It may be your right to be woke, but it's a very bad decision politically. Woke is the singular reason that the orange menace buffoon is sitting in the White House today. Young men HATE woke, and not just white young men. They are sick and tired of being told their masculinity is toxic, and that they are the reason for all the problems, and that they are the oppressors. True or false, they don't want to hear it. In the words of King Arthur in Camelot, "they are done with feeble helping". They aren't interested in giving up one ounce of their "privilege", and all the media they consume reinforces that. The same goes for black and hispanic men. They may never get the "white" privilege part, but they sure as hell want to keep their male privilege. And more and more women seem to agree with and support them.
The entire Democrat agenda, even the decent parts, has gotten lumped together with DEI and trans, under the icky title of "Woke", and it's an electoral loser. And, Trump and MAGA know it, even if the Democrats refuse to acknowledge that reality. Their entire campaign and agenda was/is based on it.
To turn the tide on this will take a tectonic shift in the Democrat platform. It's not about convincing these voters that woke is OK. It will take an obviously not-woke candidate with a lot of charisma, and even then, he's going to have to throw some woke under the bus to prove his creds - like Bill Clinton had to do in the 1990's with leftwing liberalism from the 1970-80's. It's up to Dems to come to MAGA if they want to dilute Trumpism, not the other way around, or we will have Trumpism and chaos in their pure form for the foreseeable future.
One reason we in the U. S. do not speak the language of the Master Aryan Race today is that Hitler placed incompetents in charge of their nuclear physics efforts and the courageous denial by Norwegian agents of a supply of heavy water certainly helped. The Nazi version of the Manhattan Project would have produced militarily useful results at some point just as their ballistic missile and jet aircraft projects did. Placing politically loyal apparatchiks in charge of technical projects is unlikely to produce the desired outcome - Senator Proxmire nothwithstanding. Time to brush up on my Russian and Mandarin.
Trump and MAGA support Loyal Incompetence. The more loyal you are, the less important competence becomes, even to the point where incompetence is a virtue, because you need to stay loyal because you could never go anywhere else on your merits. The Nazis did this, as well as every totalitarian regime. If you were competent, you could see the virtue in disloyalty to the crazy dictator, and you might end up like Rommel.
"One is not precise. Once praises fools, one smothers light,..." - Evita, The Art of the Possible
Your perspective that we all should be grateful and graceful winners and losers is correct.
I preach that to all my aspiring tennis students before, during and after all tennis tournaments they compete in, up to and including at the professional level.
As a former tennis professional, I can tell you as a professional athlete, you always remember the losses over the wins. The successful athletes are driven by “the fire in the belly” created by losing.
You learn much more from your mistakes and losses than from your wins.
I think Brady was reflecting upon that part of being a successful professional athlete.
I Strongly Beg To Differ that what you witnessed was the behavior and musings of a “sore winner”.
Those were the life lessons learned of one of the greatest winners of all time.
I agree with your point on Brady and the memory of losing over winning, but as a former USTA ranked tournament-level tennis player in my college days, who also holds a low handicap in golf, tennis is a very bad example of sportsmanship and decorum.
My personal experience is that the better a golfer gets, the more courteous and sportsmanlike he or she seems to be. In contrast, the better a tennis player gets, the bigger a dick he/she becomes - personally and on-court. That said, I never played at the pro level, but based on what I see on TV, in both the men's and the women's games, my observations from the lower ranks are probably not far off.
The fpotus is certainly bent on bending every conceivable facet of society to his will. Or at least, to the Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation's edicts. The Kennedy Center being called woke is not a pejorative among decent people. Woke is only used by the right-wingers to tag decency, dignity, compassion, humility, and kindness as very bad values. Being woke is going to outlast their tyranny and bigotry.
I can just smell what the new Kennedy Center leaders' offerings will be. Ted Nugent and Kid Rock, wrestling matches, "reality" shows. Oi. No doubt the new Chair fpotus will rename the Center for himself. Google and Apple will go along with that.
Now that the CIA has outed its newest hires via unclassified email to the OPM federal agency, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, et al, got a heads up on our newest spies. Great transparency move, CIA. Are MuskX's Putin loving hacker boys in charge there now?
Surviving this era is going to create a tsunami of books detailing the carnage, catastrophes, and comedies of this coup. Yes, there are comedies. Few and far between, but some.
I completely agree with Mona. Her piece reminds me of the occasional conversation I had with my two sons when they were around 10 and 11 over board games or Cribbage. When the game was just getting started, they talked about who was winning and losing. I talked about being ahead or behind, in an attempt to explain that things can change in the middle of a game: that being behind didn’t automatically mean you were losing. Dunno that it sank in much, but they grew up to be good men, so maybe.
By all means, Bill Kristol, do not give up your "right to be woke." But do understand, as a lengthy essay from Quillette sets forth, the deeply disturbing ways in which wokeness "breaks with our liberal-democratic constitutional tradition":
"The term 'wokeness' identifies our hypersensitive, invasive, censorious, punitive, and pedantically moralising social and political order—a scheme that divides groups against one another in the name of 'social justice.' Its questionableness is signalled by the many ways it breaks with our liberal-democratic constitutional tradition: it champions the identities of groups, not the rights of individuals; it obliterates the boundary between public and private; it harnesses the state to legislate morality, not to protect liberty; it demands respect and is dissatisfied with mere toleration; and it stirs people up where the liberal tradition tries to calm them down. It has upended our understanding of something as basic to human life as 'sex' or 'gender,' and in political initiatives like the 1619 Project, would make contempt for modern life a kind of virtue."
OMG! By this description, the Republican, conservative, "Christian" right has been woke for the last 75 years at least! Who is currently trying to legislate morality? Who is trying to obliterate the boundaries between public and private (Kennedy Center is a public/private partnership; identities of new CIA recruits now publicly available to hackers and foreign intelligence agencies; who has been trying (successfully) to stir up people (January 6th; holding self-aggrandizing rallies, etc.)? It ain't the liberal left, my friend!
BS. Woke means none of those things. Its original meaning has to do with being aware of social injustices. Quillette is re-defining the terms through an illiberal, extreme right-wing, propaganda lens; that is, a litany of grievances the authoritarian right accuses liberals of doing what, in fact, everything the authoritarian right actually does. Typical gaslighting. Substitute "wokeness" above with "anti-wokeness", except in the last sentence, which is revealing for its blatant anti-Black history and anti-LGBTQ bias.
I was listening to the commentary at the end of the Super Bowl, and I asked my husband who the guy speaking was because I found his remarks very strange. He told me it was Tom Brady, and I rolled my eyes. Figures. The guy was going on and on and on about how he dealt with his losses and it was all about him, him, him. Just proves that once an egomaniac, always an egomaniac.
I don't follow football close enough to know why KC was incapable of stopping Philly from bulldozing them. That's not how games between these teams usually go. But i thought the story of the last quarter was the Chiefs putting two scores and two conversions on the board, turning a humiliating defeat into a not-quite-as-humiliating defeat. I thought it was about giving 100% when you know you will lose, for the sake of giving 100%.
Why, everyday, is someone telling trump, or republicans, to "learn from hitler" or "the nazis were bad, sure, but......" ??? When did everything become so dumb? Why was i destined to be alive for the dumbest possible version of America, and perhaps the last.......
It may be your right to be woke, but it's a very bad decision politically. Woke is the singular reason that the orange menace buffoon is sitting in the White House today. Young men HATE woke, and not just white young men. They are sick and tired of being told their masculinity is toxic, and that they are the reason for all the problems, and that they are the oppressors. True or false, they don't want to hear it. In the words of King Arthur in Camelot, "they are done with feeble helping". They aren't interested in giving up one ounce of their "privilege", and all the media they consume reinforces that. The same goes for black and hispanic men. They may never get the "white" privilege part, but they sure as hell want to keep their male privilege. And more and more women seem to agree with and support them.
The entire Democrat agenda, even the decent parts, has gotten lumped together with DEI and trans, under the icky title of "Woke", and it's an electoral loser. And, Trump and MAGA know it, even if the Democrats refuse to acknowledge that reality. Their entire campaign and agenda was/is based on it.
To turn the tide on this will take a tectonic shift in the Democrat platform. It's not about convincing these voters that woke is OK. It will take an obviously not-woke candidate with a lot of charisma, and even then, he's going to have to throw some woke under the bus to prove his creds - like Bill Clinton had to do in the 1990's with leftwing liberalism from the 1970-80's. It's up to Dems to come to MAGA if they want to dilute Trumpism, not the other way around, or we will have Trumpism and chaos in their pure form for the foreseeable future.
If all sports disappeared overnight, my life would not be affected one bit. Okay, maybe a little, I work at a pizza place.
One reason we in the U. S. do not speak the language of the Master Aryan Race today is that Hitler placed incompetents in charge of their nuclear physics efforts and the courageous denial by Norwegian agents of a supply of heavy water certainly helped. The Nazi version of the Manhattan Project would have produced militarily useful results at some point just as their ballistic missile and jet aircraft projects did. Placing politically loyal apparatchiks in charge of technical projects is unlikely to produce the desired outcome - Senator Proxmire nothwithstanding. Time to brush up on my Russian and Mandarin.
Trump and MAGA support Loyal Incompetence. The more loyal you are, the less important competence becomes, even to the point where incompetence is a virtue, because you need to stay loyal because you could never go anywhere else on your merits. The Nazis did this, as well as every totalitarian regime. If you were competent, you could see the virtue in disloyalty to the crazy dictator, and you might end up like Rommel.
"One is not precise. Once praises fools, one smothers light,..." - Evita, The Art of the Possible
About Tom Brady
Mona, I Beg To Differ !
Your perspective that we all should be grateful and graceful winners and losers is correct.
I preach that to all my aspiring tennis students before, during and after all tennis tournaments they compete in, up to and including at the professional level.
As a former tennis professional, I can tell you as a professional athlete, you always remember the losses over the wins. The successful athletes are driven by “the fire in the belly” created by losing.
You learn much more from your mistakes and losses than from your wins.
I think Brady was reflecting upon that part of being a successful professional athlete.
I Strongly Beg To Differ that what you witnessed was the behavior and musings of a “sore winner”.
Those were the life lessons learned of one of the greatest winners of all time.
I agree with your point on Brady and the memory of losing over winning, but as a former USTA ranked tournament-level tennis player in my college days, who also holds a low handicap in golf, tennis is a very bad example of sportsmanship and decorum.
My personal experience is that the better a golfer gets, the more courteous and sportsmanlike he or she seems to be. In contrast, the better a tennis player gets, the bigger a dick he/she becomes - personally and on-court. That said, I never played at the pro level, but based on what I see on TV, in both the men's and the women's games, my observations from the lower ranks are probably not far off.
The fpotus is certainly bent on bending every conceivable facet of society to his will. Or at least, to the Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation's edicts. The Kennedy Center being called woke is not a pejorative among decent people. Woke is only used by the right-wingers to tag decency, dignity, compassion, humility, and kindness as very bad values. Being woke is going to outlast their tyranny and bigotry.
I can just smell what the new Kennedy Center leaders' offerings will be. Ted Nugent and Kid Rock, wrestling matches, "reality" shows. Oi. No doubt the new Chair fpotus will rename the Center for himself. Google and Apple will go along with that.
Now that the CIA has outed its newest hires via unclassified email to the OPM federal agency, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, et al, got a heads up on our newest spies. Great transparency move, CIA. Are MuskX's Putin loving hacker boys in charge there now?
Surviving this era is going to create a tsunami of books detailing the carnage, catastrophes, and comedies of this coup. Yes, there are comedies. Few and far between, but some.
Still trying to keep my head above water from the tsunami of books detailing the corruption, catastrophes, outrages and comedies of Trump 1.0!
I completely agree with Mona. Her piece reminds me of the occasional conversation I had with my two sons when they were around 10 and 11 over board games or Cribbage. When the game was just getting started, they talked about who was winning and losing. I talked about being ahead or behind, in an attempt to explain that things can change in the middle of a game: that being behind didn’t automatically mean you were losing. Dunno that it sank in much, but they grew up to be good men, so maybe.
Hey, NS where to mention this, but I would love to see some discussion at the Bulwark about the Contracts Disputes Act and the rights of contractors to sue for breach of contract if they are not paid, particularly for work already completed. I have seen no coverage of this. There is a good explanation here: https://governmentcontracts.foxrothschild.com/2025/02/articles/armed-services-board-of-contract-appeals/amidst-uncertainty-government-contractors-should-document-notify-and-escalate-claims/
By all means, Bill Kristol, do not give up your "right to be woke." But do understand, as a lengthy essay from Quillette sets forth, the deeply disturbing ways in which wokeness "breaks with our liberal-democratic constitutional tradition":
"The term 'wokeness' identifies our hypersensitive, invasive, censorious, punitive, and pedantically moralising social and political order—a scheme that divides groups against one another in the name of 'social justice.' Its questionableness is signalled by the many ways it breaks with our liberal-democratic constitutional tradition: it champions the identities of groups, not the rights of individuals; it obliterates the boundary between public and private; it harnesses the state to legislate morality, not to protect liberty; it demands respect and is dissatisfied with mere toleration; and it stirs people up where the liberal tradition tries to calm them down. It has upended our understanding of something as basic to human life as 'sex' or 'gender,' and in political initiatives like the 1619 Project, would make contempt for modern life a kind of virtue."
OMG! By this description, the Republican, conservative, "Christian" right has been woke for the last 75 years at least! Who is currently trying to legislate morality? Who is trying to obliterate the boundaries between public and private (Kennedy Center is a public/private partnership; identities of new CIA recruits now publicly available to hackers and foreign intelligence agencies; who has been trying (successfully) to stir up people (January 6th; holding self-aggrandizing rallies, etc.)? It ain't the liberal left, my friend!
BS. Woke means none of those things. Its original meaning has to do with being aware of social injustices. Quillette is re-defining the terms through an illiberal, extreme right-wing, propaganda lens; that is, a litany of grievances the authoritarian right accuses liberals of doing what, in fact, everything the authoritarian right actually does. Typical gaslighting. Substitute "wokeness" above with "anti-wokeness", except in the last sentence, which is revealing for its blatant anti-Black history and anti-LGBTQ bias.
A matter of whose ox is gored?
Rule #1. Whatever Trump does is illegal or immoral.
Rule #2. Whatever the Republicans do is illegal or immoral.
Rule #3. If in doubt about something Trump or the Republicans do, refer to Rules #1 and #2.
Can’t wait for the Kennedy Crnter production of “YMCA” accompanied by 40 minutes of Trump swaying back and forth.
I was listening to the commentary at the end of the Super Bowl, and I asked my husband who the guy speaking was because I found his remarks very strange. He told me it was Tom Brady, and I rolled my eyes. Figures. The guy was going on and on and on about how he dealt with his losses and it was all about him, him, him. Just proves that once an egomaniac, always an egomaniac.
Another poster child for Narcissism!
Really tempted to write something titled like “Anti-Anti Wokeness: A Manifesto”
I’d read that!
"The ideal subject fo totalitarianism is... people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Hannah Arendt
"Hell is empty and all the devils (republicans) are here." Shakespear
Trump/Musk-----Fetid feculas and their gaggle of dependents ensconced dinglkeberries are soiling the oval office.
Is Trump taking over filmmaking next?
I don't follow football close enough to know why KC was incapable of stopping Philly from bulldozing them. That's not how games between these teams usually go. But i thought the story of the last quarter was the Chiefs putting two scores and two conversions on the board, turning a humiliating defeat into a not-quite-as-humiliating defeat. I thought it was about giving 100% when you know you will lose, for the sake of giving 100%.
Why, everyday, is someone telling trump, or republicans, to "learn from hitler" or "the nazis were bad, sure, but......" ??? When did everything become so dumb? Why was i destined to be alive for the dumbest possible version of America, and perhaps the last.......