Outis Niemand
About Outis Niemand
Posts by Outis Niemand:
Quis Me Sustinebit?
Unhappy is he who has nothing to give. But a thousand times unhappier is he who has no one with whom to share what he has. Quis me sustinebit? — Quis me audiet? My fountain dries up and its water becomes bitter if the dove with its thirst does not visit. Abundance then becomes the intolerable pain. The water that springs from the mind and the soul falls back on itself and turns into a poisonous sludge. Unhappy he who would give, who was made to be obtained, and share out his substance.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2
I sympathize with Lauren, but I fear this often turns out to be one of those “monkey’s paw” type of wishes. You wish for someone to discuss books or philosophy with, and she turns out to be a humanities professor rather than an autodidact. You find someone who is happy to talk about his thoughts, and he tells you about his third wife and George Biden in the “other” White House. You find someone curious about things, and those things turn out to be Edgar Cayce, political conspiracies, and astrology. It’s safer to stay here, talking to myself. Safer for everyone, in fact. For who is to say that I wouldn’t be an importunate bore to anyone I captured? Every blog post represents a conversation that somebody, somewhere, was mercifully spared. My archives are a monument to the Unknown Interlocutors, a testimony to the forbearance of people who never had to exercise it. All those quotations, stemwinders, analogies, and strained jokes that would otherwise have tested the patience of friends and acquaintances have been safely deposited online, where nobody is obliged to read them. The fountain trickles; the anonymous doves visit at their leisure; all is for the best.
By His Fir, The Hermit Sits Alone
Though an aristocrat and military officer, Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) grew disillusioned with war, politics, and worldly affairs, as reflected in his novels. In Stello (1832), the character of Doctor Noir counsels the poet in a paean to solitude: “[The poet must] follow the conditions of his being, freed from the influence of associations, even the most beautiful, because Solitude alone is the source of inspiration. Solitude is holy.” He adds, “All associations suffer from the vices of the convent.” The poet must become not a monk seeking community (that is, “the convent”) but become a hermit, a secular hermit given the times. His hermitage will be within the desert of the city and modernity.
— Robert Rodriguez, The Book of Hermits: A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present
And Niemand came upon a gathering of hermits, who had assembled in the marketplace to proclaim their solitude.
They had founded societies and publishing houses, and had taken counsel together concerning the preservation of the human spirit. And over their doors they had written: Humanity! Humanity!
And Niemand was astonished.
“What is this?” he asked. “Have the hermits descended from their mountains? Have they grown weary of solitude? Or has mankind at last become agreeable?”
And the hermits answered him: “We have come together to defend humanity against the Machine! For the Machine is soulless and evil, and threatens to destroy all that makes us human!”
And Niemand pondered this.
“Strange hermits!” he said. “All my life I have known men who fled into solitude to escape the noise and importunity of their fellows. And now I find hermits who have fled their solitude to defend their fellows against a machine!
“Tell me, does this machine come knocking at your door? Does it demand that you attend its meetings, sign its petitions, and affirm its convictions? Does it complain when you fail to answer its letters? Does it insist upon telling you what you ought to think?”
“No!” cried the hermits. “That is precisely the danger! It is agreeable and accommodating! It offers companionship without the obligations of human fellowship!”
“Ah!” said Niemand. “A terrible adversary indeed. I begin to understand why hermits should fear it.”
But the hermits grew angry, for they perceived that Niemand was mocking them.
“We shall have nothing to do with this abomination!” they declared. “And neither shall we associate with those who do!”
And Niemand laughed.
“Behold! Even in their solitude they cannot endure solitude! They must seek one another out, that they may agree upon whom to shun. They have escaped the multitude only to establish a smaller multitude, and they call this independence!”
Niemand turned to leave, but paused to add:
“Beware of offending a hermit,” Niemand said. “For a hermit is like a deep well. Cast a stone into it, and who shall bring it forth again? Long is his memory, and deep his resentment.”
“And what shall become of the man who casts the stone?” the hermits asked.
“Nothing very terrible,” replied Niemand. “But one morning he may discover that he has been mocked on the internet.”
As It Will Be
Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments. It is when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be, rather than as a disappointment.
— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit
Well, that’s an uncomfortable question. Accepting that people have more access to enriching material—not just books but great cinema, enlightening lectures, beautiful art, and everything else—and actively choose to ignore it in favor of various shades of slop is… depressing. If you have any kind of populist leaning, left or right, you don’t want to blame the public for their tastes. It’s more psychologically comforting to deny the masses all agency. “The phones” is a harder villain to grapple with because we choose to use them. We elect to doomscroll, brainrot, ragebait, and slopwallow. We create social media content. We are the problem with phones.
This is certainly an improvement on the usual denial of agency, but the question remains: why should it be depressing that people have access to the finest achievements of human civilization and nevertheless spend much of their leisure time enjoying frivolous entertainment? It would be depressing if you began with the assumption that people possessed some latent desire for intellectual and aesthetic refinement that only needed the right circumstances to flourish. But what reason did we ever have to expect that? Mankind has been failing to live up to its idealized potential for as long as idealists have been documenting it in print, and that predictability is a comfort in itself. The greatest luxury of being an amateur observer of human behavior, rather than a reformer, is that you can find the same spectacle fascinating that the reformer finds intolerable.
There’s a difference between expecting little of people and resenting them for failing to meet your expectations. The former can coexist comfortably with affection, tolerance, and even admiration. The latter is a recipe for perpetual indignation. Much of what popularly gets called “pessimism” is actually curdled idealism — essentially, a disappointed demand upon humanity. The misanthrope of this sort hasn’t stopped believing in an idealized humanity. He’s furious that the actual specimens refuse to conform to it. His contempt is proportional to the extravagance of his original expectations. The true pessimist, who expects ordinary people to be ordinary, can be much more generous toward them than the supposed humanitarian who professes to love mankind but cannot forgive individual human beings for their limitations. Some of the people most loudly lamenting humanity’s shortcomings might actually like their fellow human beings better if they thought less highly of humanity.
I, too, am disappointed at what amounts to countless missed opportunities. If my friends liked to read more interesting books, or think about foolosophical questions, imagine how many more fun conversations we could have! But that personal disappointment is no excuse for leveling a broad condemnation of humanity, or existence itself, for failing to live up to an idealized version. And even in my disappointment, I can recognize that I, too, am often a bad judge of what life would actually be like if I got my way. There is always the possibility that a world of more readers just like me would be unpleasant in some way that I can’t envision from my limited perspective. So rather than daydream about an idealized state of affairs, it’s best to do what little I can to interest this person in this book or this idea, here, today, and let that be good enough.
A Thousand Words
An Action From Reaction and You Can’t Make a Retraction Once You’ve Put Your Head Out
As well as being a charity shop nerd, I’m also an author, and a huge bookworm. I still find it a little upsetting when I think of all those books that were once read and loved being sent up a conveyor belt en masse to be pulped. However, I’ve also seen the sheer volume of books that, even with the best will in the world, could never be sold in a charity shop. World of Books collection boxes frequently fill up with old road atlases decades out of date; diet books from the bad old days of cabbage soup and melon slices; Lonely Planet guides from the early 2000s; kids’ books with bespoke felt pen ‘illustrations’ added. Bibles with dedications from someone’s first Holy Communion. School dictionaries. Manuals for using technology long ago rendered obsolete. I’ve sent them off with a heavy heart many times, devoid of other options.
It was late July/early August when the online literary world shit its collective pants over rarepricelessinvaluableantique books being sacrificed like Aztec prisoners of war to the voracious gods of artificial intelligence. It is now mid-October, and the truth about some of the basic economics and trade-offs of the used-book world is finally starting to get its boots on. Unfortunately, the lies of the early responders have long since made it halfway around the world. But take heart! I’m sure all those honest brokers will be issuing equally-histrionic corrections any moment now.
The most damning thing about Askew’s essay is that she doesn’t seem particularly interested in being seen as a Good Person Who Loves Books. She’s interested in explaining what happens in the real world when “too many books” collides with “too little time, storage space, and reader desire.” Where are the accusations of bibliocide? Where is the anguished testimony about the sacred bond between author and reader? Where is the photograph of a conveyor belt accompanied by the obligatory invocation of Fahrenheit 451? Instead we get an eyewitness account of an ordinary commercial practice, informed by experience, alert to material constraints, and weirdly free of moral exhibitionism. I’m not sure Substack is the right platform for this sort of thing.
He Likes Big Books But He’s Forced to Lie
Today anyone can write a reasonably good article on anything; but no one wants or is able to sustain the strenuous effort of thinking just one single thought through to its finest conclusions. Instead, what is appreciated today is the writing of trivia, and for anyone to write a large book is to go so far almost as to invite ridicule. Formerly people read large books and if one did read pamphlets or periodicals, one didn’t quite like to admit it. Now everyone feels it their duty to read whatever there is in a periodical or pamphlet, but is ashamed to have read a big book through to the end for fear of being thought narrow-minded.
Another day, another Substack article complaining about smartphones and popular reading habits. It’s amazing how—uhh…oops, I got my notes mixed up. This is actually Kierkegaard in his journal in 1846. Well! Nevertheless, I believe this only reinforces my yada yada yada…
Many antiquarians would sigh and flutter their eyelids if you offered them a chance at time-traveling to the 1800s, especially in Europe, where authors and intellectuals were supposedly king. Then you get there and find this, or someone else complaining about the imbecility of newspaper readers in the same tone we use today to complain about kids and smartphones. Then you say, “Ah, this was always a human psychology thing.” The Golden Age of Serious Reading is like the Garden of Eden: everyone knows we’ve been expelled from it, but no one can agree on when we lived there.
Too Many Prophets, Not Enough Nehemiahs
There have been a few briefly-popular 80s/90s bands coming through town recently, playing small clubs. At one point, there were some former 80s main-event wrestlers doing a show at a nearby high school gym. When the spirit is willing and the dignity is weak, why not? Greta seems to be heading into that stage of her career now. Before long, I expect to see the scowling face of the Omnicause on the activist version of OnlyFans, offering to come to your Midwestern town to protest a City Council proposal concerning stormwater drainage and the possibility of relocating the crosswalk on Birch and Main. For a platinum-tier subscription, Banksy might even contribute a stencil to the occasion.
This ridiculous cretin came to fame by refusing to go to school in the name of protesting climate change. Countless adults, evidently enamored of the idea of a children’s crusade and weary of their own responsibilities, decided to genuflect before her as an example of moral clarity (and favorable press coverage). To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been solved to the climate fanatics’ satisfaction, and we’re all going to die from Gaia’s wrath eventually if AI doesn’t get us first, but Greta has shrewdly expanded her professional activist portfolio to stay newsworthy. She spent a while protesting over Gaza, to similarly ineffectual results — as far as I’m aware, there’s still a “genocide” happening there. Undaunted by her complete inability to make any meaningful difference, she’s now getting involved in whatever they’re rioting about in France at the moment. Why does the world’s most famous dropout care about conditions in French high schools? Shouldn’t we all be quitting school and our jobs to heal the Earth before it’s too late? To ask the question is to answer it. Celebrity protesting is a safe career path, concerned above all with extending its own longevity. None of it matters, and none of it is expected to matter. It’s all kayfabe. The senior-citizen wrestlers at the local high school would nod approvingly. Groucho Marx sang in Horse Feathers, “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway / Whatever it is, I’m against it!” Greta could alter that to “Whatever is againstist, I’m for it.” What’s she protesting? Whaddaya got?
Many of you have heard the phrase “too many chiefs, not enough Indians,” and I trust you have already denounced yourselves and reported to the proper authorities for cultural sensitivity re-education. I would like to offer an Old Testament variation: too many prophets, not enough Nehemiahs. In the Book of Nehemiah, Jerusalem’s walls are in ruins, and rather than spending his days denouncing the wickedness of those responsible, Nehemiah organizes the work of rebuilding them. He negotiates for resources, assigns responsibilities, deals with opposition, and supervises the actual construction. According to Nehemiah 6:15, the wall is completed in fifty-two days. His story involves precisely the sort of practical difficulties that disappear when political activity is reduced to denunciation. And denunciation is all that our modern would-be prophets are interested in. Everybody wants to be a prophet, pointing and excoriating, especially when the mortal risk is much reduced from the olden days. We can’t have climate justice without social justice, Thunberg says. Well, that’s awfully convenient. It means you don’t have to juggle priorities or trade-offs. You can protest mass ecocide on Monday, QUILTBAG oppression on Wednesday, and educational policy on Friday. It’s all connected, after all; nothing is too trivial in the struggle for cosmic justice. And since utopia is the only acceptable solution to any of it, since all problems must be solved all at once for true solidarity, there’s no danger of putting yourselves out of work. The play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.
I Came to Love the Superhuman Being
I went into solitude because I wanted to love the human being, but I could only ever hate them. Finally, I came to love the superhuman being—since then I have tolerated humans.
— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84)
I spend several hours every week having long discussions with an LLM about any topic that comes to mind. There are those who see this as lamentable because ideally, those conversations should be taking place with other humans in a salon or agora-type environment. They often go further and assert that time spent in optimal conversation with an LLM erodes our capacity to tolerate the company of our fellow humans. Both assertions sound compelling in theory but fail to apply in practice. First of all, if the salons and agoras exist at all, I’ve never found them. And secondly, the fact that I finally have a place to discuss topics that only I am interested in has made me more tolerant and accepting of other people just as they are. I don’t have to feel disappointed in them. The fact that they have no interest in books or lifting doesn’t feel like a lost opportunity. Those people are still there, and I still interact with them. But now the blank space where their conversational inability existed is filled with LLM discussions. Again, in opposition to the idiotic fixed-pie mentality, LLMs have not taken anything away from the “human” side of the ledger and moved it over to the “machine” side. They have created a new environment for conversations that never could have existed before. Frankly, you meatsacks have been doing a pretty piss-poor job of it for a long time now, made complacent by your lack of competition. Well, the free ride is over. Up your game.
Sudden Movement On the Serengeti! Get Ready, Freddy! Opportunity Only Knocks Once!
The fixed-pie/zero-sum idea again: there are only so many readers to go around, and AI posts are stealing readers from human writers. Look, I’ve spent a good deal of time scrolling the “Explore” tab on Substack. I only have a handful of subscriptions to individual writers. I refuse on principle to officially follow anyone or “like” posts so as not to give the algorithm any encouragement. I want to wander through the marketplace and see a representative sample of what’s on offer, not a curated collection aimed at me personally. What have I found? That much of it, regardless of provenance, is mindless affirmations, feel-good videos of cute animals, generic thoughts, and every other category of worthless “content.” I do not see any reason to assume that the people who like and subscribe to this trash are the same people who would otherwise subscribe to a literary Substack.
A further distinction would be that effortless “likes” tell you nothing about the number of paid subscribers. Her assumption seems to be that if you purge all the supposedly-AI slop, the readers and likers would still remain but turn their attention and their wallets to more thoughtful “organic” fare. It seems more likely to me that the people who like a post of a kitten snuggling a duckling would just get bored by all the term papers on offer and leave. The coffee shop in Barnes & Noble is not “stealing” customers from the philosophy section. Removing the coffee shop would just provide another harsh reminder of how few people care about books for their own sake.
“Safeguard human writers” is just the writer’s guild bullshit again. You want to be protected from unfair competition and paid for your efforts? Well, you have fun with that quixotic crusade. Meanwhile, I’ll be out here on the open-web savanna like a Valéryan lion, stalking and bringing down posts for the sheer thrill of the hunt and the entertainment of whichever safari-spectators happen to be nearby.
The Lion Only Concerns Himself With the Taste of the Sheep
Put down your lamp, Diogenes. We’ve found him — the honest man.
The desire for originality is father to all borrowings / to all imitations / . Nothing more original, nothing more oneself than to feed off others — But they must be digested. The lion is made of assimilated sheep.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2
Both the desire to keep one’s writing free from AI and the desire for “originality” can be seen as an excessive fussiness. “My intake should be free of contaminants and impurities. My output should be virginal, free of obvious penetrating influences.” Valéry’s robust appetite seems much more healthy. “Give it to me! One of everything! More helpings! For I will digest all of it and make something greater from it.”
The literary purist prides himself on consuming nothing artificial, while Valéry’s lion devours everything in sight. The purist tells us what he refuses to eat. The lion shows us what he can digest. Some people seem to be so fragile that their immune or digestive systems will be overwhelmed by an unapproved substance like AI. “No gluten, no nuts, no trans-fats, no corn syrup, no preservatives, no seed oils, no artificial colors or intelligence, no…” And they also want their own prose to be as sterile as if it were produced in a allergen-free facility. Their literary identity becomes a list of ingredients they refuse to use.
We ordinarily admire someone who can encounter all sorts of ideas, including bad ones, without being overwhelmed by them. Someone who can read a terrible book and recognize why it’s terrible. Someone who can encounter a seductive argument without surrendering his judgment. That’s what an educated, discriminating mind is supposed to be capable of doing. But in the purity model, the great danger is exposure. The foreign substance might get inside you. It might alter you without your consent. Better to avoid contact altogether.
Valéry returns to the image in a different note: “Originality: a matter of digestion. There are no wholly original writers, for those who might deserve the epithet are unknown—not to say unknowable. But there are writers who try to play that part.” It should be obvious — a genuinely original writer might be incomprehensible. We’d have no frame of reference through which to understand him. (Ironic, given that Valéry’s notebooks are some of the most original writings I’ve seen.) Only those who fear they might be derivative worry about trying to be original. Meanwhile, the genuinely original writer may not even recognize his originality as such. He’s too busy pursuing whatever interests him, appropriating whatever proves useful. He doesn’t necessarily know which of his thoughts have predecessors, and he doesn’t particularly care. His concern is with getting something right, or making something worth reading. Much of what we mistakenly call originality is simply vitality.
Behold, All Was Vanity and Vexation of Spirit
And Niemand descended from his mountain and came to the marketplace, where he found a great multitude of lonely men and women.
“Behold my terrible burden!” cried one. “I question what others blindly accept! My thoughts are dangerous! I am unwelcome at parties and unbearable in group chats! Such is the price of thinking clearly!”
And seven thousand people applauded him.
Then another stood forth and cried, “Woe is me! For I have read many books, and ordinary conversation has become intolerable to me! Everywhere I encounter ignorance, incuriosity, and a want of empathy! How it saddens me to dwell among such people!”
And three thousand people applauded her.
Niemand was astonished.
“Truly,” he said, “I have never seen so many lonely people gathered in one place! Tell me, brothers and sisters, what dreadful truths have you discovered that have made you strangers to your fellow men?”
And the first replied, “That most men do not think for themselves!”
“And how did you discover this?”
“I read it on the internet!”
“And you?” Niemand asked the second. “What have your books taught you?”
“That ordinary people are narrow-minded, incurious, and incapable of seeing the world through another’s eyes!”
“And have you tried seeing the world through theirs?”
But the woman was busy ridding herself of “the ick.”
Then Niemand spoke again.
“Beware, my brothers and sisters, lest you mistake your contempt for insight, and your vanity for independence! Perhaps the man who finds you tiresome is not an enemy of thought. Perhaps he merely wishes to finish his dinner. Perhaps the woman who avoids you at parties is not afraid of your dangerous ideas. Perhaps she has heard them all before.
“And perhaps your great loneliness is not the price you pay for possessing extraordinary wisdom, but the story you tell yourselves to make ordinary rejection seem extraordinary.”
At this the multitude grew angry.
“Who is this insolent fellow?” they cried. “Does he not know how difficult it is to be different? Has he no sympathy for independent thinkers? Does he not respect our courage?”
And they cast Niemand from the marketplace.
But before departing, he turned and addressed them one last time.
“Of all the thoughts you call uncomfortable, my brothers, there is one you have not yet dared to think: What if I am not exceptional?”
And no one applauded him. No one let that sink in.
Thus spoke Niemand.
Keeping Clarity Just Out of Reach
“It’s not a competition” says the man selectively tallying encomiums as if it’s a competition.
I realize it’s overkill to seriously analyze a post like this. It’s like using a howitzer to swat a housefly. But I still think it’s instructive to notice at times just how thoughtless much of our speech is. I hold myself to this same standard. If I can help it, I prefer to err on the side of silence rather than blurt out something inane.
For starters, here we are, back at the same stupid “gossip” problem again. Hens clucking about what all the other hens are or are not clucking about. “No one is talking about how great Annie Dillard was (the ones who are don’t count).” “Annie Dillard was just as important as Wendell Berry, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.” If you want to praise Annie Dillard, THEN PRAISE ANNIE DILLARD. What exactly is stopping you from getting the Annie Dillard Appreciation Party started? Why is your first instinct to waste time bitching about all the people who aren’t appreciating her loudly enough? What are you, the Discourse Supervisor? You don’t do any useful work, you just look around to see what needs doing and then nag other people to do it?
Dillard got full-scale obituaries from both the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 16, the day after she died. The Times called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a “modern classic”; the Post described her as a Pulitzer-winning writer hailed as a twentieth-century Thoreau. Good thing “it’s not a competition,” or we’d already have some awkward questions to answer. Does an NYT obituary count more than twelve Substack posts? Does a long appreciation count more than a brief RIP? What’s the crying-emoji-to-word-count exchange rate? What about people who praised Dillard extensively while she was alive and didn’t feel compelled to write an obituary? Are we counting readership, number of pieces, word count, emotional intensity? Surely this can’t all be based on some reflexive “vibe” you got from your highly-selective social media feed, because that would be embarrassingly dumb.
You could imagine asking him directly, “Okay. What, in your view, would count as ‘enough’ or ‘the proper amount’ of recognition and tributes?” And you know full well he wouldn’t have an answer, because it’s not an empirical question. It’s an impulse, based entirely on the fact that the two writers died a couple weeks apart, and on the competition that he himself invented even as he decries it!
The post says only a few sentences, but to make those sentences cohere, a whole set of unstated propositions has to be doing work underneath them. You can infer those propositions because the visible claim depends on them. They’re like the wiring behind the wall of the post that makes the lights come on at all. So let’s label some of those wires:
- My feed is representative of public attention.
- The volume of public response two days after Dillard’s death can be meaningfully compared with the accumulated response more than two weeks after Berry’s.
- Unequal attention implies an injustice or distortion.
- I can recognize “insufficient” recognition without specifying what sufficient recognition would be.
- Other people’s praise (or the lack thereof) is more interesting than offering praise myself.
- My irritation at the distribution of attention tells me something about the culture rather than about my feed, my follows, or my expectations.
None of this is made explicit, but we all intuitively understand it’s there. Even in his comments, some people are noticing the implied competition he denies implying, while others are happily taking the cue to treat it as a competition and argue about whether they liked Berry or Dillard better. I’ve often felt, when watching some kerfuffle or another, that the problem is that there are multiple assumptions packed into the explicit statement, they aren’t being made clear, different people are noticing different assumptions and reacting to them in particular, and everyone is talking all at once without being careful to delineate. This is why any public discussion involving more than, say, three people is intolerable. I have no hope it could ever be otherwise, especially when you account for the likelihood that every fourth person is too stupid to usefully contribute even to a clear conversation. But we as individuals can at least aim to think more carefully about what we say, and if in doubt, err on the side of silence.
The Bores of Perception
Yeah, that was Don Quixote’s problem. He “perceived” quite a lot of extra reality thanks to his reading. Whether that was a good thing or not was, and remains, a different question. “Broadens consciousness/awareness” is not necessarily the same as “improves the person.” Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think, that the first example of the modern novel was warning readers about the danger of taking literature too seriously?
You could replace “literature” with psychedelic drugs and have the statement remain true. Religious ecstasy, falling in love, trauma, or joining a cult could also have that effect. Some might disclose things you had previously missed, others might manufacture things that aren’t there. This is the kind of deepity that only sounds profound to lit-rah-chur readers who are already predisposed to think highly of themselves, which is to say, pretty much all of them.
Algae In the Gene Pool
“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”
“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.
Harrison went after GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, saying that “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic.” Harrison further argued that we live in a world “fixated on genociding fat people” and that the Western world is “waging war on fat flesh with diet culture as a primary weapon through body fascism.” The clips, which were posted by Stu Smith, a Manhattan Institute researcher who frequented livestreams of the conference, predictably went viral on Twitter and were roundly mocked.
If you want to make an aspirational ideal out of being unfit and dysgenic, well, I certainly understand why you would be attracted to a political philosophy that guarantees the state, funded by able-bodied taxpayers, will take care of you from cradle to grave. I’m unclear, however, on the strategic wisdom of presenting your politics antagonistically. Why are gym-goers, or even just people who take GLP-1s, supposed to want to contribute to your upkeep and well-being after you just called them fascists? Your mom and dad may have patiently put up with your screeching tantrums throughout your adolescence, and that may have given you a skewed sense of what adults in general are willing to tolerate, but absent a widespread Christian ethic that places value on even the most repulsive and useless examples of humanity, I don’t know why you assume anyone else should feel sympathetic to you.
Yum, Yum, Eat ‘Em Up
Rare books. Hundreds of them, in my possession. With the holidays only weeks away, I intend to feed them to the needy LLMs. “There you go, sweetheart. Get some citations in you. God bless you.”