I didn’t notice, but Monday was the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution — did Google feel that was also worth commemorating in a doodle? I mean, that had something vaguely to do with “equality”, too, didn’t it? Perhaps the same SJWs who are currently praising Kochiyama as an inspirational “human rights activist” on Twitter would have likewise been inspired by the heroic example of the Red Guards.
fresh hell
And It Came to Pass
Nearly fifteen months ago, I said:
Now, anyone can make the easy joke about how, even as we speak, sites like Salon, Alternet, Vox and the like are in a race to see who can be the first to publish an article about how white privilege is being able to take for granted one’s majority status in a crowded room full of emoji. I, on the other hand, prefer to stalk bigger game. I’m shielding my eyes and looking toward the horizon, anticipating the inevitable article analyzing the phenomenon of white flight from emoji use, dating back to this policy change. For that one, I think we’ll need the New Republic, or maybe the Atlantic itself.
So, is this close enough to count as a validation of my prophetic powers? Yeah, I think I’ll claim this one.
And That’s Just a Little Bit More Than the Left Will Allow
While backpacking through Eastern Europe, I stopped at a pub for a drink. On the stool next to me sat a squat, disheveled man. His strange habit of constantly fiddling with his nose, beard or shirt, as well as his grunting and snuffling, put me in mind of a groggy bear with a cocaine addiction. Before I could think better of my choice of seat, my presence apparently triggered a monologue that he had hooked up to a motion-detector.
“I told those imbeciles at Salon that I related to Robespierre and Lenin! But did they call me ‘Zizek the Fanatical Jacobin’, or ‘Zizek the Bolshevik Monster’? No! I was ‘the coolest, most influential leftist in Europe‘! I’ve loudly proclaimed my admiration for Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but did they call me ‘Zizek the Mass-Murder Apologist’? No! They just gently admonished me to ‘stop clowning around‘! I wrote in one of my books, ‘Better the worst of Stalinism than the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state,’ but do my leftist comrades call me ‘Zizek the Nihilist Nightmare’? No! The Chronicle of Higher Education even dubbed me ‘the Elvis of cultural theory’! They have no principles! It’s all just a big fucking joke to them!”
He turned fully in my direction, his jittery gaze coming briefly to rest as if consciously noticing me for the first time, and muttered, “But you write one article or give one speech that criticizes Islam…”
(cf.)
Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ On Me?
All this week, the Guardian has been publishing research and op-eds about the ‘dark side’ of its own comments sections, which it has discovered are packed with ‘vile abuse’ aimed at its writers, and about the increasingly ugly nature of the internet more broadly, especially social media, which are apparently seething pits of mad trolls and misogynistic blowhards.
The web used to be ‘playful, creative and open’, says a wet-eyed Guardian editorial, but now it’s full of ‘bullying, shaming and intimidation’.
One of the web’s premier hubs of social justice fanaticism complaining about bullying, shaming, and intimidation: funny. In and of itself, not really funny enough to rate genuine laughter, or even a good smirk, but when you read another article less than five minutes later spelling out just how far the JV Jacobins would like to go to, uh, “prevent” bullying and harassment, well…
And Who’s to Care If I Grow My Hair to the Sky
You may have seen mention this past week of the SanFran State incident where an angry black woman accosted and lectured a campus hippie for wearing dreadlocks, which constitutes cultural appropriation, a capital crime under the regime of the new left-wing racial separatists. Ho-hum, old hat, to be expected, you say. I agree. And yet, even I managed to feel a bit stunned by the chutzpah of the resulting commentary, in which the perp’s insistence that “his” hair is subject to the tyranny of “his” aesthetic choices reveals the grasping, selfish, petit-bourgeois nature of his ideological worldview, in which something as reactionary as aesthetics can be said to trump politics, or, worse yet, offended feelings. Has this privileged colonialist piglet seriously not heard of Sartre’s “eyes of the least favored” theory? Break out the intersectionality abacus. If someone more oppressed than you tells you that your hairstyle is problematic, you’d better double-time march to the barber’s and get the standard-issue white-man buzzcut, buddy.
(As a side note, it’s fascinating to note how quickly a market for virtue-signaling opens up, allowing savvy entrepreneurs like this guy to step in and make a killing.)
Anyway, I almost fell for this story. But this guy’s name? Goldstein. I mean, come on, what’s his middle name? Snowball? Whatever AI is writing this script is starting to become a bit heavy-handed in its symbolism. Yes, yes, we get it, it’s creeping totalitarianism, all right already. It makes it hard to suspend our disbelief long enough to get absorbed in the story. If I’m going to be hooked up to the Matrix, I demand a more immersive plot to entertain me.
Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (10)
Donald Trump is America’s collective rape fantasy. Deep down, they fully expect to settle down and spend the next several years having perfunctory relations with Hillary, but it gives them such an illicit thrill to imagine being ravished by that beastly orange man with his stubby little hands. I’m not judging anyone’s kinks here, but it is getting a little boring having to hear you moan about it countless times each day. Try a little harder to keep it private, hmm?
Statues and Limitations
Hundreds of student protesters rallied at Oxford University’s Oriel College on Friday, calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, a past pupil and benefactor of the school who made his fortune in diamonds while helping Britain seize control of southern Africa in the late 19th century.
Now:
University students will vote on whether to construct a 250ft iron statue of ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
For goodness’s sake, let’s hope this doesn’t spread over to this side of the ocean. It’s been over a decade since I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but I’m pretty sure this was his message about how Easter Island destroyed itself — identity politics leads to competitive statue-building, and before you know it, you’ve used up all your natural resources constructing mile-high representations of Reagan and FDR squaring off in a wrestling match.
We Are the World
Because if my Facebook friends’ statements were any indication, Trump should have suffered a serious blow on Tuesday night. Yet as results poured in, he continued to stand as the frontrunner. So something—whether it was algorithms or friend circles, indignation or stubbornness—prevented my friends from reaching the voters they meant to reach. Based on the results of Super Tuesday, the voters #NeverTrump posts were meant to reach were either offended by them and voted for him anyway, or didn’t see them much or at all.
Ah, life in a social media gated community. You know what I really need? Imagine someone in a cheesy horror movie making the sign of the cross with their fingers to ward off a vampire. Now, instead of a cross, what I need is a picture of some helpless, terrified victim, cowering before an evil silhouette, making a sign of the hashtag as a feeble last resort. I could have saved all this typing if only that picture had already existed.
Only the Yoni Know This Feeling Ain’t Right
Freeman argued that the key to the movement’s success was its potential to combine two ways of addressing society’s gender problems: the Egalitarian Ethic and the Liberation Ethic. The first demands an end to sex discrimination and fixed gender roles, but the second seeks a deeper change. ‘To seek only equality, given the current male bias of the social values, is to assume that women want to be like men or that men are worth emulating,’ she wrote. ‘It is to demand that women be allowed to participate in society as we know it… without questioning the extent to which that society is worth participating in.’
Meanwhile, the Liberation Ethic has faded from view. The Furies’ concept of a ‘male world view’, and their notion of dismantling competition and acquisitiveness, would sound, to many modern ears, like antiquated gibberish. And yet the Liberation Ethic might be the best place to start, not only for addressing the special burdens modern women continue to bear, but also for making life better, along a whole lot of dimensions, for both men and women.
And yet, outside the realm of traditional politics, many people – especially young ones – are seeking entirely different ways of seeing relationships, gender, and sex. Growing numbers of people identify as neither male nor female, upending not just gender roles but gender itself. Polyamorous triads and quads and more exotic geometries are reconfiguring romance. BDSM (bondage, dominance, sado-masochism etc) players are dragging unspoken assumptions about sexual dominance and submission out into the light and then reworking them in novel ways. These movements are often framed as simply a matter of individual choice, but they owe their existence to a Liberation Ethic, and they have the potential to cut to the core of centuries-old assumptions about women and men. Kate Bornstein, a prominent gender theorist and transgender activist, argues that challenging assumptions about gender is part of a broader campaign against all sorts of power structures. ‘The value of breaking the gender binary will be to use what we’ve learned to help break down the false binaries masking hierarchical vectors of oppression – namely age, race, class, religion, looks, ability, language, citizenship, family, and reproductive status and sexuality,’ Bornstein said in a 2011 interview with the magazine Herizons.
A feminism based on the Liberation Ethic would question the very foundations of our work and family lives. It would attack the ‘masculine’ obsession with narrowly defined profit and productivity. It would demand generous social welfare programmes and part-time jobs with good pay, interesting work, and room for advancement. It would help people transform marriage to work for them – or create different kinds of relationships that suit them better. It would ditch the false dichotomy of dependence and independence and acknowledge that, in a complex human society, we are all necessarily interdependent. Above all, it would argue not that women should live more like men, but that everyone, regardless of gender, should live more like they want to.
Ol’ Massa’s Gone Away
There’s something endlessly fascinating about the left’s insistence that Clarence Thomas is not “authentically” black—that this descendant of slaves, this grandson of sharecroppers, this hardworking man who rose to the grandest heights of the legal profession, is a traitor to his race and his class. I don’t know what it is about Thomas that drives the left so nuts, but it’s there, and it’s very real. Could you imagine what would happen if someone on the right described a brilliant liberal African-American of being no more than a slave controlled by white devils?
I hate to say this—the charge is offered all too often with far little in the way of support—but that shit is racist as hell.
Leave aside the “More like Uncle Clarence Thomas, amirite?” sniggering. The suggestion that Clarence Thomas is just a mindless puppet whose strings were pulled by Antonin Scalia is racist and ignorant and wholly unsupported by anything resembling the facts. Jeffrey Toobin—no fan of Thomas, he!—has said as much in the storied pages of the New Yorker.
I’m sure Bunch’s befuddlement is just rhetorical; he knows full well that Thomas is guilty of giving the lie to progressive homilies about race. “Authentic” blacks just coincidentally happen to be the ones who choose the same political positions as the white progressives who want to be credited for making a big display of standing aside and relinquishing their grip on power. “Now, Clarence, where on Earth did you get your head filled with all these crazy conservative ideas? Have you been hanging around with that Scalia boy again? I’ve told you he’s bad news, haven’t I? Look, we only want you to be happy and successful, but that means you have to listen to us when we give you advice. We know best, after all.” Actually, come to think of it, I’d love to see the Venn diagram of patronizing progressive racists and helicopter parents.
Blooper Scooper
#NobodyIsForcingYouToPlayDave #GenerationSnowflake pic.twitter.com/cW7EYQMHcB
— So.Much.Guardian (@SoMuchGuardian) January 11, 2016
Having gotten precisely nowhere in their laughable attempt to turn the Washington Redskins’ name into the great moral issue of our time, it only makes sense that our heroes would now set their sights on an even more unrealistic target. Sense, that is, because as always with these kinds of crusades, the important thing is to be seen crusading, not to actually set achievable goals. The more quixotic the quest, the less likely you’ll ever be short of opportunities to flaunt your moral superiority.
Anyway. Question: what did Orwell and Hitler have in common? Answer: they both understood, in contrast to simpletons like Dave Bry, that many human beings desire much more from life than ease, security and avoidance of pain. Some of them positively lust after struggle and danger. Bry acknowledges this, but says that “we should be more honest about how ugly and shameful our bloodlust is” even as he admits (in the same sentence) that it is also “natural” and “inherent to the human condition”, which, of course, has proven to be such a psychologically healthy tension to maintain; just ask a random Catholic. William James had the right idea, even if his details seem a bit outdated; I’d say spectator sports like football are close enough to his moral equivalent to war.
This part is just plain funny:
[W]e should try to channel our need for catharsis in this regard into forms of entertainment that don’t leave real broken bodies their wake. Violent movies, I would argue, are far more easily defensible on moral grounds, as are gangsta rap and first-person shooter video games.
This is why opponents of this sort of weepy, whiny do-gooderism feel intensely frustrated, like they’re fighting a guerrilla war. They’re constantly having to take aim at moving targets. You’ll never find one person who flat-out wants to abolish everything harmful, or even potentially harmful. But the cumulative tendency in our hypersensitive Nerf age is definitely oriented toward the goal of a world with no pain, tragedy, rough edges or sharp points. For every Dave Bry who is magnanimously inclined to let us enjoy our violent movies and video games, there’s an Anita Sarkeesian who is doing everything in her power to stamp those out too. For whatever she’s willing to overlook, there’s a crusading Christian who wants to purify pop culture for the Lord. And so on. Well, as long as we’re comparing dictators to dimbulbs, here’s something Stalin was shrewd enough to understand: when confronted by a remorseless enemy who wants to destroy all you hold dear, you just have to hold firm and say “Not one step back!”
It Ain’t No Trick to Get Rich Quick if You Dig, Dig, Dig With a Shovel or a Pick
So, what aspect of pop culture are the philistines running the Socialist Realism rule over today?
Is there any other production house operating today that is more obsessed with narratives of the workplace and employment? The basic Pixar story is that of an individual seeking to establish, refine, or preserve their function as an instrument within a system of labor. The only way Pixar is able to conceptualize a protagonist is to assign them a job (or a conspicuous lack of one) and arrange the mechanisms of plot to ensure that they fulfill that job. This is why Joy can only accept Sadness once she comes to understand what it is she does.
Pixar’s debut film organized a scenario involving sentient toys as a narrative about two men fighting for the same job. In not one but two sequels, it revisited those same characters in a narrative about how bad retirement is, and how awful it is to be made redundant. In Monsters, Inc., it developed a parallel universe populated by monsters and powered by childrens’ screams to tell a story about a workplace duo striving to be the most efficient employees. Up is ultimately a film about how unthinkable it is to retire; even elderly widowers must find a new vocation. In film after film, Pixar presents narratives chiefly concerned with characters trying to be the best at what they do, or otherwise prove their usefulness.
This excess, epitomized as the complete entanglement of an individual’s private life with their employment, is at the core of Pixar’s conceptualization of what it is to be a person: In every Pixar film, the protagonist’s arc is oriented toward the ultimate goal of being an efficient, productive worker—whether employment has been thematized as being a father, princess, robot janitor, toy, ant colonist, harvester of screams, adventurer in South America, or otherwise. For Pixar, to live is to work. Cars is a film about an ambitious racecar who is forced to chill out and not be so competitive, except he really just learns that chilling out and not being so competitive is the key to being an even better competitor. This is coming from a workplace culture that, under the guise of compassion, has erased the distinction between free time and labor time, and expects their employees not to notice that they working that much harder.
At its bottom, this is the logic of pure capitalism. In an economy structured around limitless growth, dynamism must become the natural state of things. Idle capital is unproductive capital and an unproductive worker is a waste of resources. The virtuous citizen cannot only consume but must produce, an imperative that finds its current (and particularly American) incarnation in the entrepreneur, the boot-strapper, the rags-to-riches hero, who is too busy pulling themselves up by their laces to notice that there’s no top to reach. The natural and profitable ideological by-product of this fixation is an abhorrence of collectivism—and therefore organized labor. To be collective, to be one among many, is to no longer be a special individual producer, which is its own kind of death. This is why Toy Story 2 abhors the idea of Woody becoming part of a box set.
End Tha Police
History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police.
Those of us who maintain that reform is actually impossible within the current context are positioned as unreasonable and naïve. Ideological formations often operate invisibly to delineate and define what is acceptable discourse. Challenges to dominant ideological formations about “justice” are met with anger, ridicule or are simply ignored. This is in the service of those who benefit from the current system and to enforce white supremacy and anti-blackness.
We Can’t Accept Any Deviationists and We Don’t Need Any Crazies
[T]here is something truly dispiriting about not being able to distinguish self-identified radicals from the parodies of us imagined by the right wing. Last year, the wackjob nadir was “Žižek Delenda Est” (“Žižek Must be Destroyed.”) The thesis of the panel—which featured at least one “tankie,” slang for Soviet apologist, or actual Stalinist—was that Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is some kind of COINTELPRO crypto-Nazi.
Sadly, this is not an exaggeration, and the ineffectual chaos of Left Forum is symptomatic of the state of the left at large. But I do not foresee doom. It’s quite possible the left is at a pivotal moment in political history: these days, Americans actually like the sound of socialism, and the potential for building a new base is incredibly encouraging. But as much as we should be looking to expand, so, too, must we refine our project. The marginalistas distract, disrupt and deter future comrades. So it’s high time we get a little exclusive: tankies, truthers and tofu may supply a steady stream of battle-tested conference anecdotage, but they’re not going to move us any closer to building a better world.
(“You can’t lop off the fringes!”)
No Rest for the Progressive
Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
Socially liberal people who recognize the equal dignity of polyamorous relationships need to develop way better anti-polygamy arguments.
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, “slow down” is a derided stance for a reason.
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
I would assuredly hate to run afoul of the Jacobin version of Godwin’s Law, so let me merely say that even in the cutting-edge-fashion-obsessed, social-justice-oversaturated environment of social media, I haven’t seen anyone yelping about monogamous privilege or the stirrings of a burgeoning poly-rights movement, so I suspect Freddie is just bounding excitedly down the trail with the scent of seemingly-inexorable theoretical logic, rather than a practical, felt need, filling his nose. I’m especially amused by the presumptuous, almost confrontational attitude: “Hey society! I’m some asshole with a clever idea, and I say ‘Jump!'” And society’s all like, “LolWUT? You expect us to ask ‘How high?’ Burden of proof’s on YOU, buddy. YOU make the case that there’s an actual pressing need for us to rearrange this particular social institution to suit your specifications. YOU prove to US that this is in OUR interest to consider. Better yet, go spend the next few decades building a poly-rights movement, and if the fad hasn’t fizzled out by then, we’ll talk.”
You Ain’t Afraid of Dyin’ but You’re Terrified of Youth, You Must be Gettin’ Rather Long in the Tooth
Is it overly authoritarian of me to want to round up people like this and send them off on an Outward Bound expedition? Any candidate who wants to turn that into policy, you’ve got my vote. On the other hand, a lot of the Atlantic’s editorial decisions make perfect sense to me now, seeing as how they apparently hired some kid from a high school yearbook staff and made him a senior editor at the magazine.