucker, shhhhhh).
I know if I had done the same I would have been fired so fucking fast without a chance to “redeem” myself.
…you absolutely sure you don’t work in local government?
…joking aside…I know the sympathies of random internet strangers aren’t even as valuable as a bona fide hill of beans & all
…but for the record you do have mine
I know how fucked up public service can be (I had friends work there) but it is an actual business… kind of. We have a lot of folks in charge who don’t understand how we actually make money.
Similar in a lot of ways to Nortel (which are some of the reasons why Nortel doesn’t exist anymore).
For some reason I always end up at some of the most fucked up work places… I used to blame bad luck, but I think it’s me (not sure how.)
…I once worked somewhere that pretty much had an all-staff “communications” meeting once a month…that basically consisted of an ongoing attempt for someone to explain exactly what that particular .com thought it was in the business of
…given that the services the sales dept sold to different clients frequently had next to nothing in common…it was something of a losing battle, as I recall
…so…never been in your line of work, per se…but I think I feel your pain…or something that might be mistaken for it in poor light?
huh?
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/06/dutch-universities-students-slam-plans-to-slash-english-courses/
oh yeah….we are headed in the wrong direction…
i love the final paragraph tho
“The Dutch have always had a liberal society where everyone is welcome,” said Smits, of Eindhoven University of Technology. “That’s the strength of the Netherlands, tolerance, the openness. This feels so much like going against the spirit of the Dutch.”
hahahahhahahahhahahhahahah *dies*
dont live here if you believe that
The Pilgrims, they of Blessed Memory, actually went to the Netherland first. They were very weird, but the Dutch kind of tolerated them, but they didn’t like the fact that they were becoming Dutch. So somehow they got wind of some kind of colonizing expedition and they went back to England and set sail for America. The whole thing was crazy. Half of them died within the first year. But they persevered, and then a few years later the even more insane Puritans showed up, as detailed here extensively, and to great effect.
This country was doomed from the start. Happy 4th, everyone!
…FFS…how many permutations & variations of “people like me should get to decide everything & it’d be real handy if I didn’t have to ask permission or forgiveness so how about we save time & just silence any big groups I wouldn’t be in” are we trying to speedrun our way through?
…not to mention…as big a proportion of the weird elon-stan army of the extremely online as currently overlaps the incel “community”…you’d think at least some of them might see how he thinks they’re conveniently filed under “of no value & worthy of less respect”
…& while I’m at it…I don’t actually think he sees how that would be different from the starship troopers deal with equating enfranchisement with military service…except for the part where he wouldn’t be ok with that because he never served so it puts him the wrong side of the line…even if the “logic” is identical
…& I’d bet all his money…& double his stock options…that he couldn’t successfully explain what heinlein was trying to outline with that thought experiment…or the way verhoeven flipped his script…let alone cobble either together into an original thought if his life depended on it
pretty sure i said something about rich white people fucking everything up for everyone yesterday…….
OH MY GOD those fuckig men and “won’t someone think of the men” and the fucking entitlement and anger. This is why they keep killing women.
The only thing that is holding men back is that all the emotional intelligence etc tools that women use are things that men make fun of other men for doing. Ohh he’s talking about his little feelings, what a little bitch. Etc etc.
This is not something feminism can fix because it still stems from misogyny and until men want to treat their other men better, they’re going to keep being angry and blaming women for their problems.
“everything is about women” that one dude says. Motherfucker, come shadow me at work and see how I’m treated in IT. Go into a state legislature for almost any country on earth and tell me how it is. Ask any woman about medical care and how it feels having your cervex jammed open while being told that pain is just a little pinch.
OMG men are underperforming at school? At college? Compared to what? What magical interventions are girls getting that boys aren’t? We’re not any better prepared for college than boys are. Men are the majority of murder victims? Yeah that blows, why not vote people in who want better gun control then? Oh WAIT the men keep voting in dudes that perform cowboy masculinity and use violent rhetoric.
Nothing is going to improve for men until the men with positions of power culturally choose to act differently to other men and the boys in their peer groups follow suit.
…think the term she mentions is “bender” not “bitch”…which maybe doesn’t travel well in a transatlantic sense…but feeds into her later point that a lot of what you’re getting at is bound to various toxic archetypes & arguably the main one is homophobia
…so to the extent that I know her approach to various things hitherto I think I’d be fairly confident that she doesn’t actually think feminism can save incels…more that saying basically the same thing you did but phrasing it the way she did lampshades some stuff & spotlights some other things in a way that makes it harder to pull the snow-job the long haired tate acolyte in the sonic youth shirt was obviously trying to
…but…the suicide stats are real enough…& the problems that come with reinforcing toxic concepts of masculinity in another generation because the preceding ones aren’t prepared to either address or educate young men about how to avoid needing to have things to be ashamed of…let alone top themselves over…are still legitimate concerns
…& as the irish context for the abortion thing, the realise-with-an-s & various other bits give away…she’s largely talking about a UK context where the gun thing is maybe ok to skip over…so…what with her generally not being known for suffering fools gladly…if I had to guess she’d be among the first to point out that it’s as easy to say girls perform better/work harder at school as it is to say boys do badly by comparison the way the loaded slate of woe was presented
…but…boys are…frankly…pretty dumb in a lot of ways…so transparent as that bit of manipulation might seem I do buy that we might need to be able to offer a response to it that would find purchase with that brand of disaffected youth if we want to help them resist it
…it’s obviously asinine to claim “everything is about women” but not being able to better articulate what that brother of hers thought was an imbalance in the way things appeared to him as a teen doesn’t entirely rule out that there are possibly a lot of lost souls out there full of the usual teenage angst who might be less susceptible to the snake oil peddled by tate or whichever asshole it was that wrote “the game” if someone had taken the time to clear up for them the part where men being the problem wasn’t a problem because they’re men & that’s somehow inherent but because they make problematic choices that compound problems others suffer at the hands of men
…otherwise the internalized loathing bears a lot of the same hallmarks as some of the stigmas people are still working on getting women past
…at least that’s what I thought she was going for…ish…or I probably wouldn’t have thought it was worth including what with all the other stuff going on in the headlines?
I can see a lot of your points. I just think it’s disingenuous to presume that women don’t have just as much internalized loathing etc as men. The difference is that women and minorities expect life to suck and to be treated like shit, so when shit sucks we just have to shake it off as best as possible and go to our (underpaid) jobs etc with yet another experience reifying what society is to us. Whereas men, especially straight white ones, expect reality to be “fair” because they’ve been on the receiving end of society catering to them. I can see how when things aren’t “fair” that it’s harder for them to deal with it since it is so counter to their expectations.
…I agree that the kid with the list of stats was totally being disingenuous…but I don’t think I’d accuse the article as whole of anything like that…kind of the opposite, really
…I dunno…I’m a minimum of a couple of generations out from the one she’s mostly talking about…but “life’s unfair” was considered universally applicable when I was a kid…so…you’re not wrong…but I don’t think that invalidates any of the stuff I took her to be trying to consider…& having met a few of the sort of comfortable denizens of increasingly expensive (but once very working class) neighbourhoods to which she attributes a good bit of ball-dropping on the unthinking context they’ve been supplying while acting mystified that their lovely baby boys are turning out to be the teens of their nightmares…she’s not wrong about that part either
…so I’m inclined to think both things can be true without stumbling into accidentally buttressing the kind of misogynist sophistry of your andrew tates or jordan petersons…or joe rogan or whatever shitty male “role model” some dumb kid might view as authoritative
…but…I don’t have any kids of my own…so apparently my lack of a proper stake in such things is busy making democracy unworkable…according to yet another imbecile’s idea of a smart guy™…& I’m pretty sure I need a drink?
@brightersideoflife I was just about to say that internal self-loathing isn’t limited to any one group.
Awfully presumptuous of you.
Well said, @Brightersideoflife. Regarding men at work, I am management at a very small company. In meetings, one of the staff consistently points out the obvious as if it were new and miraculous information (that isn’t already in process). I am hampered by my role in that I can’t smash him; I am to find ways to encourage and empower. But I often wonder what he imagines is the case when everyone stares at him in annoyance and refuses to engage.
@elliecoo I am admittedly not in the headspace this weekend to deal well with this sort of article after the fuckery from the Supreme Court this week. And I understand that the Guardian author here was writing for a British audience more than anything else.
I hope you don’t mind being work mommy for that clown because you know if you speak bluntly to him, you’re a big meanie and will be in trouble.
I’m sure he thinks he’s making solid contributions and doesn’t understand why no one else is at his level for business acumen when people don’t engage.
OMG @brightersideoflife you had me giggling: “doesn’t understand why no one else is at his level for business acumen”. I also amuse myself, because when I need to gain his cooperation, if I start with “you’re a smart guy…” he falls in line. Sigh. That sounded more Machiavellian than intended. He is a smart guy, and he purrs to hear it. Win win? Hope you are able to gear up for your next work day…