I couldn’t agree less with Bernard less about the awesomeness of Matt Yglesias’s principled stand against exempting Olympics swag from taxation. Not going to read what Yglesias wrote because there is no way this could possibly be an important issue. The amounts of money involved are trivial, no one is getting killed or tortured. So it matters why? Maybe because fairness, maybe because framing…people we’ve got bigger problems.
So it always is with the TNR/Slate crowd. Barber licenses! Farm subsidies! Four Loko!
Meanwhile, the entire notion of a reasonably secure middle-class is being destroyed in this country. Trillion dollar scams are being hatched by possible VP (doubt he’ll get it but the fact anyone thinks he might is scary enough) candidate Paul Ryan.
All this too-clever-by-half contrarianism and nit-picking might have impressed college teaching assistants, but it doesn’t impress the millions of Americans who are dealing with things more pressing than Upper-Class White People problems.
BGinCHI
Agreed Doug. If we’re fighting them on this penny ante shit we’re fighting them in the wrong place. The Norquist Wing of the GOP and the Banksters are turning this country into a giant trailer park and we better start playing some fucking hard ball.
If people are going to believe that Patriot Athletes shouldn’t have to contribute to America then they are already missing the bigger picture.
Davis X. Machina
Like Lower-Class Brown People…
Yglesias is irrelevant in several different ways. Which you have to admit is a neat trick.
Ben Franklin
DougJ;
That was the critical assertion of Hunger Games, the celluloid Olympiad, but it did nothing to dissuade the lowest common denominators.
AA+ Bonds
The only people who read Slate are neurotic yuppies and the deluded grads and undergrads who dream of becoming them
eric
Not true….if post-structural deconstructionist marxist literary theory has taught us anything, it is that focusing on a small and trivial rhetorical and classist excess in the present is often the way to a large and meaningful future of manifestos of quasi-pseudo-changes in our discourse, though not in a way that enhances the lives of those men and womyn that battle daily as cogs in an otherwise feudalist machine of neverending drudgery, full of meaningless distractions such as sporting events that privilege the physical over a holsitic person of peace and caring.
Sheehan/Choi 2012
Arm The Homeless
FP SLAP FIGHT!
Hypothetical: Who wins the Super Bowl in a world where Slate represents the counter-balance to Progressives?
Hypothetical: Where would my lost left socks end up in a reality where Rand Paul was widely considered to be a crackpot by the “mainstream”?
AA+ Bonds
@eric:
. . . it is that capitalism must be destroyed
AA+ Bonds
Slate is for idiots
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Heh. And ouch.
Terri Gross did an interview with Ryan Lizza about his article on Paul Ryan. I haven’t read it yet, but Lizza’s profile of Darrel Issa ought to be required reading. For Lizza’s colleagues first and foremost. Couple of facts I don’t think are quite irrelevant: When PR’s father died when he was 16, PR received a SS death benefit. He didn’t need it to live on, he was able to save it for college, because while not exactly a trust fund baby (from what I understand) the Ryan family owned (owns?) a rather large construction company, which benefited hugely from Eisenhower’s highway project. You know, big government (infrastructure) spending. Said company also provided Paulie with the only “real world, private sector” experience he’s ever had, IIRC six months work as a marketing consultant for hte family business, total earnings of about $1,600.
Turgidson
I’m sympathetic to the meta issue of making sure Democrats talk about tax fairness in a way that doesn’t validate the right wingers’ bullshit, but I agree on this one.
This isn’t going to win or lose the messaging battle. Pretty much no one is going to be in favor of Gabby Douglas coughing up 30% or whatever of her Olympic haul in taxes. Chalk this one up to “America fuck yeah, Olympics edition” and move on to the real battles.
BGinCHI
@AA+ Bonds: ….it is that capitalism will destroy itself, with irony.
Ben Franklin
@AA+ Bonds:
Hmmmmm. You don’t read anything which might sharpen your understanding of the opposition?
eric
@AA+ Bonds: destruction is a gender driven concept that fails to focus on the necessity of re-birth, so the literature would rather us say that capitalism must be absorbed in the life-blood of human history so that a true classless order can be birthed from gaia.
Keith G
Farm subsidies are not a significant issue?
Umm ok.
BGinCHI
@eric: Could you restate that using a Greimasian Square?
patroclus
It seems stupid to tax the athletes on a stipend awarded by the U.S. for athletic achievement. Especially so after NBC and all the non-contrarian-nitpicking media have been blathering for two weeks about how the athletes are going to be taxed. Besides, it’ll create a “must pass” parliamentary vehicle that might allow Congress to actually do something this Session.
Yglesias is wrong, wrong, wrong. And Romney still hasn’t released his tax returns. And Glenn Kessler still has no credibility.
SatanicPanic
Always playin the race card
BGinCHI
@Keith G: When Doug gets on a roll, like Belushi’s character in the big motivation speech in Animal House (“when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor…”), he sometimes just blurts things out.
pragmatism
i just assume that all of yglesias’ writing is geared toward one audience: Mr. and Mrs. McSuderman. Gotta keep them happy or no more evenings with flawless bechamels, pink himalayan salt, etc.
eric
@BGinCHI: I have to say that if you cannot see the applicability of my comments to the current debate over taxing olympic payments without recourse to the creation of bon vivant linguist, then there is no hope for an O-bot like you.
BGinCHI
@eric: I’ll relinquish my copy of Structural Semantics when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
MonkeyBoy
Yglesias always strikes me as someone who can speak an write very rapidly without much thinking about what he does.
scav
I’m not sure eric is transgressive enough in his dissection of the deeply imbricated meanings underpinning panum and circenses both in the past, near-contemporary and in the emerging meme-sphere. I saw no footnotes, footloose or textually tethered, upholding any examination of gestual and body-based awareness of the issues — clearly of import to both the panum and circenses mythos and embodiment in the now.
WJS
Somehow, along the way, someone figured out how to get people to feel sorry for people who have just won medals in the Olympics. This is a little like how they get people to feel sorry for billionaires who want to have a new stadium built for free next to a properly-aligned freeway system. It plays on the notion of fairness as a right for whoever is looking particularly sad on television at the moment. Never mind the fact that the poor and the ugly just don’t get on TV, except when they have just committed some big moral failure that involves the po-po and a shirtless escapade. We have to be fair to the people who look like they’re getting screwed by the government.
Uh, no you’re not. The government is why you got to go win that medal; the government built the infrastructure around your stadium, and now you want to have it built for you for free? As the man said, you didn’t build that. Others made it so you could get there and have that and not have someone strip it away from you.
If Matt Yglesias is your moral compass on matters relating to what’s right in society, something is busted.
AA+ Bonds
@Ben Franklin:
There is not really any insight that can be gained from Slate that cannot be gained from glancing over the mainstream news sites upon which Slate depends
Slate hides no secrets, no looming portents; it is death by dullness
It is no Fox Nation; no one will be threatening anyone’s family over Yglesias and barbers and Mad Men and etc.
BGinCHI
@scav: That’s what I was getting at. Where’s the meta?
Jan Radway would have a field day if there was a field that could contain her.
rikyrah
Come on…looking for the FP to bring up Willard’s camp touting ROMNEYCARE
Mnemosyne
I’m going to steal what Steve said in the thread below:
Seriously, people. The cause of ending the Bush tax cuts is going to be hurt approximately ZERO percent by Obama making a lukewarm endorsement of Rubio’s idea.
And I will send an extra $10 to the Obama campaign if this thing actually makes it through both houses of Congress and lands on Obama’s desk for his signature. Obama didn’t take the bait, so the short attention span theater troupe we call Congress will lose interest and never actually bother to push the legislation through.
AA+ Bonds
@eric:
Well that critique is just terrible :( It might as well have been written by a liberal
AA+ Bonds
Mainly I remember Slate as being really into the Monica Lewinsky case and every glancing experience I have had with them since has seemed to fall right in line with that
AA+ Bonds
Wasn’t Slate #1 on the “Al Gore is less fun than George Bush, therefore Presidency” tip
eric
@scav: so you would impose your preferred conception of human understanding on me as a show of dominance — why not just piss on my leg. You simply declare my understanding inferior without argument and employ the simple recriminations of an academic fad long past its shelf life. Ha, I turn my gender neutral back to you and fart in your general direction.
Ben Franklin
@AA+ Bonds:
I see your point, but I read just about everything across the spectrum, and I don’t think it transmits ebola to my person. Not that you are saying that, but I sense the vibe at BJ.
Mnemosyne
@WJS:
My brother just told me a long story about how Lake County (Illinois) lost their minor league baseball team because the consortium running the team attempted some shady shenanigans that would have required the city of Zion to pay the entire cost of the new stadium.
Turns out that it’s a bad idea to try and get your mistress (who is also a city council member) to spearhead this scam for you. The scandal came out, the whole deal collapsed, and the Lake County Fielders are no more.
But I’m sure we’re supposed to feel sorry for the poor, tortured owners in this case rather than, say, all of the players, concessionaires, ticket takers, office workers, etc. who lost their jobs thanks to the “brilliant” scheme of the owners.
AA+ Bonds
I’m intrigued by the amount of people here aiming snide backhands at critical theory, post-structuralism, etc. but accidentally striking liberal hand-holding nonsense instead (Gaia ‘theory’, ignorance of class struggle, crude determinism etc.)
I believe that assholes would call that a “Kinsey gaffe”, but I’ll settle for “illiteracy”
eric
@AA+ Bonds: step away from the crack pipe and go google “sarcasm” and “ridicule”
scav
@eric: and yet, in your visceral and automatic autonomic reaction to contrary dialectic, you resort to the bedrock of physicality, piss and hot-air, demonstrating by self-destruction the centrality of the geste. Well done grass-hopper!
WJS
@Mnemosyne: Pity the job creators, to hell with the jobless.
That’s America, circa 2012.
fanshawe
Yeah, important stuff like getting Z-list pundits to respond to questions about being the post punk David Broder during live chats that no one reads.
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: But you know, Lake County is so poor….
Fuckers.
Chet
This post articulates a standard of relevance that it doesn’t itself meet. What on Earth was the point of any of this except another excuse to link-bait by slagging Yglesias?
eric
@scav: spoken like a true academic espousing privilege supposedly male rationality over the physical, which has been a part of our essential nature since before our ancestors were using tools and supplanting a loving fertile goddess with a war loving god of retribution and violence as a means of keeping the life affirming sexuality of womyn in check.
scav
@AA+ Bonds: Or verbal ping-pong in clown suits after 4 post-colloquia pitchers. You should have witnessed our reconstruction of geographic information system data-types expressed entirely in snack foods. We were digital illiterates too. And we can make rude krumholtz puns, but only after a few more pitchers.
Jamie
I dunno. I agree with DougJ that the medal issue in and of itself is pretty much inconsequential bullshit. But at the same time, having someone in a relatively mainstream publication like Slate write that taxes are good and we need more of them so we can fund better social services seems like a pretty good thing for the progressive cause. As sad as it may be, that qualifies as a radically liberal statement in our media. So I think we should support it.
DougJ
@Chet:
Ha!
HyperIon
@fanshawe wrote:
Ouch!
Thanks for making my day.
Keith G
@fanshawe: Zing.
West Texan
@Turgidson: I’m completely in favor of Gabby and the rest coughing up taxes. We all are supposed to do so. I won over my Faux-News watching parents with the argument that soldiers have to pay taxes, why not athletes?
Everyone needs to pay their fucking taxes.
Steve
The general concept here is that yes, this issue may seem small, but it is in fact symptomatic of a MUCH LARGER ISSUE and therefore we must fight to the death to oppose it RIGHT NOW. There are, of course, such things as slippery slopes, but you still have to exercise a little judgment.
By the way, at the risk of disturbing consensus, the unending hand-wringing over Anwar al-Awlaki falls into this category too. OMG OBAMA KILLED A US CITIZEN, YOU MIGHT BE NEXT UNLESS WE STOP IT RIGHT HERE. Come on.
scav
@eric: And yet originally it was your ommission of the body as center to the issue of panum and circenses that caught my attention and comment. ah well. I see that you subscribe to the loving goddess interpretation of Venus figurines, omitting any potential practices of placating a potentially vengeful Mother Goddess — embrace rather the full panoply of the Eternal Feminine, extending from Medea to Mary, Venus to Hera and Athena, rather that the reductionist adoration of the merely loving feminine.
Mnemosyne
@BGinCHI:
I think you’ve picked up the wrong story thread there if you’re thinking the problem is that the city of Zion didn’t pay for the whole stadium. Even if Lake County was handing out gold bars to every resident because of how much revenue they make from the rich, the residents still shouldn’t be on the hook to buy a stadium for private business owners and give it to them for free.
DougJ
@HyperIon: @fanshawe:
Now that you two have weighed in, I wonder what Matoko Chan and Clime Acts think.
David Koch
but, but, but… Overton’s Window!
taylormattd
“Harvard dining hall bullshit” is so exactly perfect.
I had a crusty old trial lawyer mentor at my old firm. He frequently described attorneys who would niggle about unimportant shit as “arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.”
This type of niggling is worse, because it is done by smug little shits wearing smoking jackets.
Fabio
Doug — MattY does get *very* wearisome, but gratuitous and onerous licensing regimes actually does piss off many small business owners. Addressing some of those issues could peel off some low-hanging fruit in elections, particularly at local and state levels.
That said, yes. Not really a significant issue to be ruminating over at the level of national politics.
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: I should have been clearer. Counties like that often set up this ridiculous system where there are tons of rich people but they have shit services (and roads, etc.). It’s like they want to have a nice neighborhood but they don’t care about anything beyond the gates. Lake County (Lake Forest, for example) has that attitude in a number of places.
Regnad Kcin
Like we even let the TAs eat with us in the dining hall
scav
@Mnemosyne: @BGinCHI: I think you’re talking different states. Bill’s in IL, I’m guessing M’s is UT? ETA: Although for all I know of that corner of the collar, there may be a Zion in IL.
taylormattd
@eric: HAHAHAHAHAHA.
schrodinger's cat
NYT’s Economix blog had this as the headline too, I didn’t click. I think they are desperate to change the topic from Mitt’s taxes and IRA.
JWL
“The amounts of money involved are trivial, no one is getting killed or tortured. So it matters why”?
Because Obama endorsed it.
And there is a larger context, one that Y addressed and you ignore.
John
As a recent graduate student, I’ll just say that this is unfair. A student like Yglesias probably was – smart, interested, way too sure of his own smartness and impressed with his own cleverness – would almost certainly get a good grade in a class that I taught, simply because he’d be much more engaged than the majority of students (even at a place like Harvard, I think, although he’d stand out less there than at most of the places I’ve taught), and because even an obnoxious student who actually participates in class discussion is welcome compared to the typical sacks of dullness you get.
But that doesn’t mean we’d actually be impressed with the content of his ideas. A smart undergraduate is just a smart undergraduate – you give him an A, but you don’t actually consider his ideas interesting ones that you wish to discuss with your friends on your off-time.
And that’s the basic problem with Yglesias. He jumped straight from “smart undergraduate” to “national pundit”, more or less, without any intermediate stages. That’s not a good recipe for instilling actual expertise and knowledge, and Yglesias has, for the past decade, remained stunted in the form of the smart undergraduate. And a smart undergraduate is only worthwhile because they have potential, because you hope they’ll grow out of the stupid parts of being 20 years old and thinking you know everything. Nobody’s impressed by a 30 year old playing the same game.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Some of the comments on this thread read like they’ve been lifted from Alan Sokal’s article in Social Text.
John
@scav:
There’s a Zion, Illinois, that’s in Lake County and is home to the Lake County Fielders, so I’ll guess they’re both talking about the same Lake County.
abject funk
JWL at 61 nails it. I’ve read every comment here and no one seems to get that Obama took time to support Rubio’s stupid-ass plan on pandering to Olympic athletes by suggesting they not be taxed on their medals. Taxes are good, and lending Rubio credence is bad. If you haven’t read MY’s post, you should, as DougJ apparently hasn’t.
BH
The lack of self-awareness here is breathtaking. This very site covers inane crap all the time, but we are smart enough to see it as either entertaining or a piece of a larger narrative. Yglesias is right that if we join the brainiacs at Fox and grunt “taxes bad” on this issue that we are playing right into their framing on taxes. This anti-Yglesias groupthink BS lacks any legitimate basis and is getting really annoying. Slow down and think for just one second.
abject funk
To repeat myself and second BH, read the damn article (that is article, in addition to the blog post summary that starts with a link to the article), it isn’t contrarian BS at all. It’s very smart regarding taxes and Obama’s severe mis-step on this glaring pander.
Egilsson
Gun control is similar. I support the concept, but the era of democrats losing elections over symbolic, easily distorted and ultimately meaningless concepts like this needs to be over. I understand that Bernard does not agree with this characterization because his whole point is that it is not meaningless but conceptually critical – a necessary paradigm shift. I just don’t see it.
Like it took a democrat to address welfare reform*, it’s going to take a republican to address some issues.
Don’t fight over meaningless symbolic cleverish points.
*not saying welfare reform was good, just saying it took a democrat to get it passed.
Turgidson
@abject funk:
No one is going to give two shits about the “glaring pander” in 3 days, because Obama said “screw it, don’t tax them” rather than allow the rightwing poutrage machine to spend a week screaming about how Obama hates America so much he wants to tax its Olympic champions. Which is what the whole exercise was intended to do.
Like I said, I am typically in agreement with those that think Obama and the Dems in general need to avoid validating right wing “taxes are evil” bullshit and such.
But a debate about taxing Olympic champs’ prize money? You really think anyone besides the inside-baseball set will look at this and be like “whoa, because Obama did this, now I’m totally in agreement with Grover Norquist and his shitheel army about the evils of taxes!”? No. Who the fuck cares. Obama refused to let the professionally-outraged dipshits on the right create yet another ginned-up shitstorm about fucking nothing. Good for him, he has to deal with enough of those as it is.
scav
@John: Ahh, so there is a local Zion in those mysterious belts beyond the reach of the ‘L. Thanks. With a stadium of some sort for an activity involving (presumably) a ball. Two things I know nothing about. Well, three plus if we add some of my earlier baroque flights of insanity. I think I’ll be keeping that idea of footloose and text-tethered footnotes all the same. Random footnotes with no necessary or bound connection to the text just appearing . . . Hyper-meta . . .
abject funk
Turgidson, the correct response would have been to either ignore or mock the proposal, in my opinion. Joining it was unnecessary. I agree with your analysis re who gives a shit…but it’s the nibbling around the edges that makes people accept the wisdom of deficit reduction, entitlement cuts, the need for capital gains taxes, our overpaid public (UNION) workers, etc. No need to throw bones, either point out the stupidity or stay silent.
As the converse….the right wing noise machine is never silenced, so the idea that this will shut anyone up or this is a done issue and hay won’t be made, well, my historical experience tells me otherwise see birth certificate, Muslim, socialist, etc.
different-church-lady
@fanshawe: BBBBBBUUUUUUURRRRRRRNNNNNNNN…..
Spatula
Didn’t Barack Obama attend Harvard Law School?
Probably ate in the cafeteria too.
What a dumbass.