The New York Times makes its money making sure that the ideological justifications for whatever the establishment wants to do are in place.
The NYT was a key part of selling the Iraq War. Their columnists, with only a couple exceptions, are intellectual mediocrities like Ross Douthat, whose job it is to be stupid on cue. They buried the Bush surveillance story until after the election of 2004 because they were scared that if Americans knew, Kerry might win. They have buried other stories because the White House or Pentagon or NSA did not want Americans to know.
The firing of Jill Abramson has made it clear that she, a woman, was paid less by the New York Times than a man would have been.
(Her real offense is probably that she was against the continued erosion of the barriers between advertising and editorial.)
Abramson was, to put it simply, not treated fairly, almost certainly because she was a woman.
I do not care.
It is not in my mandate to care if the Duchesses of Hell are treated as well as the Dukes of Hell.
Too many people in the West want only one thing: they want in on the evil gravy train. They see that there is a scam going on, a scam that impoverishes millions and helps create and maintain rape factories like in the Congo, and their response is “I want in on that gravy train! Why are women, and African-Americans and the working class and (insert discriminated class here) not on the gravy train too!”
They look at what CEOs make, or the banker bailouts, and they want the money; they want their own bailouts.
But what they don’t want to do is drain the swamp. They don’t want to change the way the world works so that having an iPhone doesn’t mean men and women in the Congo are being raped and murdered in a systematic fashion. In the Congo they will take their rape victims, bend them over and have every man in a military unit rape them. The blood flows like water.
A choice was made in the late 70s to 1980, not to drain the swamp. In fact, the choice was made then to increase evil and poverty in the world an the only reason one can say that it has decreased is China, who didn’t go along with the IMF/World Bank prescription.
This was a choice: as problematic as Carter was (and he was very) he suggested a different way: Americans resoundingly rejected it. The Brits elected Thatcher.
These acts of greed and selfishness; these acts of “I’ve got mine, fuck you Jack” had consequences.
Institutions like the New York Times exist to control the acceptable range of political and social discourse: they are ideological bodies who help ensure change occurs largely within the spectrum amenable to current elites. That is their job, and they are very very good at it.
If you are a member of these institutions and you do not do your job, you are gone. The problem with Abramson isn’t about pay, it’s that she wanted to try and keep editorial and advertising separate. I’m sure that being an “uppity” woman helped get her fired, to be sure, but it was the small bit of good she wanted to (or evil she wanted to prevent) that the publisher hated, that is far more problematic.
After the Iraq war invasion, the mainstream pundits who were against the war were fired, let go, or demoted. The ones who were for it (and who objectively were wrong about in terms of its success and costs) were promoted.
The system is designed to do something, and it does it. Those who do not play are gotten rid of.
Abramson mostly played, she’s no martyr. Even with what remains of the siloing, the NYTimes was still doing plenty of evil.
But even the royalty of Hell sometimes have twisted notions of honor.
If what people want is equal rights to profit from a system which is profoundly evil, and whose function is to enrich a few people by impoverishing many many more while maintaining rape colonies, I’m out. I’m not fighting for fairness in the neo-Imperialism business. “The best people at maintaining our project of impoverishing people and screwing up the world, causing a great extinction event, should be chosen objectively, without regards to ethnicity, gender, age or sexual preference” is not a hill I’m dying on.
Rivers of blood from the victims, dead and alive, have priority and all I want for the class of senior retainers whom Abramson is one of, and the oligarchical class whom she worked for, and who treated her unfairly (only half a million), is for them to have all their power and all the money and influence that buys them that power, taken from them.
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Celsius 233
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the King’s horses
And all the King’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Collectively I see no hope; individually there may be some.
We have to quit waiting for Klatu…
Formerly T-Bear
Too bad about that editor, she played the game, she lost, another editor will replace upon vacancy, that’s how the system operates, that’s how the system perpetuates, that’s the way of power, it has been that way in one form or another for the history of the species. Any other fantasy about the exercise of power is either naïve or delusional, full stop.
The exercise of power is nothing other than the attempt to establish equilibrium between competing sets of interests within a given group. Power is the source of economic value that accumulates as wealth; those that control power also control wealth and its distribution. Power must maintain economic equilibrium between these competing sets or become subject to replacement by another agent of power. That simply is the way of power.
The agency of power currently attempting control of empire has lost the run of themselves. They have misapprehended the nature of power, (incidentally something Confucius successfully addressed), and the purpose of power, and have grasped only raw power (and the attendant wealth) not the virtue of power to satisfy their desires. These pretenders to power do not allow either dissent or opposition to their agenda, assuming equilibrium will follow from within and have become corrupt in their singularity of interest. These pretenders to power do not self correct or allow self-correction; equilibrium cannot be obtained and failure is assured to those persisting this path. Collapse is assured.
It is for those who survive to re-illuminate the understanding of the species and the methods by which it operates. Both power and wealth are tools (and not evils) by which the species survives. Destroy those tools, the survival of the species is at best problematic. Use those tools and the prognosis alters completely.
jcapan
“Too many people in the West want only one thing: they want in on the evil gravy train. They see that there is a scam going on, a scam that impoverishes millions and helps create and maintain rape factories like in the Congo, and their response is ‘I want in on that gravy train! Why are women, and African-Americans and the working class and (insert discriminated class here) not on the gravy train too!'”
This. They (the aspiring sell-outs) may quibble about optics, you know the black dem who drones folks deserves a Nobel while the white GOP-er who kills the same poor brown people doesn’t. But when it comes to Chomsky/Shock Doctrine style criticism of the underpinnings of 1st world wealth, it’s fucking crickets. They want a new new deal at home no matter how many Bangladeshi factory workers have to continue to die. And then they want to act like decent human beings by saying, god help me, bring back our daughters, as if their gov’ts own actions haven’t directly created entities like Boko Haram the world over.
God bless you Ian
stirling
Ian is doing his work, on doing my, another people are doing their thing, we need to get the rest of the people doing our work.
Celsius 233
@ Sterling;
…we need to get the rest of the people doing our work.
But, isn’t that our great failing?
JustPlainDave
If you’re going to convince those who aren’t already converted, you are going to have to make the linkages more specific (and ideally, referenced). The average person does not understand what “iPhone”, “Congo” and “rape factories” have to do with each other.
Chris Harlos
Powerful.
I would suggest the ancillary purpose of the NYT is to rub the faces of its less well-heeled readership in the perks and prerogatives of our Elites. One is not empowered reading it, is one. Rather, diminished.
Acute insight that the primary complaint about the Bailouts (as an example) is that “I wasn’t…” Thatcher’s claim that there is no society is a prophecy fulfilled.
Dan H
Dave, I think that’s more to do with willful ignorance than lack of information.
Amen again, Ian. Was just saying this to a buddy the other day, he’s been catching up on Breaking Bad. I was remarking how rare it is to find anyone who hates Walt, because, as with any of these crime boss shows that are so popular now( the shield, boardwalk empire, the Sopranos etc) the main character is “humanized” and most viewers own guilt follows the protagonists quickly down the drain. Constant apologia. We don’t want principles.
Celsius 233
@ Dan H
May 16, 2014
*Was just saying this to a buddy the other day, he’s been catching up on Breaking Bad. I was remarking how rare it is to find anyone who hates Walt, because, as with any of these crime boss shows that are so popular now( the shield, boardwalk empire, the Sopranos etc) the main character is “humanized” and most viewers own guilt follows the protagonists quickly down the drain.*
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Having dumped my TV in ’94; your comment both reaffirms my choice; and horrifies/affirms my decision.
I’ve long said that when TV becomes our metric for reality; then reality is dead.
Seems we’ve arrived, no…
Dan H
Well, there’s a fair bit of depth and critique to most of these shows. I think the Sopranos, in particular, is a vicious indictment of the modern American family. That most viewers cannot/ will not see those angles is another issue.
stirling
I would like to point out that Sopranos and other stuff are heard of the problem. has our almost all that come from the inside.
Celsius 233
@ Dan H
May 16, 2014
Well, there’s a fair bit of depth and critique to most of these shows.
~~~~~~~~~~
Then we have a very different view of reality; I’ll stick with mine…
I repeat; I’ve long said that when TV becomes our metric for reality; then reality is dead.
Seems we’ve, arrived, no…
This is not a sociological study; this is America today!
~~~~~~~~~~
@ Sterling
I would like to point out that Sopranos and other stuff are heard of the problem. has our almost all that come from the inside.
~~~~~~~~~~
Yes, agree whole whole heartedly. Cheers.
sanctimonius purist
When I heard the story I said to the spousal unit, the question isn’t why Abramson was paid so little but why Kelleher was paid so much. How can editors of stenographers at Pravda on the Hudson make anything close to 1/2 million/year? Pretty sure CEO’s of court stenography services don’t make that.
Dan H
TV is part of the history and evolution of narrative. To dismiss it so callously gives credence to those who call offerers of substantive critiques Luddites. You’ve just admitted you haven’t seen any of the mentioned programs… very realistic view you have then. I’ll stick with mine too, thanks.
Bill H
@Celsius 233
I make no criticism of you dumping your tv; rather admire the move, in fact. But I don’t watch tv for reality or to learn anything from it, I watch it for entertainment, and some of the shows are entertaining. Some. The DVR is my friend. Books are better, of course, but some tv is worth watching if you use the dvr to skip the commercials. And I love NFL, NCAA basketball, March Madness and an occassional Indycar race.
Celsius 233
Ian has written a powerful narrative and we’re talking about television programs and sports…
Need more be said?
Celsius 232
“Collectively I see no hope;” – celsius 233
“equilibrium cannot be obtained and failure is assured to those persisting this path. Collapse is assured.” – Formerly T-Bear
““The best people at maintaining our project of impoverishing people and screwing up the world, causing a great extinction event, should be chosen objectively, without regards to ethnicity, gender, age or sexual preference” is not a hill I’m dying on.” – a quote within a quote by Ian Welsh, so not sure who this refers to
The theme lately from many seems to be that the sky is about to start falling, the end is near, apocalypse is around the corner, putin is going to start world war 3 with nukes, climate change is going to kill off everyone, the oligarchs around the world are planning for societal collapse whereby many of us won’t make it.
what if things actually got better? Is that in the cards at all or have we, as the headlines like to state, ‘passed the point of no return?’
if you really believe that we’re headed for a “great extinction event.” Why waste your life going to a job which is boring just to pay the bills? Why not party on an island and eat cake? I’m sure none of you here on this blog post are doing that. You believe the end is near, yet live your life otherwise.
Dan H
“Ian has written a powerful narrative and we’re talking about television programs and sports…
Need more be said?”
That’s truly pathetic.
Formerly T-Bear
It appears there is a divide between those supporting entertainment and emotionality being set against some who see knowledge and rationality as basic to the fabled good life, the twain irreconcilable, both part and parcel of being human, a true Gordian’s knot to unravel into their separate aspects.
As with all processes economic, investment is where returns on that investment arise. Invest wisely and benefit results. Invest poorly and the investment is lost and cost becomes the marker. When a society willfully invests poorly, its costs mount rapidly and its days of wealth are numbered. This is the choice societies make – and, in turn, make (or not) societies. It does appear that decision has been made, for better or worse.
Patricia
Oh come on! People need stories. I don’t know why this has to be mentioned to a bunch of supposedly well-educated people.
Television is hugely important. It is the art of our society, and I don’t watch it because it is awful. It, more than anything, makes me want to leave the country.
The tales that we’ve been told for the last 50 years on television are one of the walls that stand in the way of change. And they are heard/watched when we are most vulnerable and receptive, exhausted and relaxed at the end of our day.
Patricia
(More on tv.) Television stories have become so engrained in our lives that we often cannot tell the difference between them and our own reality. Cf. reality tv shows. I was horrified by the recent conflict over the Duck Dynasty show, a complete fabrication of a particularly disgusting sort, over which people fought bitterly.
The only good thing I can say is that fewer people are willing to pay the cost of cable these days. But even so, most of us still get our news from it, and that’s a completely different set of tales being told that are constantly confused with reality.
This is something peculiarly strong in USians, ISTM.
Patricia
(Last bit re tv.) To wind it around back to Ian’s post, tv has the same problems as the NYT but spread across a broader populace. It’s the same, only rawer, coarser. Don’t mistake subtlety for superiority.
That the progs/left/libs/whatever (those next to me!!) feel itchy to complain about a power-hungry woman receiving unequal pay, and at the same time have no sense of our desperate need for good tales that could re-offer us our reality along with a vision of compassion and respect…well, here is our problem in a nut-shell.
ks
I think Dan H’s point dovetails quite nicely with Ian’s post in that we Americans, despite the noise, generally don’t give a damn and are just trying, in Soprano’s terms, to “get a piece of the action”.
What fascinated me about the Sopranos wasn’t so much the show but the reaction to it and what it said about us. What started out as a interesting character story with a twist – local Mob boss seeing a shrink for aniexty attacks- turned into a cultural megahit mainly because of the great acting and writing. Every character on the show was reprehensible in one important way or the other but the audience treated them like loveable plucky underdogs who, just, like them, were just trying to make a living, or make ends meet or whatever, etc. It was almost like the harsh reflection of us was too much for us so we retreated to the endless “But, but, but,..” rationalizations.
At times it seemed like the misplaced hero worshipping reaction was too much for the show’s creator because every once in awhile he would throw cold water in the audience’s face and have one of the characters do something very awful to remind them of who those characters were. But unfortunately, or maybe fortunately in a commercial sense, it never really took so I think an important potential reflection offered by the show was missed by many.
I think it was “For what?”. All of that scheming, killing, robbing, etc. for a generic house on a quater acre lot in a second rate Jersey suburb? The everday world of the Sopranos was so small, mean and provincial, an endless loop of sameness and misery covered up with the trappings of comercialism, willful delusion and boisterious attitude. Sound familar?
Ian Welsh
Yes, this is substantially an argument Stirling made often, though I’ve a bit more mandate for the Peasants of Hell.
As for TV, the stories we tell matter greatly. If you want to see a solidly liberal movie in almost all particulars, watch “The Winter Soldier”.
Texas Nate
I’d sooner have my eyes gouged out than watch the Winter Soldier while Jack Kirby’s grandchildren see not a penny of his creation and the assholes who stole his characters live large.
Plus isn’t liberalism what got us in this mess? Neo-liberalism is just an attempt to keep the old liberal project going a little longer after its patently bankrupt.
Great blog post though Ian. Nothing to add. You nail all the points. Thank you.
Celsius 233
Ian Welsh
May 16, 2014
As for TV, the stories we tell matter greatly.
~~~~~~~~~~
And what has one to do with the other?
The last American TV I watched was for about 8 months just prior to leaving in ’03.
TV as a tool of understanding society, maybe, but to ascribe great cultural wealth is just incredible. The *news* alone is just infantile and one has to dive deep to find value, IMO.
IMO, there is not enough value to warrant the time invested. As to reflecting culture/society? I’d guess that to be true and from the little I know, that is a sad state indeed.
When something of actual value does appear; it is also found on the i-net for an individual view.
As Tao Walker might say; the CONdition of the CONdition of the people speaks volumes and enough said…
Formerly T-Bear
Some æons will pass before Duhmerican infotainment informs the public of the death of the Republic in AD 2000 which dates the silent political coup d’etat started two decades earlier by acolytes of the nefarious ideology – neoliberal orthodoxy. This is the public investment being made. Those controlling, directing and promoting this ideology have gained complete mastery of the leavers of power of not only government, but of the courts and application of law, of the system of education subverted to enhance doubt and ignorance, of religion substituting interpretation of belief as fundamental orthodoxy and the socialization of the herd to replace excellence, not to mention the institutional enforcement means – the military and police powers. So complete is this coup d’etat that nothing can prevail contrary to that coup d’etat, TINA (There Is No Alternative). Investment in alternative is disallowed. Only a complete systemic collapse can avoid violent revolution, TINA; absolute power requires absolute destruction. What emerges will depend upon whatever investment that is made to recall, retain and restore an accurate interpretation of the experience of the species. Without that, nothing can be certain about the continuity of the species; those who achieve this ability will likely survive, those not are unlikely to survive.
The collapse will not be televised. Be surprised when it knocks on your door. It’s your choice, it’s your investment. And good luck! You’ll need. You’ll rediscover need before the Act is over.
Brucie
Celcius,
Enough with the purposeful obtuseness!
Extinction events are events almost exclusively in geological time. In the current case, it’s been going on for the last 40,000 or 50,000 years, and has only recently, in the last 200 years or so really gotten going, thanks to Science!, Overpopulation and Global Warming. It’s going to take some time (another 40,000 years?) to end. Mankind probably won’t see the end of it, at least in anything like its current numbers, but our effects will continue.
Would you go to an island and eat cake if the world were going to end in 10 years, or would you continue to go to your F-ing job and continue to support yourself?
So do the rest of us.
willf
Neo-liberalism is just an attempt to keep the old liberal project going a little longer after its patently bankrupt.
Uh, no.
Neoliberalism is an attempt by the people who run the country to take the resources and services the “liberal project” graced the US with, and sell them off to the most well connected bidder, and to try and get all functions of government performed by private industry.
Formerly T-Bear
Here is your TV:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_Speech
Mandos
Let’s just say that I don’t fully entirely agree with Ian on this, to say the least. But I will instead allow Bella Abzug define equality. This is really the kernel of any response to Ian’s position on the matter:
“Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.”
Celsius 233
@ Formerly T-Bear PERMALINK
May 17, 2014
Here is your TV:
Wasteland!
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hear, hear!
@Mandos;
Ditto.
Q. Shtik
“what if things actually got better? Is that in the cards at all or have we, as the headlines like to state, ‘passed the point of no return?’” – Celsius 232
We “passed the point of no return” about 20-25 years ago when it became cool to cease capitalizing the first letter of a sentence as if to say I’m sooo busy, who’s got the time to depress a shift key?
Q. Shtik
I am amused (NOT!) by the I-got-rid-of-my-TV-in-’94 snobs who somehow know a lot about popular TV shows.
Q. Shtik
“I would like to point out that Sopranos and other stuff are heard of the problem. has our almost all that come from the inside.” – Stirling
Maybe it’s just me but the above looks like it started out as two coherent sentences and then Stirling decided to play with our heads by applying some sort of random word sorter.
“@ Sterling
I would like to point out that Sopranos and other stuff are heard of the problem. has our almost all that come from the inside.
~~~~~~~~~~
Yes, agree whole whole heartedly. Cheers.” – Celsius 233
I assume this is sarcasm.
Ian Welsh
Stirling had a stroke, aphasia is one of the effects.
so, most likely
1) sopranos and other media are part of the problem
2) but most comes from inside (after all, why is Soprano’s popular?)
Q. Shtik
“And I love NFL, NCAA basketball, March Madness and an occassional Indycar race.” – Bill H
Bill, apparently you are unaware that it is politically incorrect in the extreme to admit on a blog site inhabited by intelligent commenters that you (1) watch sports on TV and (2) enjoy it.
rjmeyers
“…heart of the problem. As are almost all that come from the inside.”
Q. Shtik
ks, your assessment that “The everday world of the Sopranos was so small, mean and provincial, an endless loop of sameness and misery covered up with the trappings of comercialism, willful delusion and boisterious attitude” is accurate.
Not so accurate is your remark that “All of that scheming, killing, robbing, etc. [was] for a generic house on a quater acre lot in a second rate Jersey suburb?” The house was not cookie-cutter, the lot was more than a quarter acre and the suburb was hardly second rate. I’m from Joisey and I know.
Q. Shtik
“…mastery of the leavers of power…” – Formerly T-Bear
I’m pretty sure T-Bear meant levers.
Celsius 233
@ Q. Shtik
I am amused (NOT!) by the I-got-rid-of-my-TV-in-’94 snobs who somehow know a lot about popular TV shows.
~~~~~~~~~~~
I don’t know jack about these programs and haven’t seen one of them; but since the MSM has to inject so much fiction from TV into the daily news, it’s very hard not to at least be aware of their existence.
America/Americans are so infused with this shit they cannot effectively differentiate between reality and fantasy and have been turned into characters straight out of Fahrenheit 451.
Your smug serial posting says plenty about your own mental diarrhea…
profan
The big fish eat the little ones
The big fish eat the little ones,
Not my problem give me some
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COUaNmm53VA
Celsius 233
@ Ian Welsh PERMALINK*
May 18, 2014
Stirling had a stroke, aphasia is one of the effects.
so, most likely
1) sopranos and other media are part of the problem
2) but most comes from inside (after all, why is Soprano’s popular?)
~~~~~~~~~~~
Yep. That was my take also and thus my response.
Celsius 233
@ Q. Shtik
Why don’t you take your shit and go back to Clusterfuck Nation; where I’m sure James appreciates your drivel.
zhai2nan2
> They see that there is a scam going on, a scam that impoverishes millions and helps create and maintain rape factories like in the Congo,
Obviously the Congo has raw materials and industrialized countries – both in the East and in the West – are getting those raw materials. Rare earths are used for cell phones and so on.
This post would be more helpful if it dealt with the military issues and geopolitics.
For example, I hear that the USA is building new bases in Africa.
The fiction we watch on TV does shape our attitudes and is relevant.
The military movements are also relevant, and should receive some attention.
ks
A Bella Abzug reference! Nice! She was a classic NYC character.
Okay so the Sopranos fictional house and town was better than I imagined though I doubt by much. But, my point still stands – a lot of evil effort for not all that much reward.
stirling
No, the Sopranos is the point. if you want entertainment, and you wanted en masse, you are part of the problem. do something useless, and pointless, and entirely out of the ordinary, it may not be better, but it certainly no worse.
stirling
i remember Bella, in real-time and in close proximity, she was definitely a character all right.
Q. Shtik
“I don’t know jack about these programs and haven’t seen one of them; but since the MSM has to inject so much fiction from TV into the daily news, it’s very hard not to at least be aware of their existence.
America/Americans are so infused with this shit they cannot effectively differentiate between reality and fantasy………..”. – Celsius 233
OK, you don’t know “jack” about these programs or, more accurately, you know just slightly more than jack because, try as you might, you are unable to avoid contamination of your mind by other MSM who inject TV fiction into their news. (Note, there is more to life than “news.”)
And who are these other MSM, the NY Times, the internet, People Mag, and why don’t you avoid them too?
But though you don’t know jack about TV shows you are able to judge the content as “shit” and the Americans who are infused with it as idiots, unlike yourself, who cannot differentiate between reality and fantasy.
I think “no TV” allows you to feel superior. If I searched back in your old posts I’d probably find that you’re also a Vegan, grow your own food, drink 8 glasses of water a day, avoid salt and ride your bicycle to the post office.
By the way, your 10 comments as of yesterday were 43% greater than my 7 “serial posts.” Also, the sentence in one post where you mentioned Clusterfuck Nation contained a completely unnecessary semicolon. Please be more careful with punctuation in the future. I recommend for your reading list “Eats shoots and leaves.”
someofparts
Notice how quiet it has gotten since the push in this corner of the blog world to mansplain our human rights movement to the ladies? Three others besides you, Ian.
Don’t worry guys. We won’t talk about it.
ks
Huh? What happened? I’m clearly late to the party. It must have been quite the dust-up if labels like “mansplaining” are being thrown around.
Mandos
Let me put it this way: this corner of the internet, the one that believes it is a Cassandra to the left, rightly or wrongly, espousing a guns-and-butter variety of leftist analysis, has never managed to come to a truce or an understanding with the “identity-political” left.
To do so would be to acknowledge that there is a non-trivial sense or level at which a black MacDonald’s worker has something important in common with Oprah Winfrey. And so on.
Mandos
Or maybe Condoleeza Rice is a better analogy given the context.
Actually, Ian recommend Captain America: the Winter Soldier above—which is good, I saw it too, of recent movies it is the most unabashedly civil-libertarian, choosing deliberately to reverse a part of the universe that the Marvel movies had been building up to this point.
But in addition I would also recommend Aronofsky’s new movie Noah. Not that I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and if you’re looking for biblical accuracy either in storytelling or spirit, you won’t find it there. But I thought the most on-point parts of the movie was where movie-Noah shows his character flaws, being given a simple dream of what is to come and a choice to interpret it as a judgement on all humanity, himself included. In the movie, it is clearly his choice: the judgement is never made explicit, all he is told is that there will be a flood, and the animals will take refuge.
Ian Welsh
I have no idea who the three others are, nor do I much care: if I wrote articles based on whether people agreed with me, this would be a very different blog. At this point I pretty much don’t even read other blogs. As for America: what will happen, will happen, it’s not my fight, I just write blog posts for those who care to read them, I don’t expect them to influence anyone in any way that matters. They didn’t when I had an audience 50 times larger.
Abramson was just another tool of the system, slightly better than her successor and predecessor, but not enough to matter.
Die on that hill. It will make a few women’s lives better, perhaps, then they will use their success and power to help repress the rest of you. I don’t believe in “deserve”, but if I did, I’d say that’s what you deserve.
As for Noah, I get the critique Mandos is making. It’s true, the character of humans has nothing to do with what nature does, except of course, in the modern world, where it has everything to do with the character of humans, because we are the ones causing it.
The “shit happens and we shouldn’t make judgments” critique has the weight of a feather. Our societies are a reflection of us: some weigh heavier (like Abramson) some weigh less (the black fast food worker), but it could reflect no one but us.
Mandos
And this is the kind of, mmm, coldly rational ethical judgement on which guns-and-butter progressives pride themselves. I suppose it’s all very admirable and principled, but it’s looking at the issue from the wrong direction:
If a highly privileged and elite woman with a lot of power derived from her class that she shouldn’t have *still* cannot defend herself against the same processes that affect mid-level female office workers and heck, female maintenance staff, what chance do they have? Yeah yeah, you promise that once you’ve created a world of plenty, liberty, social justice, and prosperity it won’t matter, or likewise when we’ve driven ourselves into the fin du monde.
However, we live in a world where some people are more subjects than others, and some are more objects than others. And so profound is the fault line that the charmed women cannot escape objecthood. These are the women in the class that creates and sustains the major narratives of society. And those narratives are what sustain differences in subjecthood and objecthood.
So forgive me if I think it matters to the lives of more than a few women, a few blacks, etc. It’s a test: how well you do on this issue is how your utopia will also be judged by others. Is a difference in objectness in a putative prosperous future a thing to worry about, or not? All I know is that the surest sign that the Soviet Union were to have lived up to its egalitarian reputation is when it produced not a female Solzhenitsyn but a female Stalin.
Mandos
That is not the critique that I am making, but I don’t hold it against you because you probably didn’t see the movie, and I didn’t write very much explaining my point! Without, again, really delivering a full synopsis, it has nothing to do with what “nature” does—in the movie it’s really obviously the Creator deliberately choosing to hit the Reset button because it’s really not going well, but putting in Noah’s hands the choice of how to judge what should follow. Movie-Noah’s character flaw is a kind of tunnel vision, not only a binary classification of people, but in fact a desire to make that classification the first thing on which he acts.
Then after everyone but his family and the land animals and fish are dead, his family (in his eyes) effectively fails him, turning out to be messy, complicated, demanding people just like the (quite awful) world he let drown. (I’m not spoiling a major plot point—it’s foreshadowed from the very beginning of the movie.)
So what I’m saying is not just in response to you, Ian, but to the whole inability of “guns’n’butter” progressives to accommodate a vision of the world in which people are irredeemably Fallen (in the Abrahamic sense) but whose foibles/sins/crimes/atrocities must nevertheless be accepted at some level in itself as part of the world’s beauty. Disapproval of the self-regarding emotional satisfaction of, say, voting for Obama because he is the First Black President or something like that even-though-he-drones-people-to-death-and-bails-out-bankers shouldn’t make it impossible to interact with the rest of the political world who feels that way. And yet it does.
ks
I dunno I think you’re exaggerating a bit for effect. The lines are not as clearly drawn as you’re making them out to be. It’s clear that you’re enjoying playing with the utopia/guns and butter progressives/political identity memes and stereotypes. But, in reality, I find that most folks on the “left” have a blend of those views as opposed to being eternally warring camps that don’t interact with each other.
Mandos
Lines are often not very clearly drawn, but we do have something of this division in I suppose the habitually polarising online discourse. Having been at this since for quite some time now, I have witnessed many purity-schisms and purges across a variety of progressive communities and lately it has fallen to some extent on those lines.