ohferfucksake

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Conjoin ‘Em

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blotto Voce

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Freddie deBoer:

I need make no grand loyalty statements. I have no such requirement because my views on this conflict have been plain for many years: the moral imperative is that we create total legal and political equality for all people in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, as basic democratic principles demand, and that all people in that land enjoy safety and prosperity. Hamas’s attack has put a dent in both, for Israel, and destroyed them in Gaza; clearly, this is contrary to my demands. We must have freedom and safety for all, which of course includes Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs as well as African migrant workers as well as various Christians and Druze and every other kind of person, again due to absolutely bedrock democratic principles. Hamas is a theocratic body, and I am opposed to theocracy, and whatever your perspective on political violence, they have harmed the interests of Gazans and all Palestinians. They killed innocent people, which I can’t ever countenance, and by the way they’re contributing to terrible outcomes for their own side in doing so. The attack made greater Palestine more violent and less free. I don’t need to denounce the attack because it comes pre-denounced by my moral values.

The esteemed representative of the Positive Outcomes Only, Please party has spoken. You may recall that it was only a couple weeks ago that we observed this oblivious moron repeating his longstanding wish for a worldwide Marxist revolution. Given history, and given human nature, we can safely assume that the results of said revolution would dwarf the October 7th massacre, but never fear, our public intellectual would be standing athwart the chaos just as he is now, shouting, “Gentlemen! I do not countenance this! This is contrary to my demands!” This cognitive dissonance, this remarkable inability to learn anything from experience, this radiant talent for using a lot of words to say less than nothing of substance, is what you need if you want to be a Substack Superstar. “Ah! The nuance! The complexity! What a subtle thinker!” exclaims Andrew Sullivan, as he strokes his chin and readies the podcast invitation. You boring normies with your conventional opinions, like “Marxism has never worked and never will,” or “The Middle East is an intractable mess which will only end badly if it ever ends at all,” will never understand.

We’ve Tried Nothing, And We’re All Out of Ideas!

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Ian Buruma:

The Elect are fighting the wrong class war. Progressives should be on the side of all people who are vulnerable and in need of protection against powerful interests. The quasi-Protestant obsession with the morality of public figures won’t result in necessary reforms. Statements that affirm inclusivity, diversity, and racial justice sound radical, but often distract from the much harder challenges of improving public education and health care, or introducing tax reforms that create greater equality. This work will do far more for the welfare of poor and marginalized people than demonstrations of virtue.

The Democrats’ relative success in the last midterm elections showed a growing awareness of this among progressive politicians. Concentrating on local economic problems helped many Democrats to win seats. There is a chance that Western democracies will overcome the current waves of right-wing populism and left-wing moralism, but the prospects will be much better if the Elect can learn to temper their puritanical zeal. They can begin by paying a little more attention to Marx and spending a little less time dwelling in the long shadows of Luther and Calvin.

Exactly. Well said! I’m convinced that if we apply CPR to the moldering corpse of that failed prophet just one more time, he’ll spring up and start saying something true and useful for a change. Jesus Aitch, is it a prerequisite for writers at literary magazines that they never have anything resembling an original idea? Or is the lit-mag environment such that only stunning mediocrities have the ambition to appear there? Kind of a chicken-and-the-egg question.

Remember, Freddie’s Red

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Freddie deBoer:

I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.

“I’d prefer utopia, but if I can’t have that, I’ll choose the pink police state.” DeBoer in a nutshell. Like many of his posts, I saw this one being shared among conservatives who inexplicably find him to be an oasis of honesty and integrity on the left. But even this post, where he takes his fellow leftists to task for disingenuously refusing to define the word “woke” (or accept anyone else’s definition), is not really a criticism of dishonesty. It’s mostly a complaint that woke politics isn’t really left-wing politics at all, just the bourgeois posturing of spoiled rich kids building their brands. It’s not radical enough, in other words. Too individualist. Ordinary intelligent people, lacking the academic’s ability to rationalize, will look at the Great Awokening and say, “If this is what ‘not radical enough’ looks like, I’ll stick with the imperfect status quo, thanks.” Not our hero. Progress requires that he eventually endorse the direction the woke are heading in, however regrettably, since the libertarian-socialist cavalry are nowhere to be seen on the horizon. This is the sort of counterintuitive deep thinking that makes Andrew Sullivan tinkle in his pants with excitement at the thought of “unpacking.” Ironically enough, his “civil libertarian socialist” ideal is the sort of political stance that can only ever exist as a, uh, bourgeois eccentricity, not as a mass movement. Most of us understand that intuitively, but then again, most of us don’t proudly proclaim ourselves to be “fourth-generation Marxists.”

Back Seats

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Those who obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.

— La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Steven Poole:

The long-term Zizek observer already knows that one doesn’t exactly ‘read a new book’ by him so much as tune in again to the ceaselessly babbling stream of his comic-philosophical free association. And so it is here: the bracing mash-up of his beloved Hegel with Marx, perverse yet enjoyably plausible interpretations of Hollywood movies and disquisitions on contemporary politics and culture wars.

There is also the usual amount of Lacanian theory, which to some might seem like a version of Scientology for continental philosophers, a sort of intellectual Ponzi scheme in which adepts prove their belonging via the repetition of absurdities, though the psychoanalytic framework more generally does issue in pungent diagnoses of modern sacred cows. ‘Does the predominant ecological discourse,’ he asks, ‘not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological superego?’

In any case, Zizek’s value as a thinker and gadfly lies precisely in his refusal to submit to boring (another favourite word) empiricism and his joy in insulting the left as well as the right.

No matter how often I witness presumably-intelligent people attempt to pan nuggets of wisdom from the stream-of-consciousness-ramblings of this ridiculous charlatan, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

Educate the Filipinx

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

That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.

— Source: General James Rusling, “Interview with President William McKinley,” The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17.

****

In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: “The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.”

— John B. Judis

****

Filipinos slammed the comic-book convention Comic-Con International on social media last week when it referred to a group of Filipino content creators as “Filipinx.”

“The Filipinx Voices in Pop Culture was a fun and educational all Filipinx panel discussing Filipinx influences behind your favorite media,” Comic-Con tweeted on Thursday, using the alternative gender-neutral ethnic term preferred by some gender identity activists to refer to people from the Philippines. Comic-Con’s use of the term drew immediate backlash from users, including Filipinos.

“I’d rather be called a racial slur than Filipinx” one user wrote.

“Please stop trying to impose weird western gender ideology onto people who never wanted it or asked for it in the first place” another said.

— Robert Schmad

****

If history is any guide, this burst of moral enthusiasm will pass. It will leave its marks on Western history; some virtuous, but most risible and excessive. And when future historians look back on our time, they will do so with condescension and pity. They will be navigating their own moral panics, of course. But they will also be confident in their own accumulated wisdom—enough, at least, to look upon us with embarrassment and to thank the stars for their own enlightened age. And the cycle explored in this book will begin again.

We can only hope that there will be someone around then to write about how truly awful we all were.

— Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun

Married, Buried, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

By in marriage, ohferfucksake 2 Comments

Heather Havrilesky:

Do I hate my husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely. I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept. A spouse is a blessing and a curse wrapped into one. How could it be otherwise? How is hatred not the natural outcome of sleeping so close to another human for years?

Unless you plug a propofol drip into your arm every single night, how do you encounter those unwelcome grunts and gravelly snores as anything but oppressive? Unless you spend most of your waking hours daydreaming, how do you tolerate this meddling presence, rearranging stuff but never actually putting it away, opening bills but never actually paying them, shedding his tissues and his dirty socks all over your otherwise pristine habitat?

“Well, speak for yourself. I don’t hate my husband,” one of you holier-than-thou marrieds might announce, folding your hands primly in your lap. Do you think I can’t see your left eye twitching ever so slightly, as you resolve to never let each little irritation add up and move into your conscious mind like a plastic bag floating out to sea and then joining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

…Marriage requires amnesia, a mute button, a filter on the lens, a damper, some blinders, some bumpers, some ear plugs, a nap. You need to erase these stories, misplace this tape, zoom out, slowly dissolve to black. I start to spend more time in my head. I start to daydream more.

Surviving a marriage requires self-care, time alone, time away, meditation, escape, selfishness.

I find it hilariously ironic that, in this entire pathetic spectacle of therapeutic oversharing posing as an op-ed in the Paper of Record, the only revealing insight is an unwitting one: “I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true! Maybe, just maybe, you and your social circle are simply shallow, unpleasant people who would find well-adjusted happiness boring. Sucks to be you, I suppose, but maybe you could at least refrain from projecting your petty indignity onto the rest of us.

No Pomo

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Benjamin Weil:

Fifty years later, our culture has, broadly speaking, moved on. Homosexuality is increasingly normalized, and the muscular frame of the bodybuilder, once considered a form of gender deviance, has since become the male ideal—most visible in the multi-billion-dollar industry of preternaturally jacked superheroes. Globally, the fitness industry itself is now worth close to $100 billion a year.

And yet, despite these important shifts, bodybuilding has, in many ways, become more anxious and, in turn, more silent about its relationship with homosexuality. Today, male bodybuilders, dripping in machismo, trade in euphemisms to discuss one another’s bodies. As the academic Jeremy Strong observes, contemporary argot “avoids many of the terms of reference and evaluation which circulate in relation to women’s bodies,” which “structures a permission (a permission normally denied) to look at the male body.” Nervously skirting around language that might be inferred to carry a homosexual desire, bodybuilders compliment their peers, idols, or adversaries using terms like “’mirin” (short for “admiring”) or else qualify their praise with the linguistic handwashing of “no homo.” In this way, bodybuilding continues to assert a strong divide between (appropriate) heterosexual and (inappropriate) homosexual modes of gazing at the body.

I saw the link to this essay on Arts & Letters Daily a couple days ago. I didn’t click on it then, because I figured I could already tell by A&LD’s brief précis and the fact that it was published in The Baffler that it would contain nothing new or interesting. Today, I was bored enough to disregard the wisdom of my Wednesday self, proving that we don’t always get wiser with age. The whole thing is like this — stale clichés presented as subversion, garnished with the usual academic jargon. How does anyone muster up the enthusiasm for this charade anymore?

via GIPHY

…Bodybuilding simply remains no place for same gender attraction. Other than Paris, there are and have been vanishingly few openly queer male professional bodybuilders (including Chris Dickerson, who won the 1982 Mr. Olympia title). Of course, the inhospitality of professional bodybuilding as an environment for gay competitors is a product of a latent, swirling gay panic, which has led not only to a disappointing crisis of representation within bodybuilding (disappointing because, although a disproportionate number of gay men enjoy bodybuilding as a pastime, they are woefully underrepresented in the professional domain), it also disavows what is potentially politically exciting about the sport. That is, freed from the limiting grasp of homophobia, understanding bodybuilding as a pursuit requires acknowledging and accepting that men gazing desirously at the bodies of other men— one man hoping to possess the physique of another man in some capacity— is not the exclusive preoccupation of queer men but, rather, is a universal phenomenon. The line between wanting to be or wanting to fuck someone is unclear and unstable.

The time is long overdue for the world of bodybuilding to acknowledge the queerness of its historical foundations and its internal dynamics—the love and appreciation of the male form between and amongst men. Should a straight bodybuilder— the very pinnacle of heterosexual masculinity—admit his admiration for male muscularity, exactly nothing world-ending or corruptive would happen: he would not wither or shrink, lose competitive advantage in the sport, or be otherwise altered in any way. And yet, such an occasion would indeed be welcome and profoundly altering: not only opening up bodybuilding as a field unafraid of queer participation but publicly demonstrating that even the very manliest, the most macho, the heterosexual-est of men are, well, a little bit gay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; as Apocryphal Oscar Wilde famously said,”Everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power.” Freud is dead, but his malignant shadow still blights the intellectual landscape. Oh, well. Rednecks called me gay when I was a teenager for having long hair and slightly-androgynous clothes, so it’s nothing to me if leftist academics want to get in on the fun and imply that lifting weights makes me a closet case. More disturbing is the monomaniacal obsession with making leisure activities into politics by other means. Who but a commissar-in-waiting talks about a sport being “potentially politically exciting,” an oxymoron if ever there were one? And what kind of stunted soul thinks that, one, a “crisis of representation” could ever be a phrase to use in earnest, and two, that what we really need is more political sloganeering and grandstanding in athletic events?

Fortune-Teller Favors the Bold

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Andrew Sullivan:

If the definition of political courage is making big calls crisply and effectively, despite obvious risks and unknowable consequences, then it seems to me that President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson qualify right now. They’ve made calls recently that go beyond the usual mush of compromise and calculation and might even merit being called bold.

Biden braved the Blob and got out of Afghanistan. We will debate how he did so, and with what consequences, for quite some time. But he still did it. Obama tried and failed. Trump made a big song and dance and signed a surrender deal. But Biden actually got us out.

This wasn’t inevitable. The defense and foreign policy establishments had plenty of their usual arguments — threats of terror attacks, pabulum about recent “progress,” the avoidance of humiliation — to slow-walk presidents into inaction, but they didn’t succeed this time. Biden had sufficient experience to see through their bluff, and the fortitude to fight back when they raged against the withdrawal. Yes, it was horribly messy; tragic in the ways wars always are. But it had that mystical quality of an actual decision: doneness.

Kevin D. Williamson:

American presidencies do not run on policy — they run on magic.

They run on the superstitious (and, indeed, idolatrous) belief that there is something magical about the person of the president, that he enjoys the powers of at least a demigod, and that the nation’s prosperity and security are mystically connected with his person and his ritual performances in the democratic agon. That is how the 9/11 attacks came to be, in a very strange but true sense, about George W. Bush. They became something more than an event.

When the nation is insulted or attacked, then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk losing the Mandate of Heaven.

…After the airport attack — the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade — President Biden was politically compelled to do something, lest his Big Man Mojo be seen to wane and the Mandate of Heaven slip from his quavering grasp. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command. And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it.

…The prevalence of symbolism over all else means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall. Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming distraction. Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a Skutnik during the State of the Union address.

Sometimes, it’s a carload of kids being burnt on the altar of muscular executive action.

As I’ve said, Sullivan is excellent sometimes, but at other times, like here, he makes me gasp in disbelief that anyone could proudly hit “publish” on something so eye-wateringly stupid. “Boldness” divorced from skill and practical results is nothing to be proud of, certainly not a freestanding virtue. Like a typical intellectual, Sullivan has once again allowed himself to be awed by empty symbolism. This isn’t surprising. Symbolism requires critics and interpreters to make the counterintuitive seem plausible, a job perfectly suited for those like him. The plain truth of a halfway-senile executive and a humiliated superpower lashing out in weakness to disastrous effect is evident to anyone who isn’t lost in clouds of abstraction. Williamson is working on a new book about the very theme he addresses here, our idolatrous worship of the presidency. One can only hope that the ostensibly-conservative Sullivan reads it and learns something. But who am I kidding? He’ll probably just find himself fascinated by the next book by some idiot Marxist who wants to abolish the whole idea of meritocracy and higher learning.

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