Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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

i've never knowingly read Williamson, and i've seen some of the terribly over-written and hilariously vacuous passages going around on twitter. i assume they're cherry-picked in bad faith and i trust if Coates likes him there's good stuff

i have 2 or 3 grumpy conservative/libertarian economists i like to read. reading them is like arguing with your dad. ymmv

I'm with Kevin. I don't have any problem with the rhythm of the paragraph and I can follow the line of thought without putting a lot of effort into parsing it. "Strange-o" is a strange-o word, though.

He's also describing garden variety pragmatism and I don't see what's objectionable. The idea can be construed as right wing in the context of abortion or climate science or something, but reading only that passage, I'd say he's describing way of thinking that can help liberate us from a technocratic politics, to think morally or humanistically.

much as i despise technocratic liberalism the ethos of "don't trust experts" is the driving force behind Brexit and the election of Trump

I agree with you there. The idea (20th century pragmatism?) requires good faith. It's not an abdication of trying to be reasonable. It's not even an anti-science idea! But that whole spiel against progressivist thinking jibed with me. That's something that says, Don't let your guard down.

tbf to Coates, I don't know how much he really likes Williamson. I only skimmed that long-ass transcript, but he seems to think he's culpable somehow and that his attitude toward Williamson and his own role at The Atlantic both require some reflection.

this is a weird bit

Ok, this exchange is just. . . what!? No wonder Coates left the internet if folks are being as sycophantic as Goldberg. Good question from Vann. pic.twitter.com/I7ZRjGgc4T

— Freebrie (@briebriejoy) May 3, 2018

oh my god, that's not weird for it's sycophancy, it's weird because Goldberg just doesn't get at all what this attention and focus means both for Coates's psyche and for the editorial policies of The Atlantic.

Yeah. All Coates is saying is that right-wing trolls will now point at anything controversial that he writes and cry whatabout. Right?

And that they'll make him a symbol of the entire magazine - "You can't trust The Atlantic; they publish Ta-Nehisi Coates."

williamson a "good writer", but he's the kind of good writer who makes me actively want to be a worse writer.

though given my habit of randomly leaving out crucial words i'm not sure it's at all necessary

I had to look up what happened after I read this : "Ta-Nehisi Coates had a whole conversation with another man about the guy who wanted women to be hanged for abortions while women sat mute."

Technocrat ‘pragmatism’ is only pragmatic to technocrats; ‘to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities’ has always sounded genuinely pragmatic to me.

Coates loves livid language, where you really FEEL the argument being made. He loves words like 'plunder' and rooting racism in the actual physical violence done to people. I could see why he thinks Williamson is a 'kick-ass' writer. They discuss whether it was the word 'hanging' that got him in trouble, because it's so visceral, but I can absolutely see why Coates thinks that kind of conservative writing is better and more honest than the 'civil' conservative arguments, basically arguing the exact same thing but in nicer words. It really seems to be what he's struggling with in that discussion, no?

“I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment.”

"Technocrat ‘pragmatism’ is only pragmatic to technocrats; ‘to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities’ has always sounded genuinely pragmatic to me.

― suzy"

i'd argue that it's _sensible_, in the same way "love thy neighbor as thyself" is sensible. technocrat pragmatism is based on what's possible - they give short shrift to both the long-term implications of their actions and the question of whether or not what they're doing is moral. sounds pretty well in line with kissinger to me!

it is an interesting discussion, though i did reach a tl;dr point fairly early in. the implication i get most from coates is that he belongs to a media founded notionally on the basis of "civil discourse", and he's wondering what the limits are on this. having concluded (and i concur) that the republican party is essentially a party of violent white supremacy, what are the limits and the possibilities of discourse?

for instance, white liberals fall all over themselves to praise "the case for reparations". none of them, that i can see, advocate for reparations themselves. i think that's a fairly significant limit to discourse.

That's really well phrased

I am confused about the reparation thing. I know of white people who voluntarily give money directly to black non-profits, people, patreons specifically for reparations. Or maybe I am misreading the above.

hmmm. is being a white patron of black institutions, regardless of the patron's intent, "reparations"? or is it something else?

You should follow kinfolk kollective on fb or patreon. They put out a specific call for reparations a lot and white people definitely pay directly.

I think the concept embodied in the word "reparations" strongly implies it is an act sanctioned by society and backed by the force of law. I'm all for it. The big questions would still be the most basic ones: how to distribute it correctly and what form should it take? Individual charitable donations to institutions in the black community may be a great thing, but don't qualify as reparations to my mind.

the essential element to me is reparations is that it needs to be restorative, not just on an individual level, but on a societal level. i think how it's done is definitely important as well, because if it's done wrong it has the potential to further entrench systemic inequities.

i do think there are some local trials of the concept going on now, right? i think that's good. i don't want to sound like a technocrat pragmatist but i do think measurable outcomes are kind of essential.

I did misread your first post? I couldn't tell if you were saying white people who advocated for reparations on a systemic, organized level didn't themselves individually want to contribute towards reparations? I see now you were differentiating between praising and outright advocating for it.

And when I talk about reparations, I am discussing cash and land ownership, this seems to be the aim of most advocates.

i think we have to be really careful when talking about land redistribution. i guess we can see what happens in south africa, but it did _not_ work out in zimbabwe.

what i'm wondering is - since americans live in a country that has adopted a plethora of effectively racist policies that lack explicit reference to race, can america adopt anti-racist policies such as "reparation" using the same fig leaf? should we? i think there's a good possible argument to be made.

We already did reparations without specific reference to race. It was called the New Deal.

Except for the parts of the New Deal that specifically excluded African-Americans at the behest of southern democrats.

I think most people who favor reparations know that they would be a much easier political sale to close if they are enclosed in an envelope of broader help-the-poor programs. But the social and economic damage done to African-Americans has been very targeted at them as a group, so 'making them whole' is a well-founded legal concept.

It's somewhat paradoxical that the very fact that the injustices done to them were so prolonged, so widespread and so clearly socially-sanctioned is also what makes it so difficult to address politically now. First, the debt is too enormous to repay properly, and second, structural racism is so embedded in society that it is viewed as simply "how it is", like capitalism or automobile dependence.

I think your first sentence is specifically what DJP is referring to.

Sorry. It always confuses me when people say the exact opposite of what they hope to convey.

Rush, the US government wouldn't have to "redistribute" land. They could buy land and buy or build houses for Black Americans. The US government could help build the wealth of Black Americans and invest in Black communities.

The way a couple posters are using "pragmatism" is driving me crazy. iirc, technocracy is a meritocratic idea that people with technological and scientific expertise should have power and make decisions. In philosophy, pragmatism is an idea that m/l says people make meaning together, that knowledge and truth aren't accessible outside of this activity of people trying to accomplish their goals. It's an anti-technocratic idea and it's not a synonym for some kind of utilitarianism.

(In linguistics, it's the study of what people mean in a social, interpersonal context, and colloquially obviously it means something like "what's practical, functional, and workable.")