Obiter Scripta, no. 126

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Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words, the less litigation.

— Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

I did it, fellows. I recently went an entire work day without speaking to anyone. Now, like Apocryphal Alexander, I weep, for what is left for me to conquer? In order to extend my silence even longer, I’d probably have to officially join some kind of monastical order. No, I’m afraid I’ve reached the limits of my potential.

I haven’t intended to be silent here, by the way. It’s just the usual thing where the inanity and fatuity of the world reduces the onlooker to mute incomprehension. These things always pass, though.

I’m Holding Out For a Hero. He’s Gotta Be Strong

By in battling personal entropy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Where have all the good men goneAnd where are all the gods?Where’s the streetwise HerculesTo fight the rising odds?

My first thought when I saw this story, minus the part about it being done in protest, was, “Oh, no, not him, too!” I’ve enjoyed reading Silverberg’s site for a while now and was briefly dismayed to think that he would jump on this trend. Now, I can say bravo. We’ve seen in just the last couple of weeks that women’s attempts to boycott competitions that allow men to participate will be met with draconian punishment, so maybe it’s going to take women’s sports being completely overrun by men to finally bring an end to this lunacy. See you later, fellows, I’m going to go win some women’s powerlifting competitions and join the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

Left Wing, Right Wing, Broken Wing

By in books, political philosophy, tribalism No Comments

Susan Neiman:

Now, the New York Times is neither unique nor particularly leftist, but it does set standards for progressive discourse in more than one country. What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. The Right may be more dangerous, but today’s Left has deprived itself of ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the Right.

This Rightwards lurch is international and organised. The solidarity between them suggests that nationalist beliefs are only marginally based on the idea that Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your tribe, and you need have no deep commitments to anyone else.

Amusingly enough, I just got done reading a short, incisive book about this exact conceit, that your political opinions are the result of mindless tribalism, while mine are the fruits of dispassionate reasoning. As the authors state early on:

As an alternative to this essentialist theory of ideology, we propose the social theory of ideology. While the essentialist theory says that distinct political positions correlate because they are bound by a unifying essence, the social theory says that issues correlate because they are bound by a unifying tribe. According to the essentialist theory, people start with an essential principle, use that principle to think themselves to hundreds of distinct political positions, and then join the tribe that just happens to agree with them on all of those positions. The social theory says this is backward: people first anchor into an ideological tribe (because of family, peers, or a single issue), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then invent a story that ties all of those positions together. Ideologies, in other words, are reverse engineered to fit tribal actions and attachments. They are “post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to.”

Practically speaking, “conservative” and “progressive” don’t mean anything more than “what Republicans and Democrats are currently doing.” Different eras are defined by different core issues around which the parties sort themselves, and like everything else, parties evolve with no regard for consistency. The authors compile numerous amusing examples of radically opposed policies and beliefs being forced to lie down together on the Procrustean beds of “left-wing” or “right-wing.” Neither conservative nor liberal/progressive mean the same thing they meant a century ago, and they surely won’t mean the same thing in another century. The temptation to find abiding essences behind these political labels is like a mechanical rabbit, and without fail, the intellectual greyhounds take off in pursuit of it. Neiman is a philosopher, so naturally she prefers her theories of what the left should be to the reality of what it means today. And speaking of intellectuals:

Self-deception also explains why the educated are more ideological. It’s counterintuitive that more intelligent people would be more likely to accept a simplistic model in politics when they don’t in other realms, but once we realize that intellectuals are more skilled in using “system two” thinking to rationalize “system one” impulses, it makes sense that they would be more likely to construct stories that make their partisanship sound principled. Psychologist Tali Sharot notes that “the greater your cognitive capacity, the greater your ability to rationalize and interpret information at will, and to creatively twist data to fit your opinions.”

Same As It Ever Was

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, technology, unintended consequences No Comments

Oliver Bateman:

As a lifelong strength athlete, I have toiled in filthy gyms and basements to maintain my own physical condition. I would like to say that remaining “natural” or practising intense physical discipline offers some intrinsic reward. Unfortunately, it does not; it is a hard-to-follow path made more tortuous in my case by my stubborn unwillingness to take any effective shortcuts (even though the stem cell injections I received worked like a charm). But a resistance to emptying my wallet, and an aversion to some of the side effects from these drugs — cancerous tumours in the case of Ozempic — has hindered my route to body optimisation.

I think Bateman is far too pessimistic about our supposed future of rich Eloi taking advantage of gene splicing and anti-aging technologies to live utopian lives while we Morlocks live, suffer, and die like any other farm animal. Today’s rich people live lives of luxury that would have been unimaginable to even medieval royalty. Are they any happier, more well-adjusted, less prone to stupid decision-making? Of course not. Why is it going to be any different next time? Isn’t this just the photo negative of naive optimism, the idea that more money and technology will “solve” the human condition? I guess you could say I have faith in unintended consequences. Whatever we expect to happen once genetic editing becomes the norm, I suspect that the biggest impact will come from variables we haven’t yet considered. To me, the intrinsic reward of refusing to take shortcuts is the knowledge that those who take them rarely end up precisely at their intended destination.

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.”

Insult to Injury

By in battling personal entropy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Caroline Downey:

Andres isn’t humbled by his natural advantage, as one might expect. Instead he has gloated about competing in the women’s category and insulted female powerlifters for poor performance in certain upper-body exercises.

“Why is women’s bench so bad? I mean, not compared to me, we all know that I’m a tranny freak so that doesn’t count. And no, we’re not talking about Mackenzie Lee, she’s got little T-Rex arms and she’s like 400 pounds of chest muscle apparently,” Andres said in a November Instagram video.

“I mean, standard bench in powerlifting competition for women, I literally don’t know why it’s so bad,” Andres crowed in the video. “My son, he weighs 45 pounds. His max bench is like 33. I’m legit seeing some women in competition who are doing something like 50 pounds, and I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand why so many women are skipping bench and focusing on everything else.”

Wow. The absolute balls on this bitch!

A Penny For Your Silence

By in socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Ed West:

They benefited from the mystery of celebrity, living in that golden age when we didn’t know what famous people thought about the world. Remember that time, before social media, when we weren’t aware that most of the musicians from our youth were complete cranks, who wouldn’t put a vaccine inside them because of some YouTube video they’d seen, despite spending most of the 80s and 90s shoving coke up their nose and God knows what.

What a lost Eden that was. Now, sadly, we have Twitter, which has given us so many insights into the workings of famous peoples’ minds.

I don’t go in much for nostalgia, but this is one case where I wholeheartedly agree that things were better in the past, even the relatively recent past, when reticence was much more common. Sure, even in the 90s, Oprah and her talk-show epigones were creating the atmosphere for today’s climate of exhibitionist oversharing — as I said, there never has been a golden age. But it was also a time when a popular musician like Mark Sandman could manage to opt out:

After earning a BA in political science from UMass Boston, he spent a period of time traveling — at one point working on a giant fishing boat out in the state of Washington. Details like that about his personal life and his past were hard to come by. There were things he just wouldn’t talk about on the record. And in the age of the confessional talk-show interview, I grew to respect that. “I like to keep the personal personal,” is how he once put it. “I try to be a pretty private person.” He wasn’t trying to hide anything, except perhaps his age, because he was older than your average rock-and-roll star. In fact, the only time I ever pissed him off was backstage at the Conan O’Brien show in 1995, when after listening to him tell me about a Rolling Stone reporter’s desperate efforts to find out his age I joked that I was going to dig up his Newton North high-school yearbook.

Only twenty-eight years ago, it was still possible to keep something like that a secret from prying journalists! And yet, it seems like a lost world.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Sensitivity Readers

By in books, fresh hell, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jeff Zymeri:

Children’s horror author R.L. Stine has accused his publisher of editing references to weight, mental health, and ethnicity in over a dozen of his books without his permission.

Certain titles from the Goosebumps anthology, second only to the Harry Potter books in terms of popularity, have been re-released as sanitized e-books by Scholastic, a new report from The Times has revealed. The move comes after huge controversy enveloped the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s books for hundreds of similar changes, leading the publisher to agree to continue printing the original versions alongside the new bowdlerized editions.

On the one hand, it’s no surprise to see the kind of person behind these initiatives. I mean, they can’t all get make-work jobs in academia or human resources departments, and we’ve got a huge surplus of the severely educated with no practical skills, so I suppose this is the best we can do to keep them off the streets. On the other hand, couldn’t they have gone into a more honorable profession, like prostitution or drug-dealing? At least those provide a useful service. What kind of lowlife dreams of growing up to work at Winston Smith’s job?

It Depends on What the Meaning of “Is” Is

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

Patrick Reilly:

USA Powerlifting must allow trans athletes to compete in the women’s division after transgender lifter JayCee Cooper won her discrimination case against the organization.

According to the 46-page ruling, “The harm is in making a person pretend to be something different, the implicit message being that who they are is less than. That is the very essence of separation and segregation, and it is what the MHRA prohibits.”

“The harm is in making a person pretend to be something different.” That is some incredibly concentrated irony.

 

You Keep Samin’ When You Oughta Be a-Changin’

By in foolosophy, identity, tribalism 3 Comments

I had readers back in the early days of the Awokening who reacted most strongly to my own heterodox opinions about it, rather than the affronts to logic, morality and intellectual integrity to which I was reacting in the first place. One of them would attempt to joke away his discomfort by pretending to be horrified: “You sound like a conservative!” My response was always the same: well, if your progressive friends weren’t such abject, sniveling cowards who prefer tribal identity to honesty, it wouldn’t fall to “conservatives” to state the obvious. Ironically, issues like transgenderism really don’t need to have a political dimension. People of varying political opinions should be able to come together and agree that one does not change reality by changing the words used to describe it. Perhaps we could call it the “reality-based community.”

I don’t have an abundance of intelligence, courage, or integrity, of course. The biggest advantage I have is being a hermit, and thus largely insensitive to peer pressure. No peers, no pressure! As Robinson Jeffers wrote, “the cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.” Circumstances have made me “conservative,” but I could easily imagine a day when, without common enemies, I could find myself at cross-purposes with the more doctrinaire members of the right. Your integrity should matter more to you than your brand label.

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