I know you probably won’t see this, but I think you’re consistently brilliant, and I love all the work you do.

Thank you.

I like a latte or three in the morning. And I suck even worse because I get it from the Starbucks that’s 3 blocks from my house. But I don’t sip, I guzzle. Not Jewish. Plain old garden variety wasp with 2 kids, 2 car payments, a spouse and a mortgage.

Code? More like fail.

A well-made latte is a good fucking beverage, regardless of whether or not anyone else knows you’re drinking it.

I’m from a relatively large but poor and white trashy town in Iowa. I grew up with working class beer and fast food and vices and status symbols. I abandoned all of them to move to Seattle and become a latte-sipping intellectual elitist academic. I did this because lots of working class cultural signifiers are fucking awful, from my perspective. I’m a lisping John Keats-sized fey with an aptitude for mathematics and adventurous taste buds. Of course I abandoned my roots. Cheap American beer tastes like cat piss, fast food gives me the devil shits, the lottery takes all the fun out of gambling, the smell of tobacco is foul and persistent, and car culture is fundamentally unsustainable. Don’t even get me started on the clothes. The thing about being poor is that it’s frequently quite rotten as I know from personal experience and given an alternative very few people would really want to live that way. I found life in that socioeconomic milieu stultifying and repressive, and look back on it now with no fondness to speak of.

At the same time, I don’t claim to be the victim of heartbreaking discrimination by the proles. There is a lot of racism and sexism and homophobia and anti-intellectualism and all kinds of really nasty stuff stewing away among some elements of the working classes, but then again you get the same kind of thing across all classes in America and it’s never been a significant obstacle to me personally. I have no fundamental moral or philosophical objection to the working class lifestyle, or at least no more than I do for pretty much every lifestyle, my own included. I just don’t like it much.

What on Earth do these issues of personal taste have to do with any damn thing of consequence?

r4d20 said,

I’m the 17th most superior person in the world and I know the list of the 16 above me and you are not fucking on it. :)

The List

17) r4d20
16) r4d18
15) r4d16
14) r4d14
13) r4d12
12) r4d10
11) r4d8
10) r4d6
9) r4d2
8) r2d16
7) r2d14
6) r2d12
5) r2d10
4) r2d8
3) r2d6
2) r2d4

and

1) Brad DeLong

Memorized it, ate it, pooped it, and then burned the poop.

You wish.

I’m the 17th most superior person in the world and I know the list of the 16 above me and you are not fucking on it. :)

OK, but you need to do what I fucking tell you to do because I’m superior to you. Let’s get the fucking pecking order straight here you lumpen plebe.

I fucking resent ignorant trash who are fucking dumb but think they fucking know as much as their fucking superiors. they don’t. They need to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and do what we fucking tell them do.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Stop passing on this anti-jewish LIE propagated by jew-hating fucknuts. Anti-Semitism ONLY means jew-hating and doesn’t include arabs at all.

The term “Anti-Semitism” was invented by a Jew-hating German who only meant Jews and NEVER meant Arabs. He used the trm “anti-semitic” to separate his “scientific” jew-hating from previous religious-based jew-hating.

However, the term antisemitism is specifically used in reference to attitudes held towards Jews. The word antisemitic (antisemitisch in German) was probably first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider in the phrase “antisemitic prejudices” (German: “antisemitische Vorurteile”).[7] Steinschneider used this phrase to characterize Ernest Renan’s ideas about how “Semitic races” were inferior to “Aryan races.” These pseudo-scientific theories concerning race, civilization, and “progress” had become quite widespread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, especially as Prussian nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke did much to promote this form of racism. In Treitschke’s writings Semitic was synonymous with Jewish, in contrast to its usage by Renan and others.

Learn what you are fucking talking about before you open you fucking mouth you fucking cocksucker.

Oh, that’s what it was about? OK. I do remember that “The Editors” seemed to have some major, emotional beef with Noam Chomsky, which was one of the main reasons I stopped hanging out over there, actually.

Maybe I didn’t learn what the whole deal was simply because internet flame wars can be rather tedious to try to understand, if you’re not in the ‘in’ group that knows all the whys and wherefores about how they started. As I said though, most of the commenters over at “The Poor Man” seemed to find the entire thing just as pointless as I did, and subtly (or not so subtly) tended to tell “The Editors” that they weren’t interested in hearing the gory details.

I guess, to me, “The Editors” is a talented guy, but just someone that I don’t see eye-to-eye with politically. He was never an asshole to me personally, let me put it that way.

The flashpoint was Gore Vidal, but HTML had been mildly calling him on his leftist-bashing for some time – I recall both him and Tweety showing up at HTML’s former blog at one point, but it was calm then. But he periodically goes back to it, especially with regards to Chomsky, who has apparently come to stand in his mind for everything he hates about leftism, no matter how many times it gets pointed out to him that he’s ridiculously ignorant of what the man has actually said, and no matter that the Editors has been flatly, embarrassingly wrong about more things in his short blogging career than Noam has been in a few decades of activism.

He apparently believes that Noam is connected to a rumor frequently heard about the Bosnian war only being fought to secure the area for the construction of some massive pipeline to transport oil/natural gas/etc., which is another symbol of leftist craziness that holds a totemic fascination for him, it seems. Funny thing is, I’ve never seen Chomsky say one word about that (and I’ve read a lot of him), but one person who did make some hay about it was…Michael Moore, who the Editors has always defended against his cartoonish caricature (to his credit). This kind of ignorance and incoherence, combined with a habit of being a raging jackass to anyone who corrects him, is what makes the Editors such a special boy.

Is that you, That Fool? Long time no see, man, welcome back.

I agree that many academics seem totally unconnected to and unconcerned with the plight of poor people in general and poor whites in particular. None-the-less many of us are doing what we can. We support and sometimes testify in favor of programs to help the poor and against policies that harm them. We strongly support the broadest possible access to higher education (the best route out of poverty) and improved k-12 education for everyone. Remember that, for all our education and relatively more affluent life style, we have very little power. We are a small group who controls few if any critical resources.

Target your anger at those who deserve it. The think tank people, the pundits, and all the rest of the class war enablers deserve it.