John Scalzi Has A Few Words for the White Folk Freaking Out Over 4 More Years

Filed in National by on November 12, 2012

What I really wish I could do is to ignore Fair Use and just repost the entire damn thing here. But to refresh, John Scalzi is the author of my Favorite Political Blog Post of All Time, and runs the blog Whatever, where he hold forth taunting the untauntable. Scalzi has provided some thoughts on the election, specifically directed to the white people in End Stage Freakout over the President’s win. Go over right now and read his entire post — Some Quick and Final Post-Election Notes to Some But Not All White Men.

He provides seven observations meant to remind conservatives that what they are feeling is being hit with Reality:

2. Second, stop believing that the problem was that Romney didn’t sell the message. He sold it just fine. So did Paul Ryan. So did the GOP candidates you favor. So did hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads funded by SuperPACs. The problem isn’t the selling of the message. The problem is the message. Everyone else got the message. They just said “thanks, no,” to it. Stop being the guy who thinks the message will work by restating it again in a slightly different, often louder, way. That says “You’re stupid enough not to notice I’m selling the same message.” This is not a good way to convince people.

AMEN.

Got any other reassuring observations for these people? Put them in the comments.

About the Author ()

"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

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  1. From Pine View Farm » Blog's archive » Message Discipline | November 13, 2012
  1. Steve Newton says:

    How about, “Stop thinking the message will go over better if you can find your own brown-skinned guy like Jindal or Rubio to pimp for it. That’s not really why the country elected Obama. I may not like all that he says (I don’t) but in case you didn’t notice back in 2008 during the primaries he and Hillary Clinton were both saying pretty much the same thing, and either one of them would have destroyed John McCain and slipped past Mitt Romney and be starting a second term this January.”

  2. Well said, Steve. I’ll probably catch shit for this, but I don’t care:

    Jindal, Rubio et. al. are nothing more than modern day “house n****rs”. They got theirs, & tough shit for everyone else.

    No thanks.

  3. cassandra_m says:

    @Steve — Right. You can’t just say the same stuff in blackface. These folks circle of communication is small and getting smaller, the color of their candidates’ skin is not the problem.

    (And this just points out the GOP needs to stop trying to play identity politics. They need to pay attention to the fact that Rubio is of Cuban decent. That doesn’t necessarily buy him instant credibility among the entire Hispanic population.)

  4. Steve Newton says:

    Oh, and by the way, John Scalzi was one of my favorite authors long before he became a blogger.

  5. cassandra_m says:

    I’d long since abandoned my science fiction obsession by the time Scalzi published his first book. Maybe it is time to try it again.

  6. Steve Newton says:

    Scalzi’s an interesting read. His first novel, “Old Man’s War” was such a subtle side-swipe at Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and better reprise of themes from Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” that most people missed what he was doing. In fact, a good many reviewers thought Scalzi wrote the thing as a tribute to Heinlein. If you stick with the whole series, by the time you get to the fourth book, “Zoe’s Tale,” you realize that he has stood most Heinleinian views and tropes on their ears, while managing to write in almost the same sort of voice Heinlein himself used.

    Now his “Redshirts” is beginning the process of doing the same thing to Star Trek.

    The problem with Scalzi as a writer is not that he’s not entertaining (he’s compulsively readable), but that IMHO most of his readers don’t get what he’s doing.

    But then, he’d probably tell me I don’t either.

  7. >i>The problem with Scalzi as a writer is not that he’s not entertaining (he’s compulsively readable), but that IMHO most of his readers don’t get what he’s doing.

    But then, he’d probably tell me I don’t either.

    There’s a name for people like that. It’s either “Stanley Kubrick” or “douchebag artiste”. IMO the two are interchangeable.

  8. duty says:

    “Jindal, Rubio et. al. are nothing more than modern day “house n****rs”. They got theirs, & tough shit for everyone else.”

    Don’t worry Roland your ignorance is fully accepted here.

  9. puck says:

    Extreme right-wingers: You are still well-represented in the states of the former Confederacy. You can always go live there and have neighbors and representatives just like you.

  10. Chest Rockwell says:

    “Extreme right-wingers: You are still well-represented in the states of the former Confederacy. You can always go live there and have neighbors and representatives just like you.”

    Sounds like the confederacy here in Sussex County.

  11. Jason330 says:

    Thanks for that link Michelle M. Good stuff. This is under discussed:

    Meanness- Your party is really mean, mocking and demonizing everyone who does not follow you into the pits of hell. You constantly imply – as Mitt Romney did in his “47% speech” – that anybody who disagrees with you does so not by logic or moral conviction, but because they are shiftless, lazy parasites who want “free stuff” from “traditional Americans.

    People just don’t want to associate with the a-hole party. Just look at the registration numbers in Delaware.

  12. bamboozer says:

    Kind of mild actually, but essentially correct. I expect that now the Republicans will start “outreach” efforts to the many groups that hate them. Good luck, Rubio and Jindal do not a racially neutral party make. Same goes for the GOP’s rabid social conservatives, we’re not going to “join together in Christ” and ban abortion and contraception. We’re at the end of the “whites only” approach to elections by the Republicans, Karl Rove may be disgraced in the eyes of the plutocrats but he got it right a decade ago when he tried to get his party to court Latinos.