Is transparent propaganda not even propaganda?

Amazing but not surprising: no mention at all of the anti-police BLM marches and riots last year. Not even as one contributing factor. https://t.co/mmK7915raZ

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 14, 2021

The puzzling intensity of bile.

It was a beautiful piece. Honest and non-judgmental toward any other choice. Why the intensity of this bile? https://t.co/mB22zDYLoH

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 9, 2021

Let's take a closer look at that bile. Is there bile at all?

I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest "gross, pass" I've ever uttered in my life.

Bile is anger. "Gross, pass" is disgust.  One might perhaps base an entire career on examining the anger/disgust distinction, but I think the key distinction is the direction of the negative emotion. Anger urges you to take aggression at the source of your outrage. Disgust sends you away. You shun. It's the difference between wanting to attack what you hate and wanting to make sure you don't get any of that on you. Marcotte experiences disgust — "gross" — and immediately shuns — "pass." Her measure of the intensity of disgust is the shortness of the space between the emotion and the reaction. She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought. It's a feeling and a decision all at once — "gross, pass."

Having decided not to expose herself to the text of the article, Marcotte is free to enjoy herself: "The funniest part" — funniest part of the headline — "is framing 25 like it's some daringly young age. The average age of first childbirth is 26." Is that really funny? I haven't read the op-ed yet myself. I saw it, did a quick skim, and decided it wasn't bloggable, but I didn't think — like Marcotte — that my rejection of it was bloggable (i.e., tweetable). I'm going to read it in a minute, but I want to say that Marcotte comes off as privileged. I'm guessing that if the average age is 26, that includes a lot of very young women who are not spending their late teens and early 20s acquiring higher education and beginning career, that is, are not the sort of women who are reading NYT op-eds about timing their reproductive life. 

The Marcotte tweet cannot be clicked to get to the op-ed, so let me give you the link: "I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait" by Elizabeth Bruenig. Starting to read it, I see what made me reject it before. It's written at privileged NYT readers who care about the upper-middle class setting of child rearing. The writer finds herself, at age 27, "among a cordial flock of Tory Burch bedecked mothers in their late 30s and early 40s." Sorry, I don't know the brand, but I understand the nudge. "Tory Burch" is telling me these people are upper-middle class. The average age of pregnancy among "Tory Burch bedecked" women is not — I'm quite sure — 26.

When my husband and I compared notes after the [birthday party], he recounted a sly line of questioning spun by a curious partygoer that he thought was aimed at determining how, given our ages, we could afford the ritzy preschool that our daughter attended with theirs. 

Speaking of sly... you've let us know your kid goes to a ritzy preschool. Okay. Well, women who plan their reproduction think about the economics. There's going to need to be some info about how you can have your children young and still give them the benefits of an upper-middle class lifestyle. In Bruenig's case, this preschool was free to those living inside Washington, D.C. 

Bruenig is clearly talking about highly educated women — women who aspire to affluence:

A 2012 Pew survey found that while 62 percent of women with a high school diploma had given birth by the age of 25, only 18 percent of women with master’s degrees or higher had done the same. In fact, a solid 20 percent of master’s degree holders celebrated their first babies at 35 or older. Unsurprisingly, these numbers track with household income. As of 2018, more than half of women living on less than $25,000 per year between the ages of 40 and 45 report having given birth by the age of 25; among women banking $100,000 or more, the share was a touch over 30 percent....

Highly educated professionals living in major urban centers — in other words, people like me, a lily-white full-time writer with a master’s degree living within rail distance of New York City — tend to postpone childbirth until their late 20s and early 30s....

Yes, she called herself "lily-white." She's talking to white women. But you're not supposed to worry that she's afraid of the so-called "replacement" because she's made it clear — in material I've elided — that she loathes right-wingers.

While my husband and I were never in abject poverty, we understood what it meant to be precariously employed and at the start of our careers.... Reasonable concern about having children before establishing oneself could theoretically be remedied with a generous policy approach....

But what of having children — or getting married, for that matter — before establishing oneself?... When I got pregnant, my husband was a fledgling lawyer and I was a greenhorn journalist....

Once you're pregnant and decided to go through with it, all these economic matters will dissolve into a kaleidoscope of love:

When you have a baby, you do turn toward your child — that “relieved and joyful desertion” may eventually affect your friends, but it first affects yourself. What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief.... My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull.

For this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation....

You catch glimpses of yourself in time, when life shines through your inner world like a prism, illuminating all the sundry colors you contain. It isn’t possible to disentangle the light from the color, the discovery of change from the change itself....  But she peered up at me from the shadow of my shoulder, and I could see the umber of my own eyes taking shape in hers. There I am, I thought, there I am.

Ha ha. Too bad Marcotte didn't read through to all that. I'll bet she'd find the "sundry colors" and "umber of my own eyes" even funnier than the notion that 26 is a daringly young age to have your first baby. 

All these women who are thinking so hard about where on the timeline of life to place their unleashing of reproductive power? Don't think, let it happen, behold your miracle, and exult in your liberation from "the claustrophobic confines of my own skull." 

Ironically, that reminds me of Marcotte. As I said above: She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought.

Equity.

Equity = punishing kids for doing well in school. If they’re white or Asian. https://t.co/EAPbs83IRB

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 27, 2021

The masks/condoms analogy might cut the other way.

Public health officials get kind of attached to the power they get in epidemics. They don’t want to lose it.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 23, 2021

"Of course they despise Washington. Notice the graffiti '1619' on the toppled statue...."

Of course they despise Washington. Notice the graffiti “1619” on the toppled statue. And the burnt flags. The NYT must be proud. They taught these people well. https://t.co/4JTPEv2KMd

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 19, 2020

"There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration."

"In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole. The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them.... In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. 'White Silence = Violence' is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae.... If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of 'white fragility.' If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones...."

From "Is There Still Room for Debate?" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"We can say we’re going to cancel her, but she’s going to get money for the rest of her life."

Said J’Neia Stewart, whose “House of Black Podcast,” looks at the "Harry Potter" series in terms of social justice, quoted in "Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator/A slice of fandom divides itself from J.K. Rowling" (NYT). Also:

“J.K. Rowling gave us Harry Potter; she gave us this world,” said Renae McBrian, a young adult author who volunteers for the fan site MuggleNet. “But we created the fandom, and we created the magic and community in that fandom. That is ours to keep.”...

For Talia Franks, who is nonbinary and works with an activist group called the Harry Potter Alliance, Ms. Rowling’s comments were disturbing and demoralizing. But they said that they won’t have a problem continuing to write their fan fiction (where queer characters abound), attend Wizard Rock concerts and participate in the online Black Girls Create community, where they often discuss “Harry Potter.”

“I don’t need J.K. Rowling at all,” Mx. Franks said.

ADDED:

This is the most absurdly biased piece, which cannot even explore the core issue Rowling was discussing. This is why the NYT is becoming unreadable. Woke dreck like this. https://t.co/2OgGY5sIQV

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 13, 2020

"Rose Byrne’s Gloria Steinem comes off as a vacillating, shallow, vain egomaniac; Tracey Ullman’s Betty Friedan strongly suggests that her feminist anger..."

"... came out of crushed romantic dreams; Bella Abzug is only slightly more appealing — but largely because her pragmatism seems so sane in comparison with the antics of her fellows.... And what the series gets so right about left-wing identitarianism is how riddled it often is with jealousy, personal rivalry, and internal spats... The intersection, if you’ll forgive my using that word, of glamour and elite left-wing politics is pretty damning of both. The feminists completely underestimated Schlafly, because their vain self-regard could not believe that any serious pushback against the ERA could be rooted in real arguments about the difference between the sexes rather than their interchangeability.... Schlafly’s version of feminism is, in fact, less a reactionary one than a truly prescient one. She was the first feminist (though she would reject that label) to depict traditional home and family life as something not to be despised, as long as women had the choice to abandon it.... This is the first time I’ve seen a conservative woman portrayed as human, complicated, vulnerable, and also extraordinarily courageous."

Andrew Sullivan praises the Hulu movie-biography of Phyllis Schlafly (in NY Magazine).

Here's the trailer (with Cate Blanchett in the starring role):

"By Biden’s Own Standards, He Is Guilty As Charged."

Headline at the new Andrew Sullivan column (in NY Magazine). Excerpt:

Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense....

In 2014, the Obama administration issued another guidance for colleges which expanded what “sexual violence” could include, citing “a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient and include remarks about physical appearance; persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient; unwanted touching; and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” By that standard, ignoring the Reade allegation entirely, Joe Biden has been practicing “sexual violence” for decades: constantly touching women without their prior consent, ruffling and smelling their hair, making comments about their attractiveness, coming up from behind to touch their back or neck. You can see him do it on tape, on countless occasions.

Of course, his argument about all of that is that it wasn't sexual. Who thinks that hair smelling and neck nuzzling was a sexual advance on all those little girls (even if it always was on girls and not boys)?

He did not stop in 2014, to abide by the standards he was all too willing to impose on college kids. A vice-president could do these things with impunity; a college sophomore could have his life ruined for an inept remark.

Biden is now claiming simply that he never did what Tara Reade said he did. Let’s posit that he didn’t. Too bad.... By Biden’s own standards, he’s guilty as charged. He never got affirmative consent from Reade, and she feels and believes he assaulted her.

He says the entire incident didn't occur. There was no gym-bag-in-the-corridor encounter at all. Or... was there? Did Mika nail that down or not??

He never got affirmative consent for countless handsy moves over the decades that unsettled some of the recipients of such affection. End of story. By Biden’s own logic, it is irrelevant that he didn’t mean to harm or discomfit anyone, that Reade’s story may have changed over time, that she might have mixed motives, that she has a record of erratic behavior, a bizarre love for Vladimir Putin, and a stated preference for Bernie Sanders, who was Biden’s chief rival. It’s irrelevant that she appeared to tweet that she would wait to launch her accusations against Biden until the timing was right. And her cause has been championed by the Bernie brigade. The many red flags and question marks in her case are largely irrelevant under Biden’s own campus standards....

Bottom line: "I’ll vote for him anyway, because Trump."

"So we have created a scenario which has mercifully slowed the virus’s spread, but, as we are now discovering, at the cost..."

"... of a potentially greater depression than in the 1930s, with no assurance of any progress yet visible. If we keep this up for six months, we could well keep the deaths relatively low and stable, but the economy would all but disintegrate. Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind. All of this is why, [on] some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify.... Damon Linker put it beautifully this week: 'A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.'... We keep postponing herd immunity, if such a thing is even possible with this virus. A massive testing, tracing, and quarantining regime seems beyond the capacity of our federal government in the foreseeable future... [S]ometimes the only way past something is through it."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer" (New York Magazine).

ADDED: Damon Linker may "put it beautifully," but to write  "Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder" is to be on the wrong side of the flounder/founder distinction.

"Flounder" is a fish, and the verb means to struggle, and that takes some "momentum and purpose." To "founder" is to collapse, to fall helplessly to the ground... without momentum.

"These weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility."

"I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. We will all die one day, and we will almost all get sick at some point in our lives; none of this makes sense on its own (especially the dying part). The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "How to Survive a Plague" (New York Magazine).