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.
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.
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.
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.
Dropping by in-between belts of rain here that have been coming down so hard (accompanied by a high wind warning) that I have seen waves of water blowing down my street like snow drifting on a highway during a blizzard.
Two things, loosely linked in my overly-lateral mind...:
That Rubio speech in Munich was really alarming to me.
It's a full-throated apologia for explicitly euro-centric Christian colonialism. It's delusional in its sense of history. And Rubio is working so hard to name-check all of the European colonial powers on his way to rewriting himself as a proud Spanish-American:
Our [US] story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas – and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.
Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.
Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse – and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. (Laughter.)
Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos – the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.
The part of that which jumped out at me was his reference to the "Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong." I've read enough American lit to be sensitive to invocations of the Scots-Irish as a clan to hear the rhetoric that built the resurgence of the KKK at the turn of the 20th C.. Nothing here is out of place with that Klan rhetoric except for Rubio's ethnic heritage.
The second thread that runs through Rubio's speech is the Climate Rejectionism. Rubio is so very fucking cocksure that the "climate cult" is using fear to suffocate capitalism and weaken nations.
I'm making a sideways leap here that is outside of the explicit context of Rubio's speech, but so very in line with the ethno-religious calvinism of his mytho-historical conception of civilization belonging to the West...
Fast Company has highlighted the ecofascistic streak running through the Epstein files:
“Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” Epstein writes. “the earths forest fire. potentially a good thing for the species.”
[screenshot of the email]
Linking the conversation back to the earlier topic of how brains function, Epstein adds: “too many people . . . [it] is the fundamental fact that everyone dies at some time. make it [impossible] to ask so why not earlier. if the brain discards unused neurons, why [should] society keep their equivalent.”
What Fast Company does not explicitly note in their analysis is how this conversation between Epstein and Joscha Bach is that it starts with Epstein musing over the genetic inferiority of blacks and the need to improve human genetics.
That whole line of thinking is right at home with the view of history that undergirds Rubio's speech, and it highlights the importance to Rubio of his being able to link his family back to Spain, and not to the indigenous population of the New World.
The whole philosophical underpinnings of these western chauvinist christian nationalists are morally repulsive.
wonkie - High Country News has a series they call "Deep Time in the West" that sounds like it's the sort of thing you would love. Here's a shorter sample of the sort of things in the series:
Looks like Brett Adcock is taking advantage of the low-key finance panic around a potential AI winter to introduce a new shiny with the promise of unrealized exponential growth. I'm betting he's hoping to secure some venture capital now before one of the big AI firms goes public and sucks up all the potential investment ahead of the inevitable sobering up period that will follow.
Humanoid robots with AI brains - it's the next big thing. It's bigger than AI. It's bigger than self-driving cars. It's bigger than Segways. It's bigger than virtual reality.
[It hasn't yet run out of low hanging fruit to discover its own intractable problems.]
Robots in dorms? We're already forcing students to take on unsustainable levels of debts to pay for their university education and they are barely able to keep their old smartphone and cheap laptop functioning. Now they are going to bring a robobutler to campus with them? Maybe they can use it to cook them instant ramen and write their papers while they work their two part-time jobs to pay for it and all their other expenses.
At least the part time jobs that haven't already been taken by robots. (We've already got little self-guided robots delivering food for students in the dorms here, so don't even think of starting a bike delivery service as a side hustle.)
Seriously, though, how does any of this entrepreneurial hype make any sense?
I'm already sick of having to replace my phone every five years and they want me to invest in a robobutler?
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
wj - I’d go even further. Just strip it down to “Ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos!” Once they’ve gotten themselves that far, they can take the next step themselves.
I'd say it depends on the context. In one-on-one conversation that second flex could be seen as a bit extra (to borrow my students' turn of phrase). In a group context, however, or in a public online discussion where you have a few people expressing their disgust at these revelations, I think it's helpful to confront the marginal supporter with a choice where their own ethos is imperiled. That's how they were walked into their support in the first place, and you have to pull them back the same way.
I don't doubt it will take time to shift the conversation, or that a shift would not require constant maintenance and defense. We had shifted the conversation on race, and Archie Bunker and other sitcoms took the glamor out of bigotry, but now our social media overlords have brought that all storming back.
But we can't just cede all that ground for fear of offending the gouty toes of the people who voted for the Mandarin Menace. We have to make him look like the pathetic loser that he is, and make them feel as if supporting him makes that stink rub off on them as well. Looking at those approval ratings, this may be our best window for doing something like that.
Not "you are a loser for having been fooled by those guys," but "ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos, do you really want to give them your support?"
MAGA revels in their own victimhood and grievance. We should treat them to a taste of their own tactics and Swiftboat the hell out of their grievance narratives. Take their stories of bravery and defiance and turn them into mock epics.
Unlike the Swiftboaters, our version of things would be grounded in reality.
Then offer a different narrative (one in which every billionaire is a policy failure?) that allows individual MAGA supporters to find an alternate source of approval and restore their status, but only through active support of things that build the common good.
Yes, I know...a concept short on details, but it's better than cynicism and a sense of powerlessness as strategies for resistance.
Yep, cleek, the powerful are insulated, but someone gives them power, and someone allows them to be insulated for the sake of that power - because they have some vested interest in the story of that power and what it does.
So we have to go after those support networks with all the ruthlessness with which they have gone after their preferred targets.
The right is a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are stable because of that wide base that distributes the weight of the top across so many at the bottom. If we want to topple that structure, we have to dismantle that base.
We need to make support of pathetic patriarchies a cause for ridicule. We need to take all the ways that they tell themselves they are being strong and admired and turn them into signs of weakness and insecurity.
We need new, better myths and narratives that show the old ones to be the empty, pathetic, weak dreams that they are.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
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.
"
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."
"
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."
"
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.
"
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
"
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
"
If any of y'all are interested in the larger context in which Chomsky said that, it's at The Harvard Crimson:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/3/epstein-nowak-chomsky-meeting-2015/
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
"
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
On “Take your’n and beat his’n”
Given the cross-section of my friends group, I would not be at all surprised if part of that Mr. and Mrs. Noah and Joan Ark crowd were selecting that answer just to be humorous, and to fuck with the results. It's a shovel-ready subject for meme aficionados.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.
On “Take your’n and beat his’n”
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.
"
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.
On “Open Thread”
Dropping by in-between belts of rain here that have been coming down so hard (accompanied by a high wind warning) that I have seen waves of water blowing down my street like snow drifting on a highway during a blizzard.
Two things, loosely linked in my overly-lateral mind...:
That Rubio speech in Munich was really alarming to me.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference
It's a full-throated apologia for explicitly euro-centric Christian colonialism. It's delusional in its sense of history. And Rubio is working so hard to name-check all of the European colonial powers on his way to rewriting himself as a proud Spanish-American:
The part of that which jumped out at me was his reference to the "Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong." I've read enough American lit to be sensitive to invocations of the Scots-Irish as a clan to hear the rhetoric that built the resurgence of the KKK at the turn of the 20th C.. Nothing here is out of place with that Klan rhetoric except for Rubio's ethnic heritage.
The second thread that runs through Rubio's speech is the Climate Rejectionism. Rubio is so very fucking cocksure that the "climate cult" is using fear to suffocate capitalism and weaken nations.
I'm making a sideways leap here that is outside of the explicit context of Rubio's speech, but so very in line with the ethno-religious calvinism of his mytho-historical conception of civilization belonging to the West...
Fast Company has highlighted the ecofascistic streak running through the Epstein files:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91490280/epstein-files-how-ultra-wealthy-peddle-climate-denialism
What Fast Company does not explicitly note in their analysis is how this conversation between Epstein and Joscha Bach is that it starts with Epstein musing over the genetic inferiority of blacks and the need to improve human genetics.
That whole line of thinking is right at home with the view of history that undergirds Rubio's speech, and it highlights the importance to Rubio of his being able to link his family back to Spain, and not to the indigenous population of the New World.
The whole philosophical underpinnings of these western chauvinist christian nationalists are morally repulsive.
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wonkie - High Country News has a series they call "Deep Time in the West" that sounds like it's the sort of thing you would love. Here's a shorter sample of the sort of things in the series:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-1/how-to-find-deep-time-in-seattle/
...and it's talking about things in your back yard.
It's a great series.
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Looks like Brett Adcock is taking advantage of the low-key finance panic around a potential AI winter to introduce a new shiny with the promise of unrealized exponential growth. I'm betting he's hoping to secure some venture capital now before one of the big AI firms goes public and sucks up all the potential investment ahead of the inevitable sobering up period that will follow.
Humanoid robots with AI brains - it's the next big thing. It's bigger than AI. It's bigger than self-driving cars. It's bigger than Segways. It's bigger than virtual reality.
[It hasn't yet run out of low hanging fruit to discover its own intractable problems.]
Robots in dorms? We're already forcing students to take on unsustainable levels of debts to pay for their university education and they are barely able to keep their old smartphone and cheap laptop functioning. Now they are going to bring a robobutler to campus with them? Maybe they can use it to cook them instant ramen and write their papers while they work their two part-time jobs to pay for it and all their other expenses.
At least the part time jobs that haven't already been taken by robots. (We've already got little self-guided robots delivering food for students in the dorms here, so don't even think of starting a bike delivery service as a side hustle.)
Seriously, though, how does any of this entrepreneurial hype make any sense?
I'm already sick of having to replace my phone every five years and they want me to invest in a robobutler?
GTFO.
These jokers and their investors are all high AF.
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My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/the-tamarisk-hunter/
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
On “The Aiken formula”
Meet the new boss/ Worse than the old boss
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
On “Separated by a common language”
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
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On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
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wj - I’d go even further. Just strip it down to “Ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos!” Once they’ve gotten themselves that far, they can take the next step themselves.
I'd say it depends on the context. In one-on-one conversation that second flex could be seen as a bit extra (to borrow my students' turn of phrase). In a group context, however, or in a public online discussion where you have a few people expressing their disgust at these revelations, I think it's helpful to confront the marginal supporter with a choice where their own ethos is imperiled. That's how they were walked into their support in the first place, and you have to pull them back the same way.
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I don't doubt it will take time to shift the conversation, or that a shift would not require constant maintenance and defense. We had shifted the conversation on race, and Archie Bunker and other sitcoms took the glamor out of bigotry, but now our social media overlords have brought that all storming back.
But we can't just cede all that ground for fear of offending the gouty toes of the people who voted for the Mandarin Menace. We have to make him look like the pathetic loser that he is, and make them feel as if supporting him makes that stink rub off on them as well. Looking at those approval ratings, this may be our best window for doing something like that.
Not "you are a loser for having been fooled by those guys," but "ick, those guys are all gross and pathetic pedos, do you really want to give them your support?"
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MAGA revels in their own victimhood and grievance. We should treat them to a taste of their own tactics and Swiftboat the hell out of their grievance narratives. Take their stories of bravery and defiance and turn them into mock epics.
Unlike the Swiftboaters, our version of things would be grounded in reality.
Then offer a different narrative (one in which every billionaire is a policy failure?) that allows individual MAGA supporters to find an alternate source of approval and restore their status, but only through active support of things that build the common good.
Yes, I know...a concept short on details, but it's better than cynicism and a sense of powerlessness as strategies for resistance.
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Yep, cleek, the powerful are insulated, but someone gives them power, and someone allows them to be insulated for the sake of that power - because they have some vested interest in the story of that power and what it does.
So we have to go after those support networks with all the ruthlessness with which they have gone after their preferred targets.
The right is a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are stable because of that wide base that distributes the weight of the top across so many at the bottom. If we want to topple that structure, we have to dismantle that base.
We need to make support of pathetic patriarchies a cause for ridicule. We need to take all the ways that they tell themselves they are being strong and admired and turn them into signs of weakness and insecurity.
We need new, better myths and narratives that show the old ones to be the empty, pathetic, weak dreams that they are.
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