Over the years I’ve become used to (and associated with) a certain style of pugilistic political argument. That style is fine by me, and I think indicative of a healthy political culture. For as much as people complain about hyperpartisanship and “the state of the discourse today,” there’s no halcyon past where everyone was civil […]
Continue reading →Michael Ross decided he wanted to die, to begin with. Ross was a horrific serial killer, a man who in the early 1980s raped and murdered 8 women, most of them teenagers. He had been on death row for two decades when he decided he would like the state to end it; he had converted […]
Continue reading →This Jonathan Rauch response to me in Politico is indicative of most of the negative responses I’ve gotten from supposed progressives: defensive, non-responsive, filled with ad hoc arguments and temporary moral frameworks of convenience, propped up by bald assertion, and generally indicative of a profound discomfort with having to actually think through this issue. Here, […]
Continue reading →As time goes on, I’m more and more convinced that the fundamental contemporary political failing is the inability or the refusal to sort “this is true” statements from “this is good” statements. So check out this piece in Gawker by Donovan X. Ramsey, titled “White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.” It makes a moral […]
Continue reading →I am not, as you’re aware if you’re reading this, a fan of the perpetual outrage cycle over verbal gaffes and imperfect vocabulary which has replaced politics for the contemporary American left. Because I think that human beings make mistakes; because I think that in any offense, you have to take into account intent to harm; because […]
Continue reading →At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside Establishment power is defended with the baton and tear gas only as a last resort. In the first instance, it is defended with far subtler, far more insidious means. On a recent morning, 20 or so high school students, most of them white, milled […]
Continue reading →1. Of course I take the question of European anti-Semitism seriously. And taking that question seriously involves discussing it responsibly, and discussing it responsibly means meeting an evidentiary basis. It’s a mark of how unhealthy our conversation about this topic is that discussion of that evidentiary basis occurs under the shadow of threat, threat of being […]
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 […]
Continue reading →Sadly necessary preamble: please, read this post to see what it actually does and doesn’t say Long layovers make for good blogging time. So Jeet Heer has a response to Andrew Sullivan’s response to Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the form of one of his long Twitter considerations. The topic, this time, is on the legitimacy of publishing portions […]
Continue reading →North Korea is an invaluable nation for America’s cultural and political industries. A genuinely brutal dictatorship with a genuinely crackpot dictator, the site of almost unthinkable human rights abuses which can be used to distract our broken, destructive nation from its brokenness and destruction. Like all good Big Bads, North Korea’s capabilities shift back and […]
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