david brooks vs. thomas friedman vs. ross douthat

sadly just a stupid fallon "satire"

david thomas vs. brooks friedman

I follow Ross on twitter now, and it's fun. He's eminently clownable but less hateable than the other two.

FRIEDMAN: Mr. President-elect, I came …

TRUMP: So right now I’m in very good shape, but

FRIEDMAN: I came here thinking you’d be awed and overwhelmed by this job, but I feel like you are getting very comfortable with it.

TRUMP: I feel comfortable. I feel comfortable. I am awed by the job, as anybody would be, but I honestly, Tom, I feel so comfortable and you know it would be, to me, a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two years and say — and have a lot of the folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ And I don’t mean just a conservative job, ’cause I’m not talking conservative. I mean just, we’ve done a good job.

ball 1

Oh boy, lookee who wrote up a reading list:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/opinion/books-for-the-trump-era.html

everybody should definitely give that publication some money
like Planned Parenthood

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8QzeViWAAASff4.jpg

https://media.giphy.com/media/HgOYozLhuONUY/giphy.gif

thats it the worst possible tweet, shut it down

lol

he also tweeted this at elizabeth bruin, referencing pence dinnergate

https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/847507297651707905

"Care to discuss them over dinner?"

Ross is thirsty.

i thought maybe ross would call for watergatesque sabotage of trump

welllllll

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/a1/7f/9fa17fce0ef1e6911470562b9df4cec7.jpg

Kind of enjoying Douthat now that he's apparently realized that his political views have no relevance to our current reality but he can get paid to write whatever he likes.

elaborate fantasies about corporate dystopias

weird seeing a conservative in the current american milieu advocating for the singaporean health care system (which is universal healthcare)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/opinion/sunday/make-america-singapore.html?_r=0

(even if it's a weird universal healthcare with large elements where the individual has to pay)

Okay what the fuck has Douthat done this week

signal boosted incel worldview garbage and took it at face value

I didn't think most of his analysis was that terrible but it was in service of a terrible end.

FWIW I think there isn't enough contemporary left analysis of how the capitalist/consumerist paradigm shapes our ideas about sex.

sex is theft

plausible

i found that piece just unconscionable. his - completely nonsensical - combination of social conservatism and libertarianism sees him equate redistributive economic policy with the idea of forcing people to have sex with incels - if you can distribute resources why can't you distribute sex, a thing completely different from a resource which results from the consensual physical congress of individuals? asks the millionaire columnist in the paper of record.

simultaneously he blames the sexual revolution for the existence of incels, as if the "halcyon days" when every man's wife was a maid he was allowed to rape and beat were preferable to the modern day sexual politics, and as if bitter sexless men didn't exist back then.

harkens back to the argument of houllebecq's protagonist in "Extension du domaine de la latte":

"The thesis is that the sexual revolution of the Sixties created not communism but capitalism in the sexual market, that the unattractive underclass is exiled while the privileged initiates are drained by corruption, sloth, and excess."

Extension du domaine de la latte

damn you autocorrect

him and brooks seem to take turns trying out dumbass each other on a biweekly basis

He's still trying to explain today

I think one mistake was assuming readers would recall that I want *ban porn* in assessing whether I really favor sex robots.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 4, 2018

(Of course, giving the phrasing, it sounds like he wants some subset of porn called 'ban porn,' the hottest porn of all.)

lmao

suggest ban porn

oh yea baby!

that would be some fetish

i found that piece just unconscionable. his - completely nonsensical - combination of social conservatism and libertarianism sees him equate redistributive economic policy with the idea of forcing people to have sex with incels - if you can distribute resources why can't you distribute sex, a thing completely different from a resource which results from the consensual physical congress of individuals? asks the millionaire columnist in the paper of record.

I don't think he takes this line of thinking seriously, I think he saw it as a reductio argument, like "Ok, if you accept these ideas about sex, then guess what the logical conclusion is"

simultaneously he blames the sexual revolution for the existence of incels, as if the "halcyon days" when every man's wife was a maid he was allowed to rape and beat were preferable to the modern day sexual politics, and as if bitter sexless men didn't exist back then.

But yeah this seems right.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DcPbyczV0AERINN.jpg

Remember the single stupidest statement from pro-Trump commentators after the election? It was: “The media took Trump literally but not seriously. But his supporters took him seriously but not literally.”

Actually, some of us took him seriously and literally — our only mistake was not taking him literally enough. I assumed that a candidate who lied so casually and so often in the campaign would also do so as president; I just didn’t think he would literally utter 3,001 false or misleading claims in his first 466 days in office. I feared Trump would indeed, as he vowed, tear up the Iran nuclear deal, withdraw from the Paris climate accord and start a trade war with China; I just didn’t think he’d literally do them all at once with so little expert input.

I figured Trump would try to destroy Obamacare; I just didn’t think he’d literally do it without having a better alternative — any alternative — in place. I figured Trump would seek to tighten the border with Mexico; I just didn’t believe that he’d literally ask Congress for $18 billion to extend the border wall. I knew we needed to “drain the swamp” of Washington; I just didn’t think the drain would literally have to start in Trump’s White House and the offices of his cabinet secretaries.

lol friedman

also, what is with his twitter / nyt profile pics?

https://i.imgur.com/ORGqSkZ.jpg

did someone digitally add his nyt suit?

lmao looks like it that is very odd

Karl, can you overlay them?

I was really trying to figure out when you tweeted that whether it's a weird modified pic, or if he really makes the exact same pose for every photo

its def the same photo look at the hair, moustache

what if he just keeps one of those photos by his mirror and shaves and combs his hair exactly the same every day

(lol they're totally the same pic)

so someone modified the NYT one to have a suit, and he also had his personal one modified to darken his hair? wild

Why We Miss the WASPs
Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

. . . I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/57407228/what-do-you-mean-we-white-man.jpg

i posted this extremely good and very persuasive piece on the George H.W. Bush - Classic or Dud thread earlier fyi

loved this piece, Pulitzer worthy imo

jfc lol https://splinternews.com/bret-stephens-tried-to-teach-me-how-the-world-works-bec-1832996576

Man, Stephens’ column on Rep. Omar today is fucking disgusting, even for him, any reputable editor would fire him for this shit.

i read it - it's nothing special but it's not "fucking disgusting"

One problem with the quoted remarks is that THIS IS AN INTENTIONAL MISQUOTE OF THE ACTUAL QUOTE THE WHOLE FAKE CONTROVERSY IS BUILT ON pic.twitter.com/Kdc5RGWQEN

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) April 18, 2019

omar said "some people did something" how is this an "intentional misquote" as opposed to a rhetorically synonymous rephrasing

"some people did something"
"something some people did"

tom scocca: THIS IS AN INTENTIONAL MISQUOTE OF THE ACTUAL QUOTE etc

what a doofus

nyt opinion shd be shut down, the white supremacist but with glasses schtick has run its course

in some sense it is nothing special business as usual but on the other hand it is disgusting