There’s something amusingly pathetic about seeing how easily vapid progressives can be swayed into tattooing a corporate sponsor’s logo onto their political identity. J. Bryan Lowder has been good on this topic before, and I’ll just reiterate that, aside from avoiding the indignity of acting as an unpaid mascot for any corporate entity with a marketing department savvy enough to flatter your vanity, you might want to rethink the logic of this “voting with your wallet” thing.
ohferfucksake
The Moralizing of the Story
People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.
Right—a recent study shows how reading literature leads to increased compassion.
Exactly. It changes our view of what’s imaginable.
The poor panda just can’t take much more of this.
We Don’t Follow Fashion, That’d be a Joke
Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.
Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.
In other words, blogs are no longer the most happening format where happening people go to be seen and gossip about their happening lives. So, yeah, same thing as death, I suppose, for the fashion catwalk that is the twitosphere. If you’re not cool anymore, why would you even embarrass yourself by continuing to exist?
Sin of Omission
Red-cheeked, I have to admit that I went through my own phase of American Indian obsession as an adolescent, born out of, yes, noble savage romanticism. Oh, I was ridiculous. Bone jewelry. Long hair dyed raven-black. Books on everything from Indian languages, at the respectable end of the spectrum, to money-grubbing pseudo-mysticism written by pale people of dubious ancestry with names like Samuel Squatting Bear on the other. To be fair to myself, I outgrew it because even then, I was aware that such interests were widely seen as clichés. So I kept my eyes and ears open and eventually ended up paying more attention to the American Indian Movement than dreamcatchers and handcrafted medicine pouches. There’s no real moral to that story, though — you generally just come away subdued and depressed by the immensity of the hopelessness. I certainly realized in a hurry that I was not made of stern enough stuff for devoted activism. (I did meet Dennis Banks once, which was cool.) No, I just mention it to lay my cards on the table, to stress that I have more than a passing interest in the topic.
You’ve probably heard that the twitosphere is in the midst of another frenzied point-and-denounce episode, this time over the Alabama high school which mixed a reference to the Trail of Tears in with the usual pre-game trash-talking. “What? Too soon?” Yes, I’m afraid so. Bad taste indeed. Give it a few hundred years. By then, it should all be good, clean fun, just like how you don’t see any groups of indigenous Orcadian descendants today claiming to be triggered by the existence of a football team named in honor of the vicious, colonialist Norsemen who raped and pillaged the villages of their ancestors. You know what, I think I might just do that to entertain myself. Look for me crusading on behalf of the memory of my people on Twitter in the upcoming days! #IndigenousOrkneyNeverForget
But I digress. So, yeah, there are already a thousand unimaginative bloggers telling you what you already know like they think you’re a fucking moron or something — teenagers are impulsive and often stupid, racism is a Bad Thing, and hey, since this is not the first but the second American Indian issue to seize the public’s imagination in recent months (up from the usual number of “zero”), maybe we can have us one of them Teachable Moments. Oh, for the love of the Great Spirit, go jackhammer-fuck yourselves, you tedious bastards. Stating the bleeding obvious bores the fuck out of me. Instead, I will just point out that these kids likely thought the play on words was more clever than offensive because as far as they’re concerned, American Indians only exist as abstractions, barely more than an artifact of this nation’s collective mythology. I mean, how many do you know? How many reservations have you visited? How many popular movies, books and cable docudramas have been devoted to the reality of Indian life today as opposed to rehashing Dances With Wolves-territory? Hell, for all the link-aggregator-type sites I read each day, Metafilter provided the only instance in my recent memory of a link to a story about the grim reality of reservation life. It’s not exactly what they would call a trending topic.
Which brings us back to that other issue. And honestly, the only really interesting thing about all of this is the delightful coincidence of seeing the crusaders for changing the Redskins’ name simultaneously treating natives as equally abstract symbols.
Exhibit A: the article I linked to last month. This was so unbelievably “meta”, it just floored me. A bunch of white jerkoffs talking about their feelings about a satirical newspaper’s take on an abstract logo from the sports/entertainment world. “No Native Americans were affected, adversely or otherwise, during the making of this navel-gazing episode.” Except in the most generic, superficial way, they don’t care about the minorities on whose behalf they are so generously offended, any more than they deeply care about the few dozen other things they tweeted about that day. The most “problematic” aspect of this, to use that beloved buzzword of the social justards, is the fact that it impinged upon their ability to enjoy their entertainment with a clear conscience. As is so often the case, this was just another opportunity for typical guilt-ridden, Internet-savvy progressives, like modern-day Victorians, to project their neuroses and obsessions onto the backdrop of the wider world. These people are pathetic truffle pigs who squeal in delighted outrage whenever they root out another trivial instance of this-ism or that-phobia; once their flickering attention span is distracted by the next pseudo-issue, they’ll go right back to knowing and doing absolutely nothing about the lives of actual, living American Indians.
Don’t get me wrong — sure, the name is embarrassingly outdated, go ahead and change it, whatever. It very well could happen at some point, but likely not until after Daniel Snyder comes to an agreement with the NFL for tens of millions in compensation over the inconvenience of having to completely overhaul his franchise and rebrand it. Money talks, cheap outrage walks. I’m not sure how paying a rich guy tons of additional money in exchange for a feel-good victory would advance social justice, but sure, fine, should that be the case, give yourselves a congratulatory handjob and settle back for some guilt-free fun. Until the whole brain-injury issue starts to gain serious traction…
It’s Hard Out Here for a Shrimp
Jonathan Franzen, in his latest screed against social media, takes on the pitfalls of this new expectation of writers. Referring to one very active author on Twitter, he argues that now, “literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion.” There is some truth to the claim that authors are pressured to tweet. But when he then disparages “yakkers and tweeters and braggers” as shallow, he leaves writers with no way out. We are both forced to Tweet and labeled superficial for so doing. The only way one can opt out is to be very rich and famous already, too big for publishers to pressure us to help sell more copies. As my friends and I joke (on Twitter), “Only Franzen has the luxury of not being on Twitter.”
I was going to make a comment about how common this particular whine is, but I scrolled down to the first comment and saw that a familiar name done showed up and pretty much said it already, so I’ll say this instead: There are millions, literally millions, of people out there who did very well in English class and could probably write a halfway-decent story if they put their mind to it. Many of them will put their mind to it, at least for a little while. What I’m saying is, Jonathan Franzen’s insouciant opinions about your silly hobbies aren’t what’s preventing you from making a middle-class lifestyle out of your writing ability, it’s just a matter of supply and demand. Who knows, maybe if you weren’t wasting so much time fucking around on Twitter (or whining about Franzen), you might write something that people would actually want to pay for! Probably not, but we can still hope.
Anyway, as I was writing this, I kept thinking: where do I know her from? I mean, this was sho nuff a stupid article, but there was still this miasma of “daft ditz” hanging around her name that couldn’t be attributed solely to that; I must have seen something else she wrote that impressed me with its stupidity…ah, yes, that was it. Wow. On second thought, maybe Twitter is the ideal environment for such people. Maybe some delicate intellects need a sort of cerebral asylum, where they can play with harmless ideas in a safe, supervised setting.
Useful Idiots
I’m equally ambivalent about the question of whether reading literary fiction really does make you a better person—not just about what the answer might be, but whether the question itself is really a meaningful one to be asking at all. It implies a fairly narrow and reductive legitimation of reading. There’s a risk of thinking about literature in a sort of morally instrumentalist way, whereby its value can be measured in terms of its capacity to improve us. There was a weirdly revealing quality, for instance, in the language that the Atlantic Wire used in reporting on similar research conducted in the Netherlands earlier this year. “Readers who emotionally immerse themselves with written fiction for weeklong periods,” David Wagner wrote, “can help boost their empathetic skills […] Gauging the participants’ empathetic abilities and self-reported emotions before and after such reading sessions, they found that the fiction readers got more of an emotional workout than the nonfiction readers.” It’s possibly unfair to put too much pressure on one writer’s choice of words in framing the discussion (particularly in a roundup blurb), but it hints at a certain view of literature that is implicit in this way of thinking about it—literature as PX90 workout for the soul, as a cardio circuit for the bleeding heart.
Nah, it’s not unfair. The Atlantic Wire, as we saw only a few weeks ago, looooves this sort of superficial ego-stroking for the moderately-cultured, and Wagner in particular is exactly the sort of “journalist” you’d expect to find reporting on hashtag news. Anyhoo, yes, that’s not to say that the whole moral-benefits-of-fiction idea is totally useless, however — knowing the vapid twits who are impressed by it allows you to avoid ever being trapped in conversation with them.
His Feelings About This are Constantly Evolving
• I’d rather affiliate with progressive theists (although I’d be carping at them constantly about their goofball faith) than with atheists who want to rationalize women into subservience. We’re in a fight for the soul of atheism — and I want atheism to be something worth fighting for.
• Atheism is ultimately going to have to be a progressive political force, fighting for inclusion, evidence-based policy, humanist values, and the goal of expanding knowledge and power for all. We’re hampered right now by a rather reluctant leadership that tends to focus on pettier issues in the name of unity.
So, Peezles has finally followed the logic, such as it is, of his recent conversion to its inevitable conclusion, namely, that atheism is meaningless unless it’s one plank in a progressive political platform, with progressivism being, of course, the only rational choice by his famously circular, self-serving definition of rationality. Which, you know, fine, whatever. Lots of luck with that! Politics, as we all know, is about compromise, coalition-building and utilitarian solutions that leave everyone somewhat dissatisfied; Peezy and the rest of the social justards have never shown an aptitude for anything beyond adolescent temper tantrums, emo hysterics, Manichean moralizing and heaping invective upon anyone suspected of being part of the out-group. In all likelihood, those morons will never do anything more substantial than hashtag sloganeering, like every other slacktivist. Too bad, though; I imagine a Tea Party of the left would provide plenty of amusement, assuming they could even keep from savaging each other over arbitrary standards of purity long enough to work toward some sort of achievable political goal.
Even for an aspiring political animal, though, this is some incredibly brazen chutzpah:
If we are going to claim to have positions based on reason and the intelligent interpretation of the evidence, then the climate change denialists, the sexists, the racists, the narcissistic worshippers of the Holy Market…they cannot be regarded as representative. The ones who think the solution to Islamic theocracy is to bomb Muslim countries or deport brown people should be considered as lunatic and beyond the pale as atheists who advocate nuking the Vatican or ostracizing Catholics.
Yes, you read that correctly. Atheists who “ostracize Catholics” are beyond-the-pale-lunatics. This message brought to you by the imbecile most famous for sticking a nail through a Communion wafer, the very same unbelievably self-unaware clod who, less than a year ago, made this attempt at winning hearts and minds for the greater progressive good:
Fuck the Catholic church. Empty every pew, loot every coffer, disband every level of the hierarchy, take all their property and turn it over to secular authorities to be managed ethically and rationally.
And if you’re still attending church…what the hell is wrong with you?
Does that count as “nuking” the Vatican, or is he going to contradict himself yet again and stick to a strict dictionary definition of the word?
Can’t Find a Better Man
In other words, by forcing you to think, empathize, and assume instead of handing you prototype characters whose actions and personalities can be squarely understood, literary fiction is literally making you a more caring and emotionally intelligent person.
And another study has shown that writing this type of self-serving horseshit on idiotic pop-culture blogs, or being the type of moderately-educated would-be snob who will immediately rush to share the link to such self-serving horseshit with other similarly-described simpletons through social media and thus momentarily validate hizzorher otherwise empty existence, is literally making you a much stupider person. I kid, of course. No one’s gotten around to doing that study yet, though I’m certain my suspicions will be confirmed. In the meantime, here’s Charles McGrath expanding upon the most obvious criticism one could make:
And the disconnect between art and morality goes further than that: not only can a “bad” person write a good novel or paint a good picture, but a good picture or a good novel can depict a very bad thing. Think of Picasso’s Guernica or Nabokov’s Lolita , an exceptionally good novel about the sexual abuse of a minor, described in a way that makes the protagonist seem almost sympathetic.
Yet art, when you experience it, seems ennobling: it inspires and transports us, refines our discriminations, enlarges our understanding and our sympathies. Surely, we imagine, we are better people because of it. And if art does this much for those of us who merely appreciate it, then it must reflect something even better and truer and more inspiring in the lives and character of the people who actually create art. We cling to these notions — especially that art morally improves us — against all evidence to the contrary, for as the critic George Steiner has famously pointed out, the Holocaust contradicts them once and for all. “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening,” Steiner writes, “that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” Or as Walter Benjamin once wrote: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.”
…Also.
Politics of the Ugly Club
Though to a surprising degree, we agree on who is attractive and who isn’t, differences in looks remain largely unmentionable, unlike divisions of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation. There is no lobby for the homely. How do you change a discriminatory behavior that, even though unfair, is obviously deep, hard to pin down, and largely unconscious—and affects people who would be hurt even to admit they’re in the stigmatized category?
Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too.
…Other ideas, based on traditional legal and economic remedies for unfairness, can seem a bit utopian (or Orwellian): Hamermesh has proposed “affirmative-action programs for the ugly,” or extending the Americans with Disabilities Act to include the unattractive. But without a broad public understanding of the concrete disadvantages of unattractiveness, these ideas sound to many critics like social engineering run amok.
Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and say that’s what it sounds like regardless. Oh, if only people could be purely rational, like robots…
(cf.)
The Overheated Rantings of Some Fool Who Can’t Read
Kickstarter is a private entity, and can police its use however it likes. No one has a “right” to Kickstarter. Out in the real world, however, we know that the rights to publish and speak are ten thousand times more important than the overheated rantings of some fool who can’t read. As PUA guides go, Hoinsky’s is very, very far from being the most aggressive or objectifying. It is an entirely harmless book—as all books are. In fact I found Hoinsky’s Reddit guide to be full of interesting and valuable observations. There isn’t a misogynist syllable in the whole thing. But even if it were as bad as the worst excesses of Frank T.J. Mackey, it is wrong and dangerous to suggest that shutting someone up is the best answer to any problem, ever.
Yeah, I think I heard something about that. Wasn’t there some fatuous, conclusion-jumping blowhard manufacturing drama about it recently? Ah, right, that’s the one. Well, surely, once he had time to calm down and look into it more carefully, he acknowledged letting confirmation bias and ideology get the better of him, yes? Oh.
Skepticism, honey, I know the divorce couldn’t have been pleasant, but you did the best you could. There’s no reason you should have had to put up with his repeated infidelity, and we’re all just glad you got away before he dragged you down into the gutter with him.
Cocaine Runnin’ Around My Brain
America, I’m here today because I love and care about you. This is why, after the latest episode, I want to urge you to seek treatment for your addiction to moronic pop-science stories about how everything from chocolate to the Internet, make-up sex and fatty foods is “like cocaine”. There are only so many facile comparisons your brain can handle, and I don’t want to find you dead of an overdose.
We Got Spirit, Yes We Do, We Got Spirit, How ‘Bout You?
Humanist groups and atheists across the U.S. have banded together to help a fellow atheist who survived the massive tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma earlier this week.
…At the fund-raising website Indiegogo, atheists have set up a relief fund for Vitsun, who lost her house in the storm and most of her possessions.
“Let’s show the world that you dont need to believe in a god to have human compassion nor does all charity fall under the banner of religion,” says the site. “Let’s get this courageous woman and her family back in their own home.”
The site has already passed its goal of $50,000 by nearly $700 at press time, with 60 days in the fund-raiser still to go.
Additionally, their site says:
The impact of getting Rebecca and her family properly housed by the atheist community will do far more good than sitting in bars or chat rooms mocking people of faith. Like religion, free-thinking will be more easily spread through compassion and decency. …More importantly, the more money we raise the better the example we set.
Yes, how inspiring that atheists can use natural disasters as opportunities for public relations and point-scoring just as well as any other ghoul who resolutely gazes into swirling chaos in order to discern the potential for increased market penetration. If you’re anything like me, you may have been concerned that atheists, being so über-rational, might lack that reflexive tribal solidarity that has served humanity so well through the ages, so this will come as a welcome relief. Send those checks to help give a big ol’ middle finger to all those religious nuts and their antiquated in-group/out-group thinking!
Glass Walls on Slaughterhouses
Ahahaha. Now, we already knew Hamilton Nolan is a goddamned moron, and we already knew that Gawker’s brand of progressive woo-girl politics is as superficial as its audience, but shut my mouth and palm my face, this do beat all. Apparently, it never occurred to our progressive heroes while agitating for the overturn of DADT that they were, in fact, agitating for people to have the opportunity to be psychologically broken down in order to be rebuilt as perfect, unquestioning killing machines. Tugging uncomfortably at the collar, a strained expression, a finger held aloft: “This seems a bit, well, retrograde.” You don’t say.
It’s always amusing to see naïve campus progressivism run face-first into a reality-based brick wall; it tickles my slapstick funny bone. But there’s also an unpleasant dissonance in considering the kind of person who can blithely accept the idea of humans being shaped into lethal weapons while blanching at the thought that the process of shaping them thusly might involve some impolitic language. Like George Carlin said about rules of combat, it seems just a way to reassure ourselves that we’re quite civilized even as we devote our efforts to signing up as many people as possible to this institution of mass killing. Faced with the grave significance of war, presented with a pile of corpses, what kind of procedural mindset massages away the cramps of conscience by consulting a properly ticked-off checklist? Well, let’s see — proper declaration of hostilities, signed in the right place, mm-hmm; official uniform, name tag clearly displayed, yep; cause of death: regulation military weaponry, legally obtained, properly registered, good; aaaaand….nope, doesn’t appear anyone was called a faggot or a raghead in the process. All righty, everything looks good here, carry on.
One of the things that nauseated me during those wasted years spent reading the political blogosphere was the presence of so many amateur spin doctors, those process-minded moral homunculi who only thought in terms of optics and marketing, divorced from considerations of value. The Democrats were the brand, and achieving maximum market share was the goal. Repealing the ban on gays in the military looks to be polling well, so let’s go with it! Meta-questions about the worthiness of any such goals would only confuse them, like a Roomba stuck in the corner between the bookcase and the nightstand. Vroom, bonk. Vroom, bonk. Should gays or anyone else care about being discriminated against by such an institution? What about the implications of seeing the world’s mightiest death-dealing colossus as first and foremost a vehicle for job training and career advancement? Vroom, extending civil rights, bonk. Vroom, the most important election of our time, bonk.
People who can overlook gruesome reality with the help of sanitized language are not to be trusted.
If It Was So, It Might Be; and If It Were So, It Would Be; but as It Isn’t, It Ain’t. That’s Logic.
Let’s examine the most egregious Facebook ad of them all: “Dinner” (in the video above). On the surface, it portrays an intergenerational family meal where a young woman escapes from the dreariness of her older relative’s boring cat talk by surreptitiously turning away from the feast and instead feasting her eyes on Facebook Home. With a digital nod to the analog “Calgon, Take Me Away” commercials, the young woman is automatically, frictionlessly transported to a better place: full of enchanting rock music, ballerinas, and snowball fights.
But let’s break Zuckerberg’s spell and shift our focus away from Selfish Girl. Think off-camera and outside the egocentric perspective framed by the ad. Reflect instead on the people surrounding her.
Ignored Aunt will soon question why she’s bothering to put in effort with her distant younger niece. Eventually, she’ll adapt to the Facebook Home-idealized situation and stop caring. In a scene that Facebook won’t run, Selfish Girl will come to Ignored Aunt for something and be ignored herself: Selfishness is contagious, after all. Once it spreads to a future scene where everyone behaves like Selfish Girl, with their eyes glued to their own Home screens, the Facebook ads portend the death of family gatherings.
Remember what I was saying about Hume and his connexions? This is a good example. If you’re already inclined to believe that most social media activity is frivolous, it’s very easy to thoughtlessly nod along with the next few steps in his reasoning. But people are not integers. Silly ads are not chains of logical propositions understood as literal commands. The Great Unwashed are not blank slates incapable of resisting or criticizing suggestions without the help of a philosophy professor. And when it comes to human behavior, like does not necessarily beget like. Ignored Aunt might very well possess the wisdom of several decades’ experience and be gracious enough to realize that Selfish Girl will eventually outgrow her moody adolescent self-absorption, as adolescents always have, without bearing her a grudge over it. Like most humans ever, Selfish Girl will likely become bored by her normal routine — in this case, frittering away spare moments on Facebook — and go looking for greener grass elsewhere. Perhaps even in flesh and blood relationships.
It’s typical of intellectuals, in their drive for logical consistency, to trick themselves into seeing logical necessity where none exists. Overthinking things, basically. Really, the idea that millions of years of social instincts honed by evolution will be destroyed or reshaped in a couple decades by some cool new gadgets is only fit for laughing at.
Don’t Fail Me Now
David Simon wrote a post recently:
The Guardian, which I hear used to be an actual newspaper, reprinted it, but not before HuffPosting up the title a bit:
The Senate’s gun control fail: dead children and monied politicians
I am in favor of the death penalty for adults who use the word “fail” as a noun.
Trial by Smartphone
Kick It Out, the campaign group that six months ago on Saturday was the focus of a protest by leading black footballers over the game’s response to high-profile incidents of racism, is planning to launch smartphone apps next season that allow players and fans to report anonymously abuse in the stands or dressing room.
The aim is to challenge the dressing-room omertà and fan impotency that have frustrated efforts to change the culture at all levels of the game.
The new apps, one for players and one for spectators, will make it easier and quicker for players and fans to report abuse and there are hopes within Kick It Out that they will give a more accurate picture of the scale of the problem, as well as leading to more sanctions and criminal convictions.
Yes, there certainly are hopes. Mine are more modest; I simply hope that this experiment in crowdsourced snitching and rumormongering will go better than the recent trend toward vigilante sleuthing. Like the poster says, none of us is as dumb as all of us.
As for whether this is truly a serious problem demanding a severe response, I’m willing to take Kenan Malik’s word on it:
This is why the current furore over racism seems so bizarre. I cannot remember the last time I faced the kind of abuse that was so common in the eighties. Racism still exists, of course, and needs always to be confronted, but it is relatively isolated. Indeed, it is precisely because racism is so rare that it seems so shocking when we are confronted with it.
…If racism is not the issue that once it was, why the sudden interest on the part of the football authorities in combating racism? Having spent decades ignoring racism in the sport when it was a real, live issue and required a robust response, the FA is now trying to gain the moral high ground by conducting a war that has largely been won. It would have taken guts and commitment to have stood up to racism three decades ago. Today, the FA is trying to clamber on to a moral high ground that has long since become crowded.
If the character of racism has changed over the past three decades, so too has the character of antiracism. Antiracism has all too often become less about challenging discrimination or hatred, more about moral posturing. ‘A lot of the issues that we’ve gone on about in the last season or so, it’s more about people driving the issue than the issue being a real focus’, as David James put it.