no way NYT

David Brooks

The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care

a real banner week

brooks is always tailing the most reactionary currents in american liberalism and is a great example of how upper crust liberals will repeatedly indulge the musings of most intellectually lazy and vacuous people in the world because they look the part and went to the same schools as them

it must get so hard to find any kind of right-wing voice to put on t.v. that isn't either completely nuts or completely stupid. or both. with david brooks i think its just "well, at least he's not drooling and he can do that kinder/gentler thing where he pretends to be a big-hearted softie so lets keep him on..." because what else do they have? just the people who escaped the asylum who work for msnbc now.

who are you going to trust, some hysterical blue haired kid who says you're being abusive or a sensible white man in a suit who sounds serious and thoughtful in a way that doesn't require any serious thought to follow and makes you feel like a hero for supporting child abuse?

I'm just assuming what the article is like I'm not reading that shit

did william f buckley have centrist liberal simps back in the 60s? he was harder edged and less cagey about his white supremacy but he must have seemed like such a nice boy next to all the scary radicals back then

people watched him all the time on PBS! his show was really popular. that show ran for fucking ever. ugh.

PBS has to live with giving him a platform for decades.

the McLaughlin Group ran for decades too. lots of choice Pat Buchanan for you on PBS. i watched it sometimes god help me. the libs always looked like weak sisters on that show. they set it up that way.

the McLaughlin group was basically in the horror genre

WRONG

This was great: https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-17-an-implausible-mr-buckley/

I always assumed he was supposed to be kind of a heel but I guess that was wishful thinking. and wouldn't excuse it anyway. and I didn't know about buchanan who held the flame for nazism while it was temporarily uncool among mainsteam conservatives

the sort of automatic respect for and deference towards and constant platforming of any fool with right wing opinions who displays all the right class signifiers is something I associate much more with british media. but the NYT in particular has always had this slightly pompous transatlantic air to it anyway (presumably another class signifier) so it also makes sense that UK-flavoured secular liberal transphobia would be an attractive prospect esp for a paper that is clearly feeling its own senescence and needs to make waves again

I didn't know he was ex-CIA but it's setting off my conspiracy brain - so he purged john birchers and nazis many of whom were involved in some capacity in CIA backed right wing death squads - what does it all mean - probably nothing

except that the moderate right is one of the most enduring and dangerous liberal fantasies which demonstrates some unspoken sympathies and they seem to be becoming more and more spoken as the liberal wing of the establishment is feeling threatened from all sides

is ross douchehat supposed to be nu-david brooks or something. he's just as lousy. at the NYT.

Tbf Douthat is too much of a freak to be Brooks

He goes places Brooks would never go—like the Know Your Enemy podcast

I think Pamela Paul, David Brooks and Bret Stephens are the worst of the pack. Like truly evil

We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing.
― jmm, Thursday, April 18, 2024 10:01 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Is this for real?

Ann -- I’m 34, and I feel like I’ve been on and off nonmonogamous much of my life, even though I didn’t have the word. When I was 17, 18, I said free love. Around 2018, 2019, I swore off monogamy forevermore. I use the word “polyamorous,” though relationship anarchist is probably a more accurate representation.

My husband and I are very, very different, which is our strength. He’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd. In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.

Robert (Ann’s husband) -- We have this motto: Feelings are not facts. That gets us through the hard times.

At the start, I was going through some depression, and when we had sex I had so much stress. There were issues in the bedroom with her, and that happened many times, which caused more stress. She started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.

That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me, changing the way we do things helped. That’s where feelings are not facts really mattered. Because I would ask her questions, and she would be like, No, I don’t feel that way; and I would be like, I know you like being with him more than me; and she would say, I’m not lying to you, it’s different, but it doesn’t make me love you less, you provide so much more to my life than just sex. I totally get it now. That was the first instance of feelings are not facts. They feel like it. But they ain’t facts.

He’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd.

i've seen this sitcom before

We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models.

All of human culture was building toward this sentence.

Scrum is an agile team collaboration framework commonly used in software development and other industries.

Scrum prescribes for teams to break work into goals to be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints. Each sprint is no longer than one month and commonly lasts two weeks. The scrum team assesses progress in time-boxed, stand-up meetings of up to 15 minutes, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: one sprint review to demonstrate the work for stakeholders and solicit feedback, and one internal sprint retrospective. A person in charge of a scrum team is typically called a scrum master.

“They feel like it, but they ain’t facts”: Deep Polyamory In The Zoom Era

“there’s a guy coming over”

“a guy?”

“his name is todd. he’s a, what you might call, a pussy unlocker”

“a what now?”

“that’s apparently what they call it”

*doorbell rings*

W/r/t Buckley, I’m going to recommend that American Prospect piece from Rick Perlstein that Alfred linked above. Dude was personally worse in certain circumstances than even some of the more rightwing people he ostensibly sidelined, but his affect was such that he was welcomed on PBS as respectable conservative for class reasons for decades.

Oh yeah, also I scroll a bit and see that Left beat me to a lot of these points.

So, yeah, wot they said.

perlstein's WFB piece getting passed around on ilx threads more times than the new stud in the polycule

i blame the chubb group. they secretly own pbs and peter thiel and soros and the simpsons. wait i'm getting my threads mixed up. or am i....

man I hope I never learn what agile scrum is in any context

Is this for real?

― Marten Broadcloak, mild-mannered GOP congressman (Raymond Cummings)

yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. the extraordinary claim to me is the idea that a 20 person polycule would last more than a week without imploding into insane drama.

i haven't read the article in question because paywall but this sounds a lot like a tumblr post from january about a supposed "portland polycule" where the blogger just threw in the most ridiculous shit he could think of. i mean having not seen the article in question i'm not gonna say it's _impossible_. there are polycule cults out here. it's one of the main reasons i don't get any action - i don't fuck with polycules, literally or figuratively.

honestly, as far as i can tell the only way a 20-person polycule works is _as_ a cult. otherwise someone brings a friend over to the house who someone else in the polycule hates and there are fights... polycule drama scales approximately logarithmically with the number of members...

i mean this _is_ in the PNW, right? is there anywhere else in america where shit this fucked up could happen?

man I hope I never learn what agile scrum is in any context

― JoeStork

fortunately it's not something i've had to worry about since i had my orchi

it keeps making me think of the human centipede when i see the word *polycule*. which gives me the shivers.

A 20-person Cambridge MA polycule composed of 25- to 45-year-olds sounds like the premise for our millennial Big Chill.

fpsa at 2:38 19 Apr 24

I think Pamela Paul, David Brooks and Bret Stephens are the worst of the pack. Like truly evil

I don't want to defend Brooks exactly, but he seems mostly like a squish who is uncomfortable with divisiveness and ideas outside his milquetoast moderate worldview. Whereas Paul and Stephens are just lazily contemptuous reactionaries. Neither type is great, but I find the latter more irksome.

Jmm, write the script

tbf, brooks is super lazy too

20-person polycules are an entirely different sort of fucked up from the human centipede, if that helps any, scott

I don't want to defend Brooks exactly, but he seems mostly like a squish who is uncomfortable with divisiveness and ideas outside his milquetoast moderate worldview. Whereas Paul and Stephens are just lazily contemptuous reactionaries. Neither type is great, but I find the latter more irksome.

― jaymc

both types want me to not exist, the latter are just more open about it

fair

the McLaughlin Group ran for decades too. lots of choice Pat Buchanan for you on PBS. i watched it sometimes god help me. the libs always looked like weak sisters on that show. they set it up that way.

― scott seward, Friday, April 19, 2024 8:46 AM (four days ago)

I vaguely remember that Buchanan was more "restrained" on PBS than off ... definitely a lot of "I wouldn't go that far, Pat!" wrist-slapping at least... but definitely the "liberal wuss" stereotype was very present on this show. There was a CBS show kinda like it at the time that had the same set up. There actually is a deleted scene featuring Howard Hunt on Buckley's show in White House Plumbers.

Agile scrum, when gymnasts and rugby players have an orgy

I remember Buchanan getting fired up and blaming "the reds, the greens, and the trots" one time on McLaughlin and I almost spit out my coffee. The same noxious views, but skirting self-parody

I haven't read it obvs, but I keep seeing excerpts of the McWhorter column and each one is even dumber than the last

lol These protesters are ruining my John Cage lecture.

that part is discrediting (as a prof) and lol, but he also spends a lot of time elaborating a fantasy about a fictional protest against DEI as if real students are comparable to the imagined protesters that live in his mind, and then there's this:

The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what anyone should be expected to bear up under regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.

McWhorter's a fun case of radical centrism where what actually counts as centrist gets smaller and smaller

omg

But relatively constant are the drumbeats — people will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism.

why can't people protest at home, silently, like Dr. King