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Wesley Yang

1 Nov, 8 tweets, 2 min read

The meta-humor of "Let's Go Brandon" is that by being facially more innocuous than "Fuck Joe Biden", it "triggers the libs" even more, because esoteric speech stimulates the imagination to assign even more nefarious meanings than open and direct hostility

It's also a reference to the sportscaster who coined it in the first place -- a journalist who seemed to be covering up for a "Fuck Joe Biden" chant, thereby illustrating on air the will to falsify reality as clearly as the "mostly peaceful" chyron over a burning cityscape

Boomer libs who are incapable of being irony-poisoned to 4chan levels end up the ultimate butt of this meta-humor, which is just 4chan humor scaled up to national scale

Students of cultural studies and reader-response theories should all be having a field day

Dave Chappelle quit his show when he began to think that the sophisticated meta-humor of racial caricature that he was enacting was instead simply being received as...racist caricature

And the story of 4chan is how the irony poisoned meta-humor of pretending to be an online Nazi turned into...being an an actual online Nazi

Absolutely none of this should have influenced our national politics in any way

I think these eruptions of esoteric humor give a lot of pleasure to cons -- but then serve as the predicate for witch hunts and aggrandizement of the natsec state, even after explainers like this get published politifact.com/factchecks/202…

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Wesley Yang

@wesyang

2 Nov

Chappelle referred to himself as being a rich man living amidst the "tiki torch whites" in rural Ohio. Perhaps that's true of the surrounding environs, but Yellow Springs, where his father was Dean of Students at Antioch College, began as a utopian progressive community...

And remains one today: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Sp…

There are many sites that harbored escaping slaves in Yellow Springs

Read 4 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

2 Nov

"Pretty privilege" and "fatphobia" are being institutionalized freebeacon.com/campus/yale-la…

Pretty privilege pits the few against the many. It is the realest privilege there is.

But the *remedy* for it would by necessity be totalitarian.

This is a great Catch-22 moment

Read 6 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

1 Nov

https://twitter.com/mythinformedmke/status/1455209919435706380

Carlton and Urkel were the objects of fond and scornful derision — comic foils, definitely not models to emulate

https://twitter.com/mythinformedmke/status/1455209919435706380

Leave aside the divisiveness, it’s just objectively wrong and so bad as cultural observation and analysis

Diff’rent Strokes and Webster were something else — but from a prior decade, and a decade that would go on to make the no. 1 show in America and the normative image of the American family out of the non-whitewashed but very upper middle class Huxtable family…

Read 4 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

31 Oct

"What happened to Matt Taibbi?" 1.) He retained a journalist's skepticism of insane BS, 2.) he noticed that more and more of it was coming from the professional classes whose authority derives from sobriety in judgment and impartiality in execution

taibbi.substack.com/p/the-lets-go-…

3. He did not succumb to the peer pressure that overtook journalists in the Trump years to collude with the insane BS

4. He makes a lot of money because there is demand for independent writing that preserves critical distance from a vertically integrated messaging system that has enshrined verbal and emotional incontinence as a form of virtue

Read 7 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

30 Oct

Teaching a reasonable balance of the good and bad in American history is not that hard, it just takes someone able to deal with moral complexity, which the new monomania rules out as a matter of principle

It's also important that we convey both the substantive good and bad and the capacity to deal with moral complexity into young people. Those who say it doesn't matter because nobody learns anything anyway are just being the worst kind of contrarian.

I'm totally fine with the message that much of the integration of ethnonational and religious diversity in the US was premised upon the exclusion of a racialized underclass, and those who availed themselves of those benefits owe a debt to that group

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

30 Oct

Dave Chappelle was "the first person in his family not to go to college who wasn't a slave." His great grandfather, who was born a slave, went on to become a pastor and the president of a black college.

His father was the dean of students at Antioch College -- which was the institution where the sexual protocol that would later be called "affirmative consent" was first imposed.

His mother was the founders of the country's first black studies program and later a Unitarian Universalist minister.

Read 6 tweets

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