Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

On Bacevich and Bill Withers:

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/ok_now_im_totally_reaching.php

I mean if you go on his blog right now and just keep reading you don't really run into anything that sucks. I fuckin' love this guy.

otm great dude & ive noticed that he tends to really know what hes talking about when hes posting assertive and be pretty modest when he's on uncertain terrain vs. cocky overconfidence of say a andrew sullivan

yeah he's definitely not from britain

His great article about playing WoW at 30.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1577502,00.html

Adding to all that, and a lot of his commenters are sharp folks as well (and yeah I've commented there but I wasn't meaning me, dammit).

dig this guy

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/barack_obama_crush_puny_malik_shabazz.php

If you are writing columns on the president-elect of the greatest power in world history, who happens to be black and you can't even bother to crack his memoir, than you are more than Leeroy Jenkins. You do not simply fail in epic manner, but more like Palin, Couric and "all of them," like M.C. Hammer hounded by creditors. You are Plaxico at the bar, shooting yourself with your own gun. And in so doing, you ascend to the 37th chamber--the chamber of intergalactic fail. All bow before the master.

complete and absolute five-point stuck-landing DORK KLANG on all levels

I think tom has a cruuuuush

Btw coates is great--he used to do a lot of stuff for the voice and I remember keeping an eye out for his name

ive seen an older article chronicling crouch-related lols by him as well.

major loss of points for making me read mcardle today, jesus christ how in the world does she still rate a job writing about anything

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Leeroy_Jenkins_Jeopardy_clue.jpg

yeah i love this dude even if he is a cowboys fan.

http://i.imgur.com/OVBos.png

lol dude get over yrself

Needs more context, I presume.

lol you

Enh, dude's just giving himself a spacer before dumping on the dead.

well if you read him, and i am a fan, he just will not stop w/these calls for thoughtfulness which is really something thats better demonstrated than talked about

i mean if you want to take some time to think abt something theres absolutely no need to tweet abt it, except that maybe you think youre making some sort of statement

He's calling for circumspection which is fine, especially in light of the character of the defunct

I mean, it's not like he's _not_ going to unload on the stiff at some point.

Presumably.

if you want to call for circumspection that one thing, a fairly substance free presumptuous thing, but what he was doing is passing off his judgment of the situation as some sort of personal journey, im just gonna go think man, here is me tweeting abt thinking deeply

I read this guy and sometimes he has good things to say, but ice cr?m otm

i love ta-nehisi coates, but twitter is not for everyone

tbf he takes this stance constantly on his blog

which i think is v good except for this thing that is irritating and lame

but i guess isn't the thing that TNC has a bunch of followers who are expecting him to be posting about Breitbart, so he's kind of saying 'yes i know about this but i need to think it through before i write AS SHOULD YOU btw', like, there's an element of i-am-on-top-of-this-news but also i-am-representing-well-reasoned-thought

I think he's whistling at his readers that he knows Brietbart's dead and the reason he hasn't written anything about it yet is 'cause he hasn't gotten the smile off of his face yet.

i am representing well reasoned thought w/o actually demonstrating it is the problem

How much was the retainer?

i mean i know he didnt actually choose the cover image or the tagline but lol dude

http://i.imgur.com/M4Qwi.jpg

but i guess isn't the thing that TNC has a bunch of followers who are expecting him to be posting about Breitbart,

A strange expectation: yet one more liberal writing yet another scabrous obit?

Even granting that it is a pose he likes to strike, most writers in his position, needing to churn out copy at a fantastic rate to appease his readers, fall into characteristic tropes and poses. It is part of being a pundit. Not such a big lol in the scheme of things, but, yeah, it shows a tendency to furrow his brow a bit too obviously.

He is pretty cool. I can cut him some slack for a clunky thing here and there. He hasn't gone full Greenwald just yet.

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

naw he is v capable of greater self awareness and is much better in that mode

TNC will end up writing about the lack of ethics in modern poltical propaganda or epistemic closure or how the interwebs have empowered pit-bull journalism or something, but I doubt he will linger much over Brietbart himself all that much.

oh man, maybe it's TNC that is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

― horseshoe, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually forgive me for not thinking abt this deeper, i do think whats good abt his writing is maybe p closely related to his ponderousness, he does a thing thats p endearing where you can feel him thinking, he s lets you in, which is not easy, but he tends to go off the rails w/it which is maybe not surprising considering what a delicate operation it is

also id like to say that his blog is ime much better than his long form writing but why

eh his problem isn't that he's too sincere, paul krugman is sincere too, his problem is that he spends too much time thinking outloud and being nice

(xp)

he spends too much time thinking outloud

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:30 PM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is his problem, yes. twitter is bad for him, i really think, although now i sound like a crazy person who thinks ta-nehisi coates is her friend. which lol is how i actually think of him tbh. i'm fine with him being nice.

i don't really disagree with anything jho has said, though. i originally typed "ponderousness" instead of "self-seriousness." dude has a lot to say.

i'm making sure i'm putting that waxpapery ring thing on the seat before i take shit in this toilet. #breitbartpocalypse #thoughtfulguy

and he says it slowly. i always am jealous of people who can write like that; i do the opposite.

I am glad I only sporadically read his stuff as I've never come across anything exhibiting the problems/issues you guys are describing (which I half suspect are a pattern that emerges via exposure).

'i think' the thinking out loud part is just the clumsy failed aspect of what he does well when he does it well which then leads to people thinking hes their friend which is a p good trick

to be clear i really like him which is whats lead me to develop this critique of him

instead of tweeting ta-nehisi should just call me up and vent. we are on a first name basis like that.

So the ILX consensus is that it's pure coincidence that the New Yorker, a magazine with a much stronger and more cohesive institutional voice than, say, Pitchfork, has run two negative pieces about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his new book in the space of 10 days? That the website and the magazine are two totally different things, that there's no way David Remnick knew this was happening, and one should definitely not take away any impression of a larger message being sent? I gotta admit, as someone who's worked in journalism since the 1990s and been the managing editor or EIC of three different magazines, that sounds... totally right to me, yep, absolutely how things work.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 7:09 AM (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, what does aaron rupar think?

is ta-nehisi coates like your favorite celebrity or something

also there's this (being discussed on a thread US ilxors have every good reason to have overlooked):
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/rationalizing-the-horrors-of-israels-war-in-gaza

it doesn't impinge on coates directly but it surely says something about the message the NYer is currently choosing to send

― mark s

The questions are at least in part generated by his responses, digging in deeper and deeper.

Right, that's a man absolutely pushed to the breaking point on his rationalizations.

"It's so messy, how can anyone know what is the right or the wrong thing for the brave strong soldiers to do in a war like this" --> Surely some things, like stomping a turtle that's lying helplessly on its back, are just plain wrong --> "I agree absolutely, it's abhorrent, and if they were doing turtle stomping, I would find that unforgivable and I would not be able to support the war" --> *Interviewer opens thick accordion folder labeled TURTLE STOMPS (I: OCT.-DEC. 2023) and begins to read* --> "Well naturally, any war sounds awful if you exclusively focus on the turtle stompings" --> Okay but vastly more turtles are being stomped in this particular war --> "I just feel like... they probably have a good reason for doing it???"

gotta be some whiplash when you realise your team, your guys, are on the wrong side of a genocide. not that he seems to have quite realised that yet

Many such cases

finally watched that interview and i’m dumbfounded that the results of CBS’ review concluded that the problem was with the TONE. i hadn’t seen the interview yet when i read that, so came in expecting a kind of bullying, hectoring vibe, and actually the guy was very calm, even collegial. it’s what he SAID that was so shocking! saying that tnc’s writing was indistinguishable from “an extremist”, claiming (potentially libellously) that tnc says israel doesn’t have a “right to exist” - just all this horseshit that he brought to the table - but the tone was actually quite civilised imo

Liberals are like dogs, they only care about tone not content

xp

claiming (potentially libellously) that tnc says israel doesn’t have a “right to exist”

is this a misrepresentation of Coates' position? I haven't read the book, but I thought Coates argued that Israel as a Jewish state is fundamentally a colonial, racist project, that it shouldn't and should never have existed?

No, he said that no nation has a ‘right to exist’.

thought Coates argued that Israel as a Jewish state is fundamentally a colonial, racist project, that it shouldn't and should never have existed?

i mean he’s right either way, but

maybe I'm confusing the embrace of Coates and his book by avowed 'anti-zionists' for Coates being an anti-zionist himself? But that was impression I got from most of what I'd heard from him on this subject

Wouldn’t be the first time you were wrong about something

Choosing to focus on this inane argument “wah wah TNC says Israel has no right to exist!!!!” over the actual substance of his argument “The things Israel does in/to Palestine are bad” tells me a lot about where your priorities are.

In the book, his point is that a) Israel has become a victim-oppressor state and b) if you did into the reporting, speeches, and interviews circa the founding of the country and beyond, the language of genocide was flowing freely from its leaders.

Of course, this book is not entirely about Israel (it’s also about book bans in America and the impact of the author’s first trip to Africa and also, on a low key level, about the weirdness of celebrity), though it was inevitable that that was all it would appear to be about for pretty obvious reasons.

If you can, please read the book!

(Or, maybe I should say, “the language of fascism”.)

xps I was just surprised that Tracer Hand would say it was shocking or potentially libellous to suggest that TNC didn't think Israel had a right to exist, given the impression I had of his take on this issue? And I don't think you can separate “The things Israel does in/to Palestine are bad” and "does Israel have a right to exist" and call the former substantial and the latter trivial because once you accept the former you immediately get into questions about how the conflict should be resolved which bring the second question into play.

This is why I'm sceptical of this argument Coates makes that all attempts to paint Israel/Palestine as complex are mystification and cowardice, and it's actually all very simple - of course it's simple to say “The things Israel does in/to Palestine are bad” but saying that is worthless without some kind of proposed solution, and all the potential solutions *are* complex

given the impression I had of his take on this issue?

because once you accept the former you immediately get into questions about how the conflict should be resolved which bring the second question into play.

This is why I'm sceptical of this argument Coates makes that all attempts to paint Israel/Palestine as complex are mystification and cowardice, and it's actually all very simple - of course it's simple to say “The things Israel does in/to Palestine are bad” but saying that is worthless without some kind of proposed solution, and all the potential solutions *are* complex

I think this is using "simple" and "complex" in a totally different manner - slavery in the US was also complex by the metric you're using, desegregation in South Africa, the decolonization of any country you'd care to name, etc. none of these had or have non-complex solutions. But the moral imperative is simple, and when ppl talk about Israel/Palestine as "complex" in the way Coates describes the subtext is "you don't get this, you probably never will, please shut up".

I hate to keep bringing up Naomi Klein's appearance on Bad Hasbara, but she made a very succinct statement about the two afterlives of the Second World War and the Holocaust. One is the foundation of international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Genocide Convention, etc.; and the other is Israeli ethnonationalism. These two have always been in tension, but never more nakedly so than they are today.

none of these had or have non-complex solutions. But the moral imperative is simple

isn't there something pointless and ineffectual about insisting of the simplicity of the moral situation when it's not connected to any solution? Like 'thoughts and prayers' after a mass shooting? Plenty of the most hawkish Israel defenders will readily agree that the suffering of the Palestinians is a tragedy and an injustice - e.g. Howard Jacobson agrees this in that recent interview - getting people to agree on that, and that 'something must be done' isn't the problem, the nature of that 'something' is the contentious bit

"Like 'thoughts and prayers' after a mass shooting?"

Funny example because the solution to mass shootings is agreed to be highly simple.

isn't there something pointless and ineffectual about insisting of the simplicity of the moral situation when it's not connected to any solution?

It is connected to solutions, it's just that NTC never suggested those solutions are simple so you're arguing with nothing imo.

Still waiting on what soref thinks is so intrinsically necessary about mass civilian casualties.

tbf gyac I think what Coates describes as simple is not the massacre of the past year but the system predating it and its paralells to apartheid and jim crow. a lot of israeli hawks do view that as instrinsically necessary, which is why I think it's a mistake to assume everyone agrees "something must be done".

Then soref shouldn’t posit his views as separate from or critical of Israeli hawks. Why cede the argument to the most awful voices in the room because you don’t want to argue with them?

This is why I'm sceptical of this argument Coates makes that all attempts to paint Israel/Palestine as complex are mystification and cowardice, and it's actually all very simple - of course it's simple to say “The things Israel does in/to Palestine are bad” but saying that is worthless without some kind of proposed solution, and all the potential solutions *are* complex

A lot of the time we might say that solutions are complex but after a year of bombs we've only had a very short ceasefire agreement and prisoner/hostage exchange.

We can't even see how complex or otherwise the solutions would be because we can't even arrive at a place where they can be talked out. This is ofc deliberate.

“isn't there something pointless and ineffectual about insisting of the simplicity of the moral situation when it's not connected to any solution?”

can I just say that this is one my least favorite things (white) people do when they learn about some injustice? this insistence that a problem should never be called out, that people shouldn’t protest an issue unless they already have a specific solution ready to go? I started noticing it a lot during the NFL kneeling protests wrt BLM and I don’t think it’s good.

Indeed.

Saying 'no. This is not right' is the first step. Protestors may disagree on solutions but every march I've been to starts from the same, very basic, place.

American did not come up with a "solution" to its racism problems, but it did at least end legalized segregation. There are injustices Israel could just stop doing without waiting for a solution to all problems.

2x brimstead, that tendency has always struck me as a way to stifle discussion

Far more sophisticated to furrow one’s brow and talk in abstracts while civilians are dying violently, from starvation and in numbers.

The down the line solutions might be complex, and might be disagreed on, but the immedite solution seems pretty concise and with high levels of consensus. Stop bombing.

i thought the conversation with ezra klein was excellent

yeah, bringing this back to earth a bit…

agreed the klein interview was good. ezra does push him a bit on some of the things mentioned in that sehgal review

overall the conversation is very cordial and measured—they clearly both have a lot of respect for each other—but the tense moments, where they criticize each other directly and ask pointed questions, are pretty bracing

A lot of the time we might say that solutions are complex but after a year of bombs we've only had a very short ceasefire agreement and prisoner/hostage exchange.

I wouldn't say we've only had that, we've also had a steady decrease in the level of intensity of the bombings and the killing, which I imagine (though I honestly can't really prove this) is in part due to US pressure. Half the deaths in Gaza came in the first two months of the war.

Not sure that’s true - the mechanism for counting casualties is beyond messed-up to the point where there may be tens of thousands of casualties more than that. They stopped being able to count after 40K deaths.

xps Still waiting on what soref thinks is so intrinsically necessary about mass civilian casualties.

― gyac, Wednesday, 16 October 2024 14:20 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

stop the bombing sure, but like Daniel Rf said a lot of what Coates is taking about is the situation predating the Gaza war, and his visit that the book is based on took place before 0ctober 7 23. In terms of the solution to *that*, I guess some kind of two-state solution, an Israeli state and a viable Palestinian state living peacefully side by seems to me like the most plausible semi-just solution that has any chance of actually happening, but I don't know enough about to convincingly lay out that argument and would straggle to argue my case against anyone who disagreed, either from a pro-Israeli pov that any moves towards a two-state solution would risk their security, and that there's no 'partner for peace' on the other side, or from a pro-Palestinian pov that talking about a two-state solution when there's no support for that in mainstream Israeli politics and little chance of it happening in the near future is basically just evasiveness and a tacit support for the status quo. That last argument is convincing to me, but then a secular one state solution seems even more unlikely and impractical than a two state solution, so I guess that's where I end up

Far more sophisticated to furrow one’s brow and talk in abstracts while civilians are dying violently, from starvation and in numbers.

ok, this might read as to some of you as 'insisting a problem shouldn't be called out without having a solution ready to go' but - I think focusing on moral condemnation without engaging with potential solutions is far closer to 'furrowing one's brow furrow and talking in abstracts' than the reverse? You're abstracting the injustice from the material reality than produces it.
Sorry for going on so long and for getting so far away from the thread topic.

xxp Israel is starving North Gaza and killing thousands of Lebanese rn. There is no pressure from the US, and any words have been for show.

The Chotiner piece, already amusingly cited itt as though the author would agree, specifically pointed out that the war in Ukraine has gone on twice as long as and has a fraction of the child casualties, and it’s not as though Russia gives a fuck about proportionality. I’m not sure what withholding food & humanitarian aid suggests about the effects of any pressure. People are starving and collecting their children in shopping bags. The population is not allowed to leave, except to areas where more bombing is taking place.

focusing on moral condemnation without engaging with potential solutions is far closer to 'furrowing one's brow furrow and talking in abstracts' than the reverse? You're abstracting the injustice from the material reality than produces it.

I don't know what you think I'm avoiding and I've tried to answer your questions as best I can

"the only way for Israel to make itself safe is to commit genocide" is the "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it" of 2024.

While the true its worth pointing out that a large number of children have been taken by the Russian authorities and relocated into Russia, where its uncertain what their current fate is. While those may or may not technically count as casualties, they would come under the umbrella of victims still

It's also just not something anyone is doing, ppl discuss potential solutions all the time, you won't find anyone who cares about this topic who hasn't been involved in conversations about this, but obv conversations is all they can be at this point. None of that is what TNC is talking about when he says it's not complex, that's a total misreading.

xposts

gyac deeply OTM in the last couple posts