Wank Dad 2: Electric Wankaloo

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/danfromtheweb/status/1286035540437946368

[team filler]

see this tattoo here kids, i got this at the beginning of the culture wars in the 20s. i was on the front lines.

https://twitter.com/JockoPotato/status/1228477635417772036

[Oblivion]

https://twitter.com/TheLetterhack/status/1228469538964025344

 

i loved the guy and miss him greatly, getting a tattoo of youtubers is pretty cringe-y 

[benjipwns]

get tattoos of any actual people is a mistake usually

[benjipwns]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/thomas-chatterton-williams-on-race-identity-and-cancel-culture

Among the signatories was Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Harper’s, who also had a hand in writing the letter. Williams is the author of two memoirs, “Losing My Cool” and “Self-Portrait in Black and White,” which recount his struggles with racial identity as a teen-ager and as an adult. The son of a Black father and a white mother, he describes himself in his second book as “an ex-black man.” He is known for his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Williams believes overemphasizes race and racism, creating “a fantasy that flattens psychological and material difference within and between groups.”

I recently spoke by phone with Williams, who was at his office in France, where he lives. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what the Harper’s letter aimed to accomplish, whether cancel culture has always existed in various forms, and his concerns about Black Lives Matter and the media’s focus on covid-19 mortality rates among people of color.

What was the genesis of the letter?

It’s no secret. No one is trying to be evasive, but it came out of conversations that the five of us—[the Atlantic staff writer and former New Yorker staff writer] George Packer, myself, [the Columbia professor of humanities] Mark Lilla, [the journalist] Robert F. Worth, and [the historian and professor of journalism] David Greenberg—started on an e-mail chain five or six weeks ago, talking about something that I’ve been talking about with some of them for years. A mood or climate seems to have set in, especially in the past almost four years, with the intensity that Trump brings to every topic, and social media—the growth of the importance of social media can’t be taken away from anything we’re talking about. I remember I was on Facebook and other things more, but Twitter has become all-consuming, especially if you work in the media or in academia, and so it feels like Twitter has taken on this invisible, impersonal force that works through people but no one in particular, that sweeps through and enacts public humiliation and punishment, and has become another figure in all of our lives, like the spectre of Trump hanging over us.

At some point, we decided to see if we could draft an open letter. We really didn’t even know if anybody would pay attention. The five of us started talking about who we might be able to reach out to and see if they might sign it. We went through multiple drafts on our own, and then about a month ago, we started sending it out to other people, and we got yeses and nos, and some of the people that said yes and some of the people that said no had really smart responses, with incredible feedback. We then came back and incorporated it, so like twenty people contributed writing to it.

Did you do more of the writing than anyone else?

No, I wouldn’t say that, even. I contributed in an early draft. I was very involved, and then it was a real collective. This is a document that doesn’t have an author, but it has the hands of over twenty people, and especially the hands of five people.

What did you say when you reached out to people?

You need to understand that this is something that we didn’t realize we would get anybody interested in. Some of the people that we knew the best said that they were uncomfortable or afraid of the backlash or couldn’t get involved, and some of the people we didn’t know very well stepped in, so we didn’t have a way of gauging. Everybody knew some names and began contacting them on their own, with their own language. Sometimes I was texting people three lines. Sometimes David was writing beautiful long letters full of tons of evidence of why the people might want to sign. Nobody that any of us contacted was, like, “Let me see who else is signing, and then I’ll get back to you.” Not a single person. I don’t think any of us have ever done this before, so it didn’t even occur to us that that could be a critique down the road.

How important was racial or gender or ideological diversity, especially getting people on the left? I know you have previously said that the letter started out more focussed on the sins of the left.

There was always disagreement. There was never one way that the letter was conceived. There was always some feeling that Trump should be more important and some feeling that in a short letter you have to focus on the kind of culture that’s coming in our own industry, which Trump doesn’t actually fully control. Then there was a feeling, after talking to more and more people that we respected, that we really do have to acknowledge the fact that nothing exists in a vacuum outside of Trump.

You said, “The critique is against censoriousness and so after realizing that the letter would be incomplete by solely focusing on the left, we felt it was necessary to be absolutely clear that Trump is the canceller-in-chief.”

Right, exactly. We all talked for quite a while about how we can’t really think of someone who has been more cancelled in American culture recently than Colin Kaepernick. We were talking about the Black reporter in Pittsburgh who was unable to cover the protests because of a tweet. We are against Twitter being involved in your office decisions and your H.R. department. Do you see what I’m saying? It was interpreted in a different way. It was a constant conversation of “Let’s always be thinking of ways that we can make this as ideologically diverse as possible,” and, also, we know from our own lives that you can’t predict how people think based on their color category, religion, or gender identity, or any of that.

You mentioned ideological diversity and the importance of it. As far I could tell, there were no open Trump supporters who signed the letter. Did you feel that it was important to not have signers beyond a certain level of conservatism in part because then critics could say you don’t really care about liberalism? Trump has the support of more than forty per cent of the country, so aren’t we all drawing our own lines somewhere about ideological diversity?

There was a lot of discussion of that. It was not something that we didn’t know would be a point of contention, but we also basically made the decision that we have to be as idealistic as possible within the bounds of understanding that we have to be pragmatic too, and rhetorically effective. You simply cannot have a document that was as successful as ours, I believe, at this moment, with throwing every single viewpoint in. Even one person who I reached out to, who isn’t, I don’t think, a Trump supporter, said, “No, I won’t sign this because I don’t believe that Trump is the greatest threat in the nation.” We were kind of skeptical that you could have a defense of liberal values, a serious defense of liberal values, with someone who was really a diehard Trump supporter, too. We also felt that if you got somebody who was, you might very well lose some other people that you need to make this a rhetorically effective document.

I asked the question in a bad way. Even if someone didn’t violate their employment contract, if someone was going on a Web site and saying, as Blake Neff did, some awful racist stuff, which I don’t even feel comfortable reading, or got fired like Nick Cannon did, for anti-Semitism, by Viacom—is that cancel culture?

We have to have some agreed-upon standards. Part of what the problem is in this debate is deciding how we’re changing our standards right now. I understand this is not a science, but if there’s a punitive aspect to the collective response to something you do and it’s around a not-yet-solidified norm, that seems to me to be very different than to transgressing what seems to be a commonly understood norm. I know that you can say that there’s lots of difficulty in understanding, but you know that there actually is a difference.

Neff, it’s true, violated what I think a lot of us would agree as norms by using the N-word and saying a bunch of awful things. At the same time, he works for a television show that is able to broadcast these things every night, which the President watches and tweets about. Nick Cannon, who circulated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had prominent athletes speak up for him, before they recanted. I think some people would see these things as cancel culture. They would say people are overly sensitive.

You’re looking at something that is new, and, when there’s enough of a quantitative difference, you have a qualitative difference. This is something that has been with us—an impulse to punish and to single out and to scapegoat and to ostracize and stigmatize, that’s not new. But when you have a quantitative difference that technology affords—and I don’t mean to keep coming back to technology, but it’s inextricable from the experience now.

This letter was an attempt to open a conversation, to start thinking seriously about something that many people have noticed is going on. You don’t get an international conversation with a three-paragraph document like this if it doesn’t touch on something that many people understand is going on. This letter has been reprinted in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan. I’m getting interview requests from Chile. It was printed in Mexico. There were three articles at least in the Guardian about it in the U.K. This is something.

I know there was a funny thing that went around Twitter about you kicking someone out of your house, or someone “self-ejecting” from your house, for saying something not nice about Bari Weiss. Do you want to just, for the record, tell people what happened?

That got more attention than I can believe. Can I just say something that might not completely satisfy you? I really can’t comment on that for the sanctity of my own household sanity.

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1286382476336693250

[Transhuman]

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1285774083838410754

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1285772017871065088

lol.. their front page looks like an Ebay ad.

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/jeffpeshut/status/1286404704516399105

All his latest tweets mentioned The Frankfurt School Of Cultural Marxist Economic Theories.

[Tripon]

Who's paying for the Daily Wire now that Ben Shapiro resigned?

[Pissy F Benny]

Me

[Joe Molotov]

Who's paying for the Daily Wire now that Ben Shapiro resigned?

The Frankfurt School Of Cultural Marxist Economic Theories

[Oblivion]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/thomas-chatterton-williams-on-race-identity-and-cancel-culture

But it also seems to me an idea that has a racially charged history to it, and that we should want to be careful when people say things like that. Maybe that’s where we disagree.

Here’s where I draw a line, and this is why it takes people to actually listen to arguments and not scan quotes for gotcha clickbait. I’m not saying you. I’m saying that people love the gotcha as a very good way to get likes and a good way to get the dopamine hits. I engage in it just like a lot of us, because we’re all incentivized to behave this way, and it’s worth something to resist. But, if you engage in a good-faith way, then I think you can actually have conversations about difficult subjects. What I’m saying is that we’re not reading each other in the way that’s conducive to everybody having the ability to encounter the other’s experience. We’re engaging each other in ways that contribute to the fortification of identity epistemology, and I think the thing that’s so sad about that is it limits the amount of conversation we could have. That is impoverishing if what you actually care about is knowledge and ideas and making a kind of multi-ethnic society work.

I guess my point would be that if a white person said that line, I’m not sure the appropriate response would be to sit and thoughtfully listen to them.

It really depends on what made a white person say that.

I can think of one thing that might.

What’s that?

I was kidding.

[Mandark]

https://twitter.com/randygdub/status/1286324285074628609

[Oblivion]

glenn's having a totally normal one in that thread

[Mandark]

Glenn sounding like Glen

[VomKriege]

Roger Stone about him being caught saying "necro" in a lull while being interviewed.
On the 19th : "I was watching a film in French when a man and a woman were discussing. And according to my black friends it's maybe not even a slur !"
On the 20th, on Carpe Donktum InfoWars show : "If you compare the background noise of that clip with the rest of the show, it's obvious it was spliced in. If I called him a slur then why did he kiss my ass for the next 45mn."

Mr. Stone cited the championing of the term by the sociologist and N.A.A.C.P. co-founder W.E.B. DuBois, and the continued use of the word by the United Negro College Fund.

Mr. DuBois died in 1963.

 

Yeah Carpe Donktum has a show on InfoWars in which he had D'Souza, Stone and Dave Rubin as guests.
Download and view numbers seem to point no one cares.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/SonOfAssata/status/1286763468012556293

 

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1286674000530219008

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1286600842930540544

[Mandark]

Believing that three credit hours of ethnic studies could completely change someone's worldview shows a really optimistic level of faith in the power of education.

[Transhuman]

As much as I hate Rubin, having a mandatory course imposed on you that has nothing to do with your degree does seem wrong

[Oblivion]

As much as I hate Rubin, having a mandatory course imposed on you that has nothing to do with your degree does seem wrong

you mean like....general education?

[Mandark]

As much as I hate Rubin, having a mandatory course imposed on you that has nothing to do with your degree does seem wrong

boy wait until you find out about all universities

[Tripon]

If you're attending a CSU, or UC. You probably already took a course that satisfy the requirements, especially in the humanities. I guess forcing CS majors to learn some empathy is worth something.

[Oblivion]

Believing that three credit hours of ethnic studies could completely change someone's worldview shows a really optimistic level of faith in the power of education.

i spent quite a few years (more than i  should have, i'm somewhat ashamed to admit) in college, both community and university, both of which would count as among the most 'liberal' in the sea of socialism that is los angeles in the failed state of commiefornia. and yet, of all the dozens of classes i've taken throughout that time, nothing in school made me turn into a solid leftist more than me watching an evening of fox news. from the moment i heard sean hannity's smug, nasally voice, i realized these people are crazy garbage, and never looked back.

the idea that colleges turn people into leftist radicals is so fucking strange, just conceptually to me. especially the idea that they turn people into marxists. i wasn't an econ major, but i took a decent number of econ classes, and the amount of time they mentioned marx came out to be a grand total of ZERO. the most leftist thing we covered was keynesianism and that was like for two weeks at most.

[Transhuman]

As much as I hate Rubin, having a mandatory course imposed on you that has nothing to do with your degree does seem wrong

boy wait until you find out about all universities

I went to university for an IT degree and one of the mandatory prequisite courses may as well have been called "How to use Microsoft Word"

something's wrong with this boy...

Get a life, kid

[Madrun Badrun]

Those fuckers made me take geology and geography and physics for general requirements and now I burn bras and flags. 

[OnlyRegret]

As much as I hate Rubin, having a mandatory course imposed on you that has nothing to do with your degree does seem wrong

Some degrees from some places stack a bunch of filler. Won't let people study just what they want and peace it a year early to extract another organ worth of $$$. It is nicer to have a handful of options of complete free choice from whatever subject/department.
Sticking another checklist course on top isn't brainwashing anyone, the I'm-only-here-because-I've-no-choice courses won't do a thing.

[Transhuman]

Yeah i'm not saying it's brainwashing, Rubin is a moron, but it's still a dumb idea to jam dumb prerequisites, especially non-applicable ones. It'd be a different matter if it was just for the students doing humanities degrees.

[Madrun Badrun]

Also, I'm pretty sure it's a way for the universities to get a more uniform distribution of student counts in the first-year courses than something motivated out of social good or philosophy of education. 

[Oblivion]

can't speak for other unis, but at CSUN, for transfer students, the only non-major specific classes that we were required to take were like 3 electives, i think.

[OnlyRegret]

Also, I'm pretty sure it's a way for the universities to get a more uniform distribution of student counts in the first-year courses than something motivated out of social good or philosophy of education.

It was always about the benjis ($)

[Mandark]

the idea that colleges turn people into leftist radicals is so fucking strange, just conceptually to me. especially the idea that they turn people into marxists. i wasn't an econ major, but i took a decent number of econ classes, and the amount of time they mentioned marx came out to be a grand total of ZERO. the most leftist thing we covered was keynesianism and that was like for two weeks at most.

Right, Marx isn't even a footnote.

My experience with undergrad econ was that whatever the class is, 80% of it is just solving optimization equations. Basically no history of econ, and a lot of ideology passed off as math (which good teachers will point out, but still).

[Oblivion]

Also, I'm pretty sure it's a way for the universities to get a more uniform distribution of student counts in the first-year courses than something motivated out of social good or philosophy of education.

can't they just do that by counting the people they admitted? i don't think universities allow you to miss the first semester once you've been accepted.

[Great Rumbler]

the idea that colleges turn people into leftist radicals is so fucking strange, just conceptually to me. especially the idea that they turn people into marxists. i wasn't an econ major, but i took a decent number of econ classes, and the amount of time they mentioned marx came out to be a grand total of ZERO. the most leftist thing we covered was keynesianism and that was like for two weeks at most.

Right, Marx isn't even a footnote.

My experience with undergrad econ was that whatever the class is, 80% of it is just solving optimization equations. Basically no history of econ, and a lot of ideology passed off as math (which good teachers will point out, but still).

guns and butter

[Madrun Badrun]

Also, I'm pretty sure it's a way for the universities to get a more uniform distribution of student counts in the first-year courses than something motivated out of social good or philosophy of education.

can't they just do that by counting the people they admitted? i don't think universities allow you to miss the first semester once you've been accepted.

No I'm saying it's so that you don't have 500 people in a first year CS class but only 12 in a genders study class. 

[BIONIC]

Yeah i'm not saying it's brainwashing, Rubin is a moron, but it's still a dumb idea to jam dumb prerequisites, especially non-applicable ones. It'd be a different matter if it was just for the students doing humanities degrees.

the point of general education is to produce well rounded members of society

That’s right. Just look at Glen.

[Oblivion]

the idea that colleges turn people into leftist radicals is so fucking strange, just conceptually to me. especially the idea that they turn people into marxists. i wasn't an econ major, but i took a decent number of econ classes, and the amount of time they mentioned marx came out to be a grand total of ZERO. the most leftist thing we covered was keynesianism and that was like for two weeks at most.

Right, Marx isn't even a footnote.

My experience with undergrad econ was that whatever the class is, 80% of it is just solving optimization equations. Basically no history of econ, and a lot of ideology passed off as math (which good teachers will point out, but still).

yeah, that was pretty much the same in my case, to the professors' credit. i didn't walk away from those classes thinking there was much bias there, but regardless, we learned way more about reagonomics/SSE than we ever did das kapital.

[Transhuman]

Yeah i'm not saying it's brainwashing, Rubin is a moron, but it's still a dumb idea to jam dumb prerequisites, especially non-applicable ones. It'd be a different matter if it was just for the students doing humanities degrees.

the point of general education is to produce well rounded members of society

“It will empower our students to meet this moment in our nation’s history, giving them the knowledge, broad perspectives and skills needed to solve society’s most pressing problems. And it will further strengthen the value of a CSU degree,” said CSU Chancellor Timothy White in a statement.

I think it does provide a more rounded education, but empowers students? It'd be empowering if they could choose.

[curly]

Right, Marx isn't even a footnote.

My experience with undergrad econ was that whatever the class is, 80% of it is just solving optimization equations. Basically no history of econ, and a lot of ideology passed off as math (which good teachers will point out, but still).

- finding out John Hicks wrote Keynes and the Classics before reading the General Theory
- finding out Hicks eventually said IS-LM was just an academic toy and worthless for understanding short term dynamics related to liquidity and interest
- finding out that measuring the contributions of "factors of production" is tautological and Samuelson didn't think it was worth doing
- finding out Solow said that DSGM models have never produced a useful result
- finding out that Oskar Lange won the socialist calculation debate by pointing out pricing is algorithmic

a completely degenerate discipline

think how much better off you would be if you had spent the time you wasted reading that shite doing something worthwhile like watching Naruto

[OnlyRegret]

Yeah i'm not saying it's brainwashing, Rubin is a moron, but it's still a dumb idea to jam dumb prerequisites, especially non-applicable ones. It'd be a different matter if it was just for the students doing humanities degrees.

the point of general education is to produce well rounded members of society

 

[Mandark]

IME it was striking how the intro classes for sociology, psychology, and poli sci all involved sketching out different approaches to those subjects and some historical background of the disciplines, whereas intro to econ is basically "here's how we model behavior in econ, and here's how you express that as a graph."

I think a lot of how econ's taught can be chalked up to a desire to be treated like a STEM discipline and not lumped in with the other "soft" sciences.

[curly]

the point of general education is to teach you how to think not to impart some specific information on a subject so you don't end up like transhuman who appears to have no worthwhile thoughts on any subject

[Mandark]

When you consider how far shosta has come in the last couple years, the key to growing as a young person is being bullied regularly presented with direct, honest feedback online.

[Mandark]

shosta getting my feedback for his posts is like training in triple gravity

when he's editing current affairs his power level will be off the charts

that first wank dad thread was like an 80's training montage for your brain

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1286756865469288450

Is it an emergency broadcast from your hunting lodge or something ?

Also you accused Obama of being a radical Soros puppet working to brew a leftist insurrection in the US breh. You're still saying they're DISMANTLING THE WHITES WEST.

https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1286764677440118785

https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1286088640008003591

https://www.mediamatters.org/glenn-beck/beck-connects-obama-soros-violent-revolution-coming-our-shores

[Mandark]

[Great Rumbler]

(Image removed from quote.)

Guess he wasn't all that sorry after all!

[D3RANG3D]

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1285708252106416134

     Concern trolling ?
     /
 

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1286711421116416000

Do "Make America Great Again" next !

[Oblivion]

never EVER forget:

[Oblivion]

oh and if anyone wants a point by point summary of the taibbi/chapo episode, this dude has it:

https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1286506318321332224

part 2:

https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1286672104398770178

(god bless his soul    )

[Kara]

My favorite part of that episode was when Matty said that the dang news used to be about reporting what the dang news knew and letting the public decide what to do with it. If there's a hereafter I hope William Randolph Hearst had a good belly laugh at that.

[Mandark]

Matt Taibbi, famous for maintaining a stringently objective tone in his work.

[Tripon]

I started listening to Chapo mid 2018. Was their early run also just straight up grillism like it is now?

[Oblivion]

CTH is normally pretty good for the most part (minus the girl chapo, who is almost always awful), which is why the taibbi episode got the reaction it did. cause it's normally out of character for the show.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/1286787059026292736

[Great Rumbler]

My favorite part of that episode was when Matty said that the dang news used to be about reporting what the dang news knew and letting the public decide what to do with it. If there's a hereafter I hope William Randolph Hearst had a good belly laugh at that.

*laughs in yellow journalism*

[benjipwns]

Noah Berlatsky
330.8K Tweets

he/him, bylines NBC Think, Atlantic, WaPo, Pitchfork, Guardian, Foreign Policy

no thx

[Kara]

I started listening to Chapo mid 2018. Was their early run also just straight up grillism like it is now?

Nah, they got bodied pretty hard by the defeat of reluctant social fascism by a clearly unwell segregationist who is running back the Democratic Party's 2018 Leon Blum campaign while the planet circles the drain.