Dak
mentat
I just figured I could eliminate 3 paragraphs of mental gymnastics to state the approved opinion concisely in one sentence. You could do that as well. This is why French intellectuals after Bastiat are so passé.
Maybe a bit naive, but I don’t always think instances where children are modeling or whatever (in pageants or in parades) to be sexual unless they are dressed in a provocative way or something.
I'll just say that beauty pageants are far more guilty of sexualizing children than pride parades are.
I'm not talking here about the young trans child who dances in clubs. That's a more complicated scenario and more difficult to dissociate from sexuality, for sure.
Just on number of years both things have existed alone, beauty pageants are worse for it. Especially if you consider that the type of "beauty" these kids are being measured by, and are conforming to in their attire, is entirely an adult one.
What exactly is the secret of Ta-Nehisi’s success? Why has he vaulted over more talented black intellectuals such as John McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams (who have both been unloading on Coates lately)?
It’s definitely not his erudition. McWhorter scoffed recently:
The elevation of that dorm-lounge performance art as serious thought is a kind of soft bigotry, which is as nauseating as it is unintended.
What is the consistent kid version of beauty?
(And who cares what kids fucking think?)
I just figured I could eliminate 3 paragraphs of mental gymnastics to state the approved opinion concisely in one sentence. You could do that as well. This is why French intellectuals after Bastiat are so passé.
Pat is, unless I'm somehow mistaken, a TNC apologist, while I have consistently agreed with McWhorter.
Haha, wow so passive aggressive...
Maybe not, but I think I've been pretty straight forward as to my perspective that African Americans were wrongfully brought to the US/treated, but that also the victim mentality won't help them move forward and neither will "reparations" or "ethnic masochism" or any other liberal feelgood political panacea. Apologies don't fix the past and have little informative value on the future.
I disagree, I fully support the Democrats paying reparations to the descendants of slaves.
I find Coates's writing to be provocative and brilliant, and his interpretations compelling. I also find McWhorter to be measured, perceptive, and an enviable intellectual. I think the difference between us is that I don't see these two things as mutually exclusive.
I see being an intellectual and not being an intellectual as being mutually exclusive, and Coates isn't even remotely approaching intellectual status.
I would appeal to Coates ....... as an exhibit source. His writing exhibits something about black experience, whether we take that experience to be local or national, and he expresses it in a particularly thoughtful way.
he also opens himself up to scrutiny on those perspectives and slant.
Was this ever in question?
To respond to your original comment about our respective alliances, I don't own any of Coates's books. I do own a copy of The Language Hoax, though. I think you misinterpret my fondness or interest in certain writings as support for the content of those writings. I'm interested in Philip Roth, but I don't think one should live one's life according to Portnoy's Complaint. Literary studies don't unconditionally or uncompromisingly champion their texts of choice. It's more complicated than right or wrong.
America's worst run cities vs how many years since they had a Republican mayor:
D.C.—109
Detroit—57
NYC—12
San Francisco—55
Oakland—58
Flint, MI—44
Cleveland—30
Hartford, CT—48
Chicago—88
Los Angeles—18
Atlanta—140
St. Louis—70
Philadelphia—67 See a correlation?
Well I can distinguish between an intellectual curiosity in some component of a thing, and endorsing a political/social/psychological/philosophical position. But at the same time Coates is typically not read or recommended in that way, and his opinion is not alone and it is damaging real lives in its pathological paranoid externalizing (even while Coates does quite well for himself). While Coates is gladhanded and lives life on easy street, I deal with black demented (clinically) schizophrenics (who were IVCd by their own family) who refuse to take their medicines because somehow they are in an inpatient psych ward because racism (one particular current patient is in mind). That's one extreme individual anecdote, but the worse ones are the neighborhoods upon neighborhoods in places like Baltimore. How are the adherents of Coatsian rhetoric doing:
https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1141670149424123910
Also Baltimore: 57 years. Also NYC is not technically accurate - Bloomberg wasn't listed as a Democrat even though he should be.
Our view was never that truth is just a question of which perspective you see it from.
Bruno [Latour] and I were at a conference together in Brazil once. (Which reminds me: if people want to criticize us, it ought to be for the amount of jet fuel involved in making and spreading these ideas! Not for leading the way to post-truth.)
Anyhow. We were at this conference. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, took us apart privately. He said: “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?”
We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?
Take evolution. The notion that you would or would not “believe” in evolution already gives away the game. If you say, “Of course I believe in evolution,” you have lost, because you have entered the semiotics of representationalism – and post-truth, frankly. You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding.
https://twitter.com/Nicole61836638/status/1141174495576653824
But my car is why the earth is polluted......