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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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I think I stated three objections, in bullet points, that are not mere policy disagreements. I expect California's governor to select a senator that wouldn't be to my liking, but I would have generally expected him to select one that lives in California, to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, and to pick someone that had some career history other than attracting and dispensing patronage dollars. Likewise, I would expect Alabama to select someone far to my right and quite religious, but I wouldn't expect them to pick someone that lives in the Dakotas and inform everyone that isn't a white man that this is specifically a White Man seat.

The three objections you list seem to be about par for the course for senator badness. I could list five that are equally objectionable about one of the current senators from Alabama, but I'm not sure simply listing flaws of ideological opponents is a productive way to discuss anything. It's a bit too close to making isolated demands for rigor.

The point is that Butler's pros as pointed out by many other commentators outweigh the specific cons you listed for the sort of voters whose opinion matters to Newsom even though they may not do so for you. This is the exact sort of thing thing I would say to myself about Tuberville or Trump.

have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, an

The last time Newsom appointed a Senator, to a de facto permanent seat, no less, rather thana de facto 15 month gig, he appointed Alex Padilla, a Latino.

to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role

Latins are way below blacks on the oppression hierarchy, though, and most of the qualified Latinos are quite light skinned and prone to going off the reservation(remember, affirmative action hires aren’t Shaniqua either- these are PMC black women immersed in democratic patronage and have more in common with their white coworkers than with the hood granny from last weeks thread).

By the by, Latinos hate the use of the x suffix. If you're looking to speak on their behalf, you'd best start with not using a meme that is essentially an implicit attack on their language.

It is an attack, an awkward one at that, but fully deserved. Grammatical gender is a dumb feature and I will fight the whole of the world West of the Urals and South of the Himalayas on that point. At least English somehow managed to have some positive changes to it during the middle period even with the Normans doing their best to make things worse.

Even some of the progressives have picked up on this, and are moving to "Latine", which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Hopefully it's pronounced differently than "latrine".

which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Unless you speak Spanish, in which case it still sounds stupid.

I mean, come on, English already has ‘Latin’ and ‘Hispanic’ as a gender neutral term. Inventing much dumber ones is, well, dumb.

Latine would be the correct gender-neutral Spanish form, if Spanish-speaking culture cared about being gender neutral. So I don't think it sounds stupid in Spanish, just like a word only a politically correct person would use. In much the same way that "African-American" is a perfectly cromulent English word, but the group it refers to mostly prefer "Black".

Spanish doesn’t have a gender neutral form that wasn’t made up 30 seconds ago, and most -e words are masculine anyways(what would be the article, anyways? Le is already taken, it’s a masculine objective form).

It still sounds less stupid than any attempt at pronouncing "Latinx" in either language.

My framing above is intended to indicated how I would expect the governor of California to behave, which would include use of the term "Latinx".