A Storm’s a-Brewin’

By in free speech, juxtapositions, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Canada’s justice minister is considering options raised by the independent adviser on unmarked graves, who says Indigenous leaders want Canada to move on criminalizing residential school denialism.

Kimberly Murray called on lawmakers to consider “legal mechanisms” that could address the practice of denying or minimizing the abuses Indigenous children suffered at residential schools in her interim report released back in June.

One way to do that is by amending the Criminal Code to criminalize such actions, Murray said in a recent interview, noting Ottawa did so last year on the issue of Holocaust denialism.

“We could do the same for Indigenous people,” she said. “Make it an offence to incite hate and promote hate against Indigenous people by … denying that residential (schools) happened or downplaying what happened in the institutions.”

“Everybody in leadership when I speak about this, Indigenous leadership, … all want that amendment to happen in the Criminal Code.”

— CTV News

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Riots broke out in Dublin on Thursday evening, after an Algerian immigrant stabbed a woman and three children outside an Irish-language school earlier in the day. Police arrested more than 30 rioters, some of whom looted shops and lit cars and buses on fire during their rampage through central Dublin. Ireland’s police chief blamed the rioting on a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology,” which, however true of the property destruction, obscures the tensions that have been building for some time over Ireland’s generous immigration and asylum policies. From April 2022 to April 2023, Ireland, with a population just over 5 million, admitted more than 140,000 immigrants, and the foreign-born share of its population has risen from just over 6% in the mid-’90s to about 20% today. In February, Irish police reported an “exponential” increase in protests in 2023, many of them related to immigration.

Now the Irish government, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, is using the riots as an excuse to renew a push to pass a draconian hate-speech law that would criminalize, among other things, the possession of “hateful” content on personal electronic devices, which police would be empowered to seize and search. Irish police are also reportedly investigating Conor McGregor for a series of high-profile social media posts on Thursday in which the professional fighter criticized government immigration policy and the police response to the stabbing attack.

— The Scroll

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The modern Left espoused a radical version of Jeffersonian individualism. Born at Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, it considered the primary threat to democracy to lie in the great hierarchical institutions like the university, the corporation, and government. The struggle pitted the individual against the machine-like inhumanity of the industrial age. Mario Savio, the movement’s leader, told his comrades: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop.”

A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.

Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.

— Martin Gurri

 

Talking In a Sane and Cheerful Way to the World

By in technology, writing No Comments

Cal Newport:

Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.”

Newport and Gaiman hope for a return to the glory days of blogging. The practice of amateur essay writing will always be around in some form, but “blogging” per se was always a function of Web 2.0. It was trendy because the technological platform was trendy. Technology will move on, and the gens du monde will remain fascinated by it in whatever shiny new form it takes next, but they’re not going to become interested in blog posts again. Which is fine, of course — if you’re not after fame and riches, there’s absolutely no reason to want viral readership numbers. As we all should know by now, the rule for reading popular sites with comment sections is the same as the one for crossing swaying rope bridges: don’t look down.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to say is that “talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world” is a pretty good description of blogging at its best.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Conjoin ‘Em

By in foolosophy, ohferfucksake No Comments

I vaguely remember a wry observation that essentially said most internet thinkpieces can be reduced to two templates: “X is overrated,” or “X is underrated.” I would add a third, “Everyone is doing X wrong.” This is the formula chosen by Kathleen Stock for her contrarian take on gratitude, published at Thanksgiving for maximum provocation. Gratitude done properly, you see, requires a specific benefactor to whom you feel grateful. Stock, a former professor of philosophy who has done nothing to raise the discipline’s esteem in my eyes, thinks that being grateful in a bland, generic sense has become the trademark of yoga teachers, Instagram influencers, and people who want to humblebrag about their privilege — eew, those people. (Clear identification of the outgroup is also a necessary ingredient in this genre.) I mean, I’m sure there are vapid twits who invoke gratitude in a superficial way, but if you encounter so many of them, maybe this just says more about your online browsing habits than it does about significant trends. In any event, I guess I’m just glad that they’re trying, however ineptly, to model an appreciation for their good fortune. Fake it till you make it, and all that.

There are more sinister effects, though. It seems that hashtag-gratitude has an evil shadow:

It surely will not have escaped your notice that there is very little good news around — a state of affairs obviously not helped by awful wars, but not wholly caused by them either. Declinism and doom-mongering are in vogue everywhere you look; and, though they take on different flavours on the Left and Right, the net result is still bloody depressing. Whether it’s the collapse of the environment and the implacable rise of bigotry, or the collapse of Western civilisation and the implacable rise of cultural Marxism, there’s not much out there to put a spring in your step. In fact, it’s almost as if all the despairing and all the gratitude were two sides of the same psychically dysfunctional coin.

“Almost as if.” Nice hedge. She goes on to say:

When gratitude loses its moorings from a proper relation to another person’s intention and responsibility, we end up with nice vibes. When resentment does the same, we end up with increasing amounts of conspiratorial rage. And unfortunately for us, the former doesn’t seem to have the power to cancel out the latter.

Now, I’m not a former, current, or future professor of philosophy, so I don’t know if there’s an already-named fallacy on display here, but it seems to me that if you want to say that unfocused gratitude is somehow directly related to unfocused resentment, with one perhaps causing the other, or both springing from the same source, you’d have to offer some sort of actual argument. Instead, she relies on what I think of as the “argument from aesthetic symmetry” — i.e., you just claim that these two things are “two sides of the same coin,” perfectly balanced and inseparable. Or you portray them as two combatants in a zero-sum battle. The rhetorical image does all the work of argument (what little of it there is in such an impressionistic piece). Many of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams use that same formulaic symmetry to give the illusion of depth. Speaking of which, be sure to read more in my upcoming essay on Unherd, “Why Oscar Wilde Is Overrated.”

Happy Thanksgaining

By in battling personal entropy 2 Comments

Originally, I planned to squat 405 pounds back in the spring, but a Baker’s cyst behind my knee, and possibly a small meniscus tear, forced a delay in proceedings. It’s fitting that I finally accomplished it tonight, I suppose.

Againstism

By in the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Why isn’t this a problem? I find this question genuinely fascinating. What is it about those ideas being expressed by someone foreign — someone who can plausibly (albeit stupidly) be cast as a victim — that causes otherwise exquisitely sensitive people to completely gloss over them? In quotidian American politics, the most inconsequential of sentiments are routinely cast as being a part of the “white, male, cisgendered hegemony.” But Osama bin Laden starts talking about the evils of homosexuality and fornication, about the fusing of church and state, and about “complete submission to His Law,” and it’s just . . . ignored.

This same trend has been on display at many of the anti-Israel protests, where I’ve seen quite a lot of people wearing T-shirts that read, “Queers for Palestine” or “LGBT for Hamas” or what you will. It’s utterly delusional — almost to the point of pride. This is your brain on intersectionality. How to fight back remains anyone’s guess.

I feel like I’ve seen this a lot lately: people peering into the void of wokeness and attempting to discern the core of it, the ruling principle. But I’m here to tell them to stop wasting their time. There’s nothing there beyond what I think of as “againstism.” The emotional fuel of it, as Nietzsche always said, is resentment. But intellectually, there’s nothing of substance there. The point is simply to be against anything perceived to be established, successful, dominant, or powerful — whiteness, heterosexuality, capitalism, America, the West, etc. It’s the perpetual rage of the spoiled adolescent who has never had to consider how much comfort and security he takes for granted even as he blindly flails against it. Why do we find Western libertines supporting Islamic terrorism? Because it’s also against everything they resent. Why do we find trust-fund brats advocating for Communism? Say it with me now: it’s also against everything they resent. What the hell does it mean when we see signs about “reproductive justice” at anti-Israel protests, or when a kid famous for refusing to go to school anymore leads a chant of “no climate justice on occupied land”? It just means that countless resentments can fit inside a pinhead. We’re against it all! The Coalition of the Oppressed is made up of multiple marriages of convenience with nothing in common but an enemy, marriages which can be annulled on a whim. Jews are favored against right-wing populists, but disfavored against Muslims, who in turn become villains when they protest against gender ideology in schools. That same gender ideology trumps the TERFs formerly known as feminists, who were in favor when battling against patriarchy. It’s an intersectional version of rock, paper, scissors, or maybe musical chairs, or perhaps Calvinball. If the Western white male capitalist didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented just to act as a centripetal force.

The Things We Do For Love

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion No Comments

Man must either fall in love
with Someone or Something,
or else fall ill.

— W.H. Auden

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

We had the annual charity women’s powerlifting event at the gym yesterday. The Lady of the House handled the spreadsheet duties, as usual, and this year she generously volunteered my services to help with spotting and loading the bar. A good time was had by all, though it was a bit disconcerting for me, an average student in math, to have the other guys ask me to check behind them to make sure they loaded the correct plates. Still, under my stewardship, the weights were all correct and the squat rack was adjusted to the correct height each time, so it was a personal success.

Before we started, everyone involved gathered in the group fitness room for a few quick words of encouragement, followed by a brief prayer. The gym owner thanked the Lord for our health and the ability to “do what we love here today,” and asked to keep us safe (given the date, there were words of thanks for our veterans as well). Of course, I’m all for expressions of gratitude, even if I don’t believe in the literal existence of the intended recipient. The ritual, the habit, of being appreciative is good enough for me. I looked at the two ladies in front of me, their heads bowed, one woman’s arm across the other’s shoulder, their other hands clasping those of the women beside them, and thought However we got here, it’s good to see it. Personally, I can reinterpret Christian ideas and practices in a symbolic or metaphorical way, but one way in which I differ from the spiritual-not-religious is that I think it would be condescending to act as if I understand the true symbolic essence of the faith, while all those devout believers are just benighted. I respect the truth claims enough to openly say I disagree with them and call myself an atheist, even if that raises someone’s ire, rather than act like a cuckoo, secretly laying my eggs in Christian nests.

I’m sure Hirsi Ali’s announcement will ruffle some rational feathers. Stuart Ritchie calls it “daft” and wonders how she could possibly be ignorant of all the obvious rebuttals to these silly, uniformly terrible arguments. Well, I don’t know exactly how one would go about arguing decisively, pro or con, that the West is becoming dangerously decadent, self-loathing, and incapable of withstanding challenges from its enemies. How would one “prove” that our nation has used up its allotted great deal of ruin, except after the fact? Likewise, as with Athens and Jerusalem, what does argument have to do with a desire for spiritual solace?  There are certainly many conversations to be had there, but what do I care if we ultimately arrive at different conclusions? She may be incorrect, but is she wrong? I’ll resist the urge to elaborate and trust that you get the distinction I’m making.

If Hirsi Ali were a friend of mine, I would say something like this: most of what you see as good and beautiful, I do, too. I can’t tell you how to handle your need for solace; all I can say is that in my own case, my resolution to the existential angst of my youth didn’t come in the form of an answer, like a religious doctrine, but in the realization that I’d been asking all the wrong questions. The angst disappeared on its own, just like the frustration before I realized I’d been reading the instructions wrong while trying to assemble the bookcase. Of course that bolt doesn’t fit there! This may be more of a logical or intellectual approach than you’re looking for, but hey, there’s a spiritual version of that, too.

As for the meaning and purpose of life, well, I think it’s partially the wrong question, in the sense that meaning and purpose aren’t “out there,” pre-existing, waiting to be discovered or commanded to us. They do exist. In fact, we all largely recognize them when we see them. But no, I don’t think they are inherent to existence. Some assembly is required. On a biological level, it’s all just fighting, feasting and fornicating until we die. Humans, though, ask “Why?” and set about providing justifications. All of those provisional answers — art, music, writing, sport, religion, communal tasks, and the basic care and maintenance of the conditions necessary for them — are something we create and share with each other. Those things all exist and have meaning as long as we keep them alive by practicing them. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of meaning and purpose, you might say. It may seem bleak to say that, no, I don’t think there are any guarantees involved. Good and beautiful things can disappear forever, especially if we fail to work for their preservation. All I can say is, well, you know me. I don’t find it depressing or demoralizing. And anyway, whatever you believe, you still have to show up and put in the necessary work.

So we gather together and do the things we love. We put aside self-centeredness and petty concerns and create something beautiful and meaningful to share. I think that’s good enough.

There’s Something About You, Baby, So Right

By in foolosophy No Comments

Rob Henderson:

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas. You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow. The former often demonstrates a subtle understanding that weaves together insights from various domains. The latter, though sharp and quick-minded, lacks the same depth of perspective or the ability to see beyond the immediate conversation or the Current Thing. This is becoming increasingly apparent among obviously bright young adults who don’t read or read nonsense despite paying large sums of money for what should have been a decent education.

Back in my days of installing satellite television, I had a buddy in the crew named Frank, a country boy from Kentucky who had served in Iraq as a sniper. (Interestingly, one of my other buddies was Mundher, an Iraqi refugee. If you can believe it, we all got along fine without needing DEI strictures and an HR department.) Anyway, during one of our conversations, Frank asked how I’d met the Lady of the House. I said that we were both amateur writers, which perked him up. “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “I knew there was just something about the way you talk!” I can’t recall verbatim how he elaborated, but the gist of it was that I just gave off an impression of being studious and thoughtful even when I wasn’t saying much. I was just happy to have a piece of counter-evidence to the more numerous assumptions I’d encountered throughout my life that I was anywhere from rude to mute to retarded.

Kiss My Asterisk

By in language No Comments

Nancy Friedman:

Sometimes, though, it’s swear-aversion that rouses our interest. The dropped letters in ads. The bleeps in commercials. The f**cks, the s**ts, even the Victorian-appearing d*mns.

Which is why we are pointing you today to Blackbird Spyplane, the Substack newsletter that the New York Times said was “inventing a new language for talking about style.” As it happens, some of that language is generously sprinkled with little stars.

Blackbird Spyplane clearly isn’t prudish. So what is it up to with the be-asterisked words—trying to highlight them, maybe?

Over on Instagram, I private-messaged co-editor Jonah Weiner to learn his motives. He swiftly replied that he had two reasons:

1. I learned from listening to [the podcast] Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig that a good-natured upbeat conversation that’s full of bleeped curses is just funny on a formal level, and I wanted to try to simulate that in print, and relatedly 2. I tend to use so many curses that it might risk feeling a bit too harsh in aggregate without the asterisks softening the effect.

(Edited slightly not to remove profanity but to add clarifying punctuation, capital letters, and a link.)

I’ve never used asterisks in written profanity, for the usual reasons — we’re all supposedly adults here, and it’s just rude to expect your guests to do part of the work of making your meaning clear. “Here’s a new post. Some assembly required”? That would be like inviting you over for dinner and having you help in the kitchen beforehand, or maybe even handing you something from the refrigerator and pointing you toward the microwave. No, if I want to treat you to some spicy commentary, there will be no shortcuts taken. Still, though, I can appreciate the rationale here. Asterisks as sight gags, or as sheets of tonal fabric softener? Not for me, but I guess that makes sense.

My own attempts to swear without swearing usually involve archaisms, like trying to bring back the use of swive. I’ve also adopted the habit of calling someone a canute. Not in a gendered sense, of course — here I follow the example of our British cousins in that canute can apply equally to men or women. “You swiving canute!” I shout in a moment of road rage, trusting that heartfelt emotion will carry my meaning across, even if they think I’m speaking another language.

Misplaced Tycoons

By in education, eric hoffer, juxtapositions No Comments

Just as stomach ulcers were belatedly discovered to be caused not by stress but by a humble bacterium, historians of the future may well discover that the real reason campuses erupt in fanaticism is the prosaic fact that the rest of us have started shoveling money at them. The first round in the 1960s took place at a time when the number of college students in America had increased by a factor of five in the space of three decades. Naturally this swollen demographic became conscious of itself as a bloc and wanted to throw its weight around, like new money. The administrators and professors had their heads turned, too, by newfound cultural importance and flush budgets, and so they let them.

— Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

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On October 4, 1957, the Russians placed a medicine-ball-sized satellite in orbit. It needs an effort to remember how stunned we were when we discovered that the clodhopping Russians were technologically ahead of us, and that we would have to catch up to them. We reacted hysterically. We set out to produce scientists and technologists wholesale by shoveling billions into the universities. And where the billions went there went also millions of people who were not primarily interested in learning but wanted a piece of the action. Thus Khrushchev’s Sputnik toy brought about a change in the tilt of America’s social landscape from the marketplace to the universities. After October 1957, many young people who would normally have gone into business ended up climbing academic ladders and throwing their weight around in literary and artistic cliques from Manhattan to Berkeley, California…They were going to wake up the academic world and turn the university into an instrument of power. They were going to make history, which is an acceptable substitute for making and losing millions. It was these misplaced tycoons who set the tone and shaped events in the 1960s.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

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