Something weird is going on in this Kashann Kilson piece, and I think understanding it is key to understanding the progressive side of our media class. Kilson writes what is, in many ways, a paint-by-numbers “Iggy Azalea and Race” column, which has become a cottage industry in liberal circles. (If you’re a young liberal writer […]
Continue reading →So I’ve made the actual argument many many times, and you’ll ding me for linking to some random Tumblr, but this is too perfect. At Pyrrhic Comedy, there is this picture of a bunch of tween types in the Rijksmuseum, checking their cell phones instead of looking at The Night Watch. The big reveal is that they […]
Continue reading →Or, I mean, what’s going on with how the chatterati are going to write about it. As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining […]
Continue reading →“… as of this writing, neuroscience knows of no plausible mechanism for carrying a large amount of information forward over indefinitely long intervals in a form that makes it accessible to the mechanisms that effect the primitive two-argument functions that are at the heart of computation. Until the day comes when neuroscientists are able to […]
Continue reading →It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I am predisposed to not agree with Matt Novak’s argument that The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed Because Shame Works. I’m a big fan of Novak’s work in general, but I don’t find his argument remotely convincing, and the KKK analogy strikes me as a positively addled. […]
Continue reading →This piece on the annoying internet genre of the “Perfect Response” is worth your time. If anything, Adam Sternbergh’s analysis would work on a bit of a broader level than he says. He’s right that the Perfect Response is a fantasy, and one that reflects a depressing tendency for people to see wit and clarity […]
Continue reading →Noah Berlatsky Blatarsky carried out an in-depth interview with the trans activist Julia Serano, where she speaks at length about the issues of how to make left-wing activism more inclusive while maintaining rigorous condemnation of insensitivity. I highly recommend it. Serano: Sometimes, the unwritten codes of conduct in certain activist or progressive spaces may be especially […]
Continue reading →Here’s an article in America’s most pedigreed repository of credulous woowoo, Wired, on the techy side of homeschooling. Homeschooling (or as I like to call it, artisanal segregation) is a really natural fit with the norms of Silicon Valley, a community that takes as its central premise that its members are smarter and better than everyone. Might as […]
Continue reading →I’ve gotten all kinds of responses to my recent series on political correctness, but one kind stands out for its seeming attempt to exemplify irony. I’m on the record as saying that, unlike some, I think that language policing and political correctness do exist, and occasionally, they are unfair and unhelpful to the left-wing cause. […]
Continue reading →There are all kinds of arguments in the world — right ones, wrong ones, constructive ones, destructive ones, sincere ones, disingenuous ones, funny ones, serious ones. But at this stage in my life as an arguer, none is as consistently, exhaustingly unhelpful as “no one is arguing that.” This has become an absolute stock response […]
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