Jon Chait and Will Wilkinson got together on some sweet, Democrat-defending neoliberalism, going after poor old Tom Frank with the whole “you don’t know the complicated maths!” routine. Chait, of course, is the Andrew Cuomo of the hippie punching press, holding the Mickey Kaus Endowed Chair of Fake Liberalism and spending most of his time […]
Continue reading →The recent scandals involving NFL players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, for me, have revealed again this central contradiction in contemporary left-of-center thought. We have broad consensus on the left wing that we imprison too many people in America and that our police forces, in general, are overly aggressive and overly protected from punishment when […]
Continue reading →If you have any interest in the continuing controversy of the Steven Salaita affair, or academic freedom in general, or the fetish for civility and the way it is used to suppress unpopular political opinion, you really have to read this post from Corey Robin. In it, Dr. Jean O’Brien, professor of history and chair […]
Continue reading →Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time. I confess that I […]
Continue reading →In the comments of Gawker’s obituary for Joan Rivers, I pointed out that nobody seems to be remembering the fact that just a month or two ago, Rivers claimed that Palestinians deserve to die. This is about as gross and racist a thing as someone can say, but is permissible in American media because Arabs are […]
Continue reading →A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is relentless and people never seem to look back. It takes failure of world-historic proportions to prompt retrospective consideration of the […]
Continue reading →I wanted to be sure to share this remarkable letter from Natalie Zernon Davis, an emeritus professor of history from Princeton, in protest of the firing of Steven Salaita for his criticisms of Israeli actions in Gaza. She writes in part, I write you as an admirer of the remarkable achievements of the historians, literary […]
Continue reading →So since I’m talking about the Atlantic‘s biases: today Jeffrey Goldberg, the credulous Iraq war shill, contributed more to his long history of attacking critics of Israel by equating such criticism with anti-Semitism. Indeed, even by Goldberg’s incredibly low standards, this is pretty ugly: many protesters are challenging Israel’s very right to exist, not its policies in […]
Continue reading →So to continue with my complaints about how, in a world where nuance is dead, we’re unable to tell the truth, here’s a piece from Gawker’s Dayna Evans going after Vine star and moron Nash Grier for an ugly video in which he says the word “fag” and suggests that HIV/AIDS is “a gay thing.” […]
Continue reading →Here is a response from Karl Steel. Please take a moment and read it. I am only asking to be judged for what I actually believe and what I’ve actually said, and I have never said, suggested, or implied that race and gender are not wholly unique sites of oppression, or that solving those oppressions […]
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