Is it possible Arpaio doesn't know what a blowjob is? Because I read something in the news to that effect, but I find it hard to believe.

yeah wtf

is a blowjob, i mean

sorry, this thread deserves better D:

he runs a jail, he has to know what a blowjob is

D:

Despite everything that's happened, this still stands out as totally bat**** crazy.

Imagine Trump going on the wikipedia page for the KKK and scratching down notes.

on the latest Who Is America episode, Sacha asks a yacht builder explicitly about human trafficking with a yacht and the guy says yes, and proceeds to answer questions about how many people can be fit into a room.

like wtf?

Dayum.

It's still amazing to me that he managed to get elected. This is just plain bad politics. Even if you somehow don't know who David Duke is, you'd still want to come thorough with a strong message that you condemn white supremacy. Even David Duke understood that well enough to withdraw his nomination from Trump in order to help him. I really think he has some degree of senility. I guess that must just resonate with angry incoherent people.

Actually come to think of it, that's probably what it is. Since he's so incoherent, he can be all things to a huge group of angry people. Since he doesn't consistently stand for anything meaningful, his supporters can decide for themselves what he stands for and dismiss anything he says that they don't like as fake news. The GOP is very fractured, and while it's easy to unite them against "the left", it's incredibly hard to unite them in support of anything. Trump gets away with it by getting everyone to participate in his madness. Ordinary politicians have to be super careful about what they say because they'll be held accountable for it by their supporters. Trump can insult half is base, and they'll just dismiss it as liberal propaganda.

It's not just that word salad resonates with senile voters. There are lots of perfectly sane people out there who are full of **** and admire a man who can tell it like it "is"

I don't think the voters are senile for the most part. They are just highly willing to ignore information that doesn't reinforce what they want to believe. Combine that with an "attitude" that they find attractive, and Trump's incoherent ramblings mean whatever they decide they mean. It's not unintelligent, it's willful foolishness.

Oh, cool. Someone who acknowledges that Sarah Jeong's tweets were bad, and then says that she should be forgiven: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/sarah-jeong-shouldnt-be-fired-for-her-tweets-that-doesnt-mean-liberals-have-to-defend-them.html

Yeah, I think it's safe to say the defenses were reflexive instead of reasoned.

I didn't read the article, but isn't this the norm? I.e., progressives can forgive themselves on a case by case basis for things that they regularly publicly tar and feather conservatives for doing without so much as blinking.

I think it's safe to say that the left is massively hypocritical here and back pedaling won't magically cause savvy people to unsee the worldview that it so starkly and clearly revealed to everyone. If it wasn't already obvious before, that is.

I saw a lot of pieces on the left that tried to "contextualize" the tweets and offer rationalizations for why they actually contain some sort of substantive, meaningful critique of white people or racism. For example:



https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17648566/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-twitter-andrew-sullivan

Or:



https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/8/8/17661368/sarah-jeong-twitter-new-york-times-andrew-sullivan

I saw fewer lefty/liberal takes that acknowledge that the tweets are bad and more that doubled down on the "they aren't racist because racism is power plus prejudice" argument.

The Yascha Mounk article is worth reading.

In Vox's case, it may have been personal. The Verge, where Sarah Jeong used to work, is owned by Vox Media, Vox's parent company. It may be that Vox's vigorous support for Jeong was an act of solidarity with a soon-to-be-former colleague.

Like the fact that the NYT accidentally hired two editorialists who made racist tweets, but the white republican is the only one who got fired for it.

The weird thing is that they probably don’t see this problem because they probably don’t mean it “that way”. Sarah Jeong went to the right school and seems like one of those people who just knows everybody, ready to jump to the defense of another well-networked journalist because they’re a journalist (even if it means castigating a progressive activist from a brutal dictatorship to do so). So I don’t think the NYT sees themselves as racist or politically biased in this action, even though the net result is that they are. They probably see Sarah Jeong as one of the good ol boys and are willing to bend over backwards for one of their own.

I feel like progressives have some sort of term for stuff like this though... when someone’s well-meaning or superficially rules-based actions result in some kind of bias. Like, they’re not conscious of doing it, but it happens anyway. Hmm.

It's really important to show the hypocrisy and unconscious bias of people like Sam Harris, who claim that it's aspirationally desirable to try to transcend group epistemologies and aspire towards a more inclusive, universalistic discourse. It's like, super duper important to point out that their politics is nothing more than white identity politics. /s

But where does that put the people who point out that the people who talk about reason and objectivity? Are they somehow even more self-aware than those people? Or are they just doubling down on being partisan hacks?

They might just not care. I saw a few people pointing out that what matters with these firings is whether the mob that rises up and complains is the "internal mob" (that is, the people who actually make up the readership of the paper) or the "external mob "(people who don't make up the readership). It could just be that the reason why the NYT took a "tough stance" against the mob and chose not to fire her was because the people who were complaining weren't customers (or the core of the NYT readership, anyway), but people they could easily cast as "alt-right trolls" (or, in other words, deplorables, who are too far gone to be convinced that racism is bad). In short, they didn't have a financial incentive to respond to the mob.

Maybe. But I’m definitely going to pay less attention to what the NYT says now.

I wish progressives would pay as much attention to reforming exclusionary power structures as they do to whether their standards of exclusion are acceptable enough.

I thought Douthat made a good point in his column today. It might or might not be relevant:



Consistently Douthat's my favorite NYT op-ed writer. Just as socialism provides an outlook that can serve as an alternative to liberal orthodoxy, which allows one to identify the dominant and unquestioned (and often unacknowledged) assumptions that frame most of the debates, so too can religious traditions (although I don't know if that's pertinent to this passage).

Anyone who says this is being disingenuous. They're playing around with definitions to avoid answering the core question. The core question being whether or not they were acceptable things to say. When I ask the more pointed question if they were acceptable things to say directly, I have yet to see a person who has said "yes".

I grew annoyed at a social justice friend of mine for persisting in trying to weasel out of a direct answer.

These people don't and never will represent the left.

The latter take is correct, certainly Sarah Jeong even in the moment didn't really want to cancel white people as a matter of reason. To say some people are misunderstanding these tweets isn't necessarily wrong, to construe that as an advocacy of genocide is stupid.

However, that's really tertiary. They were not acceptable things to say, even in the supposed context. That's what many of these articles are resoundingly not addressing.

Think of it this way: the only thing unifying the left is a common direction of economic beliefs. That's it. Along with those beliefs are a wide array of other beliefs. It's not defining of the left to say stupid **** about race. It's defining of the left to have beliefs about the distribution of resources.

Most of the people writing, if I'm going to blindly guess, have little thought invested into their economic world view. Their priority is not economic, it's about some notion of equality. This makes them primarily liberals of some sort.

Pretty much all people today are liberals of some stripe. Many people have left or right economic beliefs while also believing in one of the quadrillion different notions of liberal equality. Like I said earlier, anyone who believes in free markets is a form of liberal. They desire perfect equality of market access, and believe this is the best way to run things.

The real question of our time, I believe, is that people have become philosophically uncritical of liberalism. Partly, this is because it's hard to question core assumptions of so many systems. I think more than ever people should be thinking about this, because we have Trumpism. Trumpism is an anti-liberal movement. The key issue being there are a bunch of people who think the president should not be investigated criminally. They have come to reject rule of law being applied equally. It's literally monarchist doctrine, we have just forgotten the words to describe it.

And yeah, part of this involves challenging whatever Vox liberals believe.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment here, but I wonder whether disingenuous is the right word. I think they sincerely believe that racism is prejudice plus power, and that, for that reason, anti-white prejudice is something very different than other kinds of hatred. Some do seem to think the tweets okay, or even, that they were fair things to say. I think they are just unwilling to come to terms with the moral shortcomings of their own ideology, because their ideology contains ways of dismissing and not having to seriously contend with the arguments of critics.

Put a little more clearly, I don't think they're being disingenuous because I don't think they realize what they're doing. Their ideology allows them to uphold the illusion in their minds that they're correct.

Also, not to be dramatic, but how many of the Charlottesville kids start out making "jokes" about black people that later turned into serious intent? There's a reason we don't make callous jokes advocating racial violence. Sometimes people take them seriously.

I apologize for confusing progressives with the left, but in my defense progressives seem to be the closest political movement in the US that actually have any significant party representation.

Damn we'd been doing so good with our political terminology (the double meaning of left as both the opposite of the right but also a subdivision within the left that differs from liberalism) and then suddenly the word progressive starts getting thrown around! Shame!

Wait, isn't it better to use the term 'progressives' to refer precisely to people who care about (important!) issues of social justice--but are possibly oblivious of economic issues entirely--than to conflate them with people who do care about addressing the ills of capitalism in our society (which is about a good a litmus test for being on the left as any as far as I can tell)? Or even worse, if we conflated everybody who is not conservative in a single slur, i.e., the word "liberal" in the sense that Rush Limbaugh throws around the term.

Edit: also, we have people like Mark Levin referring to anybody the slightest bit socialist in outlook as the "hard left" (although maybe also including those they see as 'censoring' conservative speech or just grabbing at their guns).

Racism is about whatever you define it to be about. The differences in understanding what racism means creates an endless source of meaningless debate.

These social justice people define racism to be institutions which shape things in preference of one race. To most people, racism is what racial prejudice is to social justice people. Anyone can be racially prejudiced against anyone, and some probably would agree that her tweets reflect a racial prejudice within herself. When they say they the tweets aren't racist, they're trying to say they don't reflect institutional preference for her or her opinions.

I really hate when social justice people do that, use a technically defined term to argue with someone using a term colloquially, but that's where we are.

People who say they were okay need to be responded to.



Yeah, I think this is true.

Ahhh, I'm not sure I agree with you here. As far as "the left" (in the more generic sense) goes, nobody has an exclusive claim to speaking on behalf of "the left." There's always going to be considerable differences between "liberals" and "the left." So, what Vox represents -- incremental change rather than revolutionary change, reconciling the interests of "the people" with those of big business", technocratic governance -- isn't going away altogether. One side may be stronger than the other, a new consensus may emerge where the lowest common denominator views shift away from social issues (as is the case now) to economics, but I'd insist that neoliberals aren't going anywhere.

Also, I'm not sure I agree that, for example, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's policy proposals constitute a true critique of liberalism. Single payer healthcare has been a -- if not the -- desideratum of the Democratic party for decades. The same can be said, I think, of other of her ideas. She's advocating a more interventionist government that's consistent with liberalism, really, a kind of retrieval of mid-20th century liberalism that looks beyond the Reaganite revolution.

Maybe I'm overly dismissive but I don't think progressive really means much at all. Some conservatives use the term to mean "the Bernie Sanders wing" of the Democratic party, but Hillary Clinton also preferred to call herself a progressive during 2016 election rather than calling herself a liberal, presumably because conservatives (such as, or perhaps even especially, Rush Limbaugh) made the word a derogatory term.

I think this is true: it does seem kind of pointless to argue endlessly about racism is. One of the ways in which I think this whole Sarah Jeong incident demonstrated the decadence of this whole worldview was that it brought to light that, for many, its important to denounce racism, and only racism, despite the fact that there are many things that aren't technically racist (according this definition of racism) but are nonetheless bad.

Nonetheless, there's a critical mass of people out there who talk about white supremacy as a form of systemic racism that manifests itself in the unconscious bias of whites, and who see racism as stemming primarily from white privilege and the forms of power and oppression that whites subject minorities to. It doesn't matter how vapid and irrational that understanding of racism is. We still have to contend with it, because it's still so prominent in our society. However, it might be on its way out. I sure do hope so, anyway.

I wish we could get rid of this sociological definition of racism and bring back the psychological definition, which saw racism as sincere hatred that someone harbors in their heart for people of a other races. Incidentally, it's a more liberal, individualistic definition of racism than the sociological one, but it seems like the view of racism that would be prevalent in an equal society, and a better way to combat racism (it still requires self-criticism and introspection).

Increasingly, I think one of the thing that distinguishes the left and the most attractive elements of the right from much of mainstream center-left liberalism is the belief that there's such a thing as "the common good." I'm glad that more people are seeing that it is a profound failure of "identity politics" that it doesn't have a vision of a common good (as much as intersectionality tried to be a stand in for such a thing).