Le Wokisme? or La Botte?

The polls of people who actually watched the debate showed Biden losing badly... by the exact same margin that Trump lost the Harris debate. But Trump by contrast didn't have weeks of drumbeat, full-court-press news afterwards about his debate failure - media instead dropped the story

I hear this sentiment a lot but the polls that came out in the days after the debate showed Biden losing 1% of support from his pre-debate polls. It was the weeks of fallout afterwards that actually eroded Biden's polling to the point he had to drop bsky.app/profile/dust...

🤔 bsky.app/profile/zach...

Pretty much everyone agrees that e.g. Harvey Weinstein had vast power over the news media - catching and killing/legal threats to kill negative stories about him and his crimes while planting negative stories about his accusers - but if you suggest a similar phenomenon exists for political journos..

Just remembering how one of the most important and widely read and dropped-with-maximally-damaging-timing "Biden is old and senile" pieces was reported by Nuzzi. It makes you think!

Finished reading. It’s a little over two hours of reading total, with some pauses. I heard a ton of things that need revision but I imagine in six months’ time it’ll be pretty ready to send to things. At least I hope so!

I think it’s like 56 poems at around 75 or so pages, maybe more depending on if the smaller bops get broken up onto two pages. Somewhat slim but I think appropriate and respectable for a first collection. Lots of sonnets and bops. So many fucking sonnets sheesh.

and then I have one poem about Kirk Franklin and playing Stomp in the club that I want to replace with a poem about Aretha Franklin getting the spirit in the dark.

Technically it isn’t the entirety but it’s 98% of the full draft. I have one piece I have to write entirely fresh, about Dr. Facilier from Princess and the Frog, one piece I have to finish about my relationship with my dad, which comes off of Stevie Wonder’s “Saturn”…

I am reading the entirety of what is my first manuscript and what may be my first book to myself today. I’m a little under halfway through at 51 minutes or so. Already heard some really great changes.

Lmaooooo yes

Sometimes I wish I could simultaneously watch House Hunters and Family Feud.

I agree with you that it’s useless and morally vacant, tho. There is no belief in a liberalism that would change the status quo, only a belief in a liberalism that is the status quo (or was the status quo prior to the emergence of Trump, or in their view BLM and MeToo and Twitter).

I think it’s more fair to say that the radical centrist crowd believes in procedural liberalism to the exclusion of either egalitarianism or substantive due process, which is essentially selfish, as they are protected from all sides by procedural liberalism.

But this is the fear that grips the hearts of the Yglesiases among us, and inspires them towards counter-historical lies that suggest the points of cross-party agreement in the fifth and sixth party systems centered on liberalism rather than very precisely the opposite; see again: the Iraq War.

And it is clear to any right thinking person that firing people who sexually harass their employees is force exercised towards the liberty of persons! Duh!

Even John Brown! Do we see John Brown as an authoritarian, or a freedom fighter? American history has always, as it must, made a distinction between force exercised towards the liberty of persons and force exercised against the liberty of persons.

America has perhaps a tradition of radical egalitarianism but at no point has that radical egalitarianism produced less liberalism. We don’t look at FDR’s administration as a time of encroaching autocracy! (Or rather, the only ones who did were and are deeply authoritarian themselves).

which pushes towards disunion every time it is allowed or forced—or worse, in the case of the modern Republican Party, actively sought out—to concentrate in a single political vehicle. There is one illiberalism in American history and it took its most concrete form in the Confederacy.

Meanwhile the notion of a “liberal center” is, frankly, a completely ahistorical idea that does immense violence to the history of the right wing in this country. What we see in reality is an illiberal faction that has been tolerated by all governing parties since this country’s founding…

In fact, what we see is a party increasingly convinced that liberalism requires egalitarianism and egalitarianism requires liberalism. We see a party in which the two factions Yglesias imagines at war are in reality only growing closer together.

Which again, is what you would expect of a party whose core points of agreement are, fucking duh, liberalism (so questions like due process, limited executive, etc) and egalitarianism (ie identity should be no bar to equal access to the good things in life).

"Needs more bamboo metaphor" is the new "needs more cowbell."

And even these actually-operative divisions are rapidly vanishing in the face of the fight vs don’t fight axis, which is itself oriented around questions like the kidnapping of Kilmar Abrego Garcia which are quintessentially questions of both liberalism and egalitarianism.

And the only real points of disagreement among Democrats is, as ever, “grow the pie” Democrats vs “share the pie” Democrats. The former call the latter economically illiterate commies, and the latter call the former bought and paid-for corporate shills. Thus as ever.

…which is itself a reaction formation against a liberal President who literally wore his egalitarianism, such as it was and such as it wasn’t, on his skin.

In reality, we see a party fairly unified on question of both small l liberalism and egalitarianism, in large part because they have been now for a decade in opposition to a political movement hostile to both…

The kindest version of Yglesias’ hallucinatory reading of American politics would see a Democratic Party torn between LIBERAL egalitarians and liberal EGALITARIANS but that is not what we see in reality.

Like they are not particularly good writers but I think they both think they are?

But of course, we know why he wants liberal to mean human rights for minorities and also nah, bc the people who are on the “nah fuck civil rights” side are more his people than his colleagues who told him to stop misgendering his other colleagues. Many such cases!