Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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.

seems fine tbh

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.

this sentence is a gross example of magical thinking, with Buckley-itis in the bones, but it's not terrible English.

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.

this line was the worst imo

sometimes ta-nehisi lets some overwritten junk slip through in his own work. I am not surprised that he might mistake williamson for a decent stylist if he was truly inured to / willfully ignoring the ideas in it.

The sample above ("scientistic delusion") is highly rhetorical, but for its intended audience it is fairly effective. The degree to which it depends on carefully selected adjectives is partially disguised by the fact that it is ornate enough to absorb most of your attention in deciphering the content. That excerpt is more readable than you'd expect, considering the tortured path it takes, because Williamson shows a very good sense of prose rhythm.

As for his Buckley-itis, both WFB and George Will made million-dollar careers by being the very picture of what a non-intellectual thinks an intellectual ought to write and sound like. Williamson is just emulating their formula for success; he knows which side his bread is buttered on. It's amazing that Galbraith was able to straddle both worlds so successfully.

I read The Affluent Society a few years ago and his novel A Tenured Professor two months ago, and Galbraith could write a simple subject-verb-object sentence with a pungency that would flummox the non-intellectual commentariat.

i think a lot of times artists are looking at what is effective when they glean ideas for their own work, whereas critics are often pushing back against using 'effective' as the only metric (cf critics panning post malone while acknowledging its effectiveness)

I could totally imagine coates making determinations about what works and what does & what strategies people use in an effort to improve his own

there's always the danger of slippage there, of letting message intrude over your appreciation of the medium