I've mentioned Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) a few times here over the years. Borradori's book is her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida speaking with her separately, but responding to parallel questions about terrorism and philosophy in NYC not long after 9/11. It's an extraordinary work, giving the reader a chance to see both philosophers thinking and responding in real time to an extraordinary circumstance. I found it very approachable reading, so it might make a good introduction to anyone wanting to get a taste of Habermas's thinking, and an idea of the philosophical tensions between him and the post-structuralists.
I found Derrida's responses in the book to be very insightful and clarifying, and a good corrective to the straw man portrayals of him as fast-talking charlatan.
I agree that it is unwise for other countries to rely on the US for their military protection. Hard to argue otherwise given how thoroughly we have shit the bed on this over the last quarter century.
I can only hope, though, that when other countries take back that role, they don't also tip into the militarism that has thrown us so badly out of balance. I think that in an ideal world, no one country would be able to defend itself entirely on its own, but would have to rely on a community of nations. (Not that I'm good at relying on others most of the time - I'm far too independent. Rather, I think that knowing that you can't afford to bully everyone around you is healthy, and a hedge against hubris.)
Pro Bono - In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Yes, Spanish is the same. "Tengo que trabajar los domingos" is literally "I have [that] to work the Sundays," but idiomatically it's " I have to work on Sundays."
I think it's fun that the translation nods towards the actual Spanish construction, but can see how that might be confusing (or annoying) to someone who does not know Spanish. Changing the "four" to "three" preserves the sense. Adding "the" to make it four words creates ambiguity and introduces confusion because the definite article signals opposite things in the two languages.
These sorts of translation issues remind me of one of the challenges I ran into during the Spanish translation exam I took as part of my Ph.D. qualification. The Spanish word in one of the sentences was "patria" - the most literal translation of that would be "fatherland" or "land of my fathers," but it could also be "home" or "homeland." The writer could have chosen "pais" - "country," or "nación" - "nation" in place of "patria," but those would have lost the romantic, familial sense of "home," and the sense of patriotism.
Because it was a book about the Spanish Civil War, and the person being written about was a member of the CNT/FAI and not a Nationalist, I decided to use "motherland" in place of "fatherland" in order to avoid the fascistic connotations of "fatherland" in American English (which might have led to the person being associated with Franco rather than the anarchists if the reader didn't know much about the person, but knew just enough about the war to lead themselves astray), and dropped a footnote into the translation to explain that choice.
GftNC - I don't think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher's accomplishments by saying that she was being too "soft," where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama's boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.
And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It's why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.
But in Butcher's case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.
I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of "negging" she was illustrating in that book... "Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man."
Not that Wang and Ididtarod champion Susan Butcher have similar ethoi - far from it - but rather that both get met with the same sort of dismissive criticism because they excel in ways that defy the expectations of how a woman of extraordinary skill and accomplishment should act within a conservative, patriarchal field of human endeavor.
As our part of the planet turns toward the sun this year, I remember the shy Laureli who didn’t get Susan Butcher’s autograph. Who heard people speak poorly of a woman who knew what she was doing and was doing it well. This spring, I think that if Susan Butcher could change the way thousands of dogs are treated leading up to and during a 1,000-mile race across Alaska, maybe we can spur change through our work and actions, too. Through care and our own feminine instincts, even if some people call us witches.
By waiting until the very last moment to withdraw, Mr. Daines essentially cleared the field for his chosen successor by denying others the chance to file to be on the ballot.
Don't know how well that will fly. Seems that all of his successor's opponents are going to run against the idea of a hand-picked successor who has not had to face any opposition. I know a few people who got really upset when Harris got the nod without having gone through a primary, and in that case it wasn't even her fault or Biden's intention to put her in that position.
Hopefully the Democratic candidate is someone who can exploit this opportunity.
There were about 100,000 more total votes in the D US Senate primary than there were in the R US Senate primary. Texas is still very red, but even with some election ratfucking going on, the Dems managed to turn out in competitive numbers.
Crockett has come out already for Talarico, trying to use her own momentum to boost him for the general election. Talarico still needs to go to the districts where Crockett won big and make sure to do some listening and show that he'll fight for them as well, but I'm sure he will be on that soon. The big difference between those two is more one of tone and emphasis than of any substantive policy difference.
Talarico did especially well in latinx border districts, which could be a promising sign for how latinx Trump voters might break now that it's clear that the R economic promises were bunk and their communities are a target.
Harris, who had endorsed Crockett, is already starting to reach out to her supporters to rally their support for Talarico.
...I hope Cornyn and Paxton go after each other like bantam roosters, and that both leave indelible marks on each other in the process.
She doesn't need him. He needs her. He's a gossip and a hanger on, much like Jann Wenner.
I propose the portmanteau "gatecreeper" for this particular combination of self-importance and sexism. I do think he's being sexist in his assumptions about Wang's popularity and need for his legitimation.
Must hurt to both be this wrong and get sacked over it.
I'd also like to point out that part of the problem with these discussions of good and bad masculinity is the constant sliding back and forth that we do between "masculinity" and "men." We can argue over how much of a market share different versions of masculinity have amongst men, but the heart of the problem is not one of market share, but rather of which version(s) of masculinity are treated as if they are representative of the gender as a whole. Toxic masculinity is increasing its market share and has tremendous traction and influence among younger men who are anxious about their gender status.
And I think it's important to let young men know that when we criticize a model of masculinity as toxic, we are not saying that men as a gender are all toxic, just that particular ways of being a man in the world are toxic to both the world around them and to the men who are practicing that way of being. Everyone involved is damaged and depleted by it.
"Not all men" doesn't seem to me to be a good tactic for combating the flood of online influencers who are poisoning society with their zero-sum, competitive, dominance-focused, deeply insecure and damaging version of masculinity. We need a compelling alternative that is not based in zero-sum, winner-take-all dominance.
My first response to the question of what to call a non-toxic masculinity was "feminist" And it's true. It is also, however, a sure way to lose the very men to whom you are trying to give an alternative way of being.
I blame the patriarchy.
I would also say "non-toxic masculinity," but an evangelical author has already built a brand around that one. Strike two.
I'm leaning towards "regenerative masculinity" - analogous with regenerative agriculture: a masculinity that builds up the other beings in its environment rather than depleting the others around it.
Something like that...
Masculinity needs to be sustainable. Toxic masculinity isn't. It harms every being involved and leaves all of them depleted.
But if Hegseth is upset, that strongly suggests that Anthropic is on the side of the angels, at least on this one.
Leaving aside that they built and trained their LLM using texts that they knew were taken without permission...
They owe my wife and a lot of other authors a whole lot of money for that one and are busy trying to wriggle out of that, or to get a big enough deal that paying for the settlement won't put them under.
I don't think anyone with an LLM is on the side of the angels. They were all built on theft and built to steal more jobs. And now they are trying to bury us in carbon on top of that by consuming as much energy as a small city.
But hey, at least Anthropic has found a few scruples...
Come AI winter I'm gonna open a bottle of the good stuff and drink to their demise. It will be an economic blow like the pandemic, but an environmental boon like the pandemic as well. I won't celebrate the suffering it causes, but I will celebrate the suffering that their fall will prevent.
The version of Grok I’m using is 4.20 (Beta). It’s made up of four agents, one of whom fact-checks the results. The claim is that it reduces hallucinations by about two-thirds. So, progress is being made.
And what would you say if you were teaching a research class and one of your students told you that they had two friends helping them find sources and a fourth who was checking to make sure that none of the other three were making up quotes, and that the one in charge of checking was now able to find two out of every three references that one of the others had made up or misread?
I'd rather have a student who actually read his sources, understood them, synthesized them in productive ways, and could be relied upon to manage his attribution transparently, accurately, and ethically.
None of the four agents can do those things, and the research is built on the hope that at some point of scale that sort of thing will just emerge, spontaneously, out of scale and a momentary spark of genius. They think their agents are all little synthetic Hellen Kellers just waiting for their water pump moment.
But their agents are not beings. What is there that they hope will miraculously self-actualize?
Sorry, CharlesWT, but LLMs are incapable of doing research or of taking a critical perspective on the research that it is parsing, sampling, and remixing. At best it can assemble a preliminary reading list and gather a sampling of annotations for that list. It's potentially a powerful research tool in the hands of an expert, but can't be relied upon to summarize even a single text without hallucinating material and misrepresenting information.
It does, however, assemble very convincing imitations of scholarly research, for those who want to scratch an authority itch without having to go through any of the actual work of building expertise.
Grok says - Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls.
That's a lot of qualifiers for that research (boys in 1) traditional 2) US 3) public 4) primary schools). How does that compare to boys in other countries? How much of this is influenced by the US public schools being the school of last resort for students with behavioral issues? Are their issues related to family socioeconomic status or socialization patterns rooted in those socioeconomic groups? And not specified - when were those studies done? Do we have data over a span of years, decades, or were all these studies done over a relatively short span of years or months? Were they pre- or post-pandemic? Do we have data that compares those periods? Are all of these studies from the standardized testing era? Are they from schools that still provide recess and physical education, or from those who have done away with those two things in order to maximize test prep time?
Not questions that I expect anyone to answer, just the sort of questions I think need to be looked into in order not to bake in some leading assumptions.
Also, I automatically bracket anything that comes from Grok, especially where it concerns gender studies. I think it prudent always to wonder if Musk has tried to tweak the algorithms and training to pander to his own biases on gender issues. We know he has a whole host of those issues.
That aside, I would never call any synopsis that any of these LLMs put out a survey of the research. At best it is what I'd call a "preliminary pre-search." At a minimum, I'd have to go through every one of the sources that Grok "cites" to look at its parameters and methodology, and see if those studies said anything about the questions that I ask above, or express any uncertainty about their own conclusions, etc..
Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
----
That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
cleek - I agree with what you are saying. It's a problem. The one thing I want to make sure doesn't get lost in the great evening out of "none ouf us are main characters" is that the beltway media people, donors, and political analysts are the gatekeepers between those politicians and the precariat, and they are going to pass on the voices of the resistance liberals and explain away the voices of the precariat as having no beliefs because the gatekeepers work for the billionaires.
I'd love for the resistance liberals and the bonesmashers to start talking to, and listening to, each other. The reports I am getting from places like Minnesota are that they are - mostly as they end up in the same place at the same time engaged in active resistance.
I'm not sure that Frum and Miller are aware, though, because their own participation is much more mediated.
They sure aren't listening to the precariat, or they'd know better than to decide that those people have no beliefs.
Never let Frum and Miller be your translators for what the cool leftist kids are saying.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any.
It's not that The Activist Kids (which, again, seems to include Millennials who are in their 40s) have no beliefs and think that Resistance Liberals are cringe. What they really feel is that they are not being seen or listened to by the politicians, the donors, and the media. They have plenty of beliefs, they just don't see that a return to the politics of the Clinton, or Obama, or Reagan years (since this is Frum trying to square the kid's circle) is going to fix any of the specifics of their lives that keep them trapped in the precariat.
The "bonesmashers" are not nihilists or deluded Marxist idealists; what the "bonesmashers" are actually feeling and thinking is something more like what Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was talking about when he told The Toronto Daily Star:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.
The heart of this clash of worldviews is not so much about whether or not the status quo should be obliterated, but about whether or not the institutions who are trying to guide the resistance are willing to give up their own privilege and comfort in order to build a more just future for those who have been harmed by the institutions that the resistance liberals are trying to preserve.
The resistance liberals 401(k)'s are built on the bones that keep the bonesmashers paying off predatory student loans, and that keep a runaway carbon cycle heading for collapse within the bonebreakers' lifetimes.
The sort of institutional reform they need is going to take more than just making ICE go through more training. Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the precariat.
Thanks, wj, that is what I thought you meant to argue. Glad I was following you correctly.
When I (and I assume GftNC, though she can confirm this herself or qualify it if assume incorrectly) talk about patriarchy, I'm not assuming that it only governs relationships between men and women; I'm talking about a system in which masculine men are afforded more status and power than less masculine men, women, and children. An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
Keeping this in mind will help you to understand where I am coming from with my comments.
wj - For a test case, consider prisons. Rape among inmates is pretty much never about sex. It about establishing and demonstrating who is more powerful.
Getting rid of patriarchy, while desirable in itself, won’t address the problem of rape. At most, it will shift the mix of who gets raped.
I'm not sure that I'm following your line of thinking as you intend it. Are you trying to use prisons as an example of a non-patriarchal culture or is the connection you are working from here something else? I'm trying to understand where you draw the line between patriarchy and "men seeking status and dominance."
Yep, patriarchy. And also, yep, it's not about sex, but rather about status and power and hierarchy within the patriarchal structure.
This dynamic is also of a piece with our decline into authoritarianism, and it's a force in the conservative Christian subcultures. Patriarchy puts men under psychological pressure to seek status through extreme means
This study is about authoritarianism, but I think there is enough overlap with what we have been discussing (especially given the context of the Orange Julius administration) to put it in the discussion:
The two researchers document a recurring pattern: when their careers stagnate, people working in the regime apparatus choose one of two strategies. Either ‘detouring’ – joining units tasked with repression to demonstrate their value to the sitting ruler – or ‘forcing’ – participating in coups to secure a better future under a new leader.
‘It is not only the leader's inner circle that determines the character and fate of a regime. The career anxiety of those on the middle and lower layers can be enough to trigger both violence and regime collapse,’ explains Adam Scharpf.
I'd not be surprised to find that this sort of behavior has some genetic elements, but my experience suggests that these elements are not deterministic and inescapable. Patriarchy is just a particularly nasty environment in terms of how it interacts with those traits to create systems of violence, insecurity, and inequality.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Don’t know the words, but the tune sounds the same”
I've mentioned Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) a few times here over the years. Borradori's book is her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida speaking with her separately, but responding to parallel questions about terrorism and philosophy in NYC not long after 9/11. It's an extraordinary work, giving the reader a chance to see both philosophers thinking and responding in real time to an extraordinary circumstance. I found it very approachable reading, so it might make a good introduction to anyone wanting to get a taste of Habermas's thinking, and an idea of the philosophical tensions between him and the post-structuralists.
I found Derrida's responses in the book to be very insightful and clarifying, and a good corrective to the straw man portrayals of him as fast-talking charlatan.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
Kash Patel so wants to be shiny and chrome. Witness him.
"
Hegseth is starting to give me an Immortan Joe vibe, which is fitting since we are on our way to Mad Max style fighting over petrol any day now.
On “The penny drops”
I agree that it is unwise for other countries to rely on the US for their military protection. Hard to argue otherwise given how thoroughly we have shit the bed on this over the last quarter century.
I can only hope, though, that when other countries take back that role, they don't also tip into the militarism that has thrown us so badly out of balance. I think that in an ideal world, no one country would be able to defend itself entirely on its own, but would have to rely on a community of nations. (Not that I'm good at relying on others most of the time - I'm far too independent. Rather, I think that knowing that you can't afford to bully everyone around you is healthy, and a hedge against hubris.)
Probably makes me a bad American.
On “The ides of Texas”
WJ - GOP: perhaps on its way to becoming just another example of “everything Trump touches dies.”
...but it's been working swimmingly so far for Putin - guess that's because Vlad is the dom and Donald is the sub in that relationship.
On “A little language practice”
Pro Bono - In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Yes, Spanish is the same. "Tengo que trabajar los domingos" is literally "I have [that] to work the Sundays," but idiomatically it's " I have to work on Sundays."
I think it's fun that the translation nods towards the actual Spanish construction, but can see how that might be confusing (or annoying) to someone who does not know Spanish. Changing the "four" to "three" preserves the sense. Adding "the" to make it four words creates ambiguity and introduces confusion because the definite article signals opposite things in the two languages.
These sorts of translation issues remind me of one of the challenges I ran into during the Spanish translation exam I took as part of my Ph.D. qualification. The Spanish word in one of the sentences was "patria" - the most literal translation of that would be "fatherland" or "land of my fathers," but it could also be "home" or "homeland." The writer could have chosen "pais" - "country," or "nación" - "nation" in place of "patria," but those would have lost the romantic, familial sense of "home," and the sense of patriotism.
Because it was a book about the Spanish Civil War, and the person being written about was a member of the CNT/FAI and not a Nationalist, I decided to use "motherland" in place of "fatherland" in order to avoid the fascistic connotations of "fatherland" in American English (which might have led to the person being associated with Franco rather than the anarchists if the reader didn't know much about the person, but knew just enough about the war to lead themselves astray), and dropped a footnote into the translation to explain that choice.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
GftNC - I don't think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher's accomplishments by saying that she was being too "soft," where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama's boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.
And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It's why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.
But in Butcher's case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.
I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of "negging" she was illustrating in that book... "Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man."
"
This piece from High Country News nails a lot of the gender dynamics floating beneath the surface in the Lebrecht/Wang exchanges:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-3/a-champion-iditarod-musher-proved-that-caring-and-trust-win-races/
Not that Wang and Ididtarod champion Susan Butcher have similar ethoi - far from it - but rather that both get met with the same sort of dismissive criticism because they excel in ways that defy the expectations of how a woman of extraordinary skill and accomplishment should act within a conservative, patriarchal field of human endeavor.
On “The Last Noem Standing”
Guess she was the puppy, cos she sure ain't the GOAT.
On “The ides of Texas”
According to the NYT:
Don't know how well that will fly. Seems that all of his successor's opponents are going to run against the idea of a hand-picked successor who has not had to face any opposition. I know a few people who got really upset when Harris got the nod without having gone through a primary, and in that case it wasn't even her fault or Biden's intention to put her in that position.
Hopefully the Democratic candidate is someone who can exploit this opportunity.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Other hopeful signs (from TX):
There were about 100,000 more total votes in the D US Senate primary than there were in the R US Senate primary. Texas is still very red, but even with some election ratfucking going on, the Dems managed to turn out in competitive numbers.
Crockett has come out already for Talarico, trying to use her own momentum to boost him for the general election. Talarico still needs to go to the districts where Crockett won big and make sure to do some listening and show that he'll fight for them as well, but I'm sure he will be on that soon. The big difference between those two is more one of tone and emphasis than of any substantive policy difference.
Talarico did especially well in latinx border districts, which could be a promising sign for how latinx Trump voters might break now that it's clear that the R economic promises were bunk and their communities are a target.
Harris, who had endorsed Crockett, is already starting to reach out to her supporters to rally their support for Talarico.
...I hope Cornyn and Paxton go after each other like bantam roosters, and that both leave indelible marks on each other in the process.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
She doesn't need him. He needs her. He's a gossip and a hanger on, much like Jann Wenner.
I propose the portmanteau "gatecreeper" for this particular combination of self-importance and sexism. I do think he's being sexist in his assumptions about Wang's popularity and need for his legitimation.
Must hurt to both be this wrong and get sacked over it.
What a self-important little man.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
I'd also like to point out that part of the problem with these discussions of good and bad masculinity is the constant sliding back and forth that we do between "masculinity" and "men." We can argue over how much of a market share different versions of masculinity have amongst men, but the heart of the problem is not one of market share, but rather of which version(s) of masculinity are treated as if they are representative of the gender as a whole. Toxic masculinity is increasing its market share and has tremendous traction and influence among younger men who are anxious about their gender status.
And I think it's important to let young men know that when we criticize a model of masculinity as toxic, we are not saying that men as a gender are all toxic, just that particular ways of being a man in the world are toxic to both the world around them and to the men who are practicing that way of being. Everyone involved is damaged and depleted by it.
"Not all men" doesn't seem to me to be a good tactic for combating the flood of online influencers who are poisoning society with their zero-sum, competitive, dominance-focused, deeply insecure and damaging version of masculinity. We need a compelling alternative that is not based in zero-sum, winner-take-all dominance.
"
My first response to the question of what to call a non-toxic masculinity was "feminist" And it's true. It is also, however, a sure way to lose the very men to whom you are trying to give an alternative way of being.
I blame the patriarchy.
I would also say "non-toxic masculinity," but an evangelical author has already built a brand around that one. Strike two.
I'm leaning towards "regenerative masculinity" - analogous with regenerative agriculture: a masculinity that builds up the other beings in its environment rather than depleting the others around it.
Something like that...
Masculinity needs to be sustainable. Toxic masculinity isn't. It harms every being involved and leaves all of them depleted.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
But if Hegseth is upset, that strongly suggests that Anthropic is on the side of the angels, at least on this one.
Leaving aside that they built and trained their LLM using texts that they knew were taken without permission...
They owe my wife and a lot of other authors a whole lot of money for that one and are busy trying to wriggle out of that, or to get a big enough deal that paying for the settlement won't put them under.
I don't think anyone with an LLM is on the side of the angels. They were all built on theft and built to steal more jobs. And now they are trying to bury us in carbon on top of that by consuming as much energy as a small city.
But hey, at least Anthropic has found a few scruples...
Come AI winter I'm gonna open a bottle of the good stuff and drink to their demise. It will be an economic blow like the pandemic, but an environmental boon like the pandemic as well. I won't celebrate the suffering it causes, but I will celebrate the suffering that their fall will prevent.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
The version of Grok I’m using is 4.20 (Beta). It’s made up of four agents, one of whom fact-checks the results. The claim is that it reduces hallucinations by about two-thirds. So, progress is being made.
And what would you say if you were teaching a research class and one of your students told you that they had two friends helping them find sources and a fourth who was checking to make sure that none of the other three were making up quotes, and that the one in charge of checking was now able to find two out of every three references that one of the others had made up or misread?
I'd rather have a student who actually read his sources, understood them, synthesized them in productive ways, and could be relied upon to manage his attribution transparently, accurately, and ethically.
None of the four agents can do those things, and the research is built on the hope that at some point of scale that sort of thing will just emerge, spontaneously, out of scale and a momentary spark of genius. They think their agents are all little synthetic Hellen Kellers just waiting for their water pump moment.
But their agents are not beings. What is there that they hope will miraculously self-actualize?
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Sorry, CharlesWT, but LLMs are incapable of doing research or of taking a critical perspective on the research that it is parsing, sampling, and remixing. At best it can assemble a preliminary reading list and gather a sampling of annotations for that list. It's potentially a powerful research tool in the hands of an expert, but can't be relied upon to summarize even a single text without hallucinating material and misrepresenting information.
It does, however, assemble very convincing imitations of scholarly research, for those who want to scratch an authority itch without having to go through any of the actual work of building expertise.
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Grok says - Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls.
That's a lot of qualifiers for that research (boys in 1) traditional 2) US 3) public 4) primary schools). How does that compare to boys in other countries? How much of this is influenced by the US public schools being the school of last resort for students with behavioral issues? Are their issues related to family socioeconomic status or socialization patterns rooted in those socioeconomic groups? And not specified - when were those studies done? Do we have data over a span of years, decades, or were all these studies done over a relatively short span of years or months? Were they pre- or post-pandemic? Do we have data that compares those periods? Are all of these studies from the standardized testing era? Are they from schools that still provide recess and physical education, or from those who have done away with those two things in order to maximize test prep time?
Not questions that I expect anyone to answer, just the sort of questions I think need to be looked into in order not to bake in some leading assumptions.
Also, I automatically bracket anything that comes from Grok, especially where it concerns gender studies. I think it prudent always to wonder if Musk has tried to tweak the algorithms and training to pander to his own biases on gender issues. We know he has a whole host of those issues.
That aside, I would never call any synopsis that any of these LLMs put out a survey of the research. At best it is what I'd call a "preliminary pre-search." At a minimum, I'd have to go through every one of the sources that Grok "cites" to look at its parameters and methodology, and see if those studies said anything about the questions that I ask above, or express any uncertainty about their own conclusions, etc..
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Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
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That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
cleek - I agree with what you are saying. It's a problem. The one thing I want to make sure doesn't get lost in the great evening out of "none ouf us are main characters" is that the beltway media people, donors, and political analysts are the gatekeepers between those politicians and the precariat, and they are going to pass on the voices of the resistance liberals and explain away the voices of the precariat as having no beliefs because the gatekeepers work for the billionaires.
I'd love for the resistance liberals and the bonesmashers to start talking to, and listening to, each other. The reports I am getting from places like Minnesota are that they are - mostly as they end up in the same place at the same time engaged in active resistance.
I'm not sure that Frum and Miller are aware, though, because their own participation is much more mediated.
They sure aren't listening to the precariat, or they'd know better than to decide that those people have no beliefs.
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Never let Frum and Miller be your translators for what the cool leftist kids are saying.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any.
It's not that The Activist Kids (which, again, seems to include Millennials who are in their 40s) have no beliefs and think that Resistance Liberals are cringe. What they really feel is that they are not being seen or listened to by the politicians, the donors, and the media. They have plenty of beliefs, they just don't see that a return to the politics of the Clinton, or Obama, or Reagan years (since this is Frum trying to square the kid's circle) is going to fix any of the specifics of their lives that keep them trapped in the precariat.
The "bonesmashers" are not nihilists or deluded Marxist idealists; what the "bonesmashers" are actually feeling and thinking is something more like what Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was talking about when he told The Toronto Daily Star:
The heart of this clash of worldviews is not so much about whether or not the status quo should be obliterated, but about whether or not the institutions who are trying to guide the resistance are willing to give up their own privilege and comfort in order to build a more just future for those who have been harmed by the institutions that the resistance liberals are trying to preserve.
The resistance liberals 401(k)'s are built on the bones that keep the bonesmashers paying off predatory student loans, and that keep a runaway carbon cycle heading for collapse within the bonebreakers' lifetimes.
The sort of institutional reform they need is going to take more than just making ICE go through more training. Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the precariat.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Thanks, wj, that is what I thought you meant to argue. Glad I was following you correctly.
When I (and I assume GftNC, though she can confirm this herself or qualify it if assume incorrectly) talk about patriarchy, I'm not assuming that it only governs relationships between men and women; I'm talking about a system in which masculine men are afforded more status and power than less masculine men, women, and children. An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
Keeping this in mind will help you to understand where I am coming from with my comments.
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wj - For a test case, consider prisons. Rape among inmates is pretty much never about sex. It about establishing and demonstrating who is more powerful.
Getting rid of patriarchy, while desirable in itself, won’t address the problem of rape. At most, it will shift the mix of who gets raped.
I'm not sure that I'm following your line of thinking as you intend it. Are you trying to use prisons as an example of a non-patriarchal culture or is the connection you are working from here something else? I'm trying to understand where you draw the line between patriarchy and "men seeking status and dominance."
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Ah yes, those halcyon days of my youth, when boys were allowed to run wild in the classroom, fidget, yell, and ignore the teacher.
But remember to also leave room for "Kids these days have no discipline and teachers need to crack down on these spoiled brats."
...and also "How dare these teachers present any material to my child that is not pre-authorized by me, the parent."
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Yep, patriarchy. And also, yep, it's not about sex, but rather about status and power and hierarchy within the patriarchal structure.
This dynamic is also of a piece with our decline into authoritarianism, and it's a force in the conservative Christian subcultures. Patriarchy puts men under psychological pressure to seek status through extreme means
This study is about authoritarianism, but I think there is enough overlap with what we have been discussing (especially given the context of the Orange Julius administration) to put it in the discussion:
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-brutal
I'd not be surprised to find that this sort of behavior has some genetic elements, but my experience suggests that these elements are not deterministic and inescapable. Patriarchy is just a particularly nasty environment in terms of how it interacts with those traits to create systems of violence, insecurity, and inequality.
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