Kiss My Asterisk

By in language No Comments

Nancy Friedman:

Sometimes, though, it’s swear-aversion that rouses our interest. The dropped letters in ads. The bleeps in commercials. The f**cks, the s**ts, even the Victorian-appearing d*mns.

Which is why we are pointing you today to Blackbird Spyplane, the Substack newsletter that the New York Times said was “inventing a new language for talking about style.” As it happens, some of that language is generously sprinkled with little stars.

Blackbird Spyplane clearly isn’t prudish. So what is it up to with the be-asterisked words—trying to highlight them, maybe?

Over on Instagram, I private-messaged co-editor Jonah Weiner to learn his motives. He swiftly replied that he had two reasons:

1. I learned from listening to [the podcast] Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig that a good-natured upbeat conversation that’s full of bleeped curses is just funny on a formal level, and I wanted to try to simulate that in print, and relatedly 2. I tend to use so many curses that it might risk feeling a bit too harsh in aggregate without the asterisks softening the effect.

(Edited slightly not to remove profanity but to add clarifying punctuation, capital letters, and a link.)

I’ve never used asterisks in written profanity, for the usual reasons — we’re all supposedly adults here, and it’s just rude to expect your guests to do part of the work of making your meaning clear. “Here’s a new post. Some assembly required”? That would be like inviting you over for dinner and having you help in the kitchen beforehand, or maybe even handing you something from the refrigerator and pointing you toward the microwave. No, if I want to treat you to some spicy commentary, there will be no shortcuts taken. Still, though, I can appreciate the rationale here. Asterisks as sight gags, or as sheets of tonal fabric softener? Not for me, but I guess that makes sense.

My own attempts to swear without swearing usually involve archaisms, like trying to bring back the use of swive. I’ve also adopted the habit of calling someone a canute. Not in a gendered sense, of course — here I follow the example of our British cousins in that canute can apply equally to men or women. “You swiving canute!” I shout in a moment of road rage, trusting that heartfelt emotion will carry my meaning across, even if they think I’m speaking another language.

Misplaced Tycoons

By in education, eric hoffer, juxtapositions No Comments

Just as stomach ulcers were belatedly discovered to be caused not by stress but by a humble bacterium, historians of the future may well discover that the real reason campuses erupt in fanaticism is the prosaic fact that the rest of us have started shoveling money at them. The first round in the 1960s took place at a time when the number of college students in America had increased by a factor of five in the space of three decades. Naturally this swollen demographic became conscious of itself as a bloc and wanted to throw its weight around, like new money. The administrators and professors had their heads turned, too, by newfound cultural importance and flush budgets, and so they let them.

— Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

****

On October 4, 1957, the Russians placed a medicine-ball-sized satellite in orbit. It needs an effort to remember how stunned we were when we discovered that the clodhopping Russians were technologically ahead of us, and that we would have to catch up to them. We reacted hysterically. We set out to produce scientists and technologists wholesale by shoveling billions into the universities. And where the billions went there went also millions of people who were not primarily interested in learning but wanted a piece of the action. Thus Khrushchev’s Sputnik toy brought about a change in the tilt of America’s social landscape from the marketplace to the universities. After October 1957, many young people who would normally have gone into business ended up climbing academic ladders and throwing their weight around in literary and artistic cliques from Manhattan to Berkeley, California…They were going to wake up the academic world and turn the university into an instrument of power. They were going to make history, which is an acceptable substitute for making and losing millions. It was these misplaced tycoons who set the tone and shaped events in the 1960s.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Reaping Whirlwinds

By in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Conservatives have recently scored surprise victories against left-wing corporate culture, with successful pressure campaigns against a trio of blue-chip companies—Disney, Target, and Bud Light—that have revealed the potential of a culture-war tactic once considered the Left’s stock-in-trade: the consumer boycott.

The campaigns are notable because they drew blood, figuratively speaking. Disney, which promised to embed radical gender theory in its children’s programming, watched its stock price plummet and signaled a retreat from the culture war. Target, which featured “breast binders” as part of its seasonal “Pride Collection,” saw a decline in sales and promised to “pause, adapt, and learn.” Bud Light featured a transgender “influencer” in an advertising campaign, sending its reputation and sales into freefall.

What lessons can be drawn from these examples? And how can conservatives use boycotts to fight left-wing cultural capture?

Helen Andrews, in her book Boomers, describing the tactics that brought Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to prominence:

Interestingly, if Breadbasket had tried these tactics only a few decades earlier, courts would have considered them illegal. Boycotts, except in limited circumstances, were considered unfair commercial interference, and victimized owners could sue organizers for damages. In a landmark case in 1934, the Harlem agitator Sufi Abdul Hamid, also known as Black Hitler for his vocal support for the Third Reich, launched a boycott against the A. S. Beck shoe store on 125th Street demanding that it hire more blacks on its sales staff. A New York judge ruled the picket unlawful, not because store patrons had been violently assaulted (though they had been), but because Hamid and his picketers had no connection to the store. If it had been a protest by black Beck’s employees demanding better treatment, that would have been a labor dispute and thus protected by the Norris-LaGuardia Act. But this was a​ conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences. Even a peaceful boycott would have been illegal.

I was not aware of this. I thought tedious consumer boycotts led by political activists had always been with us, like death, taxes and the poor. I had so many futile arguments in my misspent youth against left-wing enthusiasts for boycotting. Oh, man, what I wouldn’t give to see the old lefty blogosphere prosecuted en masse for “conspiracy against a lawful business by a third party seeking to impose its political preferences.” Is this what the edgy kids mean when they say RETVRN?

But alas, as with free speech, I’m resigned to the idea that it will take people like Rufo leading a counter-revolution before we have any chance of finding our way back to the detente of old-fashioned liberal pluralism. I don’t like it, and I’ll never participate in it myself, but if I see my old liberal pals squealing in protest, I’ll be happy to remind them, in the words of Les Claypool, “I’m the one who told you “Told you so.”

Cry ‘Havoc’! And Let Slip the Dogs of Cancellation

By in free speech, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Ian Leslie:

In recent weeks the air has been thick with accusations of hypocrisy, flying both ways. Left wing American academics, justifiably upset about being censored by employers for pro-Palestinian speech, have accused those who oppose cancel culture of going quiet (even if that’s not actually true). Free speech enthusiasts like me have taken great pleasure in seeing far leftists suddenly discover the importance of unrestricted speech. Much as I enjoy schadenfreude, charging someone with hypocrisy is the easy part. I agree with Matt Yglesias when he says, “Any time you find yourself prosecuting a hypocrisy case, you ought to take some time to consider what you think is actually correct.”

Free speech isn’t just a question of the law, it’s a question of norms, and establishing norms is up to all of us. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America he noted that although there were more formal protections of speech there than in Europe or anywhere else, there was no place with less “independence of mind and true freedom of discussion”. The social pressure to conform was too great.

When J.S. Mill read Tocqueville’s Democracy In America he absorbed this point and incorporated it into his theory of liberty. Mill argued that having legal protections for the rights of individuals to speak freely is a minimal but insufficient condition of a free society. You also need a culture that tolerates and supports that freedom. Otherwise, even without a tyrant on a throne telling you what you can and can’t say, people will still be subject to “social tyranny”.

I’ve always considered myself a free speech maximalist, but lately, I’ve started to lean more toward something like this:

In other words, our cancel-happy progressive friends are simply going to have to feel some serious pain in order to be reminded why it’s a bad idea to overturn social norms in favor of the pursuit of raw power. If that means a bunch of academics or radical students suddenly find their career prospects curtailed, oh, well. We didn’t make this bed, but we’ll be happy to tuck you in and bid you sweet dreams. Free speech in its ideal libertarian sense is like pacifism — it’s only workable when your opponents already share your basic moral values. In the face of a genuine enemy who only recognizes the morality of that Frank Herbert quotation, it’s suicidal.

I realize that this is a dangerous proposition. Once you’ve decided that certain ideas are beyond the pale, what’s to stop you from rationalizing that all criticism and dissent is essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy? In the abstract, I don’t know if there’s a satisfactory answer to that question. To me, though, that just means “so much the worse for abstract reasoning.” As an atheist, I run into that sort of objection all the time: if you don’t believe in a transcendent law or lawgiver, what’s to stop you from raping, robbing and pillaging on a whim? Lots of things, including social norms, practical reasoning, and what Adam Smith called “natural sympathy.” I don’t mean to digress into theological debates; my point is just that everyday life is all about discerning the difference between countless shades of grey. That judgment is shaped by experience more than abstract axioms. My judgment in this instance is that healthy social norms around free speech will only be restored through a threat of mutually assured destruction, not purity of principles.

Looks Like I Lift

By in battling personal entropy 2 Comments

I got 235 tonight. I’m especially happy about that because of how much I had to rehabilitate my shoulders from rheumatoid arthritis when I first started training.

 

We Effing Love Science

By in extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis, science, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jerry Coyne:

In the end, we have still more evidence that Scientific American is no longer circling the drain, but is now in the drain, headed for, well, the sewers. It used to have scientists writing about their field, with no ideological bias, but now has ideologues (these authors happen to be scientist-ideologues) writing about science in a biased and misleading way.

Apparently this trend will continue, and apparently the publishers won’t do anything about it. So it goes. But those of you who want your science untainted by “progressive” ideology had best look elsewhere.

Those who advocated for Lysenkoism at least had the excuse of fearing that they and their families would be imprisoned, or worse, for dissenting. We should always remember with disgust how little it took for our modern ideologues to submit to this insanity. Peer pressure? Loss of status? Maybe having to look for a new job? Cowardly whores, all of them.

Hurt So Good

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

Michael Wolf:

We’ve now seen how almost every aspect of fitness is enhanced by increasing your maximal force production – increasing your strength. While some activities and sports require a higher amount of absolute strength than others, there’s no doubt that every single one benefits from increased strength. And we’ve also established that for increased strength, there’s no tool as useful as the barbell.

The squat rack in your local gym is probably unoccupied right this very moment. What are you waiting for?

Earlier this month, I spent a week traveling. Thousands of miles spent crammed into airplane seats or riding in an SUV over gravel roads made my hips and back hurt like hell. I realized that it’s been years since I spent so much time sitting. I stand all day at work, even when I eat. At home, I at least have more comfortable chairs to sit in, but even then, I still spend a good amount of time on my feet doing one chore or another. I have no idea how sedentary people can stand it. Are they not even aware of how uncomfortable they are? Anyway, for my birthday today, I gave myself the gift of a new squat PR: 395. We followed it with a hybrid of Bulgarian squats and one-legged deadlifts. My glutes are quite tender right now, but it’s a good kind of hurt. It’s the feeling of all that forced-seating trauma leaving the body.

Descartes Before the Horse

By in philosophy No Comments

Richard Hanania:

With the benefit of hindsight, one can always find a way to connect the Inflation Reduction Act to Foucault or something, but such theories strike me as both unlikely to be true and practically impossible to falsify. We don’t have recurring moral panics about race and sex primarily because of something any philosopher has said. Moral panics exist in many cultures and the legal regime we live under determines the forms that our own ones take.

To the extent ideas matter, I think what is important is usually more likely to be intuitions and emotions than high-minded philosophy. People feel bad about the plight of black Americans. So they adopt the idea of “let’s help them and be sensitive towards their feelings.” When a bureaucrat twists the law in his preferred direction, thus proving the importance of “ideas” in forming public policy and culture, he is more likely to be relying on simple heuristics like this than any kind of well thought out ideological doctrine.

It’s like the joke about the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight blocks away from where he dropped them, because “the light’s better here!” Writers and philosophers are unsurprisingly prone to overemphasize the historical influence of writers and philosophers. Rousseau is responsible for X, Nietzsche is responsible for Y, etc. But speaking of philosophy, I often think that David Hume’s skepticism about causality might be of use in these cases. It might just be that highly literate, contemplative people are good at discerning and articulating widespread moods and “vibes,” as the kids like to say these days. Maybe they’re simply naming something that has already been born.

He That Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear

By in nietzsche No Comments

John Gray:

The adolescent quality of BAP’s ideal is a point of contrast with his intellectual mentor Nietzsche. Whatever his other personal limitations – aside from the commercial sex from which he contracted syphilis as a student, Nietzsche was practically an incel – the philosopher did have a direct acquaintance with war. A medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), he contracted diphtheria and dysentery on the battlefield, permanently weakening his already uncertain health. The experience confirmed his lifelong hostility to militarism, and when he glorifies war it is most often a mental conflict to which he is referring.

Nietzsche regarded the civilisation around him as thoroughly decadent, but he was well aware that he was a living example of that condition. When he wrote of superhuman inner strength, it was as someone who suspected he was incurably spiritually diseased. Here the contrast with BAP is particularly instructive.

As I said to Douglas some time ago, regarding Emil Cioran’s aphorisms, I’ve never been impressed with any of Nietzsche’s epigones. From Foucault to Bronze Age Pervert, they all seem to have taken away all the wrong lessons and inspirations. I don’t mean it arrogantly, as if I’m the only reader who truly understood the man. I just mean, I look at Nietzsche’s writings, which I feel reasonably familiar with, and I look at what his most celebrated followers have made of them, and I’m puzzled by the apparent disconnect I see there.

When a Man Is Tired of Lifting, He Is Tired of Life

By in jests japes jokes jollies 2 Comments

Having fun with Bing’s new AI art generator. “English writer Samuel Johnson doing barbell squats with James Boswell spotting.” I had to specify “English writer” because otherwise, it seemed to think that Samuel L. Jackson was pretty much the same person.

Unbelievable. Boswell is just standing there like a useless lump, and he’s apparently too drunk to have noticed that Johnson forgot to add a fourth plate to the right side of the bar.

This one’s better. Form is good, Boswell is sober and alert. The bar looks a little flimsy, though, like it might be made of wood.

Samuel! What is going on with your form here? You’re leaning so far to your right, I’ll be surprised if you can make it back to the top. Of course, Boswell isn’t doing you any favors by holding the bar like that. Why do you even let this guy hang around you? What is he good for?

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