Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Did you understand the (apparently gratuitous) dig at Elizabeth Breunig? I didn't have any idea who she was, or why he took that shot at her.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

He may or may not have said something interesting there; I wonder, by which I mean, I wonder.

It appears he has some interesting points buried within the equivocation. Most of them appear to be derived from the European neo-Marxist cultural critics of the 70s and 80s. But I do like the question as to whether Bill Bennett can tap dance, though I'd rather see him Samba.

Re: I don't understand
 

On that point, Ray Dalio: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-b...mies-ray-dalio

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This article is very hard to get through. The fact that the author chooses an analogy he doesn't even try to understand undermines the whole piece.

If you're going to use Tupac and Ice T, you need to put in more than a gesture in the direction of actual work when it comes to understanding who they are/were, what they were trying to accomplish, and the environment in which those things are shaped. Using a video of Tupac as a fucking kid and describing him as an "effeminate young man" as the basis to question the authenticity of who he became as an artist (and a person) later is fucking inane.

Tupac's mother was Afeni Shakur, an activist, a paralegal, and a former member of the Black Panthers. She was also a former drug addict. When the family was homeless, Tupac joined a theater group, which changed his life. His mother made him read the NYT when he was a child. She was a deeply complicated, flawed, thoughtful person. Tupac was as well.

This idea that this author saw the "real" person in the video he uses and that he took on a thug persona just to be a successful rapper is such a superficial, ignorant reading of an amazingly talented, intelligent, and conflicted artist. Tupac was many things on stage and off. The reason why people loved him so much (aside from his talent) was his genuineness. He put himself out there as an artist and the many contradictions of who he was are reflected in his work. He could write a piece as touching and "soft" as Dear Mama in one instance and turn around and write a piece as vicious as "Hit 'em up" in the next. The whole point of his professional work was to show that he embodied both the beautiful and the ugly. The statement he continually made in his music and in interviews is that this country and its treatment of people like him created him. And no matter what he did, he was going to be seen as a thug. He tried to take that and use it in a number of different ways. Sometimes he was purposefully in the face of the society that created and then labeled him. Sometimes it was him working out his issues with anger and violence. Sometimes it was to talk to people who were similarly labeled and cast aside to let them know that they have value. But in no way was it just a fucking mask he put on just to sell records.

Now, that's not to say that Tupac wasn't deeply flawed. He was. So was Ice T. But the reduction of complicated people and artists (and I'm no fan of Ice T, although he had a couple of okay songs early on) that this author uses as the basis of his analysis for his broader point is truly annoying. I understand what he's trying to do in this piece, but Jesus. Try a little harder.

If you want to use an interview to sum up Tupac, use this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrL3HmGdAZE

Aside from that, I found the article to be muddled and mostly without a point. I'm guessing the main point, which is hard to see through the anecdotal bullshit and "the poor are poor for a reason" recurring theme, is that the right should stop manipulating their base into thinking their problems can be blamed on third parties by using inauthentic voices passed off as genuine. While this is an easy concept with which one can agree, it overlooks the fact that this is entirely what the Republican Party has been about since the fucking Southern Strategy. So I'm supposed to take from this piece that this new wrinkle is bad because elite whites put on a white minstrel show to fool non-elite whites into thinking they are also non-elite to get their vote? This article is a whole lot of nothing.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The piece is hard to get through, and it's not always clear what he's saying, or why. If it came from an author with whom I generally agreed, I would be more critical of it, but I appreciate the author's willingness to agree that his own team's shit stinks.

Most artists are involved in a self-creation creation of an artistic persona, be it Robert Zimmerman becoming Bob Dylan or Thomas Pynchon opting out and using Irwin Corey as a surrogate. Williamson's treatment of Tupac is not particularly sympathetic or insightful, except in that he is wiling to acknowledge this process of creation, which is significant to him not as it relates to artistry, but as a debunking of the conservative notion (or the notion often advanced by conservatives) that black culture represents some cultural pathology. Williamson sees that it's a schtick, and that so is country music, and that the later can be just as pathological. This is not particularly insightful biography or cultural criticism, but politically speaking it is something of a statement against interest, and so relevant and admissible. Would it have been better if he hadn't tried to say anything about Tupac? Sure. But a conservative pathology is that you can't say anything critical about conservatives unless you also prove your bona fides by going after someone like Tupac or Elizabeth Bruenig, whose value in demonstrating Williamson's bona fides was, I suspect, in inversion proportion to her relevance in what he was otherwise talking about.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The dumb shots at Shakur and Springsteen are worth skipping. The guy doesn’t get either artist (and I say this as someone who thinks Springsteen is often a cliche machine).

I see the current “minstrel show” as the natural end of the Southern Strategy. It’s what happens when a party keeps its underclass fat, drunk, and stupid, and tells them they’re “Real ‘Murica.” (Pour a 40 for Flounder, btw.)

They now think they run the place.

I’m beginning to think opioids might be the best fix for an impossible problem.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

They are running the place.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Not really.

What have the angry base received? Gorsuch? He'd have been a moderate GOP nominee.

Rollbacks of regulations, pipelines being green-lighted, defunding a health care program on which Appalachia depended?

The base is getting what it always gets: Lip service. They're useful idiots serving corporate interests favored by Trump, almost all of which are the same corporate interests served by every previous moderate GOP President. And with the exception of the fossil fuel sector, every previous Democrat President.

Meet the new boss...

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

ICE crackdowns. A young woman in custody being forced to have a baby. Successive attempts to put a blanket ban on Muslim immigration. Tons of judges. Sabotaging Obamacare.

Yeah, aside from that last one, which his base shouldn't want but does, it's not much because (1) the administration is completely incompetent, and (2) the courts are not yet stacked.

I don't understand what you're saying, but if you're saying he's a moderate among potential GOP nominees, that's not at all true. Sure, he's not the worst, but he's among them.

That's all they ever wanted. They don't like him because of policy. They like him because he hates what they hate: Muslims, black people (especially Obama), immigrants, women, liberals, trans people, and kinda sorta the gays but not so much any more because my cousin Larry is gay and he's a good guy so we're only going to make sure they stay unprotected instead of proposing to "hang them all" at least in public.

I don't know what he favors, aside from the above. He doesn't know what he favors. You don't know what he favors.

:rolleyes:

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think this is all fine. Like I said, I understand what the author was trying to do. But I am so sick of giving these types of assholes credit for not being complete shitbags. "Hey guys, black people aren't inherently bad people, mostly. Poverty is the issue." Great. Let's throw you a parade. You guys going to change anything at all? No? Well, here are some pats on your back for thinking about stuff, kinda.

The level of frustration I have with the world has never been higher and I grew up in NYC in the fucking 80s. I just came back from a memorial service for my daughter's step-grandfather. This man grew up in NYC. Did well. Has a large apartment on CPW and a huge house in the Hamptons (bay side, let's not get carried away). My daughter and I were the only people of color in a room of at least 100 people. Sad occasion for sure. But I'm looking around the room just completely disgusted at the isolation white people carefully cultivate. He was a Democrat. Voted for Hillary. Seemed like a nice enough guy. But how the fuck is it even possible that you don't know one black person well enough for them to show up to your funeral? That's the problem with this country. And it's never going to be fixed.

How many people of color will show up to your* funeral? What's your excuse for why none will? Travel in different circles? None in your neighborhood? Didn't really hang out with any at your elite undergrad? Not really in law school either? Private school parents aren't exactly diverse and you just haven't gotten to know the others yet because your kids aren't friends with theirs? There aren't many at work and the ones there never seem to go to group stuff? Sure. It just happened that way. You don't have a racist bone in your body. Right?

This country is fucked.

TM

*Obviously this is a rhetorical exercise.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Maybe the base doesn't care as much about "receiving" policy as it does about having someone in charge who will piss off coastal elites, put minorities and immigrants in their place, support law & order, give voice to traditional gender roles, and give a big "f*ck you" to other countries. (If Appalachians really wanted government health care programs, they would have voted for government health care programs.)

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

In so many ways, the moment we are living through is just peak frustration at how comfortable people are with denial and outright obfuscation. On race, on criminal justice, on climate change, on taxes. Heck, on what the president just said or didn't say.

NYC is a bit different - or seems that way when I've visited which used to be several times a year - but the sad thing is it doesn't really take any cultivation for most of America. We did our segregating generations ago and then locked it in place with suburbs, zoning and school choice. Just go about your day not actively trying to diversify your social group and voila, it's pretty much all white.

Worse, we've pretty much accepted that there's nothing wrong with that.

Or, actually, it's white with some Asian and latinx mixed in, around here maybe some native people, but virtually no black.

Doesn't need to be discussed, but worth thinking about.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I could not agree more. To be alive in America today is to be in a constant state of rage.

The thing is, we all are people in power. We hire people. We fire people. To the extent we work in firms that are overwhelmingly white and male, especially at the higher levels, it is officially our fault now.

We were going to all be better than this, but we're not, and now we've got to make some impact and change some of this shit before it's too late.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Bullshit. The process of retaining segregation takes enormous effort. Knocking minorities down at work, focusing on the good neighborhood, good family or good school the unqualified white boy went to in the hiring committee meeting, making someone moving in to the neighborhood feel a little uncomfortable , finding ways to not give a minority a loan or letting them into a school, keeping some recent immigrant from getting too comfortable attending the same churches, having police who stop anyone with dark skin from driving across the town line.... these are all efforts white people take constantly.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Blue Lives Matter, internet chapter.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Exactly.

And the real work comes in the constant self-reassurance that it isn't intentional.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I had dinner with my niece last week. She told me she was recruited by Stanford (swimming) but chose to go to LSE partially because she didn't want to put up with all the crap of being black in America. She did not feel like that a few years ago when she talked about wanting to go to school here. This is just anecdotal but I do feel like our profile has taken a nosedive internationally and I am ashamed.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

When we started my firm (and you all know me I just realized so this shit is QT), we were tiny. And we needed a 401k company, and hardly any wanted someplace so small. We had two candidates.

One was a black college friend. At school we were close, I moved away and was gone for a while, so a bit of drift. Still, our young families got together 3 or 4 times a year. He will (I will?) attend a funeral.

Great sales pitch, who knows what competence means in that field, but he sounded good.

The other group was white people who sounded like computer programs.

I brought him in and my wonk partner brought the white guys in. See, i was clients and he was wonking structure. So he was the one who did the deep dive into what makes sense here. He was making dozens of decisions each week at first, and I simply did not disagree, as to do so would require me getting up to speed.

And he told me that he wanted to go with the white guys. I asked why. They were cheaper in some respect (I later asked my friend who said that is all a shell game). I thought about saying, "fuck that, it's my work bringing in the $$, why did you even bring in someone else." But. I. Didn't. Instead I called my friend and told him. And he really didn't care (I'm sure he was pissed at the insult, but substantively) because we were small. But right now we'd be a good account. Sill, he is doing fine. We would be a good smallish account, at best.

We stayed friends (until divorce, so I see him now less frequently).


I later came to realize the reasons probably had a lot to do with perceived
competence, I can only assume because of race. My partner has never done anything else that looked like that. And 4 years ago, the two of us, together we fired a partner because of racist shit on his FB. But you guys are right, everyone deals with the outward racism, but it is the "who gets the 401K work" that is this year's challenge.

As to hiring, that is a tough one in patents. The realities are such that we do not see black engineers going to law school in large enough numbers. My former biggest client had a black gc, he was big on hiring POC. The assistant patent position opened up and he insisted it be filled with a black attorney. A year later they had not filled it and he hired a Greek guy. There are upstream problems. Plus, at least around here, diversity drives from auto companies are such that black engineers get good job offers, so why go to ls?

And I was grooming one of my basketball guys to get into patent. But he just went to Australia to play pro ball (happy for him, but I did try).


EDIT- I didn't say it, but i feel like a complete shit about the 401k stuff, completely no excuse, shit.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Wow.

If the Dems don't win either the House or the Senate in 2018, I think this country (as we know it) is over.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I know what LSE is, of course, but you might clarify for these others who are more provincial.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

A nosedive seems like a generous characterization of our international reputation. This summer, we had to convince my wife's relatives in Greece that many Americans actually are aware that Trump is a pathological liar and and emotionally unstable disaster. They thought our entire country had just completely gone off the deep end. And let's face it, we basically have. Sebastian can scour the internet for the rest of time finding commentators who will say the Trump is not "the problem," that he is just a symptom of problems that have been bubbling up for decades. Fuck that shit. Trump is "the problem" "right fucking now." And, unfortunately, because his level of complete unhinged sociopathic fuckery is fucking horrible and dangerous RIGHT NOW, we don't have time to sit back and worry about figuring out exactly why Trump being elected was not Sebastian's fault. We need to try to contain the hemorrhaging occurring right now in this fuckhole of a country.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I don't know what it is, but I know it comes right after LSD.

Here's Parliament with "Funkentelechy" for the Daily Dose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFalZJ5eEwY

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

We all have sins, which is not to excuse them, just to say we have to work harder to make up for them. The thing is, I'd bet your guy was better in every way - he probably had to be.

I just lost a really star black associate, a guy who will have a great practice and will go far, to one of the big national shops in town, and fundamentally I think I just didn't protect him enough from the little shitty things in a way that would have made us different. He would have loved to have been at a smaller shop that was different. Building a welcoming place is hard. Of course, the huge increase in pay probably helped too. But there have to be consequences for the white folks who make life miserable through a lot of little things. We have to call more of them out.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

ehh, worst is that this isn’t really true. Worst is that they are all tied for even, at least as far as we can see.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Usually it goes the other way. Black associates at large firms find themselves on the outside of the power pipeline (and the related social dynamic) and move (i) in-house, which (although not exactly where it should be) is light years ahead of law firms when it comes to diversity, especially big ones or (ii) to smaller firms with better records with diversity even though the paychecks are smaller.

What I don't understand is why firms don't raid law school night school programs. The people there are often diverse, have worked all their lives (including through school--and the class load is like 1 fewer per semester while the curriculum and professors are exactly the same), and would be completely loyal to any law firm that brought them in.

I had the opportunity to talk to Disney's GC about what I thought would be an innovative way to bring in more diversity to his outside counsel and mentioned this. Of course he said he was the product of a night school law school education and seemed like he thought it to be a good idea. I don't understand the stigma attached to it. But it's there. Can any of you who worked at a large firm (hell, or any firm) name one person who came from night school? This idea that the best talent comes from the most elite schools is a joke. Our firm's partnership adheres to this delusion and there are very few partners who went to elite schools! There is a real disconnect about how people process themselves versus everyone else.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

My firm big law was what passes for "white shoes" around here. I was night school, but my boutique merged in there. I don't know if it would have hired me. My last big law had exploded from mid-sized to big (and nothing here is big in the sense NYC means) in the decade before I joined. The firm was kicking ass and driven by people that came up with a chip on their shoulders, night schools, shitty schools, hell there were people who went to Cooley.

By the time I joined they were seen as equal to the old line big law. We started interviewing "the elite" and the CEO, who was night school and too smart to not get this, got starry eyed. We started hiring these kids like mad. And the firm started to sputter.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

FWIW, the government hiring process with which I'm most familiar was highly suspicious of the elite schools. No one would badmouth those schools, but no one wanted to hire from them, either.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yes, I've seen it go the other way when I was in a big firm. The good news is I just poached my associate's replacement from a small firm with a strong reputation for diversity, so I'm hoping I can improve ours (which is, well, very Boston).

I like the night school thought, but can't think of anyone from night school at any of the firms I have been at.

I've used the minority bar associations as part of trying to develop a pipeline, and gotten good resumes just by making sure they were included in every request for resumes we do.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Very interesting.

One of the things I think we also have to do is stop promoting mediocre white guys because "everyone likes them". Is this just a widespread Boston disease or is that how the whole country promotes every Orville Ames Booth III out there?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Everyone hates night school people.

GW was seen as the place for IP when I was there. And that was 95% based on night students, we all worked for the PTO or firms. GW was thinking about closing night school, because of US News & World Reports ranking. The average LSAT and GPA for night was lower than for day, and so we were holding them back. Meanwhile, its most visible program was IP, go figure.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I saw this first hand while abroad recently.

My reply to “Trump? WTF?”: “He’s an atrocious ass, but the place was fucked for a variety of other reasons way beyond him. It’s cratering and filled with greedy people and idiots.

Thankfully, I’m Canadian.”

(I actually did say the first part. And I believe it.)

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yeah, but when you’re hiring outside litigators, “But he went to _________!” is great job protection if the case goes to shit. It’s always about the cya.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

So you’re saying the base wants nothing but to drag down others to its level? Okay. I’m sure a few do, and perhaps I’m assuming rational thought where I shouldn’t, but don’t most people want something? Don’t these entitled folks assert they’re not getting what they want, and demand they get it?

If you’re right... if 90% of populists just want to inflict pain, yeah, we’re fucked.

ETA: I know someone who just dined with Trump. I know exactly what he wants. To be adored, and to fatten pockets he thinks will repay the favor. Full stop.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

People abroad have always known there were many monumental asses in America. They followed our civil rights struggles, they dealt with us trying to suck them in to wars, they know we had a dark side.

They never expected us to go electing Morgoth.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

FWIW, this happened to me in Vienna. In 2004. But with Bush.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Monumental asses are in every country. Humans are, for the most part, dickheads.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yes, the Sebbys of the world have been pretending to be Canadian for a very long time.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I have seen this on the East Coast, but there is less of it on the West Coast.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Sooner or later he will make like a maple and leaf the US.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Sebby. What a hoser.