ohferfucksake

Remember, Freddie’s Red

By in ohferfucksake, the great awokening No Comments

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

By in ohferfucksake, who's žižoomin' who? No Comments

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

By in ohferfucksake, samesecks No Comments

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

By in ohferfucksake No Comments

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.

They Don’t Gotta Burn the Books, They Just Remove ‘Em

By in books, free speech, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit 1 Comment

Douglas Murray:

But this week the activists of Antifa returned to one of their favourite targets: the journalist whose factual reporting seems to get under their skin so much. Learning of the imminent publication of Ngo’s book they began a campaign to try to force bookstores in America not to stock Ngo’s book.

Their targets included Powell’s bookstore in Portland, where a group of Antifa protested this week, screaming at management and causing the bookstore to close as a safety precaution. The shop pleaded for mercy, insisting in a published statement that “This book will not be placed on our shelves… We will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalog. We carry a lot of books we find abhorrent, as well as those that we treasure.”

As a rule, I don’t agree with buying books, music, etc. for political reasons. At best, it’s a Pyrrhic victory which only contributes to the over-politicization of everything, which is already a societal cancer. And I can’t say I have any genuine interest in reading Ngo’s book, as I feel that I’m already au courant enough with Antifa to wish to see them all marooned on a desert island; I don’t see how any more specific details will change that. That said, after reading Powell’s ambivalent statement regarding free speech, I have to admit I’m sorely tempted to order the book from them online, just for the spiteful satisfaction of imagining the pain it would cause them to have to stain their pure indie souls with my filthy lucre.

Am I My Brother’s Personal Trainer?

By in battling personal entropy, ohferfucksake No Comments

Addison Del Mastro:

More substantively, workout culture is individualistic in the most corrosive and shame-inducing sense, pretending that the individual exists in a vacuum, and that socio-political problems like obesity, sedentary jobs, automobile dependency, and subsidized junk food, either do not exist or are merely wholesome opportunities to exercise self-restraint. Workout culture admits no possibility of societal sickness or policy solutions to the problems of being unhealthy or overweight. It is a sort of glossed-over eugenic ideology, a cult of self-improvement in a broader society which is deeply and perhaps terminally inconducive to self-improvement. The gym rat is social Darwinism made flesh.

Eugenics! Social Darwinism! Structural reorganization of society! So far, so woke, you might say. Just another predictable jeremiad from the fat-positive, pronoun-announcing, reality-is-a-social-construct side of the Internet. But no! Some of you might have already noticed that link goes to The American Conservative. Yes, it can be difficult to tell the difference between the competing brands of collective-mindedness these days, but it’s evident in the details:

In a society which has lost a sense of civic togetherness and mutual support—that is, the communitarianism of “intermediating institutions” between the lone individual and the all-powerful state—self-improvement itself becomes a sort of self-loathing. Individual responsibility becomes an exercise in bashing one’s head against the wall. Genuine good health—like faith, family, and so much else that actually matters—is done in community. Many of our particular problems lie far downstream from a broader and more general breakdown. “Excuses” might actually be opportunities to probe what has really gone wrong with us.

Yes, yes, all problems are social problems, social problems have to be addressed as a whole rather than piecemeal, and individualism is the cancer eating away at the marrow of the ideal Rousseauian community, where the Volk would get their exercise the way God intended, by doing communal labor in their idyllic, car-free villages. It just goes to show the fluidity of political identity — compared to the woke left, I’m a release-the-hounds reactionary. Compared to the communitarian right, I’m a libertarian, almost a libertine. I’m an orangutan among chimpanzees, and all I want is for these equally-obnoxious conformists to swive off and leave me out of their stupid salvific schemes.

Anyway, if our hero could pause his sermon for a moment, he might consider that many people exercise not because of self-loathing caused by Madison Avenue brainwashing, but because being fit feels better than being out of shape. It could be that they actually enjoy the challenge of building and maintaining fitness. Possibly, they might even subscribe to a Stoic realism which focuses on changing what lies within one’s power to change, starting with one’s own body. Del Mastro might enjoy posturing as a bodhisattva who refuses to enter the Nirvana of fitness until all sentient beings enjoy equal access, but Occam’s Razor says he’s just lazy, and clever enough to rationalize it as social criticism.

Only You Can Prevent Parks and Rec Exclusion

By in environment, ohferfucksake, race, the cult of multi 2 Comments

Monica Samayoa:

Recent data from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department shows Black people are underrepresented as visitors to state parks. They make up 2.2% of Oregon’s population and 0.9% of daily visitors and 1.9% of overnight visitors to parks. Other underrepresented demographic groups include American Indian and Alaska Natives, with an estimated 1.8% population, and 1.4% day visitors and 1.2% overnight visitors and Latino people, with 13% of the Oregon population and 6% of day visitors and 5% of overnight visitors.

On the other hand, whites account for 76% of Oregon’s population but 88% of the system’s day visitors and 87% of its overnight visitors.

OPRD Spokesman Chris Havel said this is an issue his department has been struggling with for years. It’s been working with different community organizations to find solutions to make sure every person feels equally welcome when they visit state parks.

I’m not surprised. Considering recent media reports of the miscreants and reprobates who can be found on Oregon’s hiking trails, I don’t think even I would feel safe there.

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