79 Comments
founding

In defense of Len Downey’s piece: objectivity can be a challenge to one’s identity if you identify as a fucking moron.

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“Newsrooms that move beyond objectivity can build trust” is a headline you can only write if your head is so far up your own ass that you think everyone in the world knows what you had for dinner last night.

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🙌🙌🙌🫰🫰🔥🔥❤️

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Feb 3, 2023Liked by Matt Welch

Matt Welch > Josef Stalin.

Yeah, I said it. Come cancel me up, fam.

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Man, you just woke up today and chose violence, huh?

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Someone has to have the stones to tell The Truth around here!

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“A bit loose between the earlobes” is my new favorite Welchism.

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founding

Dammit, now we need a centralized list of Welchisms, too!

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Perhaps we need an entire TFC encyclopedia, dictionary, or handbook? Merch idea?

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Yeah!!! A good one! 🔥🫰

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founding

My district gave all new faculty a copy of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” (Beverly Daniel Tatum) when I started in 2005. Juxtapose this with Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning,” the pick for new hires in 2022. Sigh.

Not surprisingly, the complimentary lanyard included in my new hire grab bag still works, proving more durable than either bestseller.

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Feb 2, 2023Liked by Matt Welch

The brat pack author who wrote in the second person Matt was trying to name was Jay McInerney, who for some reason I imagine Moynihan has drunk with at some point.

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Feb 2, 2023Liked by Matt Welch

Quote of the day so far: "Sniffing the musky jock"

Also, more proof of Matt's subterranean gay tendencies. Just own it, Matt. Love conquers all.

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It's a pity the Fifth doesn't have any woke 14-years-old female fans, I would absolutely love to read some godawful Wattpad yaoi fanfiction involving the two gentlemen and Moynihan.

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“Who was the better man, Dr. Martin Luther King... or Stalin?”

- Norm Macdonald, interviewing WEB Dubois with a characteristic gotcha question.

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Great pod. Disagree with the school choice bit and I think Corey DeAngelis is a charlatan. But I liked the WEB Dubois Stalin stuff, well, I didn't LIKE LIKE it, but well, you know. I overall like the pod, as it is, am aware there are times where you guys might delve into subjects where I will shake my head and say "No, I don't think that's how it is" but hey, that's why America is great, amirite??

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Also, let me add, that there is no teacher I know who LIKES Randi Weingarten.

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The Gentrification Indulgences also need to contain a land acknowledgement for the people who you priced out of the area.

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"This land is the historic territory of the poors"

*disapproving AP style guide noises*

"Sorry.. this land is the historic territory of people of poorness."

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founding

I had just posted that your offsets idea were, in the past, called “indulgences,” when Moynihan used the word. Very appropriate, as this has been a go-to of religions through the centuries.

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Welch with 2 A+ rants and I’m not even halfway through.

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New tagline:

"TripAdvisor. Your George Wallace Travel App."

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One thing I’d add to the thing about journalists wanting to change the world: changing the world is a lofty goal, but good journalism can certainly have a positive impact while still being fair and impartial. For example, where I live in Australia, the journalism done by publications like The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC has exposed corruption and changed this country for the better. For example, the 4 Corners report on corruption in the Queensland Police, the 7.30 and 4 Corners reports on alleged war crimes by the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, the 4 Corners reports on child detention, the banking industry, and aged care, all of which have led to Royal Commissions (independent judicial inquiries) into these sectors, the reporting by Kate McClymont of the Sydney Morning Herald into corruption in New South Wales, the 4 Corners and 60 Minutes reports into the cosmetics industry, the 60 Minutes reports into money laundering in casinos.

There are so many more examples of journalists making the world better through their accurate, impartial, and fair reporting. So you don’t need to be an activist, you can be a damn good journalist.

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That's been one of the more frustrating things about the decline in quality of the discourse. There are plenty of *actual* issues about race, sex, gender, and all that, but they're largely being ignored or given a superficial, inadequate treatment because it's easier and more engaging to write "white-cis-men bad amiright?"

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Exactly. Cause they’re not interested in solutions; they’re interested in power.

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I'm as far as you can get from a Marxist, and yet I think there's something to the argument that much of the discourse about race, gender, sexuality, etc. is meant to keep us from talking about the class divide.

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Well said 👏🙌🔥❤️

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This was one of my favorite episodes yet! The only thing I'm not sure I agree on is that the school choice stuff is going to produce good results. I'm open to arguments in either direction and am admittedly ignorant of all the identifiable pros and cons. I mostly attended public schools as a kid, some of which were better than others. I also attended 2 private schools for a time, an Episcopalian one and a non-religious one, and the educational offerings from them were subpar. With school choice, what measures are proposed to enforce any sort of standards of quality on private schools? What would the effect be on public schools? I worry a great deal about improving our standards of education because it's one of those long-term issues that largely affect non-voters that often seem to go under the radar of politicians.

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Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023

I’m curious how school choice opinions fall based on the the interviewee’s education. I had a great public school education and *because* of that, I’m sympathetic to school choice/backpack funding initiatives. I had an adolescent experience that was as particular to me as everyone else’s was particular to themselves. But in my experience, private school kids (with the exception of some Catholic & Jewish schools) simply did not interact with lower-tier public school students at all, ever.

The unacknowledged power of non-public schools is they can exercise the choice of exclusion. Shitty public schools get massive amounts of funding. What they can’t do is remove perniciously disruptive, or even violent, students from their classrooms. If they want to counter school choice, they need to un-fuck that. It is a horrible burden to put on teachers and it is nearly terroristic to the students.

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Can alternative schools be the public-school equivalent of exclusion? Full disclosure, I went to a private school, and in Australia they are subsidised by the government.

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