Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

How much was the retainer?

i mean i know he didnt actually choose the cover image or the tagline but lol dude

http://i.imgur.com/M4Qwi.jpg

but i guess isn't the thing that TNC has a bunch of followers who are expecting him to be posting about Breitbart,

A strange expectation: yet one more liberal writing yet another scabrous obit?

Even granting that it is a pose he likes to strike, most writers in his position, needing to churn out copy at a fantastic rate to appease his readers, fall into characteristic tropes and poses. It is part of being a pundit. Not such a big lol in the scheme of things, but, yeah, it shows a tendency to furrow his brow a bit too obviously.

He is pretty cool. I can cut him some slack for a clunky thing here and there. He hasn't gone full Greenwald just yet.

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

naw he is v capable of greater self awareness and is much better in that mode

TNC will end up writing about the lack of ethics in modern poltical propaganda or epistemic closure or how the interwebs have empowered pit-bull journalism or something, but I doubt he will linger much over Brietbart himself all that much.

oh man, maybe it's TNC that is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

― horseshoe, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually forgive me for not thinking abt this deeper, i do think whats good abt his writing is maybe p closely related to his ponderousness, he does a thing thats p endearing where you can feel him thinking, he s lets you in, which is not easy, but he tends to go off the rails w/it which is maybe not surprising considering what a delicate operation it is

also id like to say that his blog is ime much better than his long form writing but why

eh his problem isn't that he's too sincere, paul krugman is sincere too, his problem is that he spends too much time thinking outloud and being nice

(xp)

he spends too much time thinking outloud

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:30 PM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is his problem, yes. twitter is bad for him, i really think, although now i sound like a crazy person who thinks ta-nehisi coates is her friend. which lol is how i actually think of him tbh. i'm fine with him being nice.

i don't really disagree with anything jho has said, though. i originally typed "ponderousness" instead of "self-seriousness." dude has a lot to say.

i'm making sure i'm putting that waxpapery ring thing on the seat before i take shit in this toilet. #breitbartpocalypse #thoughtfulguy

and he says it slowly. i always am jealous of people who can write like that; i do the opposite.

I am glad I only sporadically read his stuff as I've never come across anything exhibiting the problems/issues you guys are describing (which I half suspect are a pattern that emerges via exposure).

'i think' the thinking out loud part is just the clumsy failed aspect of what he does well when he does it well which then leads to people thinking hes their friend which is a p good trick

to be clear i really like him which is whats lead me to develop this critique of him

instead of tweeting ta-nehisi should just call me up and vent. we are on a first name basis like that.

the funny thing abt tnc on twitter is he spent so long turning his nose up at it and now hes on it all the time basically demonstrating its shortcomings in real time in the manner he previously described

sometimes I wonder - (and again I think he's 'worthy of being a tier 1 blogger' regardless) - how many people use him as their go-to source for 'what a black person thinks' because he is what a lot of people would like black people to be

...

and it's hard to disassociate that w/ the fact that he actually is an interesting writer but I see him celebrated in ways that I don't see w/ many other bloggers, like the way people compliment him out of the blue 'one of the best writers. everyone should be reading him. just great.' etc. is...different

im really glad he has started talking abt the nba and stopped talking abt video games

iatee, the "Is this racist?" thread is over here

I'm not arguing 'tnc is the result of affirmative action' I'm saying 'is it a total coincidence that the most popular africam-american blogger among white people is like the least shrill person on the internet'

africam

fyi, tnc used to kick it on ilm a bit back in the day. i've been following him since he was at the voice doing the press clips column -- he was killer funny. sometimes he can (or could, don't read regularly now) go hella hard, albeit with some dry irony.

what was his usr name

CRW

I'm not arguing 'tnc is the result of affirmative action' I'm saying 'is it a total coincidence that the most popular africam-american blogger among white people is like the least shrill person on the internet'

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in this post he talks a lil bit abt his feelings on the topic, tho obvs he doesnt get at the particular explaining black things to white folks angle itatee is talking abt

I consider myself a writer of some merit and talent, who says some interesting things from time to time. That's all very nice. But I understand that if I were in my exact same job, and happened to be just another white dude from an Ivy, I'd attract less interest. Race, as lived by individuals, is biography and people are always interested in biography when it differs from the norm in any field. I have no idea why it should be any different with Lin.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/the-jeremy-lin-backlash/253076

i remember him writing about the hip hop cops at the voice

didnt realize that was him, i loved that story

so fn nuts

Of course his background/bio make more people notice him. That question is a textbook example of "begging the question".

My issue is that iatee basically said, "well he's good, but he's not that good, so people must be heaping all of this praise on him because he is the platonic ideal of the good Negro, so much calmer and more pleasant than all those angry black people (although I can't stress enough how talented he is so that someone won't call me on the gross assumptions spilling out in my thoughts)" and, unsurprisingly, the general reaction aside from me was "hmm, makes you think *strokes chin*"

tbf you and i were the only people who reacted at all to his posts and you should know by now that i never stroke my chin while passively condoning racism

I never said 'he's not that good', he is on my rss feed even though I have problems w/ the think out loud stuff. I said the way people praise him and talk about him is 'different' and sometimes kinda awkward and his role as that 'one and only go-to black guy blogger' in the blogosphere might have something to do with how nice he is

I'm glad you could find the secret racism tho, I thought I was hiding it so well

and it's hard to disassociate that w/ the fact that he actually is an interesting writer but I see him celebrated in ways that I don't see w/ many other bloggers, like the way people compliment him out of the blue 'one of the best writers. everyone should be reading him. just great.' etc. is...different

The direct implication here is that you think he's good but he's not THAT good, otherwise it wouldn't be so weird or awkward. Or conversely, these people don't actually think he's that good, but because he's the non-threatening black guy he gets held up as the token example, which both implicitly downplays the quality of his writing and implicitly posits the existence of a slew of equally high-profile black writers who are surly rage demons too edgy for white America to handle but more like what the average black person is like (cf the he is what a lot of people would like black people to be comment).

iatee basically said, "well he's good, but he's not that good, so people must be heaping all of this praise on him because he is the platonic ideal of the good Negro...

After a certain level of 'goodness', the great majority of people have no scale by which to measure any further gradations or distinctions. The average person is just as likely as not to heap up mountains of praise on Stephen King or Ann Coulter. At that point you have to examine what their yardstick is, to see what they are measuring. It is not inconceivable that for some of them, iatee has sussed out the mark TNC is meeting. This is not the same as endorsing that measurement.

the point was that I don't see the same 'everyone should be reading him. just so great.' talk in the same manner w/ *any* other blogger and it's awkward in that he's talked about *differently* not that he's talked about *too much*. you can read whatever 'direct implication' you want into that.

fwiw i find him a v good explainer of racism, am wite btw

im not trying to beg the question fyi, just an aside, and as an additional aside i was unaware of the original meaning of beg the question until today, also i think i used it kinda backward there but w/e

The direct implication here is that you think he's good but he's not THAT good

I read that less as a critique of his writing than as a way of marketing him.

would be curious to hear whether he feels like explaining racism to white people has become part of his job or hes just talking abt stuff that interests him and if the whole blog xposting/commenting internet communication/feedback loop has affected how/what he chooses to write on the topic

yep, too nice by far:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/on-making-yourself-right/253889/

trying real hard here to follow tnc's example and not accuse certain posters of certain things that aren't true in a somewhat escalated way, but goddamn it would feel good to do so...

(and yeah, tnc's take on sncc is problematic and one-sided, to say the least, i think. but there are ways you talk about that, and there are ways that you absolutely do not talk about that [and tnc's rejection of precisely some of those ways probably informs his take on sncc, in fact])

you have followed his example in more than one way

About half finished. Damn compelling.

man I get emotionally invested in pieces like this

probably why I read so much fantasy

“isn't there something pointless and ineffectual about insisting of the simplicity of the moral situation when it's not connected to any solution?”

can I just say that this is one my least favorite things (white) people do when they learn about some injustice? this insistence that a problem should never be called out, that people shouldn’t protest an issue unless they already have a specific solution ready to go? I started noticing it a lot during the NFL kneeling protests wrt BLM and I don’t think it’s good.

Indeed.

Saying 'no. This is not right' is the first step. Protestors may disagree on solutions but every march I've been to starts from the same, very basic, place.

American did not come up with a "solution" to its racism problems, but it did at least end legalized segregation. There are injustices Israel could just stop doing without waiting for a solution to all problems.

2x brimstead, that tendency has always struck me as a way to stifle discussion

Far more sophisticated to furrow one’s brow and talk in abstracts while civilians are dying violently, from starvation and in numbers.

The down the line solutions might be complex, and might be disagreed on, but the immedite solution seems pretty concise and with high levels of consensus. Stop bombing.

i thought the conversation with ezra klein was excellent

yeah, bringing this back to earth a bit…

agreed the klein interview was good. ezra does push him a bit on some of the things mentioned in that sehgal review

overall the conversation is very cordial and measured—they clearly both have a lot of respect for each other—but the tense moments, where they criticize each other directly and ask pointed questions, are pretty bracing

A lot of the time we might say that solutions are complex but after a year of bombs we've only had a very short ceasefire agreement and prisoner/hostage exchange.

I wouldn't say we've only had that, we've also had a steady decrease in the level of intensity of the bombings and the killing, which I imagine (though I honestly can't really prove this) is in part due to US pressure. Half the deaths in Gaza came in the first two months of the war.

Not sure that’s true - the mechanism for counting casualties is beyond messed-up to the point where there may be tens of thousands of casualties more than that. They stopped being able to count after 40K deaths.

xps Still waiting on what soref thinks is so intrinsically necessary about mass civilian casualties.

― gyac, Wednesday, 16 October 2024 14:20 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

stop the bombing sure, but like Daniel Rf said a lot of what Coates is taking about is the situation predating the Gaza war, and his visit that the book is based on took place before 0ctober 7 23. In terms of the solution to *that*, I guess some kind of two-state solution, an Israeli state and a viable Palestinian state living peacefully side by seems to me like the most plausible semi-just solution that has any chance of actually happening, but I don't know enough about to convincingly lay out that argument and would straggle to argue my case against anyone who disagreed, either from a pro-Israeli pov that any moves towards a two-state solution would risk their security, and that there's no 'partner for peace' on the other side, or from a pro-Palestinian pov that talking about a two-state solution when there's no support for that in mainstream Israeli politics and little chance of it happening in the near future is basically just evasiveness and a tacit support for the status quo. That last argument is convincing to me, but then a secular one state solution seems even more unlikely and impractical than a two state solution, so I guess that's where I end up

Far more sophisticated to furrow one’s brow and talk in abstracts while civilians are dying violently, from starvation and in numbers.

ok, this might read as to some of you as 'insisting a problem shouldn't be called out without having a solution ready to go' but - I think focusing on moral condemnation without engaging with potential solutions is far closer to 'furrowing one's brow furrow and talking in abstracts' than the reverse? You're abstracting the injustice from the material reality than produces it.
Sorry for going on so long and for getting so far away from the thread topic.

xxp Israel is starving North Gaza and killing thousands of Lebanese rn. There is no pressure from the US, and any words have been for show.

The Chotiner piece, already amusingly cited itt as though the author would agree, specifically pointed out that the war in Ukraine has gone on twice as long as and has a fraction of the child casualties, and it’s not as though Russia gives a fuck about proportionality. I’m not sure what withholding food & humanitarian aid suggests about the effects of any pressure. People are starving and collecting their children in shopping bags. The population is not allowed to leave, except to areas where more bombing is taking place.

focusing on moral condemnation without engaging with potential solutions is far closer to 'furrowing one's brow furrow and talking in abstracts' than the reverse? You're abstracting the injustice from the material reality than produces it.

I don't know what you think I'm avoiding and I've tried to answer your questions as best I can

"the only way for Israel to make itself safe is to commit genocide" is the "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it" of 2024.

While the true its worth pointing out that a large number of children have been taken by the Russian authorities and relocated into Russia, where its uncertain what their current fate is. While those may or may not technically count as casualties, they would come under the umbrella of victims still

It's also just not something anyone is doing, ppl discuss potential solutions all the time, you won't find anyone who cares about this topic who hasn't been involved in conversations about this, but obv conversations is all they can be at this point. None of that is what TNC is talking about when he says it's not complex, that's a total misreading.

xposts

gyac deeply OTM in the last couple posts