Where the "someone on the left over-steps" narrative breaks down for me is, does the Mars Candy corporation really represent The Left? Or Twix, or the makers of Mr. Potato Head, or the publishers of Doctor Suess? These are all businesses attempting to maximize profits by appealing to the broadest swath of customers. Wouldn't the "conservative" answer be to let the market correct their supposedly misplaced exuberance for woke candy bars or gender dysphoric potatoes or children's books without insensitive racial stereotypes?
This is where I expect the "conservative" outrage is coming from. The market isn't going to "correct" the problem for them, because the average person was not deeply invested in the gender expression of anthropomorphized M&Ms and potatoes. And they don't care that Dr. Suess's four least popular books aren't published anymore (not when they've read Green Eggs and Ham and Oh the Places You'll Go ad nauseum at bed times).
Right wing: has active groups who marched in support of insurrection and openly discuss arming for civil war.
Left wing: thinks we should have frank discussions on the influence of race in history, pokes experimentally at a gender-neutral descriptor.
BOTH SIDES!
Nah, screw this. First of all, 'latinx' is not widely despised because basically it never caught traction outside of proggy circles and the people who farm outrage via taking the worst possible interpretation of proggy concepts. Narrowly derided by politics nerds more than anything.
Proggies have ideas. Many of them turn out to be nonstarters, like most ideas ever. If coming up with new ways to approach things was easy, we'd already live in an idealized system. So yeah, they incubate things, talk themselves into it, dump it on the world and a lot of the time it falls on its face.
And they will keep doing that, and it's a good thing they do because for every several ideas that are dumb, there are those that aren't. Or there are those that are just before their time. Remember when Rove helped put Bush over the top by flogging gay marriage bans?
Is an honest appraisal of our history a bad thing? Is seeking an inclusive category label a bad thing? I dunno. We live in a society undergirded by ideas derided as far-out, society-shattering radicalism at point of introduction that get refined into workable systems. Staples of our labor environment such as worker's compensation and overtime compensation, that was radical socialism back in the day.
Screw the equivalency. Mock the hell out of the Tuckers of the world for their reactionary bullshit. Fight proggy overreach where it actually affects people in tangible, harmful ways. You don't have to go far for that instead of pretending that 'latinx' was anything other than a five second blip that's still only in circulation because a certain stripe of people like to get worked up over it.
Getting caught up in the minutia of the everyday political circus obscures the reality. There are very good and very bad things going on that don’t get recognized or supported. The constant need of social media and all other media for scandal, controversy, rumor, and nuttiness, blows smoke in everyone’s eyes.
The economy is good, unemployment is down, wages are up. Poverty is decreasing, and women, minorities, and LBGTQ folks are living better lives in half the country.
But now, with the clown congress, real issues that are destroying the country will got get discussed. The destruction of our climate, the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant policies of half the country are getting more oppressive. Gun violence, mass murders are at an ll time high. The war in Ukraine continues, killing thousands.
The biggest problem underlying all of this, the growing inequality of wealth, is what the Republicans are really protecting. That’s why we get all of this circus, all the time, so the power and wealth remains with the few who have it now.
Ah, more rank both-siderism, because we need lots more of that.
Do people on the left sometimes have what appear to be stupid ideas or say what appear to be stupid things (and sometimes, more often than not, it IS stupid)? Yes.
Are the center left/centrists actually doing much with it, other than usually disavowing it? Rarely.
Are they electing people who supported an actual insurrection? No. Are they electing election denialists? No. Nazis and Anti-semites? a few (anti-semites)---do those people have any power or major committee assignments? No.
But, ya, let's worry about what the Left is doing.
If we did not incentivize the media to blow all of this crap out of proportion to generate revenue, we would never hear about 95% of it.
The media thrives on conflict. On "clicks". Most of us would not even know about 90% of the inane things said on both sides if the media did not consciously choose to magnify conflict to boost their profit margins.
I don't think this is an example of the left overstepping. Tucker Carlson and his incel fanboys seem capable of overreacting themselves. Do you remember when Space Jam 2 came out? Most of the internet was focused on how the movie was a cynical and bad IP grabbag and seemed to be a movie written by a corporate marketing department. Tucker Carlson ran a whole segment, maybe several of them, on an alleged redesign of Lola Bunny being desexualized. The "evidence" for this was some fanart his staff found on the internet which had her be more endowed than she was in Space Jam. So:
1. We have a movie that is clearly meant to be for children;
2. Tucker went on a tear over the fact that a character not created until the 1990s allegedly was redesigned to have a flater chest;
3. The character in question is a cartoon bunnyl
4. I'm betting a majority of Americans under 45 were first introduced to the concept of drag from Bugs Bunny;
5. The real scandal should be the disappearance of Bugs Bunny's Brooklyn accent.
You can't make this stuff up. The thing about Tucker's internet troll army is that they have a lot of time on their hands to get crazy. Blaming the left for this is a variant of stating on the left has agency. Tucker's internet troll army can grow up and get jobs and then procrastinate like the rest of us by writing internet comments!
For corporations, I think they are between a rock and a hard place. Ideally, upper management would prefer to spend zero time on anything woke but younger audiences and employees are more liberal than previous generations as you noted and the woke-lite stuff is a good way for them to attract employees and consumer loyalty. As far as I can tell, Mars, Inc. backing down is the first time a right-wing freakout had success for a long time. Dreher had a twitter meltdown when those radical bolsheviks at (checks notes) Nabisco came out with some rainbow-colored Oreos and issued some tweets in support of fluid gender pronouns.
When was the American right ever an intellectual force? Was it when Reagan lied about welfare queens and trafficked in states rights dog whistles? Was it when Buckley championed segregation? Was it the Second KKK? Was it the Know Nothings? Was it the Jeffersonians? Was it the Border Ruffians in Missouri? Was it Newt or Ryan?
What happens when Gov DeSantis runs for President and his woke shit is all he has to offer?
Does he even have an national economic agenda or is going after private corporations by telling them what they can and cannot say and do all he has to offer?
What about foreign policy? Is paying to fly amnesty seeking immigrants to woke locations the sum total of what he has to offer?
How about education policy? Is vetting every available book in each and every school all he has to offer?
Or, what about governing policy and style? Is his authoritarian regime what will be on offer?
I read Morning Shots every day and I am truly shocked with how much I agree with him and some of the other writers on the Bulwark site. How could I be on opposite sides from them for so long? I have been thinking about this. Recently one of these writers underlined how liberals in the 80s and 90s seemed to run out of idea and the energy shifted to the conservative side. Again I would agree. But I did not and do not see that positively. They pointed to school choice as a way to pull power away from teachers unions and create accountability. At the time I thought school choice was an effort to end public education. Conservatives were able to convince folks that higher education was a private good that did not deserve public support. And many thought that if you could get enough folks out of K-12 school you could make the same argument that parents ought to pay to have their kids educated. Did every conservative believe that -- no, but the forces of the maga world were brewing way back then.
If some kook on Berkeley city council farts on a Saturday night, Joe Biden and Dems have to explain it by Monday. But if someone barks 'the Jews' on the Right it is essentially embraced. They lose 0 votes. There seems to be a discrepancy in voter behavior. Yes, 'defund police' and 'CRT' will lose votes for Dems, but 'I think 9/11 was a hoax' won't for GOP.
For all the dooming Fox News does, you can tell they must think things aren't too bad if they have time to freak out the M&M spokescandies losing their gender.
Charlie how did you miss the X-Box? Where giving people the option of a 15 sec startup as opposed to instantaneous to save on electricity is being ominously called indoctrination of children to believe climate change. Of course this was from the same person who complained that now none of the anthropomorphic spokes candies look like someone he would like to have a drink with. And yes I agree there are some loony leftists that talk about cartoon rabbits but I at least have never gotten a fundraising e-mail from a politician wanting me to be outraged about it and give them money.
Where the "someone on the left over-steps" narrative breaks down for me is, does the Mars Candy corporation really represent The Left? Or Twix, or the makers of Mr. Potato Head, or the publishers of Doctor Suess? These are all businesses attempting to maximize profits by appealing to the broadest swath of customers. Wouldn't the "conservative" answer be to let the market correct their supposedly misplaced exuberance for woke candy bars or gender dysphoric potatoes or children's books without insensitive racial stereotypes?
This is where I expect the "conservative" outrage is coming from. The market isn't going to "correct" the problem for them, because the average person was not deeply invested in the gender expression of anthropomorphized M&Ms and potatoes. And they don't care that Dr. Suess's four least popular books aren't published anymore (not when they've read Green Eggs and Ham and Oh the Places You'll Go ad nauseum at bed times).
I don’t like analysis like maurer's for one simple reason: harebrained random lefties are not the equivalent of the entire base of the gop.
So yes, some lefties promote some dumb things: the right lives to do dumb things.
Not close to the same.
In my heart, CRT will always stand for Cathode Ray Tube. I'm so stuck.
Right wing: has active groups who marched in support of insurrection and openly discuss arming for civil war.
Left wing: thinks we should have frank discussions on the influence of race in history, pokes experimentally at a gender-neutral descriptor.
BOTH SIDES!
Nah, screw this. First of all, 'latinx' is not widely despised because basically it never caught traction outside of proggy circles and the people who farm outrage via taking the worst possible interpretation of proggy concepts. Narrowly derided by politics nerds more than anything.
Proggies have ideas. Many of them turn out to be nonstarters, like most ideas ever. If coming up with new ways to approach things was easy, we'd already live in an idealized system. So yeah, they incubate things, talk themselves into it, dump it on the world and a lot of the time it falls on its face.
And they will keep doing that, and it's a good thing they do because for every several ideas that are dumb, there are those that aren't. Or there are those that are just before their time. Remember when Rove helped put Bush over the top by flogging gay marriage bans?
Is an honest appraisal of our history a bad thing? Is seeking an inclusive category label a bad thing? I dunno. We live in a society undergirded by ideas derided as far-out, society-shattering radicalism at point of introduction that get refined into workable systems. Staples of our labor environment such as worker's compensation and overtime compensation, that was radical socialism back in the day.
Screw the equivalency. Mock the hell out of the Tuckers of the world for their reactionary bullshit. Fight proggy overreach where it actually affects people in tangible, harmful ways. You don't have to go far for that instead of pretending that 'latinx' was anything other than a five second blip that's still only in circulation because a certain stripe of people like to get worked up over it.
Getting caught up in the minutia of the everyday political circus obscures the reality. There are very good and very bad things going on that don’t get recognized or supported. The constant need of social media and all other media for scandal, controversy, rumor, and nuttiness, blows smoke in everyone’s eyes.
The economy is good, unemployment is down, wages are up. Poverty is decreasing, and women, minorities, and LBGTQ folks are living better lives in half the country.
But now, with the clown congress, real issues that are destroying the country will got get discussed. The destruction of our climate, the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant policies of half the country are getting more oppressive. Gun violence, mass murders are at an ll time high. The war in Ukraine continues, killing thousands.
The biggest problem underlying all of this, the growing inequality of wealth, is what the Republicans are really protecting. That’s why we get all of this circus, all the time, so the power and wealth remains with the few who have it now.
Ah, more rank both-siderism, because we need lots more of that.
Do people on the left sometimes have what appear to be stupid ideas or say what appear to be stupid things (and sometimes, more often than not, it IS stupid)? Yes.
Are the center left/centrists actually doing much with it, other than usually disavowing it? Rarely.
Are they electing people who supported an actual insurrection? No. Are they electing election denialists? No. Nazis and Anti-semites? a few (anti-semites)---do those people have any power or major committee assignments? No.
But, ya, let's worry about what the Left is doing.
If we did not incentivize the media to blow all of this crap out of proportion to generate revenue, we would never hear about 95% of it.
The media thrives on conflict. On "clicks". Most of us would not even know about 90% of the inane things said on both sides if the media did not consciously choose to magnify conflict to boost their profit margins.
So sad to see that George Santos has lost the support of fake yokel John Kennedy.
Re: M&Ms and culture war stuff
I don't think this is an example of the left overstepping. Tucker Carlson and his incel fanboys seem capable of overreacting themselves. Do you remember when Space Jam 2 came out? Most of the internet was focused on how the movie was a cynical and bad IP grabbag and seemed to be a movie written by a corporate marketing department. Tucker Carlson ran a whole segment, maybe several of them, on an alleged redesign of Lola Bunny being desexualized. The "evidence" for this was some fanart his staff found on the internet which had her be more endowed than she was in Space Jam. So:
1. We have a movie that is clearly meant to be for children;
2. Tucker went on a tear over the fact that a character not created until the 1990s allegedly was redesigned to have a flater chest;
3. The character in question is a cartoon bunnyl
4. I'm betting a majority of Americans under 45 were first introduced to the concept of drag from Bugs Bunny;
5. The real scandal should be the disappearance of Bugs Bunny's Brooklyn accent.
You can't make this stuff up. The thing about Tucker's internet troll army is that they have a lot of time on their hands to get crazy. Blaming the left for this is a variant of stating on the left has agency. Tucker's internet troll army can grow up and get jobs and then procrastinate like the rest of us by writing internet comments!
For corporations, I think they are between a rock and a hard place. Ideally, upper management would prefer to spend zero time on anything woke but younger audiences and employees are more liberal than previous generations as you noted and the woke-lite stuff is a good way for them to attract employees and consumer loyalty. As far as I can tell, Mars, Inc. backing down is the first time a right-wing freakout had success for a long time. Dreher had a twitter meltdown when those radical bolsheviks at (checks notes) Nabisco came out with some rainbow-colored Oreos and issued some tweets in support of fluid gender pronouns.
When was the American right ever an intellectual force? Was it when Reagan lied about welfare queens and trafficked in states rights dog whistles? Was it when Buckley championed segregation? Was it the Second KKK? Was it the Know Nothings? Was it the Jeffersonians? Was it the Border Ruffians in Missouri? Was it Newt or Ryan?
What happens when Gov DeSantis runs for President and his woke shit is all he has to offer?
Does he even have an national economic agenda or is going after private corporations by telling them what they can and cannot say and do all he has to offer?
What about foreign policy? Is paying to fly amnesty seeking immigrants to woke locations the sum total of what he has to offer?
How about education policy? Is vetting every available book in each and every school all he has to offer?
Or, what about governing policy and style? Is his authoritarian regime what will be on offer?
I read Morning Shots every day and I am truly shocked with how much I agree with him and some of the other writers on the Bulwark site. How could I be on opposite sides from them for so long? I have been thinking about this. Recently one of these writers underlined how liberals in the 80s and 90s seemed to run out of idea and the energy shifted to the conservative side. Again I would agree. But I did not and do not see that positively. They pointed to school choice as a way to pull power away from teachers unions and create accountability. At the time I thought school choice was an effort to end public education. Conservatives were able to convince folks that higher education was a private good that did not deserve public support. And many thought that if you could get enough folks out of K-12 school you could make the same argument that parents ought to pay to have their kids educated. Did every conservative believe that -- no, but the forces of the maga world were brewing way back then.
How can you overreact to someone being unsuitable for office? Especially if that office is the most powerful position in the whole wide world?
If some kook on Berkeley city council farts on a Saturday night, Joe Biden and Dems have to explain it by Monday. But if someone barks 'the Jews' on the Right it is essentially embraced. They lose 0 votes. There seems to be a discrepancy in voter behavior. Yes, 'defund police' and 'CRT' will lose votes for Dems, but 'I think 9/11 was a hoax' won't for GOP.
For all the dooming Fox News does, you can tell they must think things aren't too bad if they have time to freak out the M&M spokescandies losing their gender.
Charlie how did you miss the X-Box? Where giving people the option of a 15 sec startup as opposed to instantaneous to save on electricity is being ominously called indoctrination of children to believe climate change. Of course this was from the same person who complained that now none of the anthropomorphic spokes candies look like someone he would like to have a drink with. And yes I agree there are some loony leftists that talk about cartoon rabbits but I at least have never gotten a fundraising e-mail from a politician wanting me to be outraged about it and give them money.