Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

PM is tying tnc to Obama, who was an elite technocrat that continued neocon policies (that we are still living with now so I don't get "old song", whether you know this stuff or not).

PM clearly likes tnc (highlights that he is a voice that is self-educated, which is very rare to see), thinks his project of self-education is of value (guessing because he has amassed readers and is taking them on a journey) and he wants to see where he goes next.

mark s, the reason I'm not grappling that much with pm's argument is because we've kind of done that a thousand times on this thread already.

There seems to be some tension in Mishra’s piece between wanting to say there’s something uniquely American about its gross projections of power both overseas and over its own disempowered minorities, and wanting to say that it’s sadly a fairly universal human phenomenon, usually limited only by lack of the ability to behave unilaterally.

goldberg has been his editor at the atlantic for several years now: TNC has several times thanked him as a friend and a mentor

so the link is certainly there (and well known), whether or not not PM fills in the details

― mark s, Thursday, February 15, 2018 5:42 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but TNC doesn't write about foreign policy (and the few exceptions where he does write about it he is critical of e.g. obama drone policy in yemen): his writing is historically-grounded analysis on race in america. mishra posits that he is 'americas preeminent public intellectual' and then makes a big deal of him not writing about FP. on twitter max said the piece was about how no one talks about iraq anymore, which is a good thesis, but why shoehorn TNC into it? only makes sense to me in the context of left writers making a sequence of halfassed attempts to slime TNC.

PM clearly likes tnc (highlights that he is a voice that is self-educated, which is very rare to see), thinks his project of self-education is of value (guessing because he has amassed readers and is taking them on a journey) and he wants to see where he goes next.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, February 15, 2018 6:30 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't get this impression at all, i hear a note of derision throughout. the paragraph is an abonimation of bad faith out-of-context misreading:

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

in proper context, those quotes introduce a critical and ultimately disappointed elegy (centred around race) of Obama's presidency with scenes of celebration among black comedians and musicians at the president's farewell party organized by BET

I just read that chapter in We Were Eight Years in Power and it doesn't read obeisant at all. These critics forget that Washington was the capital of the slave power, and this party written about in the last chapter is a flaunting of black elite the likes of which the nation had never seen.

otm

mishra posits that he is 'americas preeminent public intellectual' and then makes a big deal of him not writing about FP.

This is a gap (especially given that so much of the work of the President has an effect on many parts of the world in a way that almost no other country has). Hence Mishra on internationalism and the work of other black intellectuals such as CLR James.

i didn't get this impression at all, i hear a note of derision throughout.

Possibly - but I do think Mishra recognises the power of tnc's writing and that he is able to amass readers in a way that someone like Mishra has cannot.

i'll be honest with you i am sure there are a lot of good points made by people in the burgeoning "criticism of ta-nehisi coates" industry but most of it, from the left or right, parses to my ears as "you shouldn't listen to him! you should listen to me!" coates is a brilliant writer but let's not fool ourselves about the level of public discourse we're dealing with in america today.

It's also almost completely overlapping with the "Well actually, Obama sucked" industry.

who on the right cares about TNC?

"industry"

(outspoken left O critics are a pretty tiny minority AFAICT)

Yes, I am sure that rushomancy was being 172% literal about the phrase "burgeoning industry"

it's almost as if their volume is inversely proportional to the number of people who agree with them

Pankaj Mishra is Indian, and his article was in the London Review of Books. Has nothing to do with public discourse in America, and unsurprisingly, yeah, it was a lot better than usual. North American leftist discourse is an embarrassment, I agree with that fully.

north american leftist discourse == ?? jacobin, CTH, the nation, alternet, democracy now?

+ the baffler

This looks like an interesting essay:

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no4/between-obama-and-coates

Because each of these frameworks divorces racial inequality from political economy, Obama’s post-racialism and Coates’s case for reparations promote a politics that is responsible for the widening gulf between the nation’s haves and have-nots, whatever their race.

Mind. Blown. Nobody has ever written anything like this before, truly truly interesting stuff.

Mind. Blown.

I thought only Christopher Nolan's films blew your mind - a major achievement.

Once you get past the not-great introduction it makes some pretty interesting points. Saving it to finish later

I started that essay but it's like 900,000 words long, and anyway I knew Frederik would dismiss it as pointless in a sentence, so why bother, right?

I don’t know about you but ALL my open tabs get read to the end eventually, dammit

unperson - don't let Fred drag you to his level.

Once you get past the not-great introduction it makes some pretty interesting points.

― El Tomboto, 25. marts 2018 16:21 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Copy-paste or it didn't happen. I'm simply done reading about that point from the introduction, it's been done to death and it's always pushed by people who seems to have never read TNC.

xyzzz, have you read Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Yes Fred I've read a couple of big, juicy pieces. Oh yeah baby.

Criticizing at length the FHA's policies post-WWII also implicitly criticizes capitalism, it seems to me.

Yes Fred I've read a couple of big, juicy pieces. Oh yeah baby.

― xyzzzz__, 25. marts 2018 16:38 (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which ones?

Titles on pieces aren't usually chosen by the writer so I skipped that bit.

Looool

Might I propose creating a separate 'Thread for posting articles saying that Ta-Nehisi Coates needs to focus on class, and then agree on how right that is' I promise I won't disturb the group wank.

Maybe you could post a poll then never post on the thread again Fred

I saw this piece get praise from a couple of people, saw the introduction, noticed the length, and saw no need to reopen this particular case at this time lol

But watching you and Fred act fucking superior when you both actually suck is the spice of life

good morning tombot

No, acting superior when you yourself actually suck is the spice of life. Watching it in other people just makes me envious.

All this discord makes me fret that people are spending too much resource looking to give each other the 'dansk skalle' as we say, rather than respecting Ta-Nehisi's bestowed unadulterated brilliance for the manna it is. But no matter, tally ho, meet you at the milk bar comrades!

poster A: You suck!

poster B: No you suck!

bleeping sag: Hold my beer

snort my coke

I liked Touré Reed’s essay, mainly for the historical bits from the Great Society era and the Obama era I did not know.

Everyone sucks, just as everyone poops. Let’s appreciate each other. (I e been watching Mister Rogers for the last 72 hours)

The Atlantic had a staff meeting to discuss the hiring and firing of Kevin Williamson; Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates ran it, and took questions from staff. The Huffington Post obtained a recording, and published a full (yeah, it's long) transcript that's worth reading.

https://i.imgur.com/5quibIl.png

I still find it baffling that Coates thinks Williamson is/was a good writer, like just on a style level. Like as an *actual* good writer you'd think he could spot overwritten trash.

what conservative writers do you think are good writers?

Edmund Burke.

Coleridge

I mean contemporary ones

obviously there must be many, I just don't really read them unless there is some compelling reason to read a particular essay. I read a couple of k will essays recently and they're written fine

Joan Didion

Didion hasn't evinced conservative leanings at least since Reagan won in 1980

this is the final passage from the most recent piece of kevin d williamson writing i found by googling. it is terrible writing:

The scientistic delusion—the pretense of knowledge, Hayek called it—promises us that there is a way forward, that it is discoverable, and that it may be revealed to us by applying familiar, widely understood principles. The alternative—that minds and markets are beyond management—is for many too terrible to contemplate. The world beyond science is not only religion, it is also art and literature, which have been in notable if predictable decline as our increasingly timid culture defers ever more desperately to white coat-wearing figures of authority, demanding that they provide lab-tested, peer-reviewed, eternal answers to life’s every question.

Science, broadly defined, may inform our politics. It will not liberate us from politics. Nor will it liberate us from making difficult choices. And while the physical sciences have earned their prestige, the scientific consensus of any given moment may prove unreliable. Sometimes, what all the best people know to be true turns out to be a bizarre and embarrassing fantasy cooked up by an Austrian strange-o with a gift for self-promotion.

It pays to be cautious. You know it in your id.