conspicuous crusading

Is There Anybody Thinking What I Am, Is There Any Other Alternative?

By in conspicuous crusading, identity No Comments

Alan Jacobs enthusiastically linked to The IndieWeb is Punk Manifesto. I read it, and while I agree with many of the basic principles — own your domain, publish without permission, don’t optimize everything for growth, make strange personal things, resist algorithmic incentives, keep control of your work — it mainly serves as a good example of what I mean about feeling like an orangutan among chimpanzees. “Community” language leaves me cold. I think, Great, another group of people in identical clothing knocking on my door, asking me to come worship with them.

Any consciously-formed tribe becomes increasingly homogeneous. Once the identity is established, the next step is consolidating territory and circling the wagons. I know people in real life who still identify with the old punk/alternative ethos. They appear to me to be stuck in amber. They haven’t had a surprising thought in forty years; all issues were settled back when they were adolescents. You already know what they think about any given topic without having to ask.

Also, I’m just suspicious of liberatory rhetoric in the first place. “You’re free! You can do whatever you want! You don’t have to do whatever the algorithms and platforms tell you to!” Well, experience shows that most of “what we want” to do is conform to our peer groups and defend our little patch of turf against outsiders. In this instance, that means that “we” will quickly acquire an official vocabulary and a list of approved opinions on the same old topics.

What do people actually want when nobody is ordering them around? Very often they want affiliation, recognition, status, reassurance, and protection against rival groups. They want to know who “we” are. And once they know who “we” are, they want to know who isn’t. Once a recognizable community forms, the social machinery switches back on almost immediately. People look sideways at one another. Certain writers become authorities. Certain phrases become passwords. Certain opinions become embarrassing to hold. Certain enemies become useful for defining the group. The platform’s algorithm may have disappeared, but the human algorithm remains.

The IndieWeb can genuinely decentralize infrastructure while its participants simultaneously centralize culturally. Ten thousand independently owned websites can still produce ten thousand essays using the same vocabulary, citing the same people, taking the same positions, and announcing the same enemies. I should know, because looking over the smallweb/indieweb aggregator sites like Bubbles, Scour, Blogosphere, etc. is precisely where I saw ten thousand identical posts about “AI is murderizing rare books!” The herd of independent minds was in full stampede. You can own your domain, hand-code your CSS, refuse analytics, reject social-media algorithms, syndicate by RSS, and still think almost entirely by contagion. Domains, domains everywhere, and not a thought to think…

Much of the “take back the web” rhetoric tends to locate conformity externally. “The platform made us do it; the algorithm trained us; the engagement metrics corrupted us.” Well, they surely helped, but remove all three and you are left with the organism that invented cliques, sects, fashions, orthodoxies, mobs, and political factions several thousand years before anyone wrote a recommendation algorithm. I hate to act like the Grand Inquisitor on behalf of the platforms, but I tend to think, “You fools! You think people want to be free? What on earth ever put that idea in your head? You think they want to be left alone with their own organic thoughts for thirty seconds? Turn them loose on the open web with no feed, no algorithm, no comforting knowledge that everyone else is looking at the same thing, and you would condemn them to the most exquisite misery and anxiety!”

What Is to Be Bought?

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell

Say what you will about Paris Hilton, but she spent family money with the innocent joy of a golden retriever in diamond-studded sunglasses. She never asked us to believe that a shopping spree was dialectical praxis, never put on a cloth cap and pretended to be a proletarian. Piker has the rich boy’s ancient problem: he wants the money, the taste, the comfort, and the moral superiority of denouncing all three. Every expensive trinket must be offset by another call for the destruction of the system which produced it. One wishes he could work out the family drama in therapy, rather than staging it as revolutionary cosplay for Twitch.

Inflamed or Inflaming Others

By in books, bricolage, conspicuous crusading

The fact that a quite considerable number of people do seem to find “social problems” their recreation and their hobby as well as their exacting responsibility is cited by some as the one sign of health in our sick world, but why on earth this should be so I cannot see. A healthy individual does not spend most of his life examining treatments and regimens. When a man does do that we say that he is either a hypochondriac or an invalid—not that he is leading the good life for which man was obviously intended. In fact we usually wonder why he finds it worthwhile to keep alive and, for that matter, so, often, does he. Why should the case of the body politic be so different? Wouldn’t a really healthy citizen in a really healthy country be as unaware of the government as a healthy man is unaware of his physiology? The healthy citizen might get an annual check-up, but he would not consider comparative blood pressures and the latest remedies for constipation the only subjects which a serious man considered worth talking about.  And however sick society may be it seems to me that we ought at least not lose sight of what health would be like. We ought not have as our ideal the state of universal hypochondria.

— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature

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Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Not a ‘malicious’ person — i.e. suffering from seeing suffering, — yet my heart immediately hardens towards anyone who speculates about my compassion — or who wants to achieve his ends by invoking Justice, Humanity, etc. So much so that, even when his entreaties to the Idols are well-founded, — I take up position on the side of Injustice and entrench myself in my dislike for this playacting, of which I’ve seen many an example. This explains my attitude over the ’cause célèbre.’

For invoking Humanity doesn’t make you a man. — — I knew these men as free from any human or writers’ weaknesses — and in this particular case I saw them inflamed or inflaming others for a cause.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

The Spirit Is Anti-AI, But the Flesh Uses Claude

By in ai, conspicuous crusading, foolosophy, technology

When Paul Kingsnorth launched his Writers Against AI campaign, Alan Jacobs’s response was glib: “I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.” The pledge itself was not vague. It asked writers for three things: to promise that they would not use AI in their work as writers, would not support writers who did, and would support only entirely human-made work. A bright line, in other words — until Jacobs noticed that his own use might place a toe on the wrong side of it.

His is not some trivial edge case. Running dictation through Claude to punctuate and clean it is part of the writing process. Uploading six years of idea journals to Claude for thematic analysis, triage, and recovery of unwritten projects is part of the writing process. In plain English, he is using AI as a low-level editorial and developmental assistant. You can easily argue that’s legitimate. I certainly think so. I think many sane people would say it is. But if so, then the campaign he endorsed was foolishly fundamentalist from the start.

He writes, after acknowledging that he does not meet the pledge “by the letter,” “I’m okay with that.” Of course he is. The problem is not that he changed his mind; we should always encourage that. The problem is that he helped advertise a standard of suspicion first, and only afterwards granted himself the interpretive charity it denied to others. Moral severity for thee, exemptions for me: that is how these things always go.

Actually, let me revise that. I don’t think he changed his mind, because I don’t think he thought much about it in the first place. His earlier endorsement was a knee-jerk impulse; once he finally considered it carefully, he realized it was more complicated. He did not first weigh the structure of the campaign, its incentives, its likely abuses, its presumption of suspicion, and then revise his view. He seems to have begun with the gratifying emotional impulse — Down with AI — and only afterwards noticed the practical difficulties. It is a small but exquisite irony that the author of How to Think apparently endorsed a public anti-AI pledge before thinking through whether he himself could satisfy it.

Personally, I couldn’t care less if, or how, writers use AI. I just think that if you’re going to lend your voice to a public shaming/cancellation ritual, you owe it to the likely victims to spend a few minutes thinking about exactly what it is you’re supporting. The problems with this sort of campaign were obvious from the start, even to an idiot like me. A public pledge with no cost to entry is tailor-made for empty grandstanding and virtue-signaling. That is exactly the kind of thing a seasoned academic, especially one old enough to have watched a dozen waves of performative moralism sweep through institutions, ought to recognize on sight. The status incentives were obvious. The temptation to furtive noncompliance was obvious. The drift toward bot-hunting and guilt-by-aesthetic-association was obvious. None of this required prophetic powers. It just required a functioning sense of how public righteousness works.

You do expect this sort of thoughtless moral enthusiasm from excitable young people who still imagine that public declarations are the same thing as judgment. From a sixty-something Christian humanist, you expect some tragic sense — some awareness that campaigns of purity do not stay pure, that standards weaponized against bad people are soon applied promiscuously, and that people are often least reliable precisely when they are enjoying the sensation of being obviously right.

Relligiosi

By in ai, conspicuous crusading, moralizing, technology, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds, writing

Relligiosi

That’s what I call those who take it upon themselves to convince others and make them similar to themselves, make them think in the same way.
I abhor this kind of mental usurping, the great task of political parties and confessions.
What matters for you, doesn’t matter for me. Because it matters for you, it doesn’t matter for me.
To understand oneself, it’s essential (in my eyes) to think differently.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Via Paul Kingsnorth. And what does this pledge entail, you may ask?

Do you support the campaign? Go rape yourself, that’s my response. Even answering that question concedes too much to the commissar asking it. It’s none of your goddamned business how I feel about AI use. I don’t owe you a pledge, a badge, a logo in my sidebar, or an affidavit about my writing process. If I read something and it feels synthetic, I’m free to close the tab and avoid that writer in the future. That’s how grown-ups handle taste, without forming a militia and a blacklist.

What I can’t stand, as always, is the missionary spirit animating this entire self-appointed class of jumped-up hall monitors: the righteous salesmanship, the demand for public alignment, the insinuation that silence is complicity. This “download a free logo and join us” routine is a ritual with no barrier to entry for people who like the feeling of conscience without the burden of thought. Once the ritual exists, the next stage is guaranteed: bot-sniffing as sport, comment-section inquisitions, and purity audits, as though the only point of reading is to detect the Devil’s watermark.

This is the online HOA, or the Concerned Citizens Council, coming to the door with clipboards and smiles, asking you to sign. And underneath the smile is the implied threat: Do you want us to make it known that you refused? Because that’s how these things work. There is no neutral ground in a holy war. The whole point of the ritual is to sort the righteous from the wicked, and to make “I decline” sound like a confession. Even if you happen to agree with this particular campaign, the same petty functionaries will be back knocking on your door next week, with clipboards and smiles, expecting your participation in the next loyalty test. Whenever you finally decline, the smiles will vanish, and you’ll see them for what they really are.

The most a campaign like this can do is create another platform for virtue-signaling (as if we needed more) and another excuse for resentful mediocrities to claw at higher-status targets under a banner of public morality. Watch how quickly “protecting the craft” turns into guilty-until-proven-innocent accusations. It invites the exact type Valéry despised: the mental usurper, the person who can’t just choose their own life, but must conscript yours into their crusade. No thanks. Read what you want. Write what you want, how you want. And leave me out of your religion.

The Call to Battle

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

“One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil employs is the call to battle.”

“It is impossible to pay Evil in installments — and one never stops trying to.”

— Kafka, The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

In most of the ways that matter, linear time is a myth. Entropy has its arrow, sure: we are born, we age, we die, in that order, never in reverse. But moral life runs in circles. The calendar flips, the technology gets more impressive, but the human temptation stays put. We’re still the same animals, still drawn to the same pleasures: the pleasure of certainty, the pleasure of punishment, the pleasure of calling our appetite “principle.” Tenderness and cruelty are Siamese twins, never far apart. If you like religious language, call the recurring temptation the Devil: not a horned monster, but a patient solicitor who never tires, who never stops coming back, each time with a new pitch, each time asking you to sign the same contract — just this once, just this time, for a good cause, with an easy installment plan included.

The Devil doesn’t need you to become a villain in one grand gesture. He only needs you to get used to small exceptions. He only needs you to stop flinching. That’s why the call to battle is so effective: it dulls the nerve endings of conscience and fills your ears with a drumbeat. And the world will always supply new drums. New scandals, new enemies, new emergencies, new reasons you “have to” be hard, “have to” be ruthless, “have to” stop worrying about the “edge cases.” There is no finish line where you can finally relax into goodness, no historical utopia that vindicates all your choices. The test returns in different guises, over and over, asking the same question with new vocabulary: Will you bend the rule? Will you take the shortcut? Will you let the ends justify the means?

You’re never finally safe from it. You can only hold out as long as you can. The only victory available is the stubborn refusal to sign. The world will remain mixed and your crusades will not purify it. But you can keep your own hands clean. You can insist that a “false positive” is not an acceptable rounding error because it is a person, and a person is not collateral. You can refuse to let the battle-frame make you stupid and cruel. Because the real danger isn’t that you’ll one day wake up believing in Evil like a mindless acolyte; it’s that you’ll get used to the bargain, that the shrug will become second nature, that “Who gives a shit?” will start to feel like maturity. To quote Kafka one more time: once you have taken Evil into yourself, it no longer insists that you believe in it.

Carry On Perpetually

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.

— George Santayana, “Josiah Royce”, Character and Opinion in the United States

The modern citizen lives with a rectangle glowing in his palm like a little oracle. From it comes a constant stream of emergencies, outrages, villains, heroes, and urgent calls to prove you are one of the good ones. The world is always ending; the stakes are always infinite; the moral pressure is always immediate. And because it’s immediate, it feels intimate, right here, right now, in your face, as if the drama on your screen were the whole world instead of a curated sliver of it. This is how you get the weird inflation of self-importance: people acting as if they’re standing at Thermopylae when they’re actually standing in a yoga studio lobby.

Here we are, then: the yoga studio, some staff behind a counter, a handful of righteous scolds demanding their due. The charge is grand: complicity, collaboration, silence in the face of evil. It has the romance of clandestine resistance — Vichy collaborators, secret police, the brave few defying the grey mass. It even flatters the accuser with historical resonance: I am not merely a petty bitch; I am fighting fascism. And then the “resistance” takes the form of… piling dumbbells on the floor for low-level employees to clean up.

It’s impossible not to notice the mismatch. If your cause is world-historical, why does your bravery so reliably select soft targets? Why does your fury funnel itself toward people who can’t meaningfully answer back — front-desk staff, service workers, the human beings stationed at the end of institutional pipelines? The pattern is predictable: the higher the rhetoric, the smaller the actual stakes of the chosen battleground. The nobility is abstract; the punishment is concrete. The moral grandeur is vapor; the mess on the floor is real.

People will tell you — always — that they are motivated by principle. But even if the principle were genuine, the conduct still betrays something uglier: the constant temptation to treat other people as props. You are not persuading anyone. You are not changing policy. You are not speaking “truth to power.” You are simply enjoying the privilege, for a moment, of being the kind of person who can make a mess and watch someone else clean it up, while calling it righteousness.

What is the reward? Not the stated reward — the utopia at the end of history which never arrives — but the actual reward, right now, in the nervous system. The reward is the intoxicating relief of moral permission. You get to be harsh without being harsh; you get to be cruel without being cruel. Your anger becomes virtue, and virtue becomes an alibi. You break the ordinary norms of civility, restraint, proportion, mercy, and you call the breach “courage.” Better still, the audience claps. Thousands of strangers give you a little pellet of approval: stunning, brave, truth-teller. Forbidden fruit is always sweet, but it’s even sweeter when you can call it medicine. It’s a powerful seduction for anyone who has been simmering with resentment, boredom, loneliness, or a need to feel consequential.

The tragedy is not that the world is evil, but that the world is mixed. It has always been mixed. It will remain mixed. There are genuine horrors and genuine beauties, and our small lives brush against both. But most of us will never be world-historical individuals, and the universe does not grant us sainthood as a consolation prize. The yoga studio refusing entry to federal agents would not rewrite national policy. A tantrum in the lobby will not cause the President to reverse course on immigration. Nothing in these little dramas carries the weight the actors pretend it carries.

The world does not move in a straight line toward Good or Evil like a train running on tracks. It lurches, compromises, repeats itself, forgets, remembers, repeats again. And that’s why the temptation is so persistent: because you will never be “done.” There is no final victory, on earth or in heaven. There is only the daily test, administered repeatedly: will you keep faith with the basic rules of civilized life even when you have a rationalization that tells you you’re exempt?

The rot begins with the easy little indulgence: this person “deserves” it. The staff deserve it. The bystander deserves it. The wrong tribe deserves it. The “complicit” deserve it. And because your cause is righteous, your petty vengeance is transmuted into justice like lead into gold. You learn to enjoy the taste of your own anger. You learn to confuse the stimulation of drama with the seriousness of truth.

Zoom out far enough and it’s laughable. The banners change. The hashtags change. But the human pattern doesn’t: give ordinary people an excuse, and some will use it to act out the small cruelties they were already inclined toward. They will call it activism. They will call it accountability. They will call it “speaking out.” But the constant feature is the pleasure of being allowed to do what you wanted to do anyway. “The joy of violent movement pulls you under.”

If you’re fortunate, you may find yourself reflecting at the end of your life, when the volume is turned down and the stage lights go out. The slogans evaporate. The causes blur together into a collage of righteous poses. The algorithm is gone. The audience is gone. And what remains is not your intention but your residue — what you did when you could have done otherwise.

You may see, with a clarity you avoided for decades, that the world is still its familiar mixed bag. It did not become heaven because you were furious. It did not become hell because you were silent. It simply remained what it always was. And against that unchanged backdrop, you finally confront the only thing that was ever really up for grabs: the self you made.

A ledger opens. Not a cosmic ledger; just the plain memory of choices. The times you used sanctimony as a weapon. The times you chose humiliation over persuasion. The times you unleashed chaos and congratulated yourself for doing it. The times you took pleasure in spite and called it sanctity.

And the worst part is that you knew. Deep down, you always knew. You felt the little recoil of conscience and you smothered it with a pillow: this is different; I’m different; they deserve it; history is watching. History wasn’t watching. Your followers weren’t watching, not really. Only you were capable of watching, there in your own soul, and you turned away like a coward.

Sharing a Silent Look

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

This is exactly what I was talking about the other day. Something awful happens; a video circulates; and within minutes the event stops being an event and becomes a proxy for everything else. People aren’t really arguing about what happened; they’re arguing about what they already believe about the world, using the footage as a Rorschach blot. And I’m supposed to join in? I’m not a forensic analyst. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not on the scene. What earthly good would it do for me to watch a terrible clip frame-by-frame and then add my priceless contribution — “Bad things are bad and shouldn’t happen” — to the pile? Congratulations, here’s my Nobel Peace Prize. I treat discourse scrums the way the Romans treated victory: with a servant whispering a corrective in your ear. Only mine is: remember, you’re just another idiot. Your opinion is cheap, your information is thin, and your “engagement” helps no one. You can simply not perform. You can just do something else. You can just post something interesting about Lin Yutang instead of regurgitating the day’s pre-chewed cud.

Engagé and Enragé

By in books, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions

Sartre entered the fray in the aftermath of World War II, arguing that human beings could escape the contingency of existence by seizing control of their destiny, and that the writer had a duty to speak for those who had no voice. He brought these two notions together in the figure of the intellectuel engagé, of which he became the archetype. Engagement was a vocation that gave the author a responsibility to ‘compose for the whole collectivity’—a function that made him a critical social intermediary: ‘He is writing for everybody and with everybody because the problem which he is trying to solve by means of his own talents is everybody’s problem.’ The Sartrian intellectual’s duties were defined in extensive terms: ‘to interfere in matters that do not directly concern him, to question established truths, and to champion the cause of the oppressed.’ Engagement was thus inseparable from Marxian revolutionary practice: its purpose was ‘to get to know the world in order to change it.’

— Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People

Sartre’s intellectuel engagé was a Trojan Horse filled with student radicals. Declare that “every problem is everybody’s problem,” and abracadabra, every passing mood becomes a public duty. The job description (“interfere in matters that do not directly concern him”) reads like a mission statement for every half-baked, self-righteous, would-be intellectual with a social media account. Out went the hard disciplines of silence, apprenticeship, and proportion; in came “awareness raising,” the strident activist, and the moral selfie. Sartre didn’t just liberate the writer — he deputized him, then handed him a bullhorn. The result is our era’s most exhausting spectacle: professional activists like Greta Thunberg and her epigones, traipsing from one trendy cause to another like pampered students on a Grand Tour of celebrity protesting, chanting slogans with the bottomless confidence of derivative minds who mistake memes for insight and audience for authority. What Hazareesingh describes as a “vocation” became a performance art: the underemployed creative as town crier, forever “composing for the whole collectivity” because the mirror won’t clap.

The repulsive little toad-man only belatedly hopped away from doctrinaire Stalinism after tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956; a couple years earlier, like many other useful idiots, he had visited the USSR and proclaimed that he had found “complete freedom of criticism” there — an assessment that aged with unusual speed. His later championing of Frantz Fanon’s “revolutionary violence,” his anti-colonial support for the Algerian FLN, his early enthusiasm for Castro, his advocacy on behalf of the literary convict Jean Genet, even his open relationship with Simone de Beauvior — all of this demonstrates how little leftism has changed since. Today’s Zohran Mamdani voters are just going through the Sartrean motions. And while his toadies (pun somewhat intended) in the influential circle around Les Temps modernes spun his feud with Camus as a rhetorical victory for Sartre and revolutionary “history-making,” posterity has had the last word.

His concept of “bad faith” was useful, at least.

Generals Fighting the Last War

By in books, conspicuous crusading, the great awokening, tribalism

Another email from Hachette Book Group this morning: “Read Banned Books.” The old standards show up — Catcher in the Rye; The Great Gatsby — along with trendy identitarian propaganda: Stamped From the Beginning; The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish; So You Want to Talk About Race. Funny what never shows up: Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, which Amazon actually removed from sale for years and only reinstated in February 2025. That wasn’t a “challenge” in a school library; that was the dominant bookseller in America erasing a title from the market for ideological reasons. If publishers want credibility, they should admit the difference and include examples across the spectrum.

Meanwhile, the real crisis isn’t 1958’s fight to keep Catcher on a shelf; it’s that Americans just don’t read for pleasure anymore. Federal time-use data show leisure reading has cratered — down roughly 40% since the early 2000s; only about 16% of Americans read for fun on a given day in 2023. Among nine-year-olds, “almost every day” reading fell from 53% (2012) to 39% (2022). That’s the house fire; the “banned books” spectacle is a smoke machine.

Which is why “Banned Books Week” feels like Civil War reenactment: a safe, performative replay of yesterday’s battles. Even sympathetic histories admit most headline cases are “challenges,” not outright bans, yet the marketing rolls on because the ritual is familiar and fun, and it flatters our tribal prejudices. If publishers want to help, stop signaling to more than half the country that libraries and bookstores are part of the Blue Tribe’s territory. Otherwise, it’s just more useless partisan pageantry.

How to Liberate People Who Didn’t Ask

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, language, the great awokening

Kenneth Minogue once imagined St. George in retirement: the famous dragons all slain, our hero prowls the countryside hunting smaller and smaller lizards just to keep the old vocation alive. That’s the mood of a certain progressive missionary spirit today — still eager to “civilize” the backwards heathens, but reduced to policing syllables. Old Puritan habits die hard. The devil’s snares can be lurking anywhere, even in a vowel.

Behold the latest crusade: liberating Spanish speakers from gendered suffixes they never petitioned to escape. The rhetoric is anti-colonial, but the method is pure colonialism — arrive with a pre-packed moral syllabus, announce that the locals are in peril (they just don’t know it), and commence reforms by decree: You are now “Latine.” You’re welcome. When the ostensible beneficiaries say “no thanks,” as they already did with “Latinx,” the result is not reflection but escalation.

I don’t put much stock in racial categorizations myself, but by the missionaries’ own color-coded catechism, we are watching mostly white American institutions imposing taste, tempo, and terminology on a largely non-white, non-American language community. The word for that, in any other context, would be obvious.

Reaping Whirlwinds

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit

Christopher Rufo:

Conservatives have recently scored surprise victories against left-wing corporate culture, with successful pressure campaigns against a trio of blue-chip companies—Disney, Target, and Bud Light—that have revealed the potential of a culture-war tactic once considered the Left’s stock-in-trade: the consumer boycott.

The campaigns are notable because they drew blood, figuratively speaking. Disney, which promised to embed radical gender theory in its children’s programming, watched its stock price plummet and signaled a retreat from the culture war. Target, which featured “breast binders” as part of its seasonal “Pride Collection,” saw a decline in sales and promised to “pause, adapt, and learn.” Bud Light featured a transgender “influencer” in an advertising campaign, sending its reputation and sales into freefall.

What lessons can be drawn from these examples? And how can conservatives use boycotts to fight left-wing cultural capture?

Helen Andrews, in her book Boomers, describing the tactics that brought Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to prominence:

Interestingly, if Breadbasket had tried these tactics only a few decades earlier, courts would have considered them illegal. Boycotts, except in limited circumstances, were considered unfair commercial interference, and victimized owners could sue organizers for damages. In a landmark case in 1934, the Harlem agitator Sufi Abdul Hamid, also known as Black Hitler for his vocal support for the Third Reich, launched a boycott against the A. S. Beck shoe store on 125th Street demanding that it hire more blacks on its sales staff. A New York judge ruled the picket unlawful, not because store patrons had been violently assaulted (though they had been), but because Hamid and his picketers had no connection to the store. If it had been a protest by black Beck’s employees demanding better treatment, that would have been a labor dispute and thus protected by the Norris-LaGuardia Act. But this was a​ conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences. Even a peaceful boycott would have been illegal.

I was not aware of this. I thought tedious consumer boycotts led by political activists had always been with us, like death, taxes and the poor. I had so many futile arguments in my misspent youth against left-wing enthusiasts for boycotting. Oh, man, what I wouldn’t give to see the old lefty blogosphere prosecuted en masse for “conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences.” Is this what the edgy kids mean when they say RETVRN?

But alas, as with free speech, I’m resigned to the idea that it will take people like Rufo leading a counter-revolution before we have any chance of finding our way back to the detente of old-fashioned liberal pluralism. I don’t like it, and I’ll never participate in it myself, but if I see my old liberal pals squealing in protest, I’ll be happy to remind them, in the words of Les Claypool, “I’m the one who told you “Told you so.”

The Preaching Will Continue Until Morale Improves

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, world football

Douglas Murray:

There seemed little likelihood that they would put up with this new performative gesture going on not just once, but months and months after the event that kicked it off. Football grounds, even after decades of gentrification and rising ticket prices, are not always genteel places. They are places where strong views are held about peoples’ failings, real or otherwise, with crowds who do not always keep their opinions to themselves.

And so, as the months dragged on and the strange new ritual seemed impossible to shrug off, the day was always going to come when the clubs reacquainted themselves with their supporters. Sure enough, on Saturday that happened, and the inevitable, predictable thing took place, at the home of one of the less genteel of football clubs: Millwall. At the start of the match between the south London side and visitors Derby County, both teams went down on one knee as is now their custom — and as they did so, many of the supporters began audibly to boo.

So, yes — for those of you unacquainted with the world of English soccer, games have been going on since the leagues restarted over the summer, in empty stadiums. Throughout that time, it has become a new ritual for the players to take a knee for a moment in solidarity with BLM after the opening whistle. Only just this past weekend, tiny numbers of fans were allowed back in certain grounds. As the man said, the Millwall supporters made their feelings known about this new ritual of virtue-signaling. The feculent, inbred world of football journalism, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, was united in its horrified denunciation of these savages who dare to show such impiety toward the new state religion. It was suggested somewhere that CCTV might even be used to identify the “offenders,” who are apparently deserving of punishment under new anti-blasphemy laws. I smirked and thought, “Good for them.”

Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of characters among the booing ruffians whom I would find loathsome (the same rule applies to pretty much any assemblage of five or more people). But for all I know, maybe many of them were booing at what could reasonably be seen as the unwelcome imposition of American political obsessions into English sport. I know if I were English, and even tepidly patriotic, I’d be thinking, “Why do we have to imitate whatever the stupid Yanks are doing?” Either way, the strident condemnation, the determination to crush even the smallest display of dissent, doesn’t give an impression of strength or confidence. It shows insecurity and weakness, a recognition that if anyone other than carefully-chosen media elites is allowed a voice, things could get out of hand in a hurry. Maybe there are racists among the jeering masses. But when the non-racists are a bunch of tongue-swallowing cowards, well, you take your heroes where you can find them.

Cleanup In Aisle Twelve

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, george carlin, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.

— George Carlin

Kevin D. Williamson:

More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

…Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.

George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. But Kathleen Kingsbury — do I have to tell you she’s from Portland? she’s from Portland — has moved up a step at the New York Times, and promises not to publish any opinions someone might have an opinion about. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

They always come for pop culture eventually. When I was an adolescent, the crusade du jour was about putting parental warning labels on records with “explicit content,” a worthless gesture intended to vaguely relieve the widespread anxiety caused by the complex problem of broken families and latchkey kids. I can’t help but recall that the effort was spearheaded by a well-off white woman, the wife of a soon-to-be Vice President. Today’s purgeoisie (credit to Neontaster for that coinage), confronted with intractable social ills, has risen to the challenge by disarming mass murderers like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, decolonizing the breakfast table, and using national newspapers as a platform to publicly humiliate private citizens for once wearing blackface, even when it was done in the spirit of parody against the earnest wearing of blackface. When we roll up our sleeves, there is no ambiguously-symbolic representation tangentially associated with something which could conceivably be construed as “bad” that we can’t dispose of in short order.

Sooner or Later You’ll Be a He-Man Woman-Hater

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

Sometimes, you just have to admire the sheer brass ovaries.

Look, I’ve been alive and paying attention over the last decade or so. If there were any feminists publicly questioning or criticizing the increasingly-fanatical direction their crusade was taking, I somehow missed them. If there were any critics of the simple-minded slogans of intersectionality who were granted a respectful hearing by our media class, I somehow missed them. The only people who dared speak up were publicly canceled, in the parlance of our times, while being slandered as misogynist rape apologists doing the bidding of their right-wing paymasters (man, those guys are behind everything). If there were any clear guidelines about how to distinguish credible accusations from scurrilous ones, they were never publicly articulated. Talk of “due process,” however tentative, was considered a “dog-whistle” of the patriarchy.  Way back in 2014, Scott Alexander analyzed what was becoming an already-obvious compulsion among feminists to pick the absolute worst hills to die upon:

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

What’s really amusing is that he probably thought “some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists” was such a perfect reductio ad absurdum that it might serve forever as a rhetorical guardrail, preventing anyone from plunging over the edge into lunacy. That guardrail only lasted, what, five and a half years before Ms. Faludi barreled through it in an eighteen-wheeler, all hopped up on the trucker’s speed of ideology and propaganda?

Now, like many aficionados of the human comedy, I have certainly enjoyed the recent spectacle of the scuttling of the good ship #MeToo in the name of political expediency. Your revolution is over, Faludi. Condolences. The broads will always lose. It’s like one of the Three Stooges with a bucket on his head; you can see it coming from far away, but it’s still funny to watch. In fact, I think I enjoy this reboot of the franchise even better than the original version starring Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and all those other ’90s stars.

But let’s be fair. Contrary to what some have claimed or implied, #MeToo was never a purely cynical exercise in political partisanship. After all, it did bring down a powerful Hollywood Democrat and a sitting Democratic senator. It just turns out that a presidential election is simply a bridge too far. No one is willing to chance losing to Trump again for the sake of principles. Suddenly, idealists see the attraction of lesser-evilism. If we were mature adults, we could talk about this. We could admit that part of the tragic nature of existence is the fact that we’re frequently forced by unchosen circumstances to sacrifice our principles to necessity. But we’re not mature adults, Linda Hirshman’s example to the contrary. We’d rather avoid the up-front pain of facing our compromises squarely and choose the no-money-down, balloon-payment option of investing far, far more time, effort, and pain into denying that there was ever a tragic conflict in the first place, let alone any chastening compromises. We’d rather descend into farce and blame an all-powerful cabal of our enemies for playing some incredibly disciplined long game to manipulate us into this situation so that we can pretend our moral virginity remains intact.

And for what? Who does this benefit? She and her comrades know full well what sort of message they were relentlessly pushing. Those “right-wingers,” real, honorary, and imagined, certainly remember. Absolutely no one is fooled by this, though some will find it useful to pretend to be fooled. And yet, some idealistic part of me is still shocked, no matter how often and predictably this happens, that people would rather go through more trouble to lie than to cut through all those tangled webs and just tell the truth. I can’t help but laugh at the irony that my own feeble idealism would survive after theirs had sold out.

Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn

By in conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions

James Lileks:

I think a lot of people who lived their lives in a quivering state of imminent ecological collapse-panic have moved those emotions from that box into this one, and feel energized because the dread now seems even more imminent, and they have Science! on their side, and their enemies are all the right enemies, and this time they can make a difference. And it requires nothing.

I’m not much of an aphorist, unfortunately, but I do have one saying that I thought up myself: “Beware the intersection of convenience and virtue.” Righteousness that asks little or nothing of you is cheap and dangerous like bathtub gin. And, as Theodore Dalrymple notes,“There is more pleasure in being right about forthcoming disaster than in being right about incremental improvement.” How quickly we seem to have forgotten all we learned back when “motivated reasoning” and “confirmation bias” were trendy topics.

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