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).

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.

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.

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.

“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

JustTheNews.com and newsbusters as their alt news diet, that’s what!

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.

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.

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