Oct 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Pre-Emptive Wanking
This is pretty impressive. Barack Obama could lose the election in November. And if he loses the election in November, it’s possible that some people will blame racism for his loss. So The New Republic decided to print a John McWhorter attack on those hypothetical people’s hypothetical argument about a hypothetical defeat. It seems those arguments, though they haven’t been made and are about events that haven’t occurred, are groundless.
See Ta-Nehisi Coates for more on this ridiculousness. Personally, I blame Whitey for letting this run.
45 Responses to “Pre-Emptive Wanking”
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October 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I know it’s not racism, because white folks tell me so.
October 18th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
That was the goofiest piece of writing I have ever read, but frankly par for the course. His premises are always wacky and off kilter; like he’s continually asking “Did you walk to work or bring your lunch?”
Adam Mansbach, reviewing McWhorter’s recent ludicrously titled book “All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America,” handed him his lunch, nailing my complaint with McWhorter’s thinking processes. McWhorter’s a contrarian, which in itself is not awful, but at least own up to it rather than arguing from the position of concise thought. He’s like O’Reilly without the whimsical loofah.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
That should read “McWhorter’s a contrarian, which in itself is not awful, but at least own up to it rather than arguing from a professed position of concise thought.”
McWhorter annoys me into typos.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Do you know what ‘wanking’ means? Look it up in the OED. It means ‘masturbating’. How does that make sense in this context?
October 18th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
He’s been grinding this particular axe in his vlogs with Glenn Loury, which are otherwise very stimulating.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Literal much, M? When someone, even in the UK, calls someone a wanker, what do you think they mean?
I’m frankly very pleased that Atrios did so much to bring that into the American lexicon, if only because it led me to the discovery that the feminine of “wanking” is “frigging”.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
M’s comment is really funny, whether on purpose or not. Really, M? “Wanking” means masturbating? Who knew? Now tell me what “metaphor” means, because I never got that one either.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
M wrote:
Do you know what ‘wanking’ means? Look it up in the OED. It means ‘masturbating’. How does that make sense in this context?
The OED is not always a good guide to current slang, “wanking” also often means self-indulgent nonsense that the author takes way too seriously–see the second part of definition #5 here, or the term fanwank, for example.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
be fair to M, apparently this is the first time he has visited a political blog, heard metaphoric speech, or communicated with others.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
“It means ‘masturbating’. How does that make sense in this context?”
To be even fairer–or harsher?–to M, I think we can say that he understands “wanking” to be figurative but is unable to draw a connection.
As good liberals let’s not chastise but enlighten:
Groundless hypothesizing is usually taken to be a mark of authorial self-indulgence. “Self-indulgence” is the definition of wanking. QED
October 18th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I guess people like James Carville are the sort of right wingers you say are the only ones spreading this kind of thing.
October 18th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
James Robertson wrote:
I guess people like James Carville are the sort of right wingers you say are the only ones spreading this kind of thing.
Your comment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a response to Matt’s post. Where did he say anything about right wingers spreading “this kind of thing”? And what do you mean by “this kind of thing”, anyway? Is James Carville spreading preemptive predictions about how black people would respond to an Obama defeat, in order to rebut these hypothetical responses?
October 18th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Hey leave M alone! He just isn’t aware of all internet traditions!
October 18th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
The OED is not always a good guide to current slang, “wanking” also often means self-indulgent nonsense that the author takes way too seriously
For that matter, “masturbation” often means this as well.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Example.
The premise is that self-congratulation or self-reference are ways of simulating other people praising you or looking to your works for reference. The analogy here should be obvious.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
….a John McWhorter attack on those hypothetical people’s hypothetical argument….
Poor Jacob Weisberg, hypothetical person.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Is James Carville spreading preemptive predictions about how black people would respond to an Obama defeat, in order to rebut these hypothetical responses?
Well, Carville has said:
CARVILLE: Let me be clear, I said you can call the dogs and light the fire and leave the house. I think it sounds over.
Now let me be clear here, if Obama goes in this race with a 5- point lead and losing this election, the consequences are — bull, man. I mean I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I think David it’s a point to bring up.
But you stop and contemplate this country if Obama goes in and he has a consistent five point lead and loses the election, it would be very, very, very dramatic [some transcripts say "traumatic" - G.] out there.
Some people have interpreted dramatic/traumatic as a reference to civil unrest or riots.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Oops. Meant to provide a link to the transcript I referenced.
Here.
October 18th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
This may be groundless hypothesizing, and I’ll have to look up the etymology, but if “jerk” is from “jerker,” i.e. masturbator, then “wanker” has an exact precedent.
October 18th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Glaivester, Carville is talking about how most of the country would react to evidence that the election was stolen. That’s not quite the same thing as McWhorter’s racist fantasies.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
That’s not quite the same thing as McWhorter’s racist fantasies.
I’m not saying black people can’t be racist about black people, but McWhorter isn’t Sowell or even Clarence Thomas. He’s got his screwed up hobby horses and that’s why the Manhattan Institute pays him (I can’t think of anything else he is conservative about other than thinking the extent of white racism is overvalued), but he deserves better than that.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Obama will win easily but in a hypothesis if he didn’t win the left would riot.
After the last election the left swarmed Ohio and tried to break into buildings to alter ballots, blamed diebold, used every conspiracy theory in the world.
Boxer and the dems then held up Bush’s vote in the electoral college which was shameful.
Now this election where Brunner had absenttee ballots sent to only the urban counties in ohio.
In Ohio every urban county got absentee ballot applications.
The return rate is 8 times the return rate in rural areas where no absentee ballot applications were sent.
Obama has won Ohio by a huge margin before the election because this is a not a even playing field.
The left has so much anger on sites like huffingtonpost.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, democraticunderground.com, dailykos.com that if Obama wasn’t the winner they would literally turn violent.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
The left has so much anger on sites like huffingtonpost.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, democraticunderground.com, dailykos.com that if Obama wasn’t the winner they would literally turn violent.
Yeah, all those mean folks. I’ve seen scores of pissy Bush folk in the last few weeks threatening a violent revolt if they lose. Seriously, if you want to find the “angry left” they aren’t hanging out at talkingpointsmemo.com you are just losing.
October 19th, 2008 at 2:31 am
I’d say McWhorter’s been having some God awful dreams since the second debate. He may be starting to realize the Faustian nature of Republican affirmative action and fretting over all those benefits he’s going to miss. Back when John traded his soul for a speaking part in Karl’s big budget movie, he apparently dismissed any possibility of the “permanent majority” clause ever being exercised. Now that the Big Pond is drying up McLovin’s having nightmares about getting beached by angry little white fish, all those resentful wasps that he cut in front of in the crappy book deal line. I’m guessing the leftist utopian post racial politics nightmare is right around the corner for poor John. It’s that dream where Republicans are treating him like a Jewish Holocaust denier at a Christlich Demokratische Union Convention.
October 19th, 2008 at 4:04 am
You know, all of this misses the real point. This election is happening before it really happens. Think about it, we’ve already had a Supreme Court ruling, and we haven’t even had an election. Legal teams are in place, and we’re set to do battle in the courts. The election is becoming a blurr. We argue now about the vote, we will argue about the vote when it happens, and we will argue about the vote after it happens. And we will do it in court. Why is this so hard for us?
Think about it, India can run an election in 23 languages and still count the vote pretty accurately. And they have four times the votes to count. And they’re the most dysfunctional country I’ve ever been to. Yet they can run elections that even I can understand when listening to someone talk in Gujarat while I’m watching the Tamil subtitles. And trust me, I don’t even have a hope of understanding either of those languages. But I knew who won. There were numbers of votes next to the candidates. The guy with more won. Is that really so hard?
October 19th, 2008 at 7:38 am
I find it amazing that after 25 posts no one besides me still seems to have noticed that the underlying premise of this post – that ‘if Obama loses, it’s racism’ is nothing but a hypothetical argument made by hypothetical people, an argument which “[hasn't] been made” – is flat-out false.
October 19th, 2008 at 9:10 am
No, it just sounds odd to a British person for whom ‘wank’ has only ever meant ‘jerk off’.
Imagine reading a headline on a British blog that said, ‘Pre-emptive jerking off’. That’s how it looked to me.
But it’s nice to see you all trendily mangling our dialect.
And if it’s a metaphor it’s a poor one. Who ever jerks off pre-emptively? To pre-empt what?
October 19th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Further, had MY translated the title into British English, it would read, ‘Pre-emptive Wankery’. The gerund is misused.
And Sonic I thought the problem with JMcW’s piece was that he didn’t -cite- such arguments and such people. JMcW’s enemies all exist in not an ‘if Obama loses’ universe (ours) but an ‘Obama has lost’ universe.
October 19th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
M,
Matthew didn’t claim merely that McWhorter “didn’t cite” such examples. Matthew explicitly claimed that no such arguments, or people making those arguments, existed.
This assertion of Matthew’s – the central assertion of the blog post – is patently and provably false, regardless of the merits or demerits of McWhorter’s piece.
October 19th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
M wrote:
No, it just sounds odd to a British person for whom ‘wank’ has only ever meant ‘jerk off’.
So for the British, the sole meaning of “wanker” is literally “one who masturbates”? It has no other connotations whatsoever?
Imagine reading a headline on a British blog that said, ‘Pre-emptive jerking off’. That’s how it looked to me.
What if it said “pre-emptive mental masturbation”? “Masturbation” has the same meaning in both dialects, after all (though I’m not sure if the British use the phrase ‘mental masturbation’).
And if it’s a metaphor it’s a poor one. Who ever jerks off pre-emptively? To pre-empt what?
If “jerking off” is in this case a metaphor for self-indulgent pontificating, can’t you self-indulgently pontificate about the wrongness of an argument your opponent hasn’t even made yet (and about how this argument they are going to make in the future proves how hidebound their thinking is in comparison to your own perfect reasonableness), and isn’t this preemptive? If Matt had written “preemptive mental masturbation” would you really have so much trouble understanding how the title fits McWhorter’s piece?
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