Andrew Sullivan, the human hyperbola
Not hyperbole; hyperbola.
I used to follow Sullivan quite closely, even before I became a blogger. However, he really went off the deep end some time during the candidacy of Sarah Palin and developed a very singular theory about her faking her pregnancy with her last child. I won’t bother to go into it here, except to say it was incredibly bizarre, and he seemed quite obsessed with it.
Since then, I’ve paid attention to him only very sporadically, but this article of his from three days ago caught my attention, and that’s the subject of this post.
Why do I refer to Sullivan as a human hyperbola? This is why:
The graph approaches the asymptotes but never actually touches them.
In much of Sullivan’s work, he keeps coming tantalizingly close to seeing the truth but he never quite gets the whole picture; he backs away instead.
You might point out that a hyperbola doesn’t back away. It keeps getting closer but never gets there. Well, metaphors aren’t always perfect. Some are hyperbole.
But I digress.
Why does Sullivan interest me at all? I think he represents a certain percentage of people – I don’t know how large it is, but it includes quite a few people I know – who can concede that the right is correct on certain points but cannot or will not fundamentally change their politics and who continue to look at actual conservatives (or Trump supporters, which isn’t exactly the same thing) with disdain.
And don’t be misled by the fact that many MSM outlets refer to Sullivan himself as a conservative. He may agree with conservatives on some points, and he may even hold himself out to be a conservative, but in my humble opinion he definitely is not.
In that recent piece, Sullivan is at approximately the stage I got to around 2002 regarding the MSM, but I don’t think he’ll ever make the transition to the amount of distrust it so richly deserves. For example, he continues to condemn Rittenhouse – although he doesn’t say why. It seems to me that he can’t let go of some of his original MSM-planted assumptions about Rittenhouse, even when faced with the trial, and he doesn’t feel he needs to argue for his point of view because he thinks he is stating self-evident truths.
Why oh why was Sullivan relying on the NY Times for its Rittenhouse reportage in the first place? He’s pretty slow to get it. The facts about the case were out there quite early for all to see. I’m not a journalist with credentials like Sulllivan’s, but I seem to have been far more careful then he about Rittenhouse and did far more research on both sides.
What is it with someone like Sullivan? Is it hubris? Assumptions of which he’s mostly unaware? He doesn’t seem to know what he doesn’t know.
Here’s a section of Sullivan’s essay, to show you the sort of thing I mean about getting close and backing off:
I haven’t watched the whole [Rittenhouse] trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he’s acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I’m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.
Why aren’t you defending Rittenhouse, Andrew? Is he not innocent? Was he not there protecting property, helping people, being polite? Did he not fire in self-defense? What’s your problem with him? His age, his Palinesque class qualities, or was it the gun he carried?
Sullivan also writes this in the essay, about the media’s role in Russiagate:
The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.
Fine as far as it goes. And yet he feels he must follow it with this:
This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help.
Actually, Andrew, it means that there is zero evidence that Trump was “eager for Russian help” (not that it matters in terms of the mendacity of the press, anyway). Why does Sullivan cling to this last remnant of fiction? To say to the leftist hordes,, “Don’t be too mean to me; I hate Trump too?”
But then he follows that with this [emphasis mine]:
But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
It’s like he gets too close to the fire of truth, and has to pull away momentarily to cool down before he burns in it, but is subsequently drawn back to it to warm his hands again. And actually, Trump wasn’t right in the end (what does that even mean in this context)? He was right in the very beginning and he was right in the middle and he was right in the end, if indeed this has even ended.
In other words: Trump was right. It’s not really that hard to say, is it? I didn’t like Trump in 2015-2016, but at some point a few months into his presidency in 2017 I recognized, to my great surprise, that Trump was usually right. What’s Sullivan’s excuse – or that of so many others who see part of the truth – over four years later? It shouldn’t have taken Durham to let anyone know this – although I give Sullivan some credit for being one of the few who are saying it at all.
Here we go with more back and forth from Sullivan – the list of egregious media offenses, and then some minimizing in the last sentence:
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.
As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
Minor? Minor? If it had been Trump’s child and if it implicated Trump in massive corruption as it did Biden, Sullivan and others would have been screaming it to the skies. And a great many Biden voters (one in six) have said it was one of eight issues that, had they known about it, would have swayed their vote away from Biden. Not so minor after all.
The ending of Sullivan’s essay is quite fascinating, at least to me (emphasis mine):
I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology . But with this kind of record, how can I not?
We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.
Give up the Times addiction, Andrew. Or at least, if you must read it every day, read it with a skeptical and judgmental eye and mind. Accept the truth, the truth you yourself have already stated – which is that the MSM lies and lies and lies and then lies some more. And read a lot of coverage from the right, too, and you’ll find over and over that the right is more consistently correct, by far – about the facts. It’s hard to accept, I know, but once seen it cannot be unseen except by a conscious act of self-delusion.
[NOTE: I have a feeling someone will correct me on this hyperbola thing. If so, my excuse? It’s been a long time since I took high school math. A long long time.]
Sullivan was featured on last night’s ’60 Minutes’ which I almost never watch but I FFd through to get to the part about the new Beatles doc ‘Get Back’ so I have no idea what it was about but there was that.
Sully is close enough to the truth to need a conscious self-delusion.
Many more are not quite so close and their self-delusions are unconscious.
But what does a conscious self-delusion FEEL like?
Do you walk in circles saying, ‘I will not believe. I WILL not believe I will not….”?
Or do you retreat to a warmer, safer room where there’s so much less dissonance?
It’s pretty amazing to see a person struggle with their various cognitive dissonances almost in real time like this. It’s almost like watching a dog trying to extract a treat from one of those dispenser toys or something,
It’s like he gets too close to the fire of truth, and has to pull away momentarily to cool down before he burns in it, but is subsequently drawn back to it to warm his hands again.
That’s a great metaphor. It unfortunately describes a lot of people who aren’t completely closed-minded ideologues, but can’t make that final leap, which would involve actually supporting a Republican. Dershowitz, Turley, Kaus, Althouse, and many others fit that description.
I used to follow Sullivan and his blog until I began to wonder if he had AIDS dementia. He seems better now. But he still is obsessed with gay politics, which is probably why he cannot see the forest.
I feel sorry for the Rittenhouse kid because he stumbled into the present day third rail of politics, race. It doesn’t matter if he and his “victims” were all white. He interfered with a BLM demonstration of virtue by trashing a small city. In LA, the black district attorney was subjected to a BLM demonstration on her front porch. Her husband opened the door with a gun in his hand and told the thugs to get out of there. As a result, she lost the election to a white communist, who now has a recall campaign after him.
Trig Palin. That says it all about sullivan
Ayn Rand said.
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Sullivan is a certain kind of “conservative” (I know one like him) who just can’t bear to be associated with grass-roots conservatives because they aren’t his “kind of people”. It’s a class thing for shallow “conservatives” who will cave to the left (and be eaten by the left) rather align themselves the “wrong kind of people”. Who are those people? They’re guys like Rittenhouse and Zimmerman and a lot of cops and members of the armed forces who actually carry guns and defend themselves and others with those guns. They’re guys like Trump who is rude and crude but actually strove to enact conservative policies (and had a lot of successes).
Was with the parents last night. I was in the kitchen preparing food as 60 Minutes played on the tv. Sullivan was on, and thankfully I only heard about fives minutes of his self-promotion and personal politics, ideas that only a fool would hold, until my mother turned to another channel.
“Liberal turned conservative David Mamet famously said:
In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments modern liberals have to pretend not to know things…“
The orbit of many comets is a hyperbola. It approaches the Sun from deep space along a nearly straight line. As it gets close to the Sun its orbit curves around the Sun and then goes back to outer space along a nearly straight line never to return.
Class. Caste.
And Faggotry.
Normality and normal people repel him.
I also used to read Sullivan regularly, but gave up years ago as he didn’t seem committed to uncovering truth.
Now that Trump is gone he seems to be making a play for relevance again. To his credit, he’s reading the tea leaves better than Jonah Goldberg. Sullivan is an elitist, but he’s learned life gets harsher when the rubes aren’t giving you money.
He’s more the opposite of a hyperbola. A hyperbola never reaches the asymptote. Sullivan crosses the line of assininess frequently, and with reckless abandon.
GRA; Griffin:
I almost never watch 60 Minutes, but a friend mentioned that Sullivan would be interviewed and so I watched a few minutes of that part. First they labeled him a conservative, then he spoke negatively about other conservatives today and mentioned “Trump worship,” then he talked about a few other things but I heard nothing like the attack on the MSM that was in his article. Either he didn’t see fit to get into much of that while on 60 Minutes (pretty funny, since it’s the MSM), or I turned it off before he got around to it, or (and this is actually a very real possibility) he did talk about it in the interview but they edited out all the critique of the left and left in the critique of the right.
If he’s the Hyperbola, who’s the Witch of Agnesi?
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/WitchofAgnesi.html
Misspent youth flipping through dusty calculus texts in second hand bookshops.
“In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.” In that spirit, I think in any metaphor it’s ok to depart from strict correspondence in some places.
When you’re thinking about gravity, there’s kind of three kinds of orbits, hyperbola, parabola, and ellipse, but one of them (parabola) is just the dividing line between the others. (It’s the case where the sum of kinetic and potential energy is exactly zero, and it may be that nothing in the universe is following an exactly parabolic orbit.)
If you think of “conservatism” as like the Sun, then Andrew Sullivan might change his direction because of conservatism but he’s not going to go in orbit around it; at best he may learn something from it that sends him off in some other direction that he wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Something else would have to interact with him in a way that causes him to lose enough kinetic energy to “orbit” conservatism; a collision with a sufficiently large fact may do it, but it would have to be just the right kind.
Andrew Sullivan is part of the legacy media, he’s made his whole life there, and he’s going to cut them a lot of slack for a long time to come. He’s also been on the fake conservative train for a long time, much longer than some of these never-Trumpers. Will never forget his “conservative choice” endorsement of John Kerry.
As Batya Ungar-Sargon quoted from the Talmud in that Glenn Beck podcast linked yesterday, “take the truth where you can find it”.
Lately when I read a Sullivan blog post, usually I agree with 95% of the main story and appreciate his insights. He often has a different and interesting take on events instead of repeating the same points I can read on a hundred conservative blogs. But the other 5%, and then the minor stories at the end, I skim and don’t worry about too much.
As Reagan said, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20 percent traitor.” (For varying values of X and 100-X.) If Sullivan in all his not-quite-making-it-all-the-way can convince a few on the left that they should examine their dogmas, then GREAT, I’ll take it. His lack of taking that one last step is infuriating, but it might make him less effective at reaching the people we’d like to reach, so I’m okay with that.
neo states, “he really went off the deep end some time during the candidacy of Sarah Palin and developed a very singular theory about her faking her pregnancy with her last child. I won’t bother to go into it here, except to say it was incredibly bizarre, and he seemed quite obsessed with it.”
An indication of just how threatened by Palin was he.
and
“In much of Sullivan’s work, he keeps coming tantalizingly close to seeing the truth but he never quite gets the whole picture; he backs away instead.”
Not all who sense the truth can handle it. “None are so blind, as those who will not see.”
Nothing wrong with Neo’s hyperbola math. Though the graphs in her link are a little odd looking. Too close to circular arcs, though maybe that’s correct too.
Wikipedia is usually excellent on technical things,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbola#/media/File:Hyperbel-def-ass-e.svg
_____
… but it includes quite a few people I know – who can concede that the right is correct on certain points but cannot or will not fundamentally change their politics and who continue to look at actual conservatives (or Trump supporters, which isn’t exactly the same thing) with disdain.
This is a good point, but I like to quibble and amplify. Don’t dismiss the importance of “conceding that the right is correct on certain points.” Good sense always begins with finding the correct facts and a good viewpoint. And flogging an old point: Disdaining people is at the core of this. It is how most of these folks stroke their own ego. It may be true that the whole mental operation begins with the disdain and then looks for an excuse to justify it.
This may be part of Neo’s Sullivan quandary. He either hates certain groups of people or he can’t stand to sully his self image by associating with them even in the context of a political position.
Sullivan, like Douglas Murray and the Hitchens boys, seems a big fan of the old, British class system, or at least it’s institutions (I know Christopher Hitchens was a Marxist and is a bit more complex). Unlike Murray and the Hitchens boys, Sullivan seems unwilling to pursue truth when it jeopardizes his admittance and acceptance into elite circles. Or ellipses.
What is it with someone like Sullivan? Is it hubris? Assumptions of which he’s mostly unaware? He doesn’t seem to know what he doesn’t know.
It may be his Britishness. He was born, reared, and educated in the UK (including a first-class BA from Magdalen College, Oxford)– he didn’t come to the United States until he was 21– and then he promptly enrolled at Hahvahd (where he completed a PhD in 1990). It’s also possible he’s still angry about being denied U.S. citizenship when he first applied for it because of his HIV+ status (he finally became a citizen officially in 2016). The third possibility is his affection for weed– he admitted to being “dependent” (his word) on the stuff since 2001. From an interview he gave to NY Magazine (consider the source):
I fit a rare profile for a daily stoner. I didn’t touch the stuff until I was 36 years old, largely because I have chronic asthma and the idea of smoke in my lungs repelled me. But I was literally seduced into it. A beautiful, blue-eyed, hairy-chested dude I was completely bowled over by turned out to be a hard-core stoner. The night we met, he invited me to smoke with him. . . . I have a vague memory of what happened next — some incredible nonlinear sex was definitely part of it — and woke up in the morning after an amazing night’s sleep with a ravenous appetite.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/09/yes-im-dependent-on-weed.html
To invoke Neo’s word for it, the “nonlinear sex” was doubtless hyperbolic.
People will believe what they choose to believe; that’s it.
If facts or evidence contradicts the edifice upon which their belief system rests, then that evidence is either wrong , ignored or rationalized away.
This ability to ignore or rationalize evidence / facts is independent of an individuals level of education, intellect or social standing.
It is based 100000000% on one’s personality type.
Was watching on youtube the true life story of how the Mossad captured and killed the “Butcher of Riga,” Herberts Cukurs in Uruguay.
He murdered 30,000 Latvian jews during WWII. After the war he fled to and lived in Brazil. The Mossad convinced him to go to Uruguay to meet “business” people, but was killed by them there.
At the end of the program his son (born in Brazil) was interviewed. He insisted his father never killed anybody and was not a war criminal.
HIs justification?
Nobody had presented any proof that his father was a mass murderer.
His son can easily do a mini research project and look up what is out there about the Butcher of Riga and his father. He need not believe anybody, but can make up his own mind based upon what he learns from his research.
Let me guess; he never bothered looking into any of this.
Why?
Because if you keep your head in the sand, you will never have to face facts that may turn upside down everything you have believed; that everything you believed was totally wrong. That you were so stupid, you believed a bunch a lies without question.
This will make you feel like a total POS.
And what’s worse, having your little social network either ostracize you (God forbid!), or have them realize you were dead wrong.
Better to keep your head in the sand.
Ignorance can indeed be bliss.
}}} NOTE: I have a feeling someone will correct me on this hyperbola thing.
If anyone does: “It’s poetic license, you idiot!”
Done. 😉
You could also go with “strange attractor”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Attractor#Strange_attractor
He constantly circles around it, to varying degrees, but never actually Gets There.
😀
}}} Ayn Rand said.
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Aka, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
It ain’t new. 😛
}}} The orbit of many comets is a hyperbola.
Actually, a parabola, but similar to most non-mathematical eyes… 😉
Good post, and unfortunately all too common.
This was a terrific piece of commentary, thanks Neo.
Sullivan likes to pretend to conservatism, but he isn’t a true conservative – he’s the Fair Weather type, an old-fashioned Southern Democrat at best. He’s a Progressive, and with the right candidate to defend, a Democrat. I think that’s why he goes asymptotic when it comes to Conservative political truth – he’s uncomfortable speaking it plainly because that would be admitting it to himself; …and a hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.
Zaphod & Possibly Huxley: “Strange attractors? What about the Three Body Problem then?”
Sully (sic): “Problem? What Problem? You call that a Problem? Three’s hardly even Company. Take my money! You’d be surprised just how much a Koala can Bear. And boy am I going to tell you all about it whether you want to know it nor not.”
I’ve always felt that Sullivan damaged himself spiritually and intellectually in his extremely raw gay sex/drug habits with an unlimited number of partners known and unknown. This of course led to his long voyage with AIDS cocktail drugs — never good and also something that takes an intellectual edge off. Maybe these blunting effects are in abeyance now that he is older but he may not now have the brainpower to change even if he knew that he needed to change to be intellectually consistent. Then again perhaps he knows all to be true but simply cannot contemplate the destruction of his personal life such a change would trigger.
PA Cat:
“Nonlinear sex”?
Curvilinear sex? Are we into geometry again?
}}} If he’s the Hyperbola, who’s the Witch of Agnesi?
I would suggest the modern day Agnesi must be somewhere near to San Francisco.
Or maybe NYC. Or would the latter be the “up and coming Witch of Agnesi”?
😀
Little known fact that Sully after Gian Carlo Menotti’s runaway success with Amahl and the Night Visitors wrote the libretto for a one act Opera about trying to get a room at the Inn on Christmas Eve:
Emil and the Night Rate (*)
(Geddit… geddit?)
Apparently he gave up on the project when he figured out that just about anywhere would do. Rooms Shrooms.
* Wickedpedia informs me that Poppers are amyl nitrite based, but artistic licentiousness FTW.
}}} People will believe what they choose to believe; that’s it.
This is utterly dismissive of the fact that some people seek The Truth, even if they don’t like where it leads, and others abandon The Truth (like Sullivan) in pursuit of a passing fancy because they did not like where The Truth was leading them.
There is a difference between the two mindsets that is not a straight line, it’s a mother fucking Berlin Wall.
Got me curious . . . DDG’d “nonlinear sex” and came up empty.
Sure love to find out what it is, *before* I try it (I’m both risk- and nausea- averse).
And I’m hetero (some people are born that way).
Anyone here have a clue as to what Sullivan meant by “nonlinear sex”?
It’s the romance of revolution. Such a toxic infatuation and yet impossible to give up.
I’ve read and
admired Andrew’s writing since he was editor of TNR. He is, however, a snob. Always has been.
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect corollary – (Sometimes I think of this as the Althouse corollary because she seems to do it a lot). Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area. The corollary is after discovering weeks later that article you read was total bullshit and you jumped to it’s conclusions, you still read the next article without a ounce of skepticism and embrace it’s every conclusion.
See https://en.everybodywiki.com/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Why aren’t you defending Rittenhouse, Andrew?
Sullivan prefers young men with more sculpted bodies.
“I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning.” – Your wise Democrat political coach
“I still need alcohol for so much. I still need a couple of stiff shots first thing in the morning to get me to lunch.” – Your wise life coach
M J R:
My guess is that he meant the drugs made the time frame seem mixed-up. Kind of a cloudy and amorphous memory.
Dunno, though.
Neo–
Apropos of “nonlinear sex”– you’d have to ask A. Sullivan what he meant by that. I tried to figure it out– maybe he hallucinated in three dimensions under the influence of weed, maybe he meant threesomes, who knows? He was into a lot of kinky stuff when he was younger.
Aggie,
“a hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.”
It just occured to me that the most basic of requirements to get into heaven may be the willingness to admit to having been wrong. Though to oneself, it’s absolutely a form of lying.
I rather doubt that heaven is populated with liars.
PA Cat:
If I ever get a chance to have a chat with Sullivan, I think I’ll skip that line of inquiry.
I think all sex goes nonlinear at the end.
Neo–
Smart decision– he might offer to demonstrate, and none of us need that!
Mea culpa and all that… but…
Can we all agree to skip over Free Association Tuesday (it is here) next week please?
Nonlinear sex maybe refers to Andrew having sex with a guy who has Peyronie’s disease? Couldn’t resist.
Geoffry Britain,
Revelation 21:8
Specifically mentions fate of liars.
Though in greater scriptural context , one must consider verses such as Luke 13:1-5 and John 14:6, etc…
Thanks, all, for helping me out — especially TommyJay (11:56 pm)!
Good post ( espec. if you go & read Sullivan’s article.
Neo, I thought your metaphor using a (an?) hyperbola was very clever and apt. But what I want to know is how in heck did you think of hyperbola, never mind use it for your article. I had a lot of advanced math (many, many decades ago and prob. haven’t referenced much of it since) and I remember that I learned about hyperbolas, parabolas, etc. I know what they visually look like, but when I googled and saw the axes, planes, descriptions and related equations, I might as well have been looking at an ancient language. And I never would have remembered that the endpoints of a (an?) hyperbola, though drawing nearer and nearer to the axis, they will never intersect — which is the heart of the simile, ie why it works so well to make your pt. about Sullivan (and others) who in retrospect can see the many errors in past work, might even concede, but will never commit to the truth!
Brilliant, (but with all the massive and diverse info in your mind, cannot understand how you pulled that one out of scholastic history. Then, that’s why you do what you do so well, and I, uh, do very different things. lol)
Neo absolutely nailed Sullivan’s problem, although there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on the explanation for it. Probably “all of the above.”
Sullivan: “We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight.”
Does he really think the bias began with Donald Trump??
Has he never heard of Duranty?
Examples before 2016 can be multiplied endlessly.
@ Ray > Ayn Rand said.
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
At the very bottom of Sullivan’s posts, his “sign off” as it were, is this:
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell
Too bad he doesn’t actually succeed, and sometimes apparently doesn’t even try. However, as Bryan recommends, we should take what we can get; it’s more than many other “influencers” are willing to give.
Sullivan used to be the “go to” blog when blogging was young.
He was perceptive. He had something to say. His posts were well-written.
It was exciting times.
He really blew it, though.
Drugs? Meds? It’s a shame, really, but who cares…
As for one being glad that he OCCASIONALLY “gets it” (even if only hyperbolically(?))—and even then has to remind the reader of his so-called “sane conservative” (or should that be “caring conservative”?) bona fides—OK, but once again so what? I doubt very much that anyone to the left of center reads him anyway, except maybe to see what he has to opine about a certain topic and/or to see how much he may “strayed” to the right.
Essentially, the problem is that he destroyed his credibility.
The once and future champion of unprotected gay sex.
A new production of Sartre’s No Exit should feature Andrew and David Brooks bickering from here to eternity.
If you enjoy a particular columnist, you may, in a sense, identify with him.
Identifying with a snob allows a bit of social class to rub off.
For extra goodness, he may speak with the Brit ed class accent.
Happened to hear some recordings of Brit pols during WWII. Nothing like received theater pronunciation, the platinum standard of upper class.
Tribal affinities are very hard to shake.
Saw this in Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2021/11/10/the-scout-mindset-a-review/
The massive cultural changes of the last generation have resulted in a resurgence of human tribalism on a scale that would have left our ancestors aghast.
First, I believe what Sullivan is referring to – “non-linear sex” – is the opposite of “linear sex”, IE, foreplay > intercourse > orgasm. Or how the terrible normie heteros typically do it. For many gay people, literally everything about their life has to be defined by their sexuality. Just saw a Twitter thread by a “queer girl” about her problems dating “hetero men” and all that her “queerness” implies about every aspect of her activist lifestyle. I’d say Sullivan fancies himself to be “above” normal, hetero sex, so he’s virtue signalling with his term “non-linear sex”.
Anyhow, haven’t read through all of the Sullivan piece, but I got as far as this quote:
“We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that.”
Seriously ? Is Sullivan seriously still hung up on the idea that Trump did more than act the role of bragging Queens New Yorker ? Yeah, he exaggerates. A LOT. But his exaggerations are either 1) rooted in the truth, or 2) an attempt to magnify a point, which the media, and by extension, Sullivan, seem to fall for hook, line, and sinker, every single time.
Honestly, what is the purported single greatest untruth Trump ever told in the context of his campaign and presidency ? I honestly don’t know what it is.
I mean, we have the media exaggerations and lack of context – their lies about nazis being “very fine people” and Mexicans all being “murders and rapists”, but both of those are media lies / narratives.
I don’t know, but I’d love to hear some examples
Non linear? Well linear usually refers to a particular kind of “line” i.e., axial, 180 degrees, a straight line.
A straight line, or sex, in other words.
Non linear would represent ultimately, a curl: returning on itself, and would be nonlinear in that sense: representing a path constituting an inversion, one might say.
Homo-sex perversion used to be called sexual inversion in the literature of the British Isles. It is a conceptualization of the disorder that recognizes the peculiar mix of projected auto-fellating narcissisism and underdeveloped neediness that attaches to the inversive expression or behavior; trying to capture the purposive missing inner masculine, through same-sex.
Maybe that is what he was referring to. Whether the son of a bitch recognized it or not.
Yeah, “linear sex” = a, then b, then c. Like I said, typical hetero approach – foreplay > intercourse > orgasm.
I absolutely guarantee that Andrew Sullivan did not unconsciously imply that because he is gay, that he isn’t straight, therefore sex is “non-linear”. He is setting himself on a pedestal because, again, to the militantly gay, hetero-normative sex and everything it entails – romance, marriage, kids, etc. – is an abomination. He was congratulating himself on being non-hetero, not relying on traditional sexual roles and not engaging in simple, antiquated “linear” sex.
What would benefit a Sullivan fan? Or a NYTimes reading devotee?
JustTheNews.com and newsbusters as their alt news diet, that’s what!
Comets can have either hyperbolic or parabolic orbits. If parabolic, they will return to another pass through the inner solar system, either in a few years or perhaps a few thousand. If hyperbolic, they are exceeding the Sun’s escape velocity and will not return, and we are witnessing their first and only visit.
It seems reductive to state it this baldly but Sullivan’s mental-processing problem is entirely about class.
“I still read the NYT first thing in the morning.” – Sullivan.
Why does he do that, when he has virtually the entire world of news and journalism available to him at the push of a button? Why does he write that, when the entire thrust of his essay is the unreliability of organizations like the NYT?
Being able to think of himself as “the kind of person who reads the NYT first thing in the morning” means something to Sullivan. It means, in his mind, he’s smart and erudite and urbane and sophisticated. It’s part of how he defines himself as BETTER than other people. Is that any different than any of the other class-based distinctions people have drawn in the past, and all the prejudices which accompany them? No. Is Sullivan capable of acknowledging that? Hell, no.
The simple truth is that people like Sullivan aren’t going to change. They’re just going to be pushed off the stage by younger generations. That is what’s going on in the GOP right now and it’s coming to the Democrats in short order.
Mike
csimon:
Well you might ask that question about why I thought of a hyperbola. My answer is that I have a quirky memory that tends to remember certain things and connect them, and I especially like to compare unlike things (Sullivan and a graph of a shape I heard about in high school math, for example). When I took those high school math courses, I did well, but I remember almost nothing of the details now. Almost nothing – except for certain things that struck me really forcibly at the time as perhaps poetic and/or philosophically interesting. The hyperbola’s constant creep, without ever getting there (and the beauty of the way it could map out that way in a diagram of an equation), appealed to the poet in me as well as the philosopher, even more than to the mathematician in me. That’s almost certainly why I remembered it all these years, and for whatever reason it leapt into my mind when I thought about that “approaching but never arriving” trait of Sullivan’s.
Sullivan is actually pretty simple to figure out: he’s a snob.
He wants to think of himself as the gay Bill Buckley, but he’s just the blue-haired lady who knows the masses have to exist, but insists that they do so *over there*, not near her.
Sullivan is actually pretty simple to figure out: he’s a snob.
Disagree with you there. Sullivan grew up at a time and at a place that was class conscious in a way quite foreign to his contemporaries across the pond. A big chunk of his family migrated from Ireland and he grew up in an exurban town in Surrey and (IIRC) attended an ordinary secondary school ‘ere landing a berth at Oxford. One of his college chums was Wm. Hague, who had a tour as leader of the Conservative Party. Hague grew up in the northeast, attended a ‘comprehensive’ high school, hails from a family which owned an industrial concern, and speaks with an accent with northern regional features (about which the RP speaking David Cameron razzed him); in the micro society that was Oxford, Hague was not an inner-ringer. Sullivan’s views on social establishments have incorporated reservations and he elected to live in the states in part because of the tiresome cynicism of the British chatterati.
I think he may look down on people, but that’s not his raison d’etre the way it is for George Will. He has lots of vectors influencing him, and I think for that reason he’s unpredictable. The most potent is his homosexuality. He’s made quite a public point of it. Unlike other advocates, he’s never taken an interest in anti-discrimination law; he was all about promoting homosexual pseudogamy from 1986 forward. He leaves little breadcrumbs which tell you that he’s taken deep draughts of the gayworld’s hedonistic aspect. At 58, he’s got the face he deserves. His homosexuality amounts to two vectors influencing his writing, one for his esoteric self and one for his exoteric self.
Recall also we’ve learned that a big vector for a great many public intellectuals is defending positions they’ve taken in the past. Since Sullivan has had a succession of stances vis a vis public life in Britain and in the United States, that’s challenging for him. Unlike, say, Norman Podhoretz, he’s never distinctly repudiated anything he’s ever advocated.
You can do worse than Sullivan. Have a gander at this:
https://ordinary-times.com/2021/11/11/nevertrumpers-must-fork-the-gop/
It’s hard to know how you could be someone who observes the political world and not notice that there is no popular NeverTrump dispensation. NeverTrump is a residue of politicians, opinion journalists, and hustlers who have no following among ordinary voters and are to a degree being financed by hyper-wealthy liberals like Pierre Omidyar (when they’re not collecting swag from the GOP’s usual donor crew).