In a nice example of “don’t feed the trolls” pre-internet, a letter criticizing a Gore Vidal article ends with:

Why do I go on like this? I have rarely read so self-serving and stupid a piece of anti-criticism and anti-intellectualism as “Plastic Fiction.” So obviously stupid that I should know better than to respond at all. He’s just trying to sucker us into getting angry again, and I’ve fallen for it.

Vidal’s response is, of course, more expert trolling:

I don’t think much comment from me is in order. The gentleman from Virginia assures us, perhaps unnecessarily, that he is neither “a famous writer” not “even a famous critic.” From the evidence of his “insanely angry” prose, I suspect he is also neither a writer nor a critic. But he does teach school and like so many of the new barbarians out there in the weed-grown, chigger-infested groves of Academe, he thinks himself an intellectual. This is delusion. For one thing, intellectuals don’t misread texts: “He asks for books the kids will want to read. Something klassy to compete with TV,” etc. Quite the reverse. Intellectuals also try not to fall into the dread pit of non-sequitur: “Henry Adams is ‘out of date’; soon Pynchon will be ‘out of date’ too. obviously writers should have no ideas at all.” Sentence Two bears no relationship to Sentence One, while…. Well, I can’t correct all the bad writing in the country. Even so, I want very much to be helpful. But my civilizing task will not succeed unless the not-so-happy tenured many accept the plain fact that when it comes to matters of prose and of fiction at this time and in this place, I am authority.

“How can Vidal possibly think–” I begin to say in exasperation, and then remember the letter-writer’s last line, and realize that he got the better of the exchange after all

It had even been the subject of a gossipy, if rigorously argued, post on a site positioning itself as a gadfly of the mattress industry, HonestMattressReviews.com. (A court later determined that, despite the site’s name, the owner of Honest Mattress Reviews had concealed ties to the mattress company GhostBed.)

McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits have become known among fans of the rock group The Beatles because they were the cause of an argument between George Harrison and John Lennon during a recording session for the group’s 1969 album Abbey Road.

Inadequacy and Modesty →

Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate. The most popular movie in Seoul at the moment is a thriller about a joint North–South effort to catch a criminal ring of North Korean defectors. That plot tells you something right there. The main North Korean character is played for cool by a handsome Tom Cruise type, while his South Korean counterpart is a homely, tired-looking figure of fun. There is a tradition of this sort of casting.

B. R. Myers (source, Feb 2017)

It’s unclear if Jong Chol plays any role in Kim Jong Un’s regime. He left North Korea in the late 1990s and reportedly was deemed “like a little girl” by Kim Jong Il.

A charming and subversively “innocent” book that delightfully combines pro-feline sentiments and self-awareness.

Note that back in the day, each sentence ended in an exclamation point. That is because everything was exciting! In the modern day, each sentence ends in a period. Nothing is exciting. Nothing matters.

trump voters

oligopsoneia:

nostalgebraist:

I keep seeing people – of various stripes – talk about “Trump voters” in a way that seems off to me.  It seems like most of left and liberal America still hasn’t fully internalized the sheer normalcy of Trump voting in 2016.

People talk about “Trump voters” like they’re this specific, unusual demographic group, like Mormons, say, or furries (to take two random and very different examples).  They talk about “explaining” Trump voters (via economic factors, racism, or whatever), as though not voting for Trump is the normal, unmarked condition and “Trump voting” is a surprising deviation that needs special explanation.  Like we’re talking about the risk factors for a disease.  (We talk about risk factors for diabetes, not risk factors for “non-diabetes” – non-diabetes is the normal state, from which diabetes is a deviation.)

This is indeed how it feels.  On a gut level, I’m still confused that anyone voted for Trump, much less enough people to win him the presidency.  The pundits and comedians go on (rightly) mocking the man, reinforcing the sense that this guy is just obviously absurd, someone that no one would ever vote for without some special “risk factor” stepping in.  But although that’s how it feels, the fact is that voting for Trump was absolutely normal.  

Over 62 million people (nearly 63 million) voted for Trump.  We like to concentrate on swing states and states won by small margins, which reinforces the sense that the people “responsible for” Trump’s win are some specific identifiable group (the inhabitants of “Trump towns,” or whatever).  But if we switch the frame from “the people responsible for Trump’s win” to “the people who voted for him” – which is, after all, what the phrase “Trump voters” actually means – we don’t see specific groups in specific states.

We see about 63 million people, distributed across all 50 states and across all demographic groups – not equally, but in patterns similar to those we usually see in voters for Republican presidential candidates.  It helps, here, to focus on raw numbers rather than percentages or – especially – differences in percentages.  We were surprised when exit polls said that Latino support for Trump was comparable to that for Romney (28%, vs. 27% for Romney).  Later analysis revealed that the true number was much lower.  But even then, if we take the 15.8% number from that paper (pooled over 10 states) and multiply by Latino turnout, we get about 2 million Latinos who voted for Trump.

2 million Latinos.  31 million women.  4 and a half million Californians.  Etc., etc., etc.

I’m not saying anyone should be, I don’t know, less negative about Trump voters or something.  If you think something is rotten in the soul of “Trump voters,” and you mean something is rotten in the soul of those 63 million Americans, then sure, that’s a coherent position.  Just, if you say “Trump voters” and you’re talking about some special sinister cohort, some group that deviated from the “normal” pattern for some specific reason, you aren’t really talking about Trump voters in the usual sense of the phrase.  And you may not have truly internalized how normal it was – alas – to vote for Trump.

I think this is one of those cases where the strict denotation of the term doesn’t match what people are looking for. The set “people who voted for Trump in the general election” maps very very very closely to a paradigmatically normal population: the set of people who voted for the Republican candidate in almost any recent election. 

So insofar as we’re interested in the value added by Trump, we’re thinking about two groups that need, themselves, to be thought of separately: 

1. People who voted for Trump in the primary.
   
2. People who voted for Trump in the general election who otherwise wouldn’t have voted, or otherwise would have voted for the Democratic candidate/a third party candidate/whatever.

But the very fact that these need to be thought of separately means that they’re not actually usefully subsumed under the same label. 

I agree, except I think that we can’t take the first part as a given.  There’s an imaginable counterfactual in which Trump manages to win the primary due to a sufficiently large, distinctive base demographic, but goes on to fail horribly in the general because he isn’t palatable to normal Republican voters, just to his base.  Indeed, this is what I would have expected if I didn’t know the real story, and indeed I think it’s what I did expect at one time, and what many, many other people expected.

So in a way, Trump’s palatability to normal Republicans is part of “the value added by Trump,” because Trump is not a normal Republican candidate, and the conventional wisdom said he would not be treated as one.  We need to remember that this (palatability to normal Republicans) was (1) not a foregone conclusion, (2) a necessary condition for Trump’s win, and (3) an unignorable aspect of how the public sees Trump (pretty much by definition, since normal Republicans are a large fraction of the public).

(via oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051)