Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

Neoliberal has shifted in meaning recently to mean you are a liberal like me, but our views line up at most 99%, therefore you deserve the firing squad.

I’m not saying there are no good critiques of Coates possible, but I honestly don’t think West came for Coates in a fair way. And I suspect the thing that frustrates West about Coates’s work is its reception, to which I say it’s going to take more than a radical black prophet to unsettle comfortable people’s complacency about the order of things. The fact that the literary ruling class likes to anoint a single black male writer is not Coates’s fault, nor is late capitalism.

Horseshoe in my absence from ILX I missed ur posts ur great

Tbf though I respect Cornel West’s intelligence and believe his politics to be sincere, his persona as a public intellectual is offputtingly slick to me and Coates’s is easier to take. I may be biased in my reading of his critique as a result.

<3 hoos how u been man???

I felt like it was unfair when Coates tweeted that Richard Spencer “agreed” with West. He knows it’s logically impossible for them to actually agree and Spencer was just trolling.

But also i agree with you horseshoe, broadly, that West wasn’t being totally fair either and was blaming Coates for things beyond his control.

Maybe, but he was hurt. West knew his dad, I think!

Neoliberalism is when traditional conservatives embraced the free market: i.e. Thatcher, Reagan and so on. The idea that it means 'modern liberals' (liberals in the American sense) is a sign of how fractured political discourse has become. I still think it's mostly a definition of the internet, rather than concrete politics. People reasoned from the name to the definition, and assumed it meant centrist.

But the mainstream Democratic Party has supported neoliberal policies for decades now. It isn’t totally off the mark.

I guess so. But there is still a difference between Thatcherism and this attempt to rebrand Neoliberalism as third-way Blairism (to use British examples).

West seems off his rocket three days, my 1cents

Nice

(I felt uncomfortable about the fact folks were using US party names and I was responding with UK names. I wasn't doubting folks knowledge, just being anxious)

Well the rise of Neo-Liberalism roughly coincides with the death (by merger) of the UK’s Liberal Party, which was just slightly younger than the United States. They did a lot of good, but the line still sticks that they were devoted to everywhere upholding the lot of the working class, as long as they never had to meet any.

In the 1980s I felt reasonably confident that neoliberalism referred to the embrace of extreme laissez-faire economics (a la Milton Friedman) by the likes of Pinochet and to a slightly lesser extent Thatcher and Reagan, as well as by international institutions that imposed such norms in the form of austerity measures. As West’s latest sally demonstrates, the term has taken a boozy, meandering stroll through the woods since then.

This piece is otm:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/12/on_cornel_west_s_reckless_disappointing_broadside_against_ta_nehisi_coates.html

Yep.

Thirded

The lesson of the West/Coates affair is, black people can’t even have a bad conversation without someone speaking on our behalf or treating us as totems in which one finds the expression of this or that political belief; the latter is distinct from reading their works politically

— Dominick (@FanonsDream) December 21, 2017

OK tbf famous people of any color, gender, stripe or religion can’t have any public conversation without being treated as totems or mouthpieces for other people’s beliefs, but it has to be gratingly paternalistic when white guys intervene in shit like this to tell it how it is, and I too am guilty as charged

Also Simon H., on that note, is your posting that tweet a sort of weary self-clown?

absolutely

what idiot called it a debate between cornel west and ta-nehisi coates and not the East Coast West-Coates Feud

— big kesha fan (@lynyrdsremmurd) December 22, 2017

Jesus Christ

“How can I make a nigger joke about this without using the word ‘nigger’? WAIT I’VE GOT IT”

http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-coates-and-west-jackson

robin kelley on coates, the west incident, and why both perspectives have value and are needed. by far the best, most considered essay to come out of this dustup I’ve read

it's good

ultimately Coates quit Twitter because of this so his life will be a lot better for this beef if for no other reason

The Kelley piece is fantastic.

Great perspective but i think his analysis of Obama and liberalism is-not sure if “overly-reductive” is the phrase i’m looking for?

A Twitter thread worth reading (I haven't checked out the YouTube clips yet).

Coates issa trip. So someone tweets Black women's critiques of you and you respond w/ "I did not come for this"? Begs the question of what tf DID you come here for then if THIS is the thing you run away from? 🤔🤔🤔https://t.co/BtT1AGdCov pic.twitter.com/N6LX7ohjil

— William Jamal Richardson (@DecolonialBlack) January 18, 2018

That's a horrible thread.

Anyone else who has read the book? I'm on year seven, and it's predictably amazing. West def didn't read it, btw, that should be quite clear.

It’s not horrible but Twitter certainly is

that tweet is an infuriatingly ungenerous take on what TNC actually said. it seems clear that "i did not come for this" means that he doesn't want to spend his time feuding w/ cornel west, not that he doesn't want to be criticized at all. it also seems clear that west's out-of-nowhere attack on him made TNC something of a target for leftists on twitter and it's understandable that he didn't want to waste his afternoons arguing w/ every single person informing him that he's just a shill for the neoliberal establishment, blah blah blah.

also twitter is a cesspool and the only writers who seem to thrive on it are idiots.

ya i read the TNC quote that way, too

otm, if you watch the YT clip there is really no other way to interpret what Coates says, so kudos to twitter guy for illustrating exactly why a public figure would want nothing to do with twitter

I just started listening to the WTF interview with TNC and... in the intro Maron refers to him as the "young buck."

uh

Lock the gates

I just started listening to the WTF interview with TNC and... in the intro Maron refers to him as the "young buck."

― President Keyes, Monday, January 22, 2018 7:38 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maron!

https://a1cf74336522e87f135f-2f21ace9a6cf0052456644b80fa06d4f.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/images/characters/p-the-sopranos-steven-van-zandt.jpg

"young buck" is unfortunate, but it does have a non-racist affiliation that refers to the social behavior of deer.

Is maron Irish at all, perfectly normal term here

I'm assuming he's not

Let's be outraged regardless tho

excited to find out if Lou Reed was one of TNC's "guys"

pankaj mishra on tnc in the lrb

I liked this review of same: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_05/action=send/19134

‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives.

Ffs just stop this bullshit. Over and over and over and over. I like Pankaj Mishra, but he is playing an old song.

yes, we know you are inured to the bloody Chief Executioners' deeds

quotidian murder, soooo boring, you shitbag

The irony is that Mishra several times in that piece accuses Coates of writing stuff that is only true because they are banal. But with foreign policy, 'hey, don't kill other people' is all of a sudden the deepest insight of all.

if it was good enough for Moses...

Moses killed his own nephews because they were sacrificing the wrong kind of incense...