What Lit3Bolt Said In Comments

Was too cherce to leave in comments:

This [fiddling with "Dark Art of Racecraft"] is Sullivan's pet "contrarian" issue to boost his links and traffic.

In the vein of Saletan, Hitchens, and others (it goes back to Oscar Wilde, really), Sullivan has mastered the art of trolling his readers into extremely specific knots with odious opinions dressed up in superficially plausible arguments. Then, as columnist after columnist after blogger after blogger takes a whack at the giant Wicker Man Argument Sullivan has made, he pirouettes to the next topic, blithely ignoring any mention his previous odious opinion for weeks, if not months or years at a time, softening his writing with some more conventional opinions or some futuristic meta-think or some pictures of puppies and kitties frolicking in fields.

And people fall for this...

time...

after time...

after time...

again, giving breathless attention to an upper class twit for having such SHOCKING, just SHOCKING, opinions about decent society, gossipgossipgossip.

Andrew Sullivan does not have real opinions on well, anything. Instead, he's a privateer of his own colors, always hoisting sail and weighing anchor wherever the winds are blowing. He straddles conventional wisdom, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but he's always careful to offer some red meat to everyone.

Thus, Sullivan can be Catholic and gay married at the same time, because he's the authority of and for gay conservatives, who hate Hillary Clinton for no good reason yet adore Margaret Thatcher for no good reason other than pure tribalism. He's always met somebody, always knows somebody, and can gossip on any topic effortlessly, dismissing who's out and approving of who's in with a smattering of columns and links.

And he is being paid to do this. Because he publishes an appeal for bipartisanship and centrism on Monday, a guessing game on Tuesday, a paean to superficial morality on Wednesday, a worrisome graph of the economy on Thursday, a picture of a puppy on Friday, a incoherent defense of Toryism on Saturday, and some poems and artwork and links on Sunday, all stolen from Buzzfeed and Reddit, and be paid 20 dollars a month by slavish fans who just love his centrist, edgy opinions of how white people are poodles and black people are beagles, cause dog breeds are just like race.

And as soon as anyone opens there mouth to say, "Well, studies show..." or "Actually, you're wrong..." or "I'm never going to give you money, you racist sybarite" he's danced away again, offering a sad picture of a dead Syrian child juxtaposed with his next post about balloons and lollipops and buttsex.

Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coats adds this:

...

Our notion of what constitutes "white" and what constitutes "black" is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a "Southern race" and not see the Civil War, the creation of an "Irish race" and not think of Cromwell's ethnic cleansing, the creation of a "Jewish race" and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of "whiteness" or "blackness," not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn't really "black" but "half-white." One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.

When the liberal says "race is a social construct," he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the "Irish race" for intelligence or the "Southern race" for "hot-headedness." These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask "Is the black race dumber than then white race?" than it is to ask "Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?"

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