fresh hell

Angry at Numbers

By in fresh hell

Kindergarten teacher: “Butt-head, are you angry?”
Butt-head: “I’m, like, angry at numbers.”
Beavis: “There’s, like, too many of ’em and stuff.”

— Beavis and Butt-head, “Held Back“

Rachel Sugar:

As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.

This is basically “I bought a thing; the thing has numbers; numbers are everywhere; counting is stressful” stretched into a lifestyle vignette. This thousand-word article could have been a tweet without losing any substance.

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.

Everything Human Is Alien to Him

By in fresh hell, history

L. P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Rob Boddice, the subject of Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic profile, apparently imprinted on that line shortly after hatching. Boddice argues that we project our own emotional categories backward — pain, love, grief, even “human nature” — when in reality, experience is historically made, not universally shared. Even a carpenter’s smashed thumb is, in effect, a foreign language.

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. Plenty of critics, starting with postcolonial thinkers, now understand this to have been an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity is not just an 18th-century one. Freudian psychology also reduced the dynamism of the human mind to a machine powered by predictable and shared drives. By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident.

Mwah! This is so perfectly calibrated to modern midwit pieties. The Enlightenment: a club of privileged European males in powdered wigs inventing “human nature” as a fig leaf to cover the White Phallus of Power as it raped its way through the diversity of history. Before that, apparently, nobody had ever noticed that human beings have anything in common, least of all the Christians, with their quaint doctrine that man is made in the image of God, and their bizarre hobby of preaching to all nations. Or the Stoics, who somehow developed a universal moral vocabulary without the benefit of a Paris salon. Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me”? Montaigne: “Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition”? Take a seat, boys, The Atlantic is here with the highly-credentialed to explain the world atcha.

To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?

It no longer seems so simple as just saying “pain.” We cannot put the carpenter in an MRI machine—we will never have total access to his feelings—but by building out his world in all of its dimensions, Boddice believes, we can get closer to appreciating the specificity of those feelings. This points to another radical element of Boddice’s thinking: To re-create an experience, you need to know all of the conditions that may have led the brain to originally create it, and this means bringing dozens of different academic disciplines to bear on the task, getting fields that don’t usually mingle to interact with one another.

This is the real work of art. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: here we’re told that to understand what it “felt like” for a medieval carpenter to hit his thumb with a hammer, you’ll need a kind of academic Avengers initiative: theology, archaeology, art history, material culture, semiotics, perhaps a visiting chair in Comparative Thumb Studies, and a grant. Only then may you begin to approach the mysteriously foreign experience known as “pain.”

Now, I’ll grant the modest point hidden under the grandiosity. People don’t just feel sensations; they interpret them. The same event, a hammer-smashed thumb, can be filtered through pride, shame, religion, habit, fear of lost wages, or the general anxiety of living in a world where God is watching and your tools are trying to kill you. Fine. Culture supplies scripts. Narratives matter. Buddhists, who of course didn’t appear until the Enlightenment, would call it clinging: the thumb hurts, but the story you attach to it — “I’m a clumsy failure and this is why my wife left me,” “This always happens to me, why am I so cursed” — hurts extra.

Still, the fact that meaning is flexible does not mean meaning is infinite. It doesn’t follow that slave labor under the desert sun was a rollicking good time in the right cultural context. It doesn’t follow that the medieval carpenter might have experienced a broken thumb as a wave of orgasmic rapture. The space of plausible interpretations may be wider than first thought, but it isn’t boundless. Human beings can be culturally varied without being mythical creatures. This is where Boddice’s extreme skepticism resembles something like travelogue-fantasy: the fetishization of difference as an end in itself. It reminds me of Pliny the Elder dutifully describing faraway islands where the inhabitants are all ears, or Marco Polo’s dog-headed cannibals. The past becomes an exotic zoo, and the historian becomes the docent.

And you’ll notice how selectively the skepticism is applied. If “experience” is sealed inside a vault unless we reconstruct “all the conditions,” there’s no reason to stop at medieval carpenters. My neighbors are also concept-laden brains in dark skulls with culturally trained categories. Taken seriously, the view doesn’t just make the past foreign; it makes the present unknowable, and logically points the way to solipsism. (And yet, miraculously, the academic Avengers can still deduce the “true” feeling from texts and artifacts.) But ordinary life plainly assumes the opposite — that we can understand one another well enough to cooperate, console, forgive, punish, and love. My assumption is that Boddice, with his tedious “down with empathy” provocations, is probably making a bid to be the next pop-academic superstar milking the Freakonomics template of counterintuitive insights. I can easily imagine “people in the past didn’t feel the same emotions we do” becoming the next “Eskimos-have-200-words-for-snow.”

Which brings me to the correct research method, and it requires only one professor: Samuel Johnson. If someone tells you we can’t understand an injured thumb without dozens of academic disciplines, a Johnsonian response suggests itself: pick up a hammer, hit his thumb, and say, over top of his howls and curses, “I refute Boddice thus.”

Talkin’ ‘Bout Butterflies In My Head

By in fresh hell

Theodore Dalrymple:

Let us take a simple example (as Lacassagne would have done): the tattooed butterfly. As butterflies become rarer and rarer in the real world, so the tattooed kind become ever more common on the shoulders, buttocks, and ankles of young (and not so young) women. But what do such butterflies signify? Here we may turn to Charles Dickens for illumination, and to the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. Skimpole, a shallow, charming, calculating faux naïf says:

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies. 

The tattooed butterfly speaks of freedom and self-pity, for it is more likely that the tattoo symbolises an aspiration than an achievement or an actualised state of being. It is precisely because a woman feels that she is not free that she tattoos herself thus, in the primitive hope that the symbolised quality will become reality in her life. We are never far from magical thinking.

When confronted with a butterfly tattoo, Dalrymple consults the only living authority on the subject: Charles Dickens. (What, Nabokov wasn’t available?) Sure, sometimes people signal what they want, not what they have (wealth, toughness, uniqueness, whatever). But sometimes symbols are just aesthetics, memory, affiliation, grief, a private joke, or “I like it.” Good thing we don’t take Freud seriously anymore, or I’d have to conclude that Dalrymple’s increasingly-fanciful tattoo essays are just a displaced wish to get hammered and come home with a pectoral panther.

Batboy Marries AI!

By in ai, fresh hell, technology, the geist of the zeit

Lila Shroff:

Many people are becoming reliant on AI to navigate some of the most basic aspects of daily life. A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”—yes, because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance. For this set of compulsive users, AI has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The emails they write, the life decisions they make, and the questions that consume their mind all filter through AI first. “It’s like a real addiction,” Metz told me.

Three years into the AI boom, an early picture of how heavy AI use might affect the human mind is developing. For some, chatbots offer emotional companionship; others have found that bots reinforce delusional thinking (a condition that some have deemed “AI psychosis”). The LLeMmings, meanwhile, are beginning to feel the effects of repeatedly outsourcing their thinking to a computer.

Every time I read one of these AI–panic pieces from The Atlantic, I feel like I’ve picked up a high-end version of the Weekly World News. We meet a man who needs Claude to tell him whether it’s safe to sleep in his house because a nearby tree looks like it might fall, another who instinctively wants to ask ChatGPT how to fish an AirPod out from between two train seats, and an anxious tech worker demanding a probability estimate that her friends are still alive after a night out. This is not a portrait of “how AI is changing all our minds.” It’s a freak parade of unbalanced weirdos who just happen to have discovered chatbots.

Once you see the tabloid DNA, you can’t unsee it. You could drop these people straight onto a supermarket cover with only minor copy-editing:

  • “SHE USED AN LLM TO WRITE HER EMAILS – NOW DOCTORS SAY SHE HAS WEEKS TO LIVE”

  • “HE ASKED A CHATBOT IF A TREE WOULD FALL ON HIM – SCIENTISTS SAY HUMAN JUDGMENT MAY BE EXTINCT BY 2030”

  • “MAN ANGRILY ARGUES WITH AI MID-FLIGHT – EXPERTS WARN OF ‘AI PSYCHOSIS’ EPIDEMIC”

The Atlantic just swaps the all-caps and exclamation points for a few quotes from a philosopher, an “addiction psychiatrist,” and a reference to “the architecture of human cognition,” then ships it to the Acela corridor as serious cultural analysis. You get to gawk at the weirdos — people who ask Claude for the odds of identity theft, or need a ridiculous branded event like “No AI December” to remember how to think — while flattering yourself that you’re not like them; you’re enlightened enough to worry about what this means for society. You’re not eagerly devouring gossip about how Camilla walked out on Charles after catching him rogering the stableboy; you’re “engaging deeply” with the cultural implications of technological change.

Meanwhile, the boring truth is that most of us use LLMs the way we use every other tool: to save some time and get on with things. Draft an email, outline a project, summarize a paper, maybe bounce ideas around when the mental gears are sticky. We are not polling chatbots about how to raise children or shop for groceries. The handful of people who treat AI like an oracle are not victims of “AI dependence”; they’re just the same old neurotics, now expressing their neurosis through a new interface.

Higher Cred

By in education, fresh hell

From the NYT obituary of Tom Stoppard, emphasis mine:

A voracious reader but otherwise remarkably undereducated for a writer of such voluminous knowledge and understanding, Mr. Stoppard found both inspiration and provocation in his literary predecessors. His work alluded to, commented on or borrowed from classic works of literature and philosophy, from the Greeks and Romans to Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel. He often drew on consequential historical events and real-life figures of intellectual power and influence.

“William Shakespeare, though never having completed an MFA program…”

Assuage Against the Machine

By in fresh hell, gender

Tyler Austin Harper:

Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society. “People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue,” he writes. But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas, first aired on his Substack, have, not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. The writer, green activist, and former Kingsnorth enthusiast John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation.

For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it. Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter.

I’ve never been much interested in Paul Kingsnorth. I’m not a Luddite, and I have no interest in becoming a subsistence farmer in response to the “climate crisis,” which I think is mostly performative hysteria. However, it does seem like his newest book, Against the Machine, might still grapple with some interesting issues. I realize it’s The Atlantic — caveat lector and all that — but I was nonetheless annoyed to encounter this irrelevant tangent. Kingsnorth’s concern is that modern technoculture treats everything — land, animals, even the human body — as raw material for the will, rather than as something given that places claims on us. That’s a theme even I’m interested in. Instead, I’m forcibly reminded that I’m reading a review tailored to the sensibilities of Acela corridor midwits: we get a narrative detour to confirm that, yes, some thoughtcrime may occur here, but there’s no need to panic, it has been safely contained and rebuked, and we remain Good People. It feels less like a serious engagement with Kingsnorth’s argument and more like a pilot’s announcement of mild turbulence. The reader is invited to relax. Whatever Kingsnorth thinks about bodies, limits, and modernity’s Promethean will, it won’t require changing any of the emojis in your social media bio.

What makes it more exasperating is that even the counterpoint offered is rote and weak. Harper blithely suggests that we’re already cyborgs, so who is Kingsnorth to object to gender-affirming surgeries and hormones? But this is just a category mistake. There is an obvious difference between unintended collateral damage (microplastics), restorative medicine (pacemakers), and deliberate, irreversible interventions into healthy sexual development. To pretend they all belong in one moral category called “assaults on nature” is precisely the sort of flattening a serious critic is supposed to resist, not perform.

Which is a shame, because aside from the obligatory culture-war throat-clearing, Kingsnorth’s basic question is unavoidable: are there any non-negotiable limits built into human nature and the world, or is everything from sex to climate to cognition just clay for the will to mold? You don’t have to be a radical environmentalist or a would-be peasant in rural Ireland to see the importance of it. You can reject Kingsnorth’s own answers and still recognize that he’s at least posing the right kind of question. What I want from a review is help in thinking that question through, not another in-flight assurance that the moral instruments are functioning and the crew’s politics are sound. If Kingsnorth is wrong about givenness and limits, show me where. If he’s right in places but goes too far, mark the line. But don’t waste my time with ritual genuflection toward the Rainbow God. I can get that from any algorithmic feed. From critics, I’d prefer something closer to thought.

For a sense of what actual context and perspective looks like, you can put Harper’s piece alongside John Gray’s review of the same book in the New Statesman. Gray takes Kingsnorth’s central claim seriously: that contemporary environmentalism and progressive politics are not a radical alternative to the Machine but one of its more hysterical moods, still committed to remaking the world as raw material for human projects. Gray traces the lineage of this idea through Lewis Mumford’s “megatechnics,” Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain phase, his eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the eschatological fiction. Then he does the thing a critic is supposed to do: he asks whether a collapse of the Machine would mean anything like Kingsnorth’s “uncivilisation,” or whether, as history suggests, it would more likely mean famine, pogroms, militias, and then a new, harsher form of industrial order.

Reading Gray after Harper clarified what had been bothering me. Gray sees the same faults I see in Kingsnorth: the fantasy that a smallholding in Galway could somehow scale to eight billion people; the muddled eschatology that can’t decide whether it wants Christian apocalypse or pagan world-cycles; the refusal to admit that renouncing technological progress may mean a more denatured planet, not less. Watching him work through those points, you can feel a mind engaging the book’s actual architecture. With Harper, by contrast, I found myself briefly disoriented: what does gender have to do with Kingsnorth’s core outlook? Why is that the element being singled out for extended treatment? It’s like a film where a jarring line or bit of acting breaks the spell: suddenly you’re no longer inside the world of the story, you’re staring at a studio note. Gray makes me want to argue with Kingsnorth; Harper makes me want to argue with The Atlantic.

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.

Lifters In the Mist

By in battling personal entropy, fresh hell

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:

After losing big with men under 30 in the 2024 election, Democrats have spent $20 million on a program called “Speaking with American Men” (SAM) to help figure out which “spaces” they need to show up in to fare better with this demographic. A smart place to start would be the gym; the booming men’s fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, growth driven by men under 25, who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women. And as SAM co-director Ilyse Hogue and I wrote here last year, the right has done an excellent job parlaying young men’s healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics.

…Yet destabilizing moments like the one we are now living through reveal an enduring dynamic: Men are encouraged with particular urgency to get moving when their social status feels in flux. Generation after generation, boosters sell men the irresistible idea that at the gym, if nowhere else, the sweat of your brow is all that stands between you and success. It’s an understandable, even healthy impulse, and Democrats would do well to start rebuilding their political muscle quite literally, by seeking to identify with the guy at the gym.

I love that they have to commission a study to figure out how to mimic normal people, for all the good that will do. On the one hand, there is obviously a lot of hilarious potential here. I look forward to seeing videos of awkward libs acting like Jehovah’s Witnesses, interrupting people during their sets to preach the good word about puberty blockers and green energy initiatives. And the gym has natural antibodies against weaklings who are averse to hard work, so I’m not concerned. But on the other hand, I despair a little bit — what will it take for these jerkoffs to stop attempting to politicize everything? When will they understand that this isn’t merely a messaging problem that can be solved with a public relations blitz? We already know what you’re all about. We reject it entirely. Let us know when the entire character of your party is completely different, and until then, get fucked.

What He Said

By in ai, battling personal entropy, fresh hell, media/propaganda

We’ve recently seen garbage articles from GQ and Vanity Fair about gyms and lifting weights; now it’s the New Yorker’s turn. As I was saying just last week, there’s no substance to grapple with here, just a lot of pretentious literary chin-stroking. If that were all there is to it, I wouldn’t even bother rousing myself to post about it. But as it happens, the Lady of the House has been using ChatGPT a lot for research lately, and she decided to jokingly ask it, “Why does this article seem so utterly pointless?”

****

Why the Prose Feels Impenetrable

  • Abstracted Language: Instead of saying “Johnston got into lifting because it made her feel better,” Jackson filters everything through critical theory and literary metaphor (e.g., Raymond Williams on “form”).

  • Shifting Registers: The essay jumps from cultural history (Bush/Arnold) to memoir to academic theory to internet culture to queer subtext.

  • Ambivalence: The author avoids definitive claims—everything is “paradox,” “tension,” “ambivalence,” or “complicated,” making it hard to grasp a central thesis.

Central Tension

The article is less a review than a recursive reflection on whether any bodily discipline can free you from aesthetic and gender expectations—or if it just gives you a new way to serve them. Johnston believes lifting saved her. Jackson believes it helped, but sees too many cultural echoes to declare true liberation.

If you want the clean one-sentence version:

Jackson argues that while weightlifting may feel like an escape from diet culture and gendered expectations, it still operates within—and often reinforces—the same systems of performance, self-surveillance, and aesthetic conformity it claims to subvert.

You said:

Well, I suppose when you’re contracted to write 4000 words for the New Yorker, you’d better deliver.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that’s precisely the structural constraint that often distorts these essays. The New Yorker doesn’t publish book reviews; it publishes essays that orbit a topic using the book as a gravitational center. That means:

  • The writer must appear to wrestle with an idea, even if the conclusion is lukewarm.

  • Every tangent (Arnold, Raymond Williams, Instagram captions) must serve dual purposes: padding the word count and signaling cultural literacy.

  • Ambivalence is currency—commitment is gauche. A clear thesis would make it seem like the conversation is over. Better to “trouble the narrative” than resolve it.

The result is often less “what do we learn from this book?” and more “what does this book let me talk about for 4,000 words in this house style?” A skilled reader can dig out the substance, but the opacity isn’t accidental—it’s ornamental.

****

I have to admit, I couldn’t have said it better myself. If these chatbots can be gratuitously ornery or make vulgar jokes, I might be out of a blogging job.

When Vegans Attack

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda

Boy, if I could read, I’d probably be really angry over this.

Seriously, though, I thought it would be amusing to make fun of this article, but, no pun intended, there’s no meat to the argument, such as it is. There’s nothing to sink your teeth into. Like so much of contemporary media, it’s all just “vibes” and “feels,” a vague constellation of trendy grievances. (The link is here in case you want to see for yourself.) The aim is not to inform, or even to put forth an argument. It’s just supposed to poke you in the amygdala. It’s like a prose poem in which this ditz free-associates about protein and whatever negative connotations she can hallucinate in connection with it.

So, since rational argumentation isn’t the name of the game here, we may as well respond in kind. From the NYT notice of her wedding in 2020:

They planned to get married on June 6 near the Burnett Fountain in Conservatory Garden in Central Park, with 60 guests, before the coronavirus outbreak. Instead they spent the morning with their puppy Fauci (a rescue from Tennessee) at a social justice march, along Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But of course.

Is This Your Homework, Larry?

By in fresh hell, waiting for the barbarians

Ahahaha:

“They”? Are there no mirrors in Sabato’s house? Is there some reason he didn’t say something after having this scoop dropped in his lap, other than the same cowardice and partisan loyalty that motivated the rest of the Democrats? Oh no, not the cold shoulder!

You lied and dissembled and manipulated in the name of preventing a second Trump term, and you got it anyway. You failed your party and your country, and you irreparably stained your honor and integrity in the process. My old martial arts teacher committed honest-to-God literal seppuku in a public park after being outed as what the kids these days call a “sex pest.” He hadn’t committed any actual crimes, but, having publicly tarnished his reputation, he felt obliged to ritually atone for it. I don’t know what made me think of him after all these years…

ElectionSlam!

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

How long have I been preaching to you guys about the trickster deity who loves us and wants us to be amused? Well, I don’t know about you, but my cup is about to runneth over here. You see, if you had popped through an interdimensional portal around 2004 and informed me that in twenty years, the Democratic nominee for president would be publicly thanking the Cheney family for their endorsement, I would have stared at you in mute disbelief. If you had then told me that Digby, one of the most popular Democrat bloggers of the early ’00s who wrote thousands of posts ranting about the enormity of the Bush administration and Darth Cheney in particular, joined in the praise, I would have assumed that the time travel had scrambled your brains. But here we are, El Oh El.

“Kayfabe” is a term that refers to the old code of professional wrestling, back in the days before it became “sports entertainment.” Wrestlers went out of their way to protect the business by refusing to do anything in public that would indicate that the matches were staged. No breaking character in front of fans, no traveling to the next show with other wrestlers who were supposedly sworn enemies, etc. Of course, that all changed on Vince McMahon’s watch, and for the last few decades, wrestling — sorry, sports entertainment — has embraced the understanding that the fans don’t have to believe the athletic competition is real in order to appreciate the bombast, drama, and campy humor.

Political discourse is no more real than old wrestling promos. The only difference is the “marks” aren’t wise to it. Liz Cheney can swear for years that Kamala the Radical Liberal will destroy the country, before turning babyface in order to team up with her against The Orange Miscreant at the next pay-per-view. Digby can spend several years telling us that Dick Cheney was the original election thief and a sociopath who orchestrated a phony war for the benefit of Halliburton stock prices, before gladly accepting this sociopath’s help to “protect democracy” from “fascism.” Words mean nothing, convictions mean nothing. It’s all bullshit. I’d rather watch old videos of Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes screaming at each other. At least they were entertaining.

The Invisible Fence

By in fresh hell, gender, jests japes jokes jollies

The replies are filled with amusing mockery — sea horses are horses, hot dogs are dogs, urinal cakes are cakes, and, probably most enraging to a ridiculous trust-fund communist like Robinson, national socialists are socialists. I may be a simple fellow, but I never stop being entertained by seeing self-proclaimed radicals being all BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK about smashing fascism and ending capitalism, only to skid to a halt right before the invisible fence of fashionable ideology zaps them in their shock collar. Good doggie!

Why Do You Think They Call It Dopamine?

By in fresh hell

The analogy of information as sugar is not just rhetoric. A 2019 study by researchers at Berkeley found that information acts on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as food.

…But despite being “empty calories,” junk info still tastes delicious. Since your dopamine pathways can’t distinguish between useful and useless info, consuming junk info gives you the satisfaction of feeling like you’re learning—it offers you the sensation of mental nourishment—even though all you’re really doing is shoving virtual popcorn into your skull.

Gurwinder’s post is otherwise unobjectionable, if almost too obvious to need saying, but I’m afraid that I’ve developed a loathing for the word “dopamine.” The pleasure center of my brain does not “light up” when I encounter it. In fact, you might even say that it causes the pleasure center of my brain go as dark as a nighttime aerial view of North Korea, but only if you were an insipient midwit incapable of thinking outside the confines of jargon and cliché. Since you are not that, you would probably say something more like, “Man, it really pisses him off when people replace the vocabulary of intention and agency with empty neurojargon and pretend they’ve explained something!” And you would be right. Not only that, but with your colloquial and humanistic language, you would have done a more accurate and complete job of describing the situation, despite your failure to cite any recent studies in support of your claim.

On the bright side, this at least spurred me to get around to reading some of Raymond Tallis’s books.

Overthrown By Your Children

By in fresh hell, the geist of the zeit

Ed Simon:

After all, we were all fundamentally liberals, even if I may define myself as a left-liberal (which is to say that between barbarism and socialism, I’m probably going to opt for the latter).

I want you to know that I tried really hard to avoid making this obvious joke, but nevertheless, to paraphrase a famous quotation, you were given the choice between barbarism and socialism; you chose socialism, and you shall have barbarism.

Ahhh, I feel better.

Anyway, this is from a review in the Baffler of John Gray’s newest book. I’m always a bit surprised whenever I’m reminded that the Baffler* still exists, and this piece is a good example of why. The thrust of Simon’s review is that Gray spends too much time criticizing wokeness rather than more worthy targets, like Christian nationalism, QAnon, and — he actually says in earnest — “the rise of fascism.” (Yes, if only some brave soul would finally raise the alarm there.) Simon displays the standard range of theatrical exasperation common to leftists confronted with the fact that their revolutionary libido reliably keeps producing retarded, bastard offspring, from “vulgar Marxism” to wokeness. Why oh why can’t the stupid proles stop worshiping false idols? Ironically, Simon accuses Gray of being a bit like Grampa Simpson, shaking his fist at the clouds, even as he himself embodies a different Simpsons meme. Boy, it must really gall these guys to see Bernie in his role as a lackey for the DNC. Cheer up, fellows! I’m sure a bit more abstruse theorizing and fulminating against neoliberalism will breathe new life into the lungs of the social-democratic revolution.

*Or In These Times, while we’re on the subject of leftist fossils.

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