Wed, 09/30/2009 - 10:15am — vastleft
Go, read Stop Me Before I Vote Again.
To be fair, Melissa Harris-Lacewell doesn't expect that we're actually going to get any ponies. Instead, we should continue to enjoy the benefits that come from expecting to get a pony. Well, not benefits exactly, but there's a meta-pony payoff in there somewhere for continuing to act as if we still believe. Or something.
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I became skeptical at
Melissa Harris-Lacewell's assertion that "Winning does not give us a mandate to ignore the interests of those we defeated.... "
Isn't the Civil War sort of, um, a counter-example of that?
Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.—Sidney Wolin
There's a part of me that likes MHL....
....but that one comment is simply DUMB.
Ahhh, Mel...the very idea of winning an election is to EXACTLY ignore the interests of those who opposed you...or to put it another way, to promote with vigor those who SUPPORTED you.
Problem is, though, the Democrats seem more interested in promoting the interests that feed them $$$$$ than those who actually feed them votes to stay in power...which is why they get their asses kicked every time when they do get power.
Which is also why the BlueDog/GOP Alliance will always smack down any puny lib/prog challenge to its rule.
Here's an idea, Melissa...how about having a party and a movement that ACTUALLY REPRESENTS the people who vote for them, and doesn't just use them for electoral disposable diapers???
Anthony
My SmackDog Chronicles Blog (Warning: mostly SFW, but contains topics of adult nature; prudes and wingnutters beware!!)
Elections have consequences
Unless you vote for a Democrat
" a certain emotional valence"
bwahaha! That's priceless.
Never have so few said so little with so many words.
You don’t know me, son. So let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake, you’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.
-Malcolm Reynolds, “Serenity”
I had to look up the word "valence"...
...when I read that. But I still have no idea what she was talking about.
Valence is a psych term
It means the attractiveness or aversiveness of something. (The word ambivalence—which combines attraction and aversiveness within it—is better known.) MHL is essentially using it to mean "Obama made politics or political action 'attractive' again," ("attractive" in the sense of people wanting to engage in it).
The shorter MHL is, I think:
It's not really something one can argue against, really. You either want to do it or you don't.
Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.—Sidney Wolin
Pay no attention to the man behind the valence!
[rimshot. laughter]
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Headings I wish I had thought of
Hahahaha.
Yeah, the even shorter MHL.
Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.—Sidney Wolin
There are times when I am so
There are times when I am so taken by the sneering at the uppity women and how uppity they are that I have to stop before I make it to the criticism of whatever it was that is so dreadful it is worthy of criticism. This was one of those times.
Sign me confused
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Er, me too
Confused, I mean.
You don’t know me, son. So let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake, you’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.
-Malcolm Reynolds, “Serenity”
Please do go on
Are you saying that the criticism of MHL's comments are gender-based? How so?
I had the same reaction as the bewilderness.
I had to hack my way through "moral panic" (about Polanski) and "Pecksniffian" - both terms commonly used to tell uppity women to STFU
about sexual abuse - then "Melissa Harris-Lacewell, she of the pretentious double-barreled name" - now, I don't know why she has that name, but many of us who don't like taking our husband's name on marriage end up with names like this, so that pisses me off too. "Merit baby" is pretty offensive as well. I have no idea whether Melissa Harris-Lacewell "relentlessly" harps on her Princeton connection (it wouldn't surprise me, given my experiences with other Princetonites), but I've never seen any snark directed at, say Paul Krugman, over that.
All that is simply to say that before I ever got to the real point of the article, I had a pretty good idea that the writer thought this woman, as a woman, was getting above her station.
As for the real point of the article, it has been adequately addressed by others, and I agree with y'all on that.
Policy not party!
Duh!
I do see on the double-barreled -- Will Doctor Freud please pick up the white courtesy phone? -- name. Thanks!
It's never too late to learn! (Though I'd guess that the hyphenated name is also a class marker, as well. Eh?)
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Food for thought, thanks Gob
I must admit that some of those dogwhistles are outside my hearing range (and, illiterate that I am, "Pecksniffian" is outside my vocabulary). What's the gender background on "moral panic" and "Pecksniff"?
Hyphenated names have long been mocked as posh-sounding, so I didn't pick that up as as a gender cue.
At this point, Krugman's cred isn't so highly leveraged on Princeton, so I wouldn't expect that to be a main line used in mocking him.
The meaning of "merit baby" isn't quite clear to me, but it sounds like some kind of affirmative-action dig. If so, I think you've got a point, since it's applied here to two women. Me, I don't know much about MHL, but though I'm not a fan of Our Rhodes Scholar, it wouldn't be my choice of snark.
I wonder how Mr. Smith would respond to these criticisms. I could guess, but it would just be a guess. Judging by the comment thread there, there's a little history of some sort on this topic, and some of the reader commentary does strike (even?) me as blatantly sexist.
How do you say,
"Where's my fucking pony?" in latin?
Sorry, I don't fall in love with politicians. I'm not that desperate.
merit babies and double names
A commenter over at my blog, Stop Me Before I Vote Again (SMBIVA), drew my attention to this thread. SMBIVA is where the original whack at Melissa Harris-Lacewell appeared.
I see that my reference to "merit babies" has been read by some as a slap at affirmative action, and my dislike of double-barreled names as a slap at feminism.
Actually, in my idiolect, a merit baby is someone who got where they did on officially certified merit: good grades and high SATs. To the extent that affirmative action takes other factors into account, it is of course anti-meritocratic; and since I loathe meritocracy, I have no problem at all with affirmative action.
Same for these stupid pretentious double-barreled names. I'm an equal-opportunity mocker on this subject; IIRC at SMBIVA I have also taken Melissa's colleague Sam Graham-Felsen to task for the same absurd affectation.
Sure women don't want to take their husband's name any more; why should they? But then, why not just keep your own? That's what all my wives have done.
What with intermarriage and all, a lot of these names sound like an ethnic train wreck. You can't help pitying the poor little tykes showing up at Montessori schools from coast to coast, saddled with monikers like Fiona Perlmutter-Bacigalupp.