Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 Profile picture
Soviet-born Jewish American gal. Voice of reason against the madness. Lover of otters. @BulwarkOnline @Reason @Newsday etc. CathyYoung63 at gmail
Nov 4 8 tweets 4 min read
I'd much rather not fight w/Kat on whether she is (as I said in an article) "anti-anti-Trump," partly b/c I love her writing on culture & find this depressing, partly b/c I have other things to do. But since Kat's next tweet accuses me of "lying"... let's look at these, shall we The first screenshot is from here.

I mean, I agree w/Kat's basic point here! But even so, this is a "Trump's detractors are overreaching" piece.

Second one, I can't find (maybe not online). Moving on...medium.com/arc-digital/th…
Dec 17, 2022 15 tweets 3 min read
1. I really cannot stress enough how much I've had it with the Elon Twitter drama, but I did look into the jet tracker story, so... 🧵 2. The narrative we're getting from the pro-Musk side, e.g. @AbigailShrier, is that Musk's ban on the ElonJet account & other accounts that tweeted links to the jet tracker was motivated by security concerns after an attack on his limo with his kid inside.
Aug 13, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
I see some are up in arms about this tweet so lemme explain:
1. Hobbes et al. claim that mobbings which destroy people's careers/schooling (& even upend lives) to punish "bad" speech are just "consequence culture." This is a satirical/hyperbolic comment on that, not an equation. 2. Am I being unfair to Hobbes in particular? Nah, he routinely smears and lies, as I think I conclusively documented here (& no this isn't personal - if he's ever attacked me I'm not aware of it. he blocked me after this piece)
arcdigital.media/p/nothing-to-s…
Jun 6, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
The smiling face of evil A few years ago some nice folks from my condo complex banded together to block a low-cost housing development about a mile away. The flyer they sent out was just dripping with an "oh noes! *those people's* kids are gonna sneak in to play on our basketball court!" mentality
Mar 13, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
@wil_da_beast630 1. Saddam Hussein was in violation of a bunch of UN resolutions, some of them pertaining to the conditions after which he was allowed to stay in power post-Gulf War I. @wil_da_beast630 2. The US didn't just say "OK, we're going in, here's a long nonsensical lecture on why Iraq was always American land to justify our invasion." We *tried* to make a case to the UN. We also built a fairly large coalition (UK, Australia among others)
Nov 24, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read
So the responses to this tweet (& @rasmansa's quote tweet saying that I'm promoting a baseless panic ) are very typical:
"LOL this isn't happening, you're nuts"
"LOL what's the big deal about stating your pronouns?"
"Being asked what your pronouns are isn't pressure" (my fav) Oh there'a a major corporate memo encouraging employees to state pronouns and practice gender-neutral pronouns at home so they feel natural? LOL who cares!
goldmansachs.com/careers/blog/p…
Oct 18, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
It's cute that Bailey says this while RT'ing a text which shows that they explicitly said one of their reasons for going to war was that the British Crown was stopping them from dismantling that institution. The thing is, there really is a complicated history here that doesn't place the Founders in a particularly good light. All the evidence shows that they understood slavery to be deeply immoral & incompatible with the principles of freedom they espoused.
Sep 3, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
So here's an interesting thread.
First of all, this guy clearly agrees with me about the idiocy of Rufo's tweets about the US pushing "woke" feminism in Afghanistan. Secondly, he thinks it's bad that we tried to promote basic human rights that are contrary to "traditional Afghan society," like female education or female judges. He also thinks it's gonna make Muslims hate us everywhere. (#ProTip: almost 20% of judges in Pakistan are women.)
Aug 6, 2021 11 tweets 3 min read
A few words about criticisms of my @arcdigi essay on the problems with race-difference discourse (and specifically Charles Murray's recent commentary). I can't respond to each comment individually, but here are some general points.

cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-reality-… 1. Do I dispute that there are currently substantial disparities between racial groups in America in crime rates and (average) cognitive skills? I think my article makes it clear I don't dispute that. I've *discussed* differences in crime rates in my articles on race & policing.
Aug 3, 2021 4 tweets 3 min read
@browntom1234 @ZaidJilani @kmele "You're not going to like what I'm about to do" certainly *can* seen as threatening (body language is also a factor).
But I still can't quite get over her telling *Christian* (not the 911 dispatcher!) that she would tell the cops an *African-American male* was threatening her. @browntom1234 @ZaidJilani @kmele With the dispatcher one can claim that she was merely describing the guy. But why say it to him? He certainly knows he's African-American.
May 20, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
Having dug into this a little bit, it seems like Wilder was a casualty of AP's jitters over claims they knew they shared a building with Hamas & possibly allowed Hamas to censor their West Bank coverage. Right-wing activists wanted a scalp, AP was craven. That said, there's no way AP would have hired a student who had been active in, say, a pro-Trump or anti-abortion group in college, so there's that.
Apr 24, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read
Highlights from my latest @ArcDigi newsletter, which is paywalled for now.

cathy.arcdigital.media/p/revisiting-j… What many derided as "Sicknick trutherism" -- the idea that Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died the day after the Jan. 6 riot, wasn't murdered as initially reported -- is now vindicated by the ME's report. I was among many journalists who were wrong.
Apr 9, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
My debut newsletter at @ArcDigi looks at why not all allies are good in the pushback against runaway "wokeness." It's paywalled, but preview to come...

cathy.arcdigital.media/p/dissidents-c… By the way: yes, the pushback against "wokeness" is important. Image
Mar 27, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
I don't want to debate whether this is "cancel culture" (thankfully, Orman is not in a position to be hurt by these loons), but it's absolutely effing nuts.

insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/2… First, note the assumption that the org. cannot tolerate a speech that dissents from current political dogma. Discussing personal obstacles to wealth doesn't negate "systemic barriers." But no, *every speaker* has to follow the party line. This is a totalitarian mentality. Image
Mar 18, 2021 5 tweets 3 min read
It's terrible and white supremacist to try to drum up sympathy for perps of anti-Asian violence
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
... oh wait this was before the Atlanta shootings and this person was talking about "the optics of a Black or brown person assaulting or attacking" Asians Honestly, I don't want to be flippant about this issue but this article is such a stark demonstration of how toxic the Current Moment is
Mar 10, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
What a blinkered piece by @GiniaNYT on #WoodyAllen & "Manhattan."
nytimes.com/2021/03/05/nyr…
It's not true no one in the film questions Isaac's relationship w/a 17-y-o. Mary (Diane Keaton) suggests, plausibly, that it's his escape from feeling threatened by the power of grown women. Isaac is also *not* shown as a man of "unimpeachable moral character." He's shown as narcissistic, egotistical and often dishonest. He's frequently made to look ridiculous. He's also ultimately a sexual loser, like many other Allen alter egos.
Mar 9, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
The other day someone questioned whether the 2019 Katie Ishizuka/Ramon Stephens study exposing alleged racism in "Dr. Seuss" was related to the anti-#DrSeuss push. Why, yes it is. (It began in 2017 when Ishizuka's first version of the paper appeared.)

learningforjustice.org/magazine/its-t… The Ishizuka paper is not only a paranoid exercise in decoding "harmful" tropes everywhere, it's also wildly fraudulent. Here, for instance, is a passage about the racist symbolism of ink stains in a Cat in the Hat sequel... which forgets to mention that the ink is PINK.
Mar 5, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
This piece is a good example of how crazy, paranoid & potentially authoritarian social justice discourse about "embedded" or subtly "inscribed" racist images/tropes can be.

washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sh… Let's say that the Cat in the Hat really was partly based on images from black minstrelsy. (Dr. Seuss, apparently, said he was based partly on a real-life, black elevator operator, Annie, who wore gloves & had a mischievous smile.)
So what? How does this make the book "harmful"?
Feb 17, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
I decided to investigate. Here's the passage from the review. ImageImage Intrigued even more, I got the book on Kindle. Here are the offending passages. ImageImageImageImage
Jan 30, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
It's kind of hilarious that these guys would pick a still from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" for their glorious image of trad manhood, because, well....

(stop reading now if you haven't seen the film and don't want to be thoroughly spoiled. also, go see it!) What we see here is a young lawyer, Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart -- not exactly *young* here, but he's supposed to be), taking shooting lessons from rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) to fight back against the thug Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who has robbed & humiliated him.
Jan 30, 2021 10 tweets 4 min read
As you may have seen, @ArcDigi, the Medium-based publication where I am an associate editor & regular contributor, has taken a bit of a financial hit in terms of Medium support for our budget for authors' fees.

Why should you support @ArcDigi? No, not just because I'm involved. 😃 In today's partisan media environment, @ArcDigi has a rare commitment to intellectual pluralism as a foundational value. There may not be "both sides" to all issues, but there certainly are to most.