Just a Final (I Hope) Couple Notes, Sorry, for the Record

April 25, 2012

I’ve said this a couple times, but I really like Girls and I think Lena Dunham is unbelievably talented for her age. Maybe not just for her age. I thought the same thing about Tiny Furniture, for what it’s worth. I am looking forward to seeing where she goes and what she does.

It’s okay to criticize a show you like. In some sense it’s probably necessary!

The idea that writing about race and popular culture somehow qualifies necessarily as “race-baiting” or as trolling for traffic is annoying, but on the bright side (heh) it offers a kind of appropriate example of the idea that the Tumblr generation has a really hard time thinking or talking about race. (A nice woman named Lake emailed and described Arfin’s Precious Tweet as a “turn to total irreverence when approached with a minimally challenging discussion,” which is a nice way of putting a certain measure of the response to this entire discussion.)

I hope that if there’s a “lesson” to be taken out of this it’s something like “wow, if I want to be a successful HBO writer or even just a vaguely adult human being I should probably stop making bad race jokes and start thinking about how I deal with race, because there are a lot of people outside my 2,000 or 3,000 internet followers who don’t find that stuff as edgy or cutesy or interesting as I do and are actually totally alienated and turned off by it. And maybe the best way for me to be a good friend is to tell my other friends to knock it off, too, because for Christ’s sake we are almost 30.”

Also if there’s another lesson it should be that anyone who links to a Gavin McInnes article sincerely should be forced to tattoo one quote from that article on their forehead. That’s more of a rule, but it should be real.

In this case it would be this quote: The beta males on Twitter seem confused by this “Racial McCarthyism” quote. It’s ironic that the people who use “Nazi” to mean “Anything bad” get thrown off by an anti-communist being used to conjure up something that isn’t specifically anti-communist. Check Wikipedia.

Just a reminder: a bunch of you guys linked to an article containing those three sentences, in that order.

Check Wikipedia.