#Freddie deboer

[st-just]

In the mid-2000s I lived in Chicago, just a couple blocks from the big gay neighborhood, Boystown. And though I didn’t understand it at the time, when we went out in those years we were seeing the transition of gay culture into Big Gay. My roommates and I would go to this after-hours club called Hydro, which had until recently been a legendary gay bar called Manhole. (Just a top-tier gay bar name, there.) And I once talked to an older guy who pointed to the conversion of Manhole to Hydro as a symbol of how the neighborhood was changing, how it had become sanitized and was now overrun with straights. This was only a year or two after Karl Rove had used gay marriage as a wedge issue to reelect George W. Bush, so homophobia was still prevalent. But the fact that gay marriage was an issue at all spoke to the increasing visibility and salience of the marriage equality movement. And the same cultural processes that made those annoying straights feel comfortable going to get drunk and mingle in Boystown, which an older generation lamented, were making gay marriage possible. Gay marriage gathered steam precisely as the inherently political nature of being gay died. This is what I’m saying to you today: there is no space between normalization and assimilation. They aren’t entangled or related; one doesn’t lead to the other. They are one and the same.

-Freddie deBoer

[bambamramfan]

A fun read, even if you don't entirely agree with the thesis. Full of delightfully illustrated examples. I'd rate it 75% correct.

I'd add examples of what it used to be like going to used bookstores looking for that one out of print book, vs searching amazon now. Or what I previously wrote about World of Warcraft optimization.

For the other 25%, well...

Sam Kriss wrote a while ago about the death of hipsters.

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good.

Almost any economist will tell you, that information gathering is just a different sort of price people pay for products. They can pay $300 up front for a good experience, or they can spend hours scouring and networking to find a similar quality experience for $100. If they find these two bundles equivalent, then that information gathering labor was worth $200 to them.

The difference is, when the naive consumer just pays *someone gets those extra $200*, whereas if the information gathering is labor (big if), then that extra labor doesn't actually pay anyone, and the world is just $200 of effort worse off. So, cetera paribus, it's better if everyone knows all the good places and at least the local industry is reaping the surplus.

So this is the death knell of hipsters, as all the information they had to seek out is accessible by everyone and just goes into rents for the producers.

...

Except we know from experience, it doesn't *really* work like that. For one, a lot of us ENJOY the hipster information gathering experience. It's a fun activity in moderation, and we even develop an identity for having a personal research base to use as a resource. How do you calculate the labor surplus lost if you're having fun? Well, I'm sure the economists can find some way to.

The other problem is that Freddie is only talking about a certain class of hipsters. The same ones Sam refers to in his essay. You can look at it as a sort of pyramid.

Top: quasi-autistic savants who are on Discords talking about secret places, or going out and mapping territories themselves.

Middle: hipsters who casually seek out new things they heard about and report back in indy magazine columns.

Bottom: the great mass who do one google search and flock to whatever they are told "the best deal" is.

(Now it's more complex than that. To be honest these three are probably only the top 25% of people, and the real base of the pyramid has no idea what any of this is about. And there's networks and lines of communication between the different layers. But you get the idea.)

For a while in the 90's and 00's, being a hipster became easier, and maybe that middle layer grew a bit in both directions. And then in the 10's the process Freddie describes ramped up, and so the value of just being a middle-tier hipster shrunk again.

But there are still a lot of secrets out there. You just have to be a much more dedicated information gatherer. Being in the top tier - which in travel might be as simple as driving places instead of flying to them IME - will still find you things where no one else is there.

This month I'm going to visit the cement factory where they filmed scifi movies like the Crowe and Super Mario Bros, and I expect to be the only one there.

[liskantope]

My situation of the Severely Limited Time/Energy For Tumblr continues. When Scott Alexander came out with an essay arguing against the Social Model of Disability, I managed to write a substantial comment and meant to follow that up with a Tumblr post but got my hands full with Other Stuff again before I was able to get around to the latter. I'd been hoping my comment might engender some kind of interesting discussion, but nobody responded, nor did it come up in Scott's more recent "highlights from the comments" post.

To put it bluntly, where I am at this point with regard to the social model of disability is that I see it as a sort of ideological nemesis -- obviously not in the sense that it's the my least favorite ideology out there, nowhere close, and I'll even concede that the more sophisticated thinking coming from it has very interesting and worthwhile ideas -- in the sense that it seems to be everywhere now among today's youth social movement and I see it seeping into everything, and I see it as fundamentally, profoundly misguided and (for the most part) at odds with common-sense reality. It seems in the last few years to have taken the number one spot among ideological trends that I'm worried about. (I think I first began to see it as a full-blown problem around the time I made these posts when Stephen Hawking died in 2018).

I couldn't remember ever seeing Scott Alexander tackle the social model of disability head-on (the closest very adjacent thing I can think of is that some years ago he came out very strongly against the prevalent ideas in autism activism about blurring the lines between different types of autism and taking offense at any desire for a cure), and I was immediately pleased to see that he takes such a critical stance. As I said in my comment, though, his discussion was very confined to the narrow world of scholarship and actual disability treatment (I don't fault Scott for this, since there's plenty of discussion to be had even in that narrower realm), whereas I see it as a much broader social phenomenon based on an axiom of "no trait is innately unfortunate" which is wide-reaching in how it affects how younger people are thinking about all kinds of social issues.

I was bemused that within half a week of the ACX post, Freddie de Boer published another one of his (excellent) posts which I interpret as attacking the mental health awareness movement wing of the social model of disability mindset:

who are unable to parse the idea that some things are inherent and also bad

Exactly, thank you, Freddie.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Freddie deBoer

Published: Nov 8, 2021

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.

If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one. You can’t just bitch on Twitter every time someone tries to describe your political cohort, which again you yourself say intends to change the world. Name yourself or you will be named.

The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics. When someone like David Shor gently says that they in fact do have to care about politics, and points out that they’ve accomplished nothing, they attack him rather than do the work of making their positions popular. Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds. Nobody gives you what you want. That’s not how it works. Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough - I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I'd be happy to substitute something that's not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I'm asking for a name.

[ Via: https://archive.is/ytzJc ]

==

It's a mistake to think this is accidental. It's not. When it's undefined and unnameable, it's harder to refute and reject, and they don't have to resort to an obvious No True Scotsman.

[misomythus]

My God, Freddie Deboer put out another full-scale substack post grousing about Taylor Swift and her fans. I like him but having a financial need to produce weekly content is the worst thing that could have happened to him as a writer

[madewithonerib]

4.] Why Don't We Understand?

Let me show you let me give you an example how life-changing this should be. In our situation, we live in the middle of New York — which is at the heart of modern western secular culture.

Some years ago, a man, a Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a magisterial book called: The Sources of the Self

I don't recommend it at all, it's really a tremendous book; it's a nice big thick book. A philosopher wrote to philosophers, and so it is not an easy book to get through.

     But it's a magisterial account of how modern      western society's understanding of self and      identity is so different than every other      culture & every other century.

You see even today in non-western cultures & in previous centuries how did you find your identity

   •  How did you find out who you were?

Your parents told you and your people told you and they said this is who you are, this is who you should try to be.

And if you aspire to that & if you fulfilled that then everyone said you're a good person & you had self -esteem.

In other words, every other culture your family & your people said here's who you are & then when you lived up to that then they affirmed you & you felt you had self-esteem & self-worth as a person

But Charles Taylor says we are the first culture in which “No, we say you decide who you want to be —you determine who you want to be. You do not let anybody else tell you.”

But once you go deep in your heart & you figure out who you are, then you come out. Now Charles Taylor says, “We so desperately need affirmation from everybody, I mean we've come up with this identity all by ourselves & now suddenly we go out into the world & we demand recognition!

     We need recognition, we      demand constant affirmation.”

He says we have the most fragile identities in the history of the world because we need everybody pretty much to affirm them.

We cannot take it if people dislike us, or disagree with us or don't affirm us. We can't take it we are the most fragile identities in the world.

4.1] Downfall of Social Sciences

Now somebody who has been writing about this recently is a guy named Freddie DeBoer, I think he's on the staff of Brooklyn College.

He lives in Brooklyn & he's a good writer and he writes a column & he writes a blog & recently he wrote a great article about this very thing about the fragility of modern identity

that Charles Taylor writes about & he wrote this in an article called “You Can't Fake It.”

So the article starts like this:

     I have been increasingly preoccupied by a      basic question recently why is everybody      such a wreck?

And now listen he goes through a list he says first we have this vast intellectual architecture telling us that physical attractiveness & hierarchies are cruel & gendered & unfair.

………………………………………………………………… And this is correct but we still care so much about being hot—and we judge each other about it & all of our papers & humanity seminars are entirely inadequate to ending that condition. …………………………………………………………………

Secondly we have a political critique of all the ways in which “notions of human worth” are dictated by our traditional inequalities of race & sex & class.

We have a whole set of political concepts of self- care designed to fight all those negative effects, we have a self-help culture that constantly tells us you are wonderful, brilliant unique light; and you alone can shine the way in a dark world.

We have very woke.

He said we have a woke world of marketing.

All the marketing is always affirming you, affirming you. He says he has a gym nearby where he lives in Brooklyn & the gym's ad says join the body acceptance movement.

He points out if you actually did join the body acceptance movement there'd be no reason to join a gym.

But he says,

     “See everything is there to help you      feel good about yourself, & then he      says we've also got social media tools      to craft a perfect idealized vision of      ourselves curated to the millimeter      that we can present to the world..

     exactly the kind of self that we want      to present.

Then he says & none of this is working, none of it works, and this is what he sees around Brooklyn:

     I see people who are the most outwardly      secure and confident they never betray a      hint of doubt or guilt or remorse.

     They project cool at all times, they are      popular; they're getting plaudits and      positive affirmation all the time. They      are academically and professionally      successful, they have money & respect

     And yet the flow of life reveals that      inside they hate themselves, they all      hate themselves.

     None of that stuff matters, none of it      gets at the core self-hatred within & I      am beginning to wonder is this the      human condition?

4.2] Heart of Flesh Thru JESUS CHRIST

See Charles Taylor would say yeah, but modern culture aggravates it. And here's what the Bible would say yes.

But what Freddie DeBoer calls self-hatred:

     Why is it with all this stuff we're doing      all these ways of making ourselves feel      good about ourselves that we are just      screaming affirmation & recognition so      deep down: Why it's not working at all?

The Bible would say that we're not OK is a universal sense that we all know deep down inside that we're sinners—so this thing that he's describing is

      like a rock on everybody's heart; it's a rock       on your heart & you know what the social       media & you know what the self-help &       the therapy & the self-esteem..

      You know what all these things are?

…………………………………………………………………       Water pistols trying to deal with that rock       but this in JESUS CHRIST, the FATHER loves       you even as HE loves JESUS! …………………………………………………………………

      Even as!

4.3] No Longer Trying to Self-Soothe

That is not a water pistol! That will blast that rock off of your heart—that will explode the rock off your heart if you believed it.

   •  Do you believe it?    •  Do you realize it?

That's what the Lloyd-Jones says:

All of your problems come from the fact that you don't really believe it. It's not really there & it is not a reality to you.

So this is the thing you most need.

You need to believe the Gospel, not just believe the Gospel—but believe the Gospel!

Beholding the Glory of CHRIST P1,2,3,4,5,6 | Timothy J. Keller [John 17:20-26]

[barbaragenova]

Sometimes these people have actually tried and failed in various creative endeavors - gone to film school, sent their manuscript out to agents, bought an expensive microphone and ring light for their YouTube channel, spent a year begging people to like, share, and subscribe to their podcast. My sense, though, is that many of the people I’m talking about have never actually made an honest try at a creative field, perhaps too embarrassed to dream big and fail. They are nevertheless possessed of a deeply-ingrained cultural expectation that they’re supposed to desire more than middle-class stability and the fruits of contemporary first-world abundance.

this is really good 

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

I’m always sensitive to the ways internet culture pressures people to adopt certain performances of how to be a person. And it feels like the most aggressive of these pressures are about how to be a modern woman.

For example, there’s a well-meaning but casually destructive trend that’s prevalent on Instagram. These memes idealize a state of impossible self-regard in women, an unachievable narcissism that’s justified through a garbled kind of feminist empowerment. You are not merely to be a healthy and functional adult who rises above the depredations of everyday sexism. You have to be some sort of Amazon warrior queen mystic who “manifests” what she wants through sheer force of will. It’s not hard to see where such impulses might come from. Women are systematically robbed of confidence in essentially every human culture, unless it’s in the specific arena of physical attractiveness or motherhood. I don’t know how you’d go about denying that. [...]

Unfortunately, the way that meme culture has responded has been to produce images like the one at the top.

There’s an endorsement of absolutely deranged self-confidence, an impossible level of self-belief that I imagine is actually only achievable while high on PCP. The meme I’ve included is in fact a pretty tame example of the genre. The idea seems to be that because women often lack confidence for bullshit reasons, we should convince women to try and pump themselves up with confidence like a child overfilling a balloon. Ideas common to these memes include that you don’t care about what anyone thinks (you do and should care), and that normal emotions are beneath you (they’re not). The problems in your life, no matter how mundane, are all the product of sexism or haters or sexist haters, and there is no such thing as a legitimate conflict between two sincere people who both have defensible desires. Anything that obstructs your goals, including people with their own autonomy, is merely an obstacle to be stepped over without a second thought. The standards of self-love here are so lofty that they seem just as unreachable as all of the other social standards that woman can’t possibly meet.

I find the attempts to embody this trend pretty sad. You may get a pretty standard picture on a woman’s Instagram, completely innocuous, and the caption will be like “watch out bitches, I’m finally ascending to my final form.” It’s all a little… strange.

Sadder still, this stuff comingles with the batshit generalist mysticism that is so common on social media today. Horoscope stuff, obviously, but also Tarot and numerology and (let me calculate the necessary number of quotation marks) “““““““energy”””””””. The previously-mentioned notion of “manifestation” has endured as a zombie grift 15 years after the publication of the book that popularized it, The Secret. Manifestation or “the Law of Attraction” tells people that everything they get or don’t is the product of their desires and intentions, so stop complaining about your leukemia, thanks. How this fits alongside the Zodiac stuff, which asserts the exact opposite of you being solely in charge of the events of your life, is unclear. One way or another you end up with an incomprehensible set of beliefs about the world that are both exacting (if you don’t tend to your energy you deserve what you get) and opaque (who could actually follow all this shit?). As an atheist this concerns me. As a feminist it offends me: apparently now women need literal magic to escape oppression. For whatever reason, the popular conception of the paths to women’s liberation just gets more convoluted and inscrutable over time.

I don’t know, to me being a badass bitch doesn’t seem fun. It seems alienating and tiresome. Also I’m so sick of the constant modern insistence that we love ourselves. Stop telling me to love myself all the time. Mind your business.

Here’s what I suspect: mentally healthy people, if they still exist, aren’t healthy because of the constant presence of positive feelings of self. They are healthy because of the habitual absence of any feelings of self at all. (I guarantee you this is already a thing in psychology or some 19th century German philosophy but it’s proving stubbornly resistant to my Googling.) Where we’ve gone wrong as a civilization in terms of understanding confidence is in thinking of it as a presence, as an emotion. But I think what we perceive as confidence is simply not constantly thinking about yourself and your value. That’s more real and sustainable to me than thinking about yourself all the time and consistently feeling good about what you find. Unfortunately it seems like not thinking about yourself is what many modern people find hardest of all.

Bad folk wisdom about confidence is all over our culture. [...] Whatever the case…. I am not a woman and I have no idea what it’s like to experience the endless swings in society’s perception of not just What Women Need to Be Now but also Why Women Need to Reject What Society Thinks Women Need to Be Now. I don’t want to condescend, nor do I want to do the Good Male Ally routine. I just want to say as a typical dude that it’s not that men don’t feel much pressure to conform to gender stereotypes. We do. It’s that we don’t have to deal with the meta layers women seem to have to navigate, the sense that you can’t just resist societal pressures to act according to gender expectations but rather have to swing wildly between one conception of femininity to another, endlessly made to worry that you’re doing it wrong as you try to shake off one bogus caricature of your gender while leaping to another. [...]

There was a version of this post that included a bunch of the weird empowerment/yoga/girlboss/mysticism/juice cleanse memes I’m talking about and made fun of them. But I realized pretty quickly that it would be a shitty thing to publish. The women who are making and sharing those memes are just trying to navigate a bewildering array of choices about how to exist in a sexist world, and if they’ve arrived at a cartoonish version it’s only because all the more mundane approaches seem to have failed. It’s certainly possible that I overemphasize meme culture and that it’s all ephemera that nobody takes that seriously. But I suspect not. Memes are a language of the youth, and it appears that the youth are facing the same old challenge of forces that pressure women to be everything and nothing all at once.

[sawthatmountainburn]

man, it's always the same shit. a certain way of thinking or doing things is affirmed or reaffirmed for years and years, but eventually people start seeing the flaws in it and push back. eventually pushing back gains more traction and you see way more discussions of it. and then there's always at least one fucking genius who shows up and says "I'm about to say something bold and controversial: we've become a culture of weak pansies and actually this thing you all have an issue with isn't an issue at all, and we've gone too long (a few years) of not adhering to the tough guy way of thinking/doing things" and you can't tell these people to fuck off because it just inflates their ego, you have to carefully explain to them the thing they're advocating for was the consensus for decades and people are acting tue way they do now in response to how much it sucked. god forbid you call them reactionary.

[centrally-unplanned]

As a tangent note, education-as-opportunity discourse is one of those things where another author (in this case Freddie deBoer) has already just said it all, so I feel a bit foolish repeating the points. For the record I guess, the idea of addressing inequality via "redistributive opportunity" in schools is a contradiction in terms, accepting as valid that say being a barista can never be a good job so we fix society by giving everyone the opportunity to be "better" than that. Which flies right in the face of the fact that society needs baristas and the number of baristas is not meaningfully going to shift via having "better schools" because people want coffee. Not only does the education system not exist, at all, to "fix" inequality, it is itself inherently unequal, concerned as is it with heterogeneous acquisitions of heterogeneously-valued human capital. And this is a trait inherent to education, not specifically a product of any given school system. You can't squeeze any blood out of this stone.

[st-just]

A central misconception regarding American education is that we are a uniquely terrible nation when it comes to schooling. This assumption is not defensible. It’s certainly true that our performance does not look good relative to expenditures, but then school funding is not consistently or simplistically associated with student performance. Overall, I think the evidence is strong that the United States has mediocre mean academic outcomes and that this disappointing average performance is the product of a relatively small number of schools in economically-challenged parts of the country that perform truly terribly. Our median student does alright, not great but alright, but our worst-performing students struggle dramatically compared to the rest of the developed world. Meanwhile, the top-performing American public school students are competitive with those from anywhere; I would put our top 1% or 3% or 5% of students up against those from any country. In events like the International Chemistry Olympiad and the International Mathematics Olympiad, for example, American students have excelled for decades. American high school students go on to flourish in the most elite universities in the world. Our problem isn’t at the top. The story of American education is not of generically bad or even mediocre results but of extreme inequality. Which is the general American story.

-Freddie deBoer

[drdemonprince]

"Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette... Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.”"

A really even-handed post-mortem on some of the shortcoming of Kendi's approach that never demonizes him, yet clearly tackles the limitations of taking an individualistic, liberal approach to racial justice. He also had some ideas with potential, such as the establishment of a policy unit that drafted model anti-racist legislation to push to lawmakers. I would love to see what some of those sample policies looked like and where they fell on the spectrum between reformist and anti-reformist.

Freddy DeBoer has a good follow-up on the article too. I think he's generally right here about pop-academia rewarding and fomenting a certain kind of approach that sets authors up for failure and leaves the public feeling swindled and misinformed, often with no one directly involved acting out of malice. I have a different take on repligate than he does, but I can see why he included mention of it here.

[liskantope]

It seems that if I listen to any public intellectual long enough, even after a long run of liking them a lot, there will still come a point when something about them will start to grate on me. Such is getting to be the case with the Feminine Chaos podcasters Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Malz-Bovy; I still love their podcast and my subscription feels well worth it, but if you look at some of my recent posts tagged with Kat's name, on a very subtle level she's started to get on my nerves. In a members-only episode -- I think the one from October 20th, 2023 (I've been backtracking through members-only episodes since recently becoming a member) -- it's the way Phoebe talks about some things that bothers me.

She and Kat are grappling with the issue of free speech in a college campus context and applying the issue to the (then very recently exploded) Gaza conflict. Both appear to be aware that they don't know much of the details surrounding the many decades of Israel-Palestine conflict -- it's not in either of their wheelhouses -- but both are pro-Israel in a kneejerk way and come across to me like they're halfway doing the thing where as experts on criticizing overblown fears expressed in the name of social justice you're suddenly sounding an awful lot like the SJ-ish people you were criticizing. I say "halfway" because they are at least trying to consistently stick to their pro- free speech stance and presenting it as a struggle (my own take on how to deal with such struggles is to let go of the "free speech" framing, which is misleading in most particular social and professional contexts where there has never been such a thing as absolute free speech in the first place! But I acknowledge that the object-level issues that arise often aren't easy to figure out.)

Here is the bit (from Phoebe) that kind of made my jaw drop.

We were talking about where it crosses over between, like, anti-Zionism and antisemitism's always an interesting question, because I saw a professor, um, somewhere, but like, with a big social media presence, had tweeted something about, like, that... was claiming that professors who are supporting Israel at this time are doing so because they don't want to be in trouble. Which just seemed so extremely nuts, when in academia, if you're pro-Israel... it's not pop... that doesn't make you popular. But it seemed to be insinuating almost, like, Jewish cabal -style things. But then I think, that makes me think two things. One of them is that I don't want this person teaching Jewish students, and yet, they have the right to, and I'm not saying they shouldn't legally have the right to do that, but it's not... like, emotionally, I don't like it.

Okay, so a professor (1) is pro-Palestine (nothing unusual so far), (2) frames their position on this ideological spectrum as the underdog/minority position, and (3) suggests that those vocally on the upperdog/majority side are only pretending to be because they're afraid to take the underdog side in public. Parts (2) and (3) certainly seem obnoxious given that within any typical university context (not in the space of American political discourse as a whole, but in the subculture of academia!), as Phoebe points out, it's the pro-Palestine side that's popular and if anything, I would think that it's pro-Israel faculty that are afraid to speak out (I have good evidence of that at my current university for example). But this is one of the oldest and most common and natural culture warrior tactics there is: make yourself out to be the underdog and your ideological opponents to have the power and to be rhetorically surrounding you on all sides (closely related to what Scott Alexander might call "bravery debate" tactics). Taking it to the point of wild claims that in fact, most of those who appear to be one's ideological opponents are just cowed into playing this role is extra obnoxious but again nothing shockingly unusual: look at the ideologues far enough down any direction on any spectrum and you'll constantly hear "my side is afraid to speak out and the weaker among us are pretending to be on the other side so that it looks like most people think like them when actually most people think like me!", "silent majority", etc. Twisting this into some kind of antisemitic trope about Jewish cabals seems like quite an athletic move on Phoebe's part.

(I mean, I haven't seen the actual tweet she's talking about, and she's completely vague in her memory of where it came from, so I can't check and will allow for now that I might have a different opinion based on the precise wording I suppose?)

I'll point out that Freddie deBoer, who is Phoebe Malz-Bovy's friend and has let her guest-blog on his blog, is staunchly pro-Palestine in his outlook and has done a rather similar, if less extreme, version of the thing with "People who think like me are weak and powerless underdogs in the discourse space!" (much to my annoyance!). Does his friend Phoebe think he carries a dangerous enough degree of antisemitism for young Jews not to be safe around him?

[joons]

In emphasizing that Ken needs to look past romantic love and search for satisfaction within, Barbie is of course also staking a claim about her own identity and value. In doing so, she’s joining with a broad trend in kid-friendly entertainment: we no longer make movies where a heroine’s destiny is to fall in love. If you look at Disney movies in particular, the classic storyline of the protagonist getting her man in the end has been pretty definitively retired. The last movie of theirs that could be said to hold romantic love as the fundamental goal of the protagonist is Tangled, and even that’s debatable. Frozen and its sequel very directly reject that story structure, while films like Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon are indifferent to it. And, you know, that’s all fine; there’s lots of different good stories out there. But I do think that the out-and-out abandonment of the notion that love is the noblest pursuit of human life says a lot about our cult of self-worship. Because once you’ve dropped the romantic ideal, that’s all our culture really has to offer. ... The individual problem is that telling people they are enough is a cruel thing to do, because they aren’t enough. None of us is enough. I don’t know you, personally, but I can still say with great confidence that you are not enough. If you go through life uncritically accepting the Instagram ideology that you can #manifest everything you deserve because you practice #self-care and are #valid, on a long enough time frame you’re going to end up alone and miserable and profoundly aware that the idea of total emotional self-sufficiency is a transparent lie. Human beings need other human beings. All of us. You might be inclined to lament that fact, and you’re entitled to if you want. But you don’t get to choose to be self-sufficient, any more than you can choose to not require oxygen or water. We’re all interconnected in these vast webs of social influence and causality, whether we want to be or not, and very very few of us can last for long without relying on other people. The connections that save us don’t have to be romantic, but they do have to be connections.

No One Is Kenough, Freddie deBoer

[king-of-men]

There's a certain class of public intellectual - the two examples I have in mind are Bryan Caplan and Freddie deBoer, who otherwise have very little in common - who is genuinely quite smart and articulate, and able to defend their positions against almost everyone they debate with (including other people smart and articulate enough to be serious public intellectuals), and who therefore come across as being Well Up There in the human tiers. And then, every so often, whether from hubris or just sheer bad luck - they'll go up against someone with Serious Brainpower and they will get absolutely fucking smashed. Bryan Caplan tried to critique Huemer's book and came out of it looking a lot like the coyote after his own steamroller has squashed him flat; FdB had the very bad luck to post about EA a few hours before the sage Alexander did, which perhaps made his post come to Scott's attention in a way it otherwise wouldn't, and a day later there was a SlateStarCodex post that took FdB's position apart entirely, thoroughly, and without visible effort.

It's like watching, say, the Romanians in WWII going up against late-war Russians: These armies are visibly roughly the same thing, they both have tanks and machine guns and a reasonably up-to-date officer corps, it's not like bolt-action rifles against spears and shields. (That would be a normie trying to argue with the likes of Caplan.) And nonetheless one of these armies is about to cease to exist as a serious military organisation.

And nonetheless both bloggers are multiple tiers removed from the average human! I will give Caplan the win against everyone he's ever debated except Huemer and Alexander; and of course most of those people are still people literate enough to actually come to his attention, far beyond any possible effort of a normie Reddit poster; and even Reddit posters (in politics discussions, that is) are (generally) at least capable of reading a few hundred words and posting some moderately grammatical sentences in tangentially-relevant response, putting them easily in the top 50% of humans.

I get kind of used to reading Scott Alexander (quite aside from anything else, he just posts a lot!) and that makes it easy to forget just how much of a mutant superman he really is. And then you watch fairly heavyweight writers like FdB get casually flattened, and you go "Oh, right... born under a red sun."

[loving-n0t-heyting]

I knew I would receive a lot of angry and loud criticism over my recent New York piece on involuntary treatment, and I got it; I also knew that I would receive a lot of private and quiet praise for it, and I got that too. The basic structural reality of our national conversation renders a lot of otherwise thoughtful people afraid to talk about this issue. There’s a real fear of being seen as stepping outside of orthodoxy, and the issue is deeply, painfully, irreparably complicated - and we don’t do complicated, anymore.

Its fucking bonkers the way freddie deboer seems to have convinced himself that left-liberal tut-tutting on bluesky is somehow a more restrictive, threatening, courageous-to-resist system of orthodoxy than the one where cops in his city are now allowed sweeping new powers to seize and cart off to medical facilities any rando on suspicion of being touched in the head. Its a form of self flattery only possible if you have immersed yrself lain-like in lefty social media to the point of spiritually detaching from the physical realm