February 8, 2020

"When the New York Times starts imitating a satirical character..."


Andrew Doyle's "satirical character" is Titania McGrath. I've listened to Doyle's entire conversation with Joe Rogan and recommend it: here.

68 comments:

rehajm said...

That's the New York Times

Yes. Yes it is. Adjust accordingly...

Achilles said...

They don't realize how transparent and ridiculous they are.

pious agnostic said...

I hope everyone realizes that this guy is an impostor. Titania McGrath says so.

Sprezzatura said...

I also hear this podcast.

Then I read the NYT piece. It was much less SJW than it had been sold as.

IMHO.

Yancey Ward said...

I still think Doyle made a mistake outing himself. It has lessened some of the impact the McGrath character had by allowing people to point to the explicit fact that it is parody. Some of the art has been lost.

Yancey Ward said...

de-Sitter,

I tried to read it, but it was firewalled. Can you quote from it? Did the article take the professor to task for his/her belief that the movie was flirting with "blackface"?

gilbar said...

Wait a minute?
is this guy saying that Tatiana isn't Real
That is Such BULL!

Drago said...

I originally considered doing a satirical LLR/NeverTrump character on twitter but there was an insurmountable problem: there was no way to really distinguish the LLR/NeverTrump character with the Titiana McGrath characterl. Content wise they would be too similar.

Simply examine LLR-lefty Chuck's offerings here and you'll see what I mean.

Yancey Ward said...

I often think there are several "Chuck" parodies going on in some of these threads- it is too much work (or, at least more than I want to do) to check the profiles to verify.

Jimmy said...

I often wonder if the left is even aware how insane they have become. Can a group of people be so insular as to not even notice that their thought leaders have gone nuts? Reading comments on Twitter, and this blog, I think the answer is that they lack not only a sense of humor, but self awareness.
It all would be hilarious- I mean, Biden, Sanders, Pelosi, NYT -except what they want to do to normal people and society is dangerous and obscene.

narciso said...

That would be j covington voorhees.

Temujin said...

I like how that clip ends with him saying emphatically, "That's the New York Times", as if this is not something they do every single day of their operation and have been doing for years. They've only recently put their approach in writing with the 1619 Project, but it's been a part of their DNA for years.

I don't see how this ends well for both sides.

Sprezzatura said...

YW,

It went over the olden days, but associated, texts and theatrical portrayals that were undeniably racist.

It was a history lesson more than a BLM pep talk. Though it was obviously pro social justice stuff. Which seems to be very serious threat re some folks POVs.

IMHO.

n.n said...

Woke but drowsy: social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere. So Pro-choice.

Yancey Ward said...

De-Sitter, I got to see the title of the article and the first sentence before the paywall descended- those were clearly directed at Mary Poppins in soot, not blackface in general. Of course, I couldn't see beyond that point in the article. It seems to me that Mary Poppins shouldn't have been discussed at all from my memories of the movie- I just don't get it.

Achilles said...

anti-de Sitter space said...
YW,

It went over the olden days, but associated, texts and theatrical portrayals that were undeniably racist.

It was a history lesson more than a BLM pep talk. Though it was obviously pro social justice stuff. Which seems to be very serious threat re some folks POVs.

IMHO.



A history lesson that left out certain Virginia Governors and former Vice Presidents and other obvious racists.

And the last 5-8 decades or so of Democrats turning black urban population centers into ghettos.

And how the democrats turned the public school system into an explicitly socioeconomically segregated travesty while sending their kids to private school.

Certain POVs are definitely threatened by racism.

Sprezzatura said...

I do pay for the NYT.

But I almost never bother signing in. Just put your browser in private or incognito or whatever, and you can read everything.

Some browsers do this better than others, and sometimes dumping all cookies makes things work better. I always have multiple browsers running, and often multiple machines with multiple browsers. So their tracking (that counts how many articles you’ve read) is easy to avoid. For me these workarounds are faster than me needing to typing in my login stuff.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

There was also recently a learned gentleman of the negro profession who railed against the white privilege and racism of early-twentieth-century coal miners wearing blackface.

Achilles said...

Obama sends his kids to schools with armed guards.

The rest of you plebs can deal.

robother said...

Tatiana Lives! As has happened many times in Herstory, a weak male has come forward to simultaneously steal the credit for and mock this strong woman's work. This will not stand. We the POP (People of Pronouns) are shortly opening a donation site to fight this Doyle and his (in)appropriation of the righteous Tatiana's tweet-woke.

h said...

from the article:
One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up . When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.

This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.

The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. When the dark figures of the chimney sweeps step in time on a roof, a naval buffoon, Admiral Boom, shouts, “We’re being attacked by Hottentots!” and orders his cannon to be fired at the “cheeky devils.” We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans; they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. It’s a parody of black menace; it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. In the 1952 novel “Mary Poppins in the Park,” the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, “I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.”

“Mary Poppins Returns,” set in the 1930s, seems to offer a more racially inclusive vision of the Banks’s London (at least among the working classes). But a key sequence of the film plays into a much more fraught history from a suppressed part of Mary Poppins’s past.


In Travers’s first “Mary Poppins” novel, published in 1934, a magic compass transports the children around the world, including a stop where they meet a scantily clad “negro lady,” dandling “a tiny black pickaninny with nothing on at all.” (“Pickaninny” has long been seen as an offensive term for a black child.) She addresses Mary Poppins in minstrel dialect and invokes the convention of blacking up: “My, but dem’s very white babies. You wan’ use a li’l bit black boot polish on dem.”

This episode proved so controversial that the book was banned by the San Francisco Public Library , prompting Travers to drop the racialized dialogue and change the offending caricature to an animal. (A number of British authors built on the tradition of turning American minstrelsy into animal fables: Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne both cited Uncle Remus dialect stories, including “Br’er Rabbit” tales , as inspiration.)

In Travers’s 1981 revision, the “negro lady” became a hyacinth macaw who speaks genteel English. Travers, who was born in Australia to Anglo-Irish parents, claimed that black children loved reading the “pickaninny dialect” in her book, but that she made the change because she didn’t wish to see “Mary Poppins tucked away in a closet” by meddlesome adults.

hstad said...

anti-de Sitter space said..."....It was a history lesson more than a BLM pep talk. Though it was obviously pro social justice stuff. Which seems to be very serious threat re some folks POVs....?" I'm sorry you view SJWs as a history lesson. These people have caused serious damage to economies and lives. That's why the news organs like the NY Times is pure propaganda, which destroys civilizations. It is as you state, but far more serious as to "POVs". Peoples lives have been lost and entire civilizations have collapsed on such POVs.

Bob Boyd said...

Governor North and PM Trudeau are not racists, but Mary Poppins is.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Big fucking deal, h. Cry all you want for those poor, oppressitated darkies, butI have no sympathy left for them. I'm all niggered out.

n.n said...

Mary Poppins dressed in soot chic. Chimney sweepers were and are rabid diversitists. Coal miners, too. They should be now and henceforth aborted... cancelled.

rhhardin said...

I'm guessing that nothing new comes up after the first three minutes.

Yancey Ward said...

I think I have related this story before, but will again.

My father worked in a deep coal mine when I was between the ages of 4-13. In those first couple of years, my father used to come home after his shift and wash up in the utility room of the house we rented that was there for that specific purpose- for the miner to wash- it was a company house at one time in the past. The first time I ever saw him after a shift, I was playing outside and he came up the driveway and asked me what I was doing. With the black coal dust on his face, I didn't recognize him at all, apparently. According to the story, he told he was my daddy, and I replied that he wasn't because my daddy wasn't black. My father loved telling that story, though I have at times thought maybe he made it up. I can't seperate the actual memory of the event from the times he told the story throught my life.

RK said...

Guessing that journalists felt compelled to come up with some angle of the latest hot trend, which at the time was probably blackface outrage.

Ann Althouse said...

“ I still think Doyle made a mistake outing himself.“

He didn’t.

Explained in the full podcast.

A UK journalist went to a lot of trouble to figure it out.

He says he’s working on other characters that haven’t been outed yet.

Yancey Ward said...

Yes, I know that, but he didn't have to confirm the identity. It is like the Whistleblower- had Adam Schiff and John Roberts not censored the name, we wouldn't know that it was Ciaramella. If Doyle hadn't confirmed he was McGrath, a lot of people on both sides wouldn't know Titania is parody. I liked having that sliver of doubt, and other having it in bigger or smaller bits.

Gahrie said...

The fact that people continue to subscribe to, and read, the NYTimes disturbs me. Nearly everyone acknowledges that it is a partisan weapon that is absurdly in thrall with extreme Left politics.

Yancey Ward said...

Well, Gahrie, people like to support their propaganda operations with their hard-earned money.

Yancey Ward said...

From Titania just the other day:

Penis equals Problematic Truncheon
Semen equals Hate Syrup.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Yancey Ward said...
a lot of people on both sides wouldn't know Titania is parody. I liked having that sliver of doubt.


There was never any doubt. Hard to imagine how someone could think there was. Ann Coulter regularly quoted her.

Maillard Reactionary said...

Char Char Binks for the win. No way I can top that one.

narciso said...

you couldn't do python type satire today,


https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/02/post-brexit-frances-macron-proposes-eu-nuclear-doctrine/#comments

Bay Area Guy said...

Titiana McGrath = funny. She really puts the tit in Titiana.

The New York Times? Just not funny. You could get more laughs at a insurance convention.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Scotland should get the nukes housed in Scotland following Scexit, making them the second nuclear armed power in the EU.


Gahrie said...

Scotland should get the nukes housed in Scotland following Scexit, making them the second nuclear armed power in the EU.

There is a Trident nuclear submarine base already in Scotland.

narciso said...

and yet they learn no lesson,


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/08/homeowners-could-forced-replace-gas-boilers-ensure-uk-meets/

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Scotland should get the nukes housed in Scotland following Scexit, making them the second nuclear armed power in the EU.

Sacré Bleu!

Ken B said...

Twitter mobs and the French government attack a 16 year old girl, for her “blasphemy” https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/07/je-suis-mila/

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Gahrie said...
There is a Trident nuclear submarine base already in Scotland.


Kind of the point. Won't cost them anything. Just have to repaint everything blue and white.

narciso said...

'to speak the truth, in a time of deceit, is a revolutionary act' a fellow named orwell said that.

William said...

Thanks to h for an informative entry. I don't think Hottentot was used in a racially pejorative way. Hottentot is just an excellent word to use to describe a tot who is boiling over.....Some insults and words may be safely used because nobody remembers they're derogatory. Shakespeare calls some of his black characters blackamoors. I don't think black people take offense at blackamoor. I would guess Hottentot is in the same class......."Ditchdigger" used to be an ethnic slur directed against the Irish. That was when they dug ditches and before back hoe operators made so much money. (Back hoe operator sounds like a slang term for some kind of dishonorable profession.)

stephen cooper said...

nobody but me is going to say this, so I will say it.

I object to Titania McGrath because

somewhere, some young woman woke up one morning, washed her hair, put on makeup, probably had less breakfast than she wanted because she did not want to become overweight someday, and looked in the mirror, and thought to herself, well it is good that I did not hook up with that meth-dealing boyfriend, and ....

somewhere later in the day, she had her picture taken.

That picture of that woman, who is NOT "Titania McGrath" is now the "avatar" of young Mr. Doyle, who NEVER

had to put on makeup
who probably has a pot belly
who probably never had to resist the temptation to hook up with a flashy meth-dealing guy.

Cultural appropriation!

Just as bad as all those "beach reads" by elderly overweight women who, God bless their hearts, are not all that photogenic, written in the first person, BUT which feature on the cover a casual young woman, not overweight at all, relaxing at a beach in a photogenic pose, as a stand-in for our esteemed and elderly author of the novel.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

" Can a group of people be so insular as to not even notice that their thought leaders have gone nuts?"

Some blue checkmark actually said on Twitter yesterday that after the Traitor Twins were shittcanned from the WH he went home and watched "Schindler's List" and thought about how close we are to that here in the States.

And people were agreeing with this fool that Dachau on the Mississippi is gonna happen any day now.

That's the sort of thing that made my jaw drop 3 years ago. Now it gets an eyeroll and a headshake, because I read rhetoric like that all the time.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Speaking of England:

Trump slammed the phone down on Boris Johnson after an 'apoplectic' call with the prime minister

The technical term for this is: out of the frying pan into the fire.

England is a legacy nation, its current relative wealth almost entirely due to its history rather than its present - Italy with worse weather. The other nations of Europe are much the same but they realize that they can stabilize their decline by creating the illusion of a much larger country. They will pick up London's finance industry and Scotland, with its nukes, and end up not much worse off.

Ann Althouse said...

"Yes, I know that, but he didn't have to confirm the identity."

He would have had to lie when confronted. He just didn't.

Drago said...

ARM: "They will pick up London's finance industry and Scotland, with its nukes, and end up not much worse off."

Precisely the opposite will occur.

Britain with an allied trade deal with the US will force the EU to accept a new reality.

Trump has repeatedly intimated a willingness to deal quickly with the UK in order to give Boris the leverage to force Merkel's budding new german empire to back off. Imagine a YS/UK trade deal which specifies any EU tariffs on Britain will result in retaliatory US tariffs on the EU.

Next, imagine a scenario whereby the US provides a trade advantage to the UK over current arrangements with the EU...resulting in EU entities funneling MORE investment into the UK in order to gain Nation of Origin advantages.

And to top it all off, just this week the EU morons just withdrew a Canada style free trade deal that had been promised as an option and Boris has told the EU to stuff their demands that UK regulatory frameworks remain aligned with the EU.

Boris also told them to go stuff their demand for the 38B as well.

Barnier and Von der leyen better figure this out quickly.

You know, ARM is actually a very good barometer for what will happen in terms of trade and business impacts...if you simply assume the opposite of what he claims will happen occurs.

Drago said...

Btw, the argument was ALL about Huawei as the selected UK 5G provider which sends up all kinds on security concerns and will no doubt have ripple effects in security collaboration.

However, on trade deals and relations with the EU, it changes nothing.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Drago said...
Precisely the opposite will occur.


Your predictions are:

1. Scotland never leaves the UK
2. London is strengthened as a financial center by Brexit.

Currently the evidence is not particularly in your favor:

1. SNP won 48 of the 59 seats in Scotland in last month's general election, while campaigning to "put Scotland's future in Scotland's hands".

2. “There is no precedent for decoupling between a major economic power- in this case the European Union- and its financial centre, London”. London may survive as a major financial center, no one knows for certain, but a relative decline seems more likely.

tim in vermont said...

CYPRESS, Texas -- For the second year in a row, a transgender wrestler has won the Texas girls' Class 6A 110-pound division.

Women’s sports have been awarded to transgender boys as a consolation prize. Wrestle agains the women and win every time, or wrestle against the boys and lose all of th time. There is no real choice to make here. Titiana understands that sacrifices must be made.

Hagar said...

It is hard to make predictions - especially about the future - and should be prudently avoided.

Drago said...

ARM: "1. Scotland never leaves the UK
2. London is strengthened as a financial center by Brexit."

There is zero chance the current conservative govt will allow another "once in a generation" Scotland independence referendum.

So that's 5 years minimum.

By then its very possible another nation that matters will exit the EU (probably Poland). With UK's exit the EU lost the only other net cash contributor and Scotland by itself is an economic basketcase.

So no, in 5 years not even the Scots will want to jump ship from a secure economic power to join the parade of welfare cases in a weakening EU.

London as a financial powerhouse will definitely get locked in with the US trade deal. See Switzerland/Geneva for an example of a non-EU European financial stronghold that wisely avoided the common currency and getting trapped with that caterwauling cacophany of crazies in Brussels/Strasbourg.

Gahrie said...

1. SNP won 48 of the 59 seats in Scotland in last month's general election, while campaigning to "put Scotland's future in Scotland's hands".

Britain will never allow Scotland to leave. They would dissolve Scotland and annex it to England first.

2. “There is no precedent for decoupling between a major economic power- in this case the European Union- and its financial centre, London”. London may survive as a major financial center, no one knows for certain, but a relative decline seems more likely.

I'm betting on a huge upswing as EUs flee the regulatory behemoth for the freedom of the UK.

daskol said...

Andrew Doyle, and Joe Rogan actually, represent the revolt of the mild.

daskol said...

If you've lost the mild, you're truly lost. I do like the bit about "who says you can't punch down?" Punching down can be very funny, mostly because of the presumption that it's taboo. I think that's behind a lot of Trump's recent humor.

daskol said...

The self-censorship they describe is the saddest part. People who are dependent on large employers, whether in the creative fields or in corporate America, serve at the pleasure of the woke. And they know it.

daskol said...

It's fun to see Joe Rogan, not particularly erudite or well read but clearly intelligent and curious, discover and articulate through his conversations, clumsily if authentically, great insights into psychology and behavior, politics and philosophy that avid students get from engaging with great thinkers and texts.

Yancey Ward said...

ARM,

That you profess there could be no doubt tells us a lot about your reasoning abilities. Tell us- is 99.99% certainty the same as "no doubt"? What else are you absolutely certain about?

Yancey Ward said...

Althouse, he should have lied- it would be for the art of it all.

Birkel said...

ARM re: London's economy:
"If the question is when will London recover, a first-pass answer is never."

What a maroon.

Sprezzatura said...

The data I want to follow is how many folks parallel park Chirons on busy London streets before grabbing a bite.

Will this increase or decrease?

Seems like more successful financial biz means more of this, which is the result predicted by out commenting geniuses. So the UK populists win!

That’s like our DJT and R populism here!

Cool.

P.S. I’ve only seen that once. But we need real data. They’ve got cameras.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Blogger Birkel said...
ARM re: London's economy:
"If the question is when will London recover, a first-pass answer is never."

What a maroon.


In this post Birkel makes up a quote. Lying cunt. I can see why the republican posters here think you are a lying cunt. Because you are a lying cunt.


Nichevo said...

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...
Blogger Birkel said...
ARM re: London's economy:
"If the question is when will London recover, a first-pass answer is never."

What a maroon.

In this post Birkel makes up a quote. Lying cunt. I can see why the republican posters here think you are a lying cunt. Because you are a lying cunt.



No, no, no, BCARM. We* don't think Birkel is a lying cunt**. We think that YOU are a lying cunt. So in that sense, your handle is rather ironic, because nobody loves you, not even your dog or your mom.

As for his content, I believe that falls under the rubric of HUMOR. Look it up. Or just cosides him seriously but not literally. I don't think there is actual risk of you being confused with the coprophage Paul Krugman***, author of the quote.



*Not actually a registered Republican

**Some may disagree...but I'm not even sure if Ken B is a R/conservative

***Other than on the basis of your shared coprophagy.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Another stupid post. I got the reference. Humor, by definition, is funny. Birkel is only ever funny inadvertently. There is no WE, just you, a lonely bitter humorless man.

Nichevo said...

If Ann will do a poll on whether or not you are a lying cunt, we can see about that, but I reckon you are safe at the end of an old thread unlikely to garner sound-offs. However, you are a strong contender for most hateful commenter on this board. Much worse than Chuck.