Scary Mr. Olmec Man

@scarymrolmecman

Sociopolitical malcontent. Chinese lit sometimes. 我的名字是一个问号。

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You want Zohran to pretend Standing Together is representative of Israel and not a widely despised minority the cops love to beat the shit out of? Ok!

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 7d

Sorry, but you cannot purport to critique how things work and then profess ignorance about how things work!

I do not care to examine the quality of Arday’s scholarship, research or life story beyond what has already been written elsewhere. What concerns me is how little space remains for a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations and corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform, leaving it vulnerable to just this kind of backlash. It has also meant that the right has enjoyed a near monopoly on criticism of DEI, leaving it to frame it entirely on its own terms.

Let’s take a look back at the coverage of Arday’s appointment at Cambridge in 2023. The headline was that Arday, then 37, was to become the “youngest black professor” ever appointed at Cambridge and that his feat was particularly remarkable considering that he supposedly only learned to speak at 11, and to read and write at 18, having been diagnosed with global development delay and autism spectrum disorder as a child. The media circus around this appointment rivalled Hollywood press junkets, with newspaper, television and radio slots covering him on both sides of the Atlantic, including an NBC News item on his “inspiring story”.

I am not privy to the hiring process for a professorial chair at Cambridge. I do not know exactly why and how Arday got the job or who else was in the running. But what happens when an academic’s story is sold through him being the “youngest black ever” (sitting alongside familiar monikers such as “the first black” or “black excellence”) and asterisked by a tale of hardship? You are not encouraged or invited to engage with the substance of their scholarship; instead, you are invited to clap. Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 7d

Here's your postsocialist image of the day: a colorful cruise ship construction labeled Solidarity at the water park at Solidarity Lake Park in Beijing

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 8d

They don't do puff interviews in China?!?

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 12d

Again, we were supposed to go along w it when this guy pretended he'd rein Israel in bc the Dem establishment thinks we're fucking stupid

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 14d

Really appreciated this from Beinart. There's one faction in American Jewish life playing the court Jew, and it's not mine!

Peter Beinart in JC: "The American Jewish establishment—which in the last century helped expand American liberal democracy—has now largely given up on it. Instead of responding to this moment of democratic peril by helping to assemble the kind of multi-racial, multi-religious alliance that defeated Jim Crow, it has chosen a different approach: Curry favor with powerful bigots in the hope that they don’t turn against Israel. This go-it-alone accommodation to authoritarian rule has deep historical roots. It is the strategy of the court Jew. In early modern Europe, that strategy constituted an understandable response to pervasive antisemitism and princely power. In 2026, however, it represents something very different: a betrayal of democratic principles that undermines not only American freedom, but Jewish safety as well."

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 14d

The NYT gets more ridiculous by the day, like, this is really just embarassing

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 17d

Oh sweet, my ride is here

Car in Beijing wrapped in an image of a surrender...by the Japanese to the Nationalists? By the Nationalists to the Communists? Not sure.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 20d

Like, cute, you're having fun with the metaphor, but do you see how you're not really responding to the argument?

Jill Lepore in the New Yorker: "In “Language Machines,” Leif Weatherby, N.Y.U.’s director of digital humanities, points out that, in the years since the Cold War, “the humanities lost language” to cognitive science and computer science. Given that machines can generate language without recourse to reason—he argues that the two things have been radically decoupled—what’s needed now is “a theory of meaning in the absence of intelligence.” Language no longer distinguishes humans, Weatherby says, dismissing the contention, made by Chomsky and others after the release of ChatGPT, that L.L.M.s “differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language.” Weatherby calls this, in a curious choice of metaphor, “remainder humanism”: “a humanism without a theory or doctrine of what is human, in which humanity is remaindered, like a book past salability.”

If that’s what it means, now, to be human—to cling to the idea of a relationship between language and reason—I don’t think I mind being a book, even a remaindered one, shelved in the dark downstairs of a bookstore and priced cheap. "

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 21d

Douglas Murray is practically a fuckin' Nazi

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 22d

This is Remnick's coup de grace in defense of Haberman's book, and what I would ask you is: what do we learn from this that tells us more than simply observing the actions and public statements of the administration?

“Regime Change” is exceptional. It transcends its genre. Although some of the material is familiar from the Times and other sources and from Trump’s relentless self-exposure, the book is packed with news that will stay news. One late-breaking example among many: Haberman and Swan provide an astonishing account of Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip, just four months ago, to the White House Situation Room, where the Israeli Prime Minister persuaded Trump to join him in what would be a strategic catastrophe. Netanyahu assured the President that together they would topple the Iranian regime and end its nuclear ambitions before it ever had a chance to close the Strait of Hormuz. Haberman and Swan report that the Secretary of State called Netanyahu’s plan “bullshit.” The C.I.A. director declared it “farcical.” Whatever. “Sounds good to me, the President told the Prime Minister.” Everyone fell into line. Well played, sir!

This is reporting of consequence, and it puts to rest the knowing online critique of these beat reporters that to get their scoops they engage in “bothsidesism” or dampen their coverage in exchange for access.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 22d

On the contrary, I think Didion had Woodward dead to rights and Remnick's response is basically "well, he's in the club"

n 1996, Joan Didion unholstered the X-Acto knife that was her pen and went to work on Bob Woodward. In a register of pitiless irony, she quoted Woodward’s earnest explanations of his journalistic methods—the difference between “background” and “deep background,” his “eight file drawers” of documents for a book on the Supreme Court. She was unimpressed. “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” Didion wrote. In the end, she determined that Woodward was engaged in the writing of “political pornography.”

This was unfair, at best a category error. What Didion failed to note was that Woodward was a reporter, not a scholar or a belletrist, and that before he was thirty he, with his Washington Post partner, Carl Bernstein, had unearthed the predations of the Watergate scandal—hardly the work of stenographers in thrall to power. It brought down the Presidency of Richard Nixon. Journalism is a first rough draft of history, as they say, and scholarship, which feeds on journalism and so much more, plays by another clock. Robert A. Caro began the research for his multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson half a century ago.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 24d

Why is so much that happens these days Ximen Qing's trip to the capital

After the 2016 election, Tate had posted a string of pro-MAGA tweets, and he began messaging with Donald Trump, Jr. Eventually, he secured an invitation to Trump Tower. “That was the first time he had ever had any kind of interaction with anyone that big,” his former “harem” member told me. “It was like a drug to him.”

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 24d

I find this sentence...highly dubious

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· 26d

Sorry but lmao, if only someone would write a defense of the humanities! Please, somebody, anybody!!!!

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jul 8

Just a beautiful picture of the PRC's propaganda "efforts" vis-a-vis Taiwan

From a post by the China Media Project: "Posts on Chinese official social media accounts pointed to favorable comments on this news story as reported on the program “Strait Talk” (兩岸做伙講) as evidence of popular support in Taiwan for a visit by Zhang. In fact, the “Strait Talk” program is run by China Daily, the Chinese government’s English-language external propaganda outlet."

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jul 8

My response to the Rahm nothingburger speech

The scene with Bane from Dark Knight Rises where he says "Do you feel in charge?"

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jul 8

His boss was his mother!

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jul 2

Does Julie Menin or any of the councilmembers ever want to do anything about this garbage person who does nothing but incite violence against the mayor all day long or nah

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jul 2

Every university instructor has had this thought, which no university instructor can ever say

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 29

Editor for the New York Post here:

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 27

This is Brad Lander's position. Is he rewarded for it? In 2026 there is no daylight btwn Likudism and Zionism and it is a farce to pretend otherwise.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 27

Centrists still think that their association with the incompetent, unengaged, and parasitical is incidental rather than a natural result of their ideology and approach to politics.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 27

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 24

The best response to this bullshit is "scoreboard." Clearly Zohran understands the politics of NYC better than you do!

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 21

Goddamn, when @davidjroth.bsky.social nails it, he fucking nails it.

Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try.

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 18

I really appreciate how Riklin here chalks up the failure of the Kurd militia plan to the US and Turkey and assigns exactly zero agency to the Kurds themselves, when, as I understand it, the plan failed bc the Kurds did not fancy doing a Bay of Pigs suicide invasion.

From the Chotiner interview with Shimon Riklin: "These are Kurdish militias you’re talking about?

Not only. Israel can provide them with weapons. This was part of the plan. And then, to our amazement, Trump said the Kurds didn’t want to fight. But, really, Trump is the one who forbade them from fighting, because Erdoğan put pressure on him not to do it. Israel had a brilliant plan and spent a lot of money, and shocked the Iranians in the beginning of the war. But you prevented the militias from acting, and now you ask why the regime didn’t fall. Because you didn’t give us the chance. In Gaza. In Lebanon. In Syria. In Iran. Everything we wanted to do, you prevented us from doing it. If you go to war, and you define the goal of the war, do it. If not, don’t do it. It’s not only that you don’t do it, but you falsely blame the Kurds and the Israelis. And you give in to all the demands of Iran. And they won’t stop. Tomorrow, they might say, If you don’t close the Embassy in Jerusalem, we will close the strait. Then what do you do?"

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 12

New sign up at the crossing at Ogdensburg, real rich stuff considering this district voted for Trump by like 20 points

A sign that says "Welcome Canadian Neighbors"

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 11

Btw when Jilani says HR here he actually just means Grim's female colleagues who could not stand his disgusting shit

Scary Mr. Olmec Man@scarymrolmecman· Jun 10

Gwyneth Paltrow has godawful politics?