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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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“Everybody wants politics to be this really inspiring thing,” Shor said as the sun set on Suffolk Street. “But politics in the real world is an endless series of terrible, emotionally unsatisfying tradeoffs.”

“And if you pretend it’s not,” he said, “then you are going to make bad choices, and when you make bad choices, children go hungry. I don’t want to be extreme, but I think all of us who work in politics, we’re all so privileged to do this, to have people pay us to do stuff we care about, and they are doing it because they hope we help the outcomes. Those hungry kids are counting on us to make the right fucking choices, and so we shouldn’t get drunk on self-expression.”

He took a swig of his cocktail.

It is our fate to live in an age where this is how journalists write, if you give them half a chance.

Harlequin5942 said, taking a puff from his 1962 Cuban cigar.

How the fuck did thinkers and writers this awful wind up the professional caste of writers?

Reminds me of the popes who owned brothels... institutions actively selecting for the worst possible candidate.

I hope some crazed video essayist literally devours him... not figuratively. Literally. Let one instant in his life be poetic

Oh, they all write like that since the New Journalism, because it's human interest donchaknow, it makes it bright and newsy and relatable and gives people a hook to emotionally attach to the story.

Ordinarily this annoys me, because I want "just the facts, ma'am" and I don't care if blonde 42 year old Doris was sipping her morning coffee as she looked out her kitchen window and saw the car crash, I want to know "there was a car crash? where?"

But in this case it doesn't matter, since it's not reporting as such, it's a colour piece about a bunch of insufferable youngish leftyish Democrats chewing one another's faces off over who gets to steer the party, vaguely realising that if they want to win seats they need to have policies that appeal to normal people, and tripping over themselves not to use the word "populist" since they have succeeded in making that a dirty word, but also realising that damn it, they need to be populist.

So the pretentious twats in both camps being described as sipping their cocktails as they have their 'happy hour' parties and watch and rewatch videos of old election debates are perfectly suited for this style. In this case, I do want to know if they look like 'inflated eight year olds' (oooh, that one was sharp) and what kind of nonsense they indulge in, thinking this makes them cool and mysterious when it just makes them look like prats to the adults in the room.

I mean, a guy who can say with a straight face that "hungry kids are counting on us" should be mocked soundly, roundly and often by having someone write in excruciating detail what his sad little drinking group are like as they fool themselves that they matter, they're relevant, hey AOC swung by one of our dos a couple years back!

The photos, oh my God the photos. They look exactly as you imagine they'd look.

Friends and former colleagues say they persuaded him to cultivate the air of a young prodigy, that if he appeared at meetings with stuffy political types wearing a black T-shirt and didn’t say much, that it helped create a mysterious aura around him and gave their ideas more heft.

Imagine being a Democratic party operative who has worked in politics for donkey's years, and this twenty year old infant strolls in wearing a black T-shirt and saying nothing because he wants to look cool. Do you, grown-up politics person, think "Wow I should let myself be said and led by this wunderkind" or do you go "Holy crap, is this what the party has come to? Okay, we'll let the nerds do the number-crunching in the back while we do the real work of the campaign"?

Imagine being so clueless you take the advice of people around you to wear black and say nothing, you'll be cool and mysterious, you'll have that rock-star vibe (meanwhile, to anyone over the age of thirty, it's abundantly clear you only started shaving two years ago).

The black t-shirt, eh whatever, but you've got to admit that "say nothing" is powerfully good advice in context. "Mouth shut, ears open" is something every novice usually doesn't hear enough.

Good points. Perhaps by accident, it's useful information in this article, rather than just a thin sickly familiar in the form of Hunter S. Thompson.

I couldn't tell if this article was supposed to be a hit piece, and if so which side it was trying to hit.

For once, I enjoyed a Politico piece, because it's pretty clear the writer was fed-up with both sets of pretentious wannabes. The writer is "David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications."

So he's older than this bunch of 20-30 year olds, I think maybe in his mid-forties, and he's probably been around long enough to no longer be impressed by this kind of guff.

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