by liberal japonicus
The title is from Bum Phillips, a football coach who, when talking about Don Shula, said “He can take his’n and beat your’n, and then he can take your’n and beat his’n”
This is what this article had me think of. The article does have a problematic portion, when it refers to Chomsky as saying “The cool observers – meaning us smart guys – it’s our task to impose necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep these poor simpletons on course.” If you click on the link, he actually doesn’t say that in the video. It sounds like something Chomsky would say, but only to highlight the hypocrisy.
But that is a small bump and having Chomsky write in an email that “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” underlines some ugly truths.
nous comments with a great observation that Rubio’s speech was basically “a full-throated apologia for explicitly euro-centric Christian colonialism” and a “name-check all of the European colonial powers on his way to rewriting himself as a proud Spanish-American”. Nous didn’t mention that Rubio got close to a standing ovation for this claptrap.
nous goes on to point out Rubio goes on to trash the idea of climate change and gives this Fast Company article that links it to the Epstein network. I don’t think that nous is wrong, but, thinking about the first article I linked to connecting academics like Chomsky and Pinker, it seems to me that an underlying foundation to all this is the argumentative slickness that arguments often made. In the article, I am reminded of Pinker’s Edge debate with Elizabeth Spelke.
I’m also struck by the fact that I found it virtually impossible to think of a good pejorative word for being glib. All the other words I could use to describe this way of arguing, facility, adroitness, ease, don’t really get at the fundamental shittyness of that ability to jump back and forth.
I’m still trying to put these ideas into some sort of organized form, but with nous comment, I thought I would put this here.
I’d say glib is sufficiently perjorative, and captures the idea you are describing here.
My question about all of this is “what is this Western civilization you speak of?”.
Did “the West” begin with the Romans? Or the Greeks? Would they have thought of themselves as being “the West”?
Does it begin with Europe’s early and growing awareness of itself as an entity that *wasn’t* Rome, or some descendant of Rome? Like, maybe 11th and 12th C. Europe?
Are we meant to preserve the concept of nation states that emerged from the centuries of non-stop warfare over religious issues and competing wanna-be empires?
Do we get to include the Enlightenment in all of this, or do we need to, a la Rod Dreher, throw all of that away?
Is it capitalism? Christianity? If Christianity, is it just the Western traditions – Roman Catholicism and the Protestant movements that emerged from that? Do the various Eastern traditions get included? African Christianity? South American evangelicalism?
Is it just being white? Who gets to be white?
Oddly, to me, all of this blather comes in the context of the US basically telling Europe to fuck off. Which seems… inconsistent with an emphasis on “preserving our Western identity”.
Oddly, to me, all of this blather comes in the context of the US basically telling Europe to fuck off. Which seems… inconsistent with an emphasis on “preserving our Western identity”.
Yes, and regarding nous’s comment in the other thread about the standing ovation Rubio got, it just shows how pathetically (and I really mean that) grateful they all were that, unlike Vance, Rubio was taking the trouble to put it in more flattering, quasi-ingratiating diplomatic-style language. FFS.
(Glib is pretty good, but as an adjective “facile” might be as or even more pejoritive, whereas as a noun “facility” seems to me to lose that somewhat insulting implication.)
I think “breezy” captures a bit of the pejorative, since it is so often deployed as a collocation with “indifference.”
I’m not going to bother trying to suss out the origins of Western Civilization as a concept because it is absolutely clear to me that the vast majority of the people who are acting as Western Civ chauvinists don’t really mean Western Civilization when they deploy that term; it’s just a bit to on-the-nose for them to say what they really mean: “Christendom.”
They’ll keep Judaism as a poor relation, and they have to baptize Plato and Aristotle posthumously (à la Aquinas) to keep their philosophical pretenses, but neither of those are truly in the line of succession. And if they can finally undo all that Enlightenment blather about pluralism and rationalism, they’ll sure as shit go right back to calling it Christendom. Western Civ is just its nom de guerre.
But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
My own thought is that it’s all about whiteness. And specifically whiteness deriving from a northern European genetic heritage. Which, for similar reasons, they don’t want to be right out front with.
Tan won’t do, and Marco “my first AND last names end in a vowel” Rubio may need to watch his back.
russell – But which Christianity? There are a lot of them.
From the point-of-view of the christian nationalists, the answer to anyone capable of asking such a question is “clearly not yours.” It’s a very pluralistic, humanistic, Post-Enlightenment sort of question, and anyone who thinks that way is clearly an apostate and a victim of liberal delusions.