#(I do. some people. especially americans. seem like they lack basic education and critical thinking. and logic is a foreign thing to them)

[arttsuka]

Just saw a video that said 'why does food get cold, but drinks get warm?' with a caption 'just thinking!'. Please end my misery

[torschlusspanikattack]

Hey Torschluss -- when you reblogged that zionism discourse post and called the comments "a work of art", were you saying you agreed with the final poster (dancinbutterfly), or that you thought they were wrong in an interesting way?

I ask because I get quite frustrated with the sort of hugboxy-pseudointellectualism a lot of Tumblr Leftists engage in, and I feel the problems with dancinbutterfly's responses are severe and obvious:

1) while making an argument that calling people "retarded" is wrong, DB _perfectly_ and transparently recreates the underlying logic behind calling a person retarded -- they list a number of factors outside of their interlocutor's (Mephorash's) immediate control that would limit that person's capacity to engage critically with an idea, then insinuates that this lack of engagement is responsible for Meph's opinions. Maintaining a tone of condescension intended to demarcate Meph as mentally and morally inferior in a "nice" way WITHOUT directly engaging with their arguments;

2) they behave in exactly the way the OP (evilsoup) stated: conflating Zionism with Judeism, and therefore antizionism with antisemitism, by ignoring the existence of non-zionist jews and non-jewish zionists. Reacting with hostility to the statement that antisemitism will increase as zionists do bad things _and conflate antizionism with antisemetism_, then imply that being Jewish clears zionists of moral culpability for their support of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians.

I see a lot of Leftists on this site reinvent racism in a "woke" way, stating that a person's minority status matters more for the legitimacy of their opinions than the ability of those opinions to withstand external scrutiny, or excusing when a minority activist group is on some "blood-and-soil" shit (Black Seperatists come to mind). I understand why -- enough people are bad-faith bigots that reflexively giving minorities the benefit of the doubt or extra room to be platformed seems a good way to start fixing the issue of them being under-represented in society as a whole -- but I would hate to think you were supporting that line of logic in the case of Dancinbutterfly's obvious Zionism. You seem smarter than that, from what I can tell.

I don’t think the parts that make their comments and tags so funny have anything to do with their rightness or wrongness (although I do think they are very wrong).

Basically everything you say is true, but I think the especially notable element to me is the degree of condescension combined with the veneer of compassion. I’ve never seen it be so extremely blatant and comprehensive.

Plus, the specificity and breadth of the condescension really elevates the strength of the attack:

Probably because you didn't pay attention in English Language Arts Class from Ages 10-17.

Doubling down on the idea that people disagree with you (in bigoted ways according to the speaker) bc of lack of a very specific kind of education. The specificity really helps bc it manages to not just centre humanities courses but (presumably American) primary and secondary school basic courses as the source of rightly moral thinking.

It makes me wonder: was your educational development negatively effected by Covid 19? Because if that's the case, I'm sorry.

This one combines the implication of being very young with the specificity of education disruptions caused by a specific world event.

It's not you fault if your ability to understand written language was delayed because of the pandemic.

This one is just very brazen about couching calling someone illiterate (and by implication developmentally delayed/impaired ‘compassionately”.

Also, having 4 or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can greatly increase people's difficulty in school and vulnerability to radicalization and group think, so maybe you've just had a very hard life and that's why you're being like this.

As noted, this one is my favourite; it combines psychology-adjacent jargon (ACEs) with totally dismissal of other perspectives as a ‘vulnerability to radicalisation and groupthink’. The elevation of claims about psychology and claims about the correct viewpoint to objective fact, made even more funny by the specificity of ‘4 or more’. Not only is disagreement the result of objective psychological impairment, this is quantifiable and the quantity is exactly 4 or more ACEs (taken as completely reified and measurable discrete things).

Ending on ‘being like this’ also clearly implies that the form of disagreement (and disagreement broadly) is a specific and defective way of being—this one is harder to explain. Disagreement is transformed into a consequence of being a certain way, not anything else, and the cause and effect relationship to being that way is rendered ironclad. There’s more to it, but I don’t know how I would convey the remaining impact of rhetoric phrase: being like this.

Which really makes your response much more antisemitic. And ableist actually. Cuz of the R word.

Because lashing out antisemitically and ableistically like that at a stranger seems like a sign of really intense distress to me.

There is just something to the craft and arrangement of these sentences. The way antisemitism and ableism are referenced. The way ableism is added, with the actually. The way the sentences are paced. The use of R word. The construction of the words ‘antisemitically and ableistically’.

[link to some form of psychological or social treatment]

The link (which doesn’t work but that’s irrelevant) has all the specificity and condescension of sending someone a link to a suicide hotline with the novelty of not just being that—also implies mental or social deficiency towards target.

#just wishing them healing and peace and the ability to remember that other people on the internet are human beings

The tags are littered with lines like this one that just manage to convey such a total disregard for the person being responded to while apparently promoting self-evident positivity.

The total effect of the post is to, purposefully or not (intent is basically irrelevant), relentlessly attack both the specific poster disagreeing with them and anyone who shares the same views in a particularly dismissive and condescending way, while maintaining the outward trappings of soft compassion.

The ironic pose endemic to online arguments puts an emphasis on boldness and excess that gives the post value as an extreme execution of various postures common in online arguments.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you really hate this county? Or were you just ranting?

Sigh. I debated whether or not to answer this, since I usually keep the real-life/politics/depressing current events to a relative minimum on this blog, except when I really can't avoid ranting about it. But I have some things to get off my chest, it seems, and you did ask. So.

The thing is, any American with a single modicum of genuine historical consciousness knows that despite all the triumphalist mythology about Pulling Up By Our Bootstraps and the American Dream and etc, this country was founded and built on the massive and systematic exploitation and extermination of Black and Indigenous people. And now, when we are barely (400 years later!!!) getting to a point of acknowledging that in a widespread way, oh my god the screaming. I'm so sick of the American right wing I could spit for so many reasons, not least of which is the increasingly reductive and reactive attempts to put the genie back in the bottle and set up hysterical boogeymen about how Teaching Your Children Critical Race Theory is the end of all things. They have forfeited all pretense of being a real governing party; remember how their only platform at the 2020 RNC was "support whatever Trump says?" They have devolved to the point where the cruelty IS the point, to everyone who doesn't fit the nakedly white supremacist mold. They don't have anything to do aside from attempt to usher in actual, literal, dictionary-definition-of-fascism and sponsor armed revolts against the peaceful transfer of power.

That is fucking exhausting to be aware of all the time, especially with the knowledge that if we miss a single election cycle -- which is exceptionally easy to do with the way the Democratic electorate needs to be wooed and courted and herded like cats every single time, rather than just getting their asses to the polls and voting to keep Nazis out of office -- they will be right back in power again. If Manchin and Sinema don't get over their poseur pearl-clutching and either nuke the filibuster or carve out an exception for voting rights, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is never going to get passed, no matter how many boilerplate appeals the Democratic leadership makes on Twitter. In which case, the 2022 midterms are going to give us Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House (I threw up in my mouth a little typing that) and right back to the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Power Hour in the Senate. The Online Left (TM) will then blame the Democrats for not doing more to stop them. These are, of course, the same people who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton out of precious moral purity reasons in 2016, handed the election to Trump, and now like to complain when the Trump-stacked Supreme Court reliably churns out terrible decisions. Gee, it's almost like elections have consequences!!

Aside from my exasperation with the death-cult right-wing fascists and the Online Left (TM), I am sick and tired of how forty years of "trickle-down" Reaganomics has created a world where billionaires can just fly to space for the fun of it, while the rest of America (and the world) is even more sick, poor, overheated, economically deprived, and unable to survive the biggest public health crisis in a century, even if half the elected leadership wasn't actively trying to sabotage it. Did you know that half of American workers can't even afford a one-bedroom apartment? Plus the obvious scandal that is race relations, health care, paid leave, the education system (or lack thereof), etc etc. I'm so tired of this America Is The Greatest Country in the World mindless jingoistic catchphrasing. We are an empire in the late stages of collapse and it's not going to be pretty for anyone. We have been poisoned on sociopathic-libertarian-selfishness-disguised-as-Freedom ideology for so long that that's all there is left. We have become a country of idiots who believe everything their idiot friends post on social media, but in a very real sense, it's not directly those individuals' fault. How could they, when they have been very deliberately cultivated into that mindset and stripped of critical thinking skills, to serve a noxious combination of money, power, and ideology?

I am tired of the fact that I have become so drained of empathy that when I see news about more people who refused to get the vaccine predictably dying of COVID, my reaction is "eh, whatever, they kind of deserved it." I KNOW that is not a good mindset to have, and I am doing my best to maintain my personal attempts to be kind to those I meet and to do my small part to make the world better. I know these are human beings who believed what they were told by people that they (for whatever reason) thought knew better than them, and that they are part of someone's family, they had loved ones, etc. But I just can't summon up the will to give a single damn about them (I'm keeping a bingo card of right-wing anti-vax radio hosts who die of COVID and every time it's like, "Alexa, play Another One Bites The Dust.") The course that the pandemic took in 21st-century America was not preordained or inevitable. It was (and continues to be) drastically mismanaged for cynical political reasons, and the legacy of the Former Guy continues to poison any attempts to bring it under control or convince people to get a goddamn vaccine. We now have over 100,000 patients hospitalized with COVID across the country -- more than last summer, when the vaccines weren't available.

I have been open about my fury about the devaluation of the humanities and other critical thinking skills, about the fact that as an academic in this field, my chances of getting a full-time job for which I have trained extensively and acquired a specialist PhD are... very low. I am tired of the fact that Americans have been encouraged to believe whatever bullshit they fucking please, regardless of whether it is remotely true, and told that any attempt to correct them is "anti-freedom." I am tired of how little the education system functions in a useful way at all -- not necessarily due to the fault of teachers, who have to work with what they're given, and who are basically heroes struggling stubbornly along in a profession that actively hates them, but because of relentless under-funding, political interference, and furious attempts, as discussed above, to keep white America safely in the dark about its actual history. I am tired of the fact that grade school education basically relies on passing the right standardized tests, the end. I am tired of the implication that the truth is too scary or "un-American" to handle. I am tired. Tired.

I know as well that "America" is not synonymous in all cases with "capitalist imperialist white-supremacist corporate death cult." This is still the most diverse country in the world. "America" is not just rich white middle-aged Republicans. "America" involves a ton of people of color, women, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Christians of good will (I have a whole other rant on how American Christianity as a whole has yielded all pretense of being any sort of a principled moral opposition), white allies, etc etc. all trying to make a better world. The blue, highly vaccinated, Biden-winning states and counties are leading the economic recovery and enacting all kinds of progressive-wishlist dream policies. We DID get rid of the Orange One via the electoral process and avert fascism at the ballot box, which is almost unheard-of, historically speaking. But because, as also discussed above, certain elements of the Democratic electorate need to fall in love with a candidate every single time or threaten to withhold their vote to punish the rest of the country for not being Progressive Enough, these gains are constantly fragile and at risk of being undone in the next electoral cycle. Yes, the existing system is a crock of shit. But it's what we've got right now, and the other alternative is open fascism, which we all got a terrifying taste of over the last four years. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to go back.

So... I don't know. I don't know if that stacks up to hate. I do hate almost everything about what this country currently is, structurally speaking, but I recognize that is not identical with the many people who still live here and are trying to do their best, including my friends, family, and myself. I am exhausted by the fact that as an older millennial, I am expected to survive multiple cataclysmic economic crashes, a planet that is literally boiling alive, a barely functional political system run on black cash, lies, and xenophobia, a total lack of critical thinking skills, renewed assaults on women/queer people/POC/etc, and somehow feel like I'm confident or prepared for the future. Not all these problems are only America's fault alone. The West as a whole bears huge responsibility for the current clusterfuck that the world is in, for many reasons, and so do some non-Western countries. But there is no denying that many of these problems have ultimate American roots. See how the ongoing fad for right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world has them modeling themselves openly on Trump (like Brazil's lunatic president, Jair Bolsonaro, who talks all the time about how Trump is his political role model). See what's going on in Afghanistan right now. Etc. etc.

Anyway. I am very, very tired. There you have it.

[st-just]

Barely coherent rambling about nation-states, culture, the Hapsburgs, and Canada

Because why have a blog except to occasionally purge one of the essays floating around half-formed in your brain. To be clear, it’s still half-formed, just on tumblr now. 1,666 words, here’s the Deveraux essay mentioned. Book is Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs: To Rule The World

So I’ve had like, nationalism on my mind recently.

And so there’s a kind of recurring beat in left-of-centre American political discourse (like, not ‘internet rnados screaming at each other’ discourse, ‘people with doctorates or think tank positions having debates on podcasts or exchanging op eds’ discourse) where you have some people on the radical end list some of the various horrible atrocities the country is built on, the ways that all the national myths are lies, and how all the saints of the civic religion were monsters to one degree or another – this can come in a flavor of either righteous anger or, like, intellectual sport. And then on the other end you have the, well, Matt Yglesiases of the world. Who don’t really argue any of the points of fact, but do kind of roll their eyes at the whole exercise and say that sure, but Mom and Apple Pie and the American Way are still popular, and if you’re trying to win power in a democracy telling the majority of the population that their most cherished beliefs are both stupid and evil isn’t a great move.

Anyway, a couple weeks back Deveraux posted an essay for the 4th of July (which I don’t totally buy, but is an interesting read) about why the reason American nationalism is so intensely bundled up into a couple pieces of paper and maybe a dozen personalities is precisely because it isn’t a nation at all. Basically, his thesis is that in proper nation-states like England or the Netherlands or wherever, there really is a core population that is the overwhelming demographic majority and really have lived in more or less the same places since time immemorial, and that once the enthographers and mythologists finish their work, all those people really do identify with both the same nation and the same state as its expression. America, by contrast, is by virtue of being a settler nation whose citizenry was filled by waves of immigrants from all the ass ends of Eurasia in a historical eyeblink, even before you add in the native population and descendants of slaves lacks any single core ethnicity that is anywhere close to a majority, as well as any organic national traditions or claims to an ‘ancestral homeland’ that aren’t obviously absurd (and we are trying to include the descendents of slaves and the native population these days, to varying levels of success). All this to say that his point is America is a civic state, not a national one, with the identity of ‘American’ being divorced from ethnicity and instead tied to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the whole cult around the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and [FDR and/or Reagan depending on your politics].

Which, like I said, don’t totally buy, but interesting. (to a degree he overstates how homogenus ‘actual’ nation-states are, he makes America sound very special but if his analysis holds that it’d presumably also apply to several other former settler colonies, in the American context there’s a fairly solid case to be made that the whole ‘nation of immigrants’ story and the racial identity of whiteness were constructed to function as an erratz national ethnicity, with incredible success, etc, etc).

But anyway, if we accept that the American identity is bound up in its civic religion and the mythologized version of its political history, it’s absolutely the case that there’s several segments of the left who take incredibly joy in tearing said civic religion and national mythology apart and dragging whatever’s left through the mud. I mean, hell, I do! (reminder: any politician whose ever had a statue dedicated to them was probably a monster). And, well, call it a greater awareness of historical crimes and injustice, or the postmodern disdain for idols and systems leaking out through the increasingly college-educated populace, or the liquid acid of modernity dissolving away all unchosen identities, or a Marxist cabal undermining the national spirit to pave the way for the Revolution or whatever you like, but in whichever case, that critical discourse is certainly much more prominent and influential among left and liberal media and politics types that is was in decades past.

And, okay, so I finished Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs a few days ago. And I mentioned as I was reading it that the chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries reminded me quite a bit of courses I’d taken in school on the late Ottoman Empire and Soviet Union. Because all three are multi/non-national states (Empires, in Deveraux’s terminology, though that’s varying degrees of questionable for each, I think. Moreso for the Hapsburgs than the rest) who outlasted their own ideological legitimacy. And in all three cases it just, well, it didn’t not matter, but even as all the ceremonies got more absurd and farcical  and the politics more consumed by inertia punctuated with crises, things kept limping along just fine for decades. Even in the face of intense crisis, dissolution wasn’t inevitable. (The Ottomans are a less central example here, admittedly, precisely because of the late attempt to recenter the empire on Turkish nationalism. But even then, more Arab soldiers fought for the Sultan-Caliph than ever did for the Hashemites, and most prewar Arab nationalism was either purely cultural or imagined the Empire reformed into a binational federation, not dissolved).

But as Rady says in the book – losing WW1 crippled Germany, it dissolved Austria-Hungary. And in all three cases, as soon as they were gone, the idea of bringing them back instantly became at least a bit absurd.

And okay, to now pivot to talking about where I actually live but about whose politics I (shamefully) know significantly less than America’s. I mean, maybe it’s because most of my history education from public school was given by either pinko commies or liberals still high off ‘90s one-world universalism, or maybe it’s just a matter of social class, but I really can’t remember ever having taken the whole wannabe civic religion of Canada seriously (the only even serious attempt at sacredness I recall was for Remembrance Day). Even today, the main things I remember about our Founding Father is that he was an alcoholic who lost power in a railroad corruption scandal.

Really, in all my experience the only unifying threads of national/particular Canadian identity are a flag, a healthcare system, those Canadian Heritage Minute propaganda ads, a bill of rights from the ‘60s, and an overpowering sense of polite smugness towards the States.

And that last one (or, at least, the generally rose-colored ‘Canada is the good one’ view of history) is taking something of a beating, on account of all the mass graves really rubbing the public’s noses in the whole genocide thing. At least among big segments of the intellectual and activist classes, most of the symbols of Canadian nationhood are necessarily becoming illegitimate as Canada is, in fact, a project of genocidal settle colonialism.

But it really is just purely symbolic. Most of the municipalities who cancelled their Canada Day celebrations are going to elect Liberal MPs and help give our Natural Governing Party its majority in the next election, no one of any significance has actually challenged the authority of the civil service or the courts. And, frankly, most of the people who are loudly skeptical of all the symbols of the nations are also the ones whose political projects most heavily rely on an efficient and powerful state bureaucracy to carry out.

(This is leaving aside Quebec, which very much does have a live national identity insofar as the vigorous protection of national symbols is what wins provincial elections. If I felt like doing research and/or reaching more there’s probably something there on how pro-independence sentiment has largely simmered down at a pace with the decline of attempts to impose a national Canadian identity).

I mean, Canada does have rather more of a base for a ‘national’ population core than the US (especially if you’re generous and count the people who mark French on the census as a core population as well). At the same time, no one really expects this to continue to be the case – even back in Junior High, I remember one of the hand outs we got explaining that due to declining fertility most or all future population growth would come from immigration (I remember being confused when my mother was weirdly uncomfortable with the idea when it came up). I suppose our government gets credit for managing public opinion such that anti-immigration backlash hasn’t taken over the political conversation. Which you’d think would be a low bar but, well.

But anyway, to try and begin wrapping this rambling mess up – it does rather feel like Rady’s portrayal of the late Hapsburg empire might have a few passing similarities to the future of Canada. A multinational state whose constitution and political system and built on foundations and legitimized by history that no one actually believes in anymore, or at least no more than they have to pretend to to justify the positions they hold, but persisting because it’s convenient and it’s there and any alternatives are really only going to seem practical after a complete economic collapse or apocalyptic war. (Though our civil service is a Josephist’s dream by comparison, really.)

Or maybe I’m premature, and the dominant culture will just be incredibly effective at assimilating immigrants into that civic identity. Anecdotally, the only people I know who are at all enthusiastic about Canada as an idea are first generation immigrants. I could certainly just be projecting, really – I’ve never really been able to get all that invested in the nation-state as an idea of more moral power than ‘a convenient administrative division of humanity’, and certainly liberating ourselves form the need to defend the past would certainly rectifying certain injustices easier.  

Or maybe I’m just being incredibly optimistic. Half the economy’s resource extraction and the other half’s real estate, so decent odds the entire place just literally goes up in flames over the next few decades. BC’s already well on its way.

[possibilistfanfiction]

on a related note, where do you think pinoe fits into the conversation? i’ve read a bunch of criticism surprisingly from uswnt fans who claim her activism work/increased focus on work off the pitch is part of the reason behind her poor performances lately, i can’t help but feel like it’s just another excuse for them to pretend football exists in a bubble especially after 2020 (like you mentioned). appreciate all your commentary on this topic so far, it’s refreshing to hear someone actually discussing last year’s ramifications on the teams cohesiveness

to me that seems silly bc lots of athletes are wonderful players/athletes while being very active politically. an easy example is basically the entire wnba lol, especially when you consider so many of the wnba players are Black women & nb ppl who spent 2020 & 2021 being extremely active & outspoken; still undoubtedly the best players in the world. on the uswnt, cp is not as abrasively (not in a bad way, just stylistically lol) outspoken or active as pinoe, but thru re-inc & just her personal politic it’s very clear where she stands. there are ofc lots of other examples but those are top of mind for me.

on the flip side, players like kelley didn’t play well at all & are politically … on the wrong side of things, to put it mildly. so in my mind that performance, while i love to believe in the ramifications of energy lol, also has rly nothing to do with her beliefs & expression of them.

beyond that, everything is political. existing “apolitically” or “just being an athlete” is also a political stance, usually rooted in blatant anti-Blackness (which of course stems out into anti-fat, anti-disabled, anti-poor, etc politic)

i do think some of the poor play is probably just age & preparation, & also, tbh, a lack of tactics for YEARS. cp has excelled so much bc she’s always been a tactical player — she’s incredibly fast & smart off the ball, very skilled in tight, quick spaces: she reads the game well & reacts accordingly. pinoe has been playing a pretty typical uswnt style for a decade — e.g., out-muscle the other team, run faster, etc. tbh even in 2019 wc lots of goals she scored were set pieces/penalties, not in the run of play. i think she should have retired.

i will say that there is a mental & emotional toll that being hyperactive in politics can take. i think pinoe’s politics aren’t actually left or radical at all, so she’s not doing any particularly meaningful organizing for actual liberation or safety imo, & instead investing in american systems that will always encourage imperialism & violence (like electoral politics, voting, etc). it’s just so telling to me that a lot of ppl who don’t like her think she’s on the left like lmfao y’all have never talked to an actual radical but ok. pinoe has whiteness & intense class privilege, she’s thin, cis, & (as far as we know) able-bodied. so while it can absolutely be exhausting to engage in activism, she has so much privilege that it’s essentially impossible to blame poor play on anything but like … athletic ability? or smth like that

i do think it is also pretty clear that cp, for example, works hard to have a balanced life. sport clearly matters to her, but it seems like she has a lot of other things going on that she genuinely finds immense joy & peace in.

& at the end of the day (HOT take) if being politically active, albeit almost painfully neoliberal, means that a privileged white player doesn’t play as well… sport doesn’t rly matter? like it’s fun & it impacts things but the uswnt winning a gold medal (or not) isn’t going to help end climate change, or extend eviction moratoriums, or abolish all carceral systems & ideology in mental & physical health/education/police, prisons, etc, or give land back to indigenous people, etc etc etc. there is nothing abt sport that is rly going to get into the dirt of things & fundamentally make society livable for everyone — especially a team that is in service of the state!! (🥴🤪)

so anyway, yes i don’t think that her politic has anything to do with her performance, but IF it did, fine lol

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.  

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs  - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of  valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. By Benjamin Ginsberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: nonfiction

Part of a Series? No.

Summary: The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content/Trigger Warnings: references to sexism and racism

Since this book is non-fiction (and thus, has no plot or characters), this review will be structured a little differently than usual.

I first became aware of this book when I saw it quoted in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and being an ex-academic myself, I had a personal interest in the subject matter. Despite being published in 2011, The Fall of the Faculty is shockingly still relevant, mainly because the trends in higher education that have led to increased administrative positions and fewer teaching jobs have continued to the present day. But while I found this book valuable, there were some drawbacks that led to me giving it 3 stars instead of 4 or 5.

For one, Ginsberg writes with a tone that I think damages his credibility. Part of me relished in his anger - I loved seeing him call administrators unqualified or incompetent or all sorts of things that reflected my personal feelings and experiences with university administrators. However, I worry that this tone can come across as biased to readers who may not have as much of a stake. Ginsberg seems to be preaching to the choir, speaking primarily to other teachers who feel the same way as he does. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but I do wish he had given the impression of being more objective.

Second, I wish Ginsberg had relied more on anecdotes outside the realm of his own experience. This book doesn’t lack for data; it cites useful studies and includes horror stories to support Ginsberg’s main points, but it also contains a lot of generalizations or basic descriptions. That’s not always bad, as sometimes, peoples’ jobs are at risk or a more detailed picture isn’t required, but I personally wanted to see more detailed evidence and analysis to support his conclusions. When Ginsberg needed more detail, it seems like he relied almost exclusively on his own experience, and while I don’t doubt that Ginsberg has valuable insight, I do wish his personal experience was less the star of the show and more of a voice among many. I would have liked to see something more in the style of Graeber’s methodology: gathering anonymous stories and tracing patterns across multiple first-hand accounts, making caveats when appropriate and using more formal studies to explain the trends. I understand that such a process would be difficult, given that many may be reluctant to talk, but I think quoting more from other educators (and even administrative staff) would have gone a long way.

Third, there are some parts of this book that are a little cringey, to say the least, and may put some progressive readers off. For example, Ginsberg complains about “multicultural” or “diversity” programs receiving lots of administrative support despite having fewer students. Buried in this complaint is the point that some of these smaller “diversity” programs are used as a shield against administrative criticism - a point that is absolutely worth exploring. However, I do think that complaining too much about African American or gender studies receiving unfair support comes across as dismissive or discrediting, regardless of intent. Ginsberg also states that administrative pressure for departments to hire more diverse faculty is useless because either A.) there just aren’t (m)any women or POC in some fields to hire, or B.) some fields, such as the humanities, are already doing so successfully. While there’s a kernel of truth in those statements, Ginsberg doesn’t address the fact that A.) less women and POC earn advanced degrees because of institutional discrimination, hostile learning or work environments, etc., and B.) just because his own department was “diverse,” that doesn’t mean other departments are (many English programs are overwhelmingly white). Instead of just complaining that administration is meddling where it doesn’t belong, I would have liked to see an argument for more aggressive reforms of the education system as a whole and what role admin plays in helping or hindering this process. Ginsberg could have even kept his point that admin only shows interest in diversity for appearances - that point just could have been made without suggesting that it’s just a fact that women/POC aren’t available or, if they are, it’s because departments are already doing what they need to be doing.

Despite these drawbacks, this book isn’t without merit. I particularly thought that the chapter overviewing the history of tenure was well-written, with interesting tidbits of information that I think makes the history of higher education accessible to a casual reader. I also think Ginsberg had a good defense of the liberal arts and closed his book with concrete advice regarding what can be done about administrative bloat. But as it stands, The Fall of the Faculty is not necessarily a book I’d recommend if someone wanted to learn more about current trends in academia, especially if that person is an administrator themselves.

[leverage88]

Opinion Series

To my fellow young adults, with much frustration, it appears that we have inherited a world on fire. Our generations from the Millennials to the Generations Z, we all are faced with the unjustified burden of cleaning up the messes made by the generations before us. The student debt crisis is a primary example of one of many very difficult situations forced on to us because of our parents and their parents' parents made poor decisions. The U.S, as we know, is currently $1,5 trillion in student debt and it all started with the "Space Race." After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the U.S. government passed the Defense Education Act of 1958 to encourage students to attend university by mainly offering federal loans since they thought that too many scholarships were considered “free rides” and having the students focus on learning science, math, and foreign languages with the hopes of beating our opponents and it did work, The number of students attending colleges nearly doubled within the next decade When we fast forward nearly 70 years, we see that student debts have only increased and the Department of Education has become one of the largest banks in America in regards to loans. How disgusting is it that our government, let alone, the Department of Education, was never meant to be a bank so we have to instead, outsource management to Loan Servicers. The comedian, Hasan Minhaj, best describes these companies as part of a “multi-billion dollar predatory industry that ruins lives” and Navient is one of the largest and worst debt collection companies in the nation. They have been accused of abusing military members, double-charging borrowers, and in 2017 they were sued and accused of systematically misdirecting borrowers into types of forbearance, which disqualified them from a Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which is a program that offers public servants (think around the lines of firefighters and crossing guards) to have their outstanding federal student loans forgiven if they meet the requirements. Navient's web-page literally states that "We help our clients and millions of Americans achieve financial success through our services and support." but they are like any business and they only care about making a profit and our government has done very little to regulate these companies. So many lives have been ruined by this issue that it can feel like there is nothing we can do. Well, I say enough is enough! For too long we have been criticized for making the nation worst, for being too focused on comfort, and the media and the government have constantly berated us for having socialistic views, that are “un-American” but the reality is that the previous generations have failed us. Their way of handling the student debt crisis is not working. So many of our peers no longer cares about continuing education. For some, going to college is like getting a pool in your backyard. It is definitely something nice, but it is not really worth it. Thee thing about that concept is that the pursuit of knowledge obviously holds more value than a freaking pool. The student debt crisis is much more like a dam is holding back so much water that it is going to burst soon and if we don't do anything about this issue, we are going to drown.

As a parent, it is only natural to want your child to be happy. You make constant sacrifices for them only because you want your children to have a better life than what you, yourself had. For many years parents have thought that in order for their children to succeed in life, they need to get a good education so they can get a good-paying job and then they can live a happy, healthy, and meaningful life. There is nothing wrong with thinking that way, as a Pennsylvania mother, June, felt as well, while she encouraged her daughter’s ambition to study out of state at New York University. (Hsu, Student Debt Is Transforming the American Family.)  Her daughter studied diligently with the financial support of her mother June and her father as well as assistance from a couple of loans. By then end of her daughter's education, her daughter was looking forward to chipping away at loans while starting a career dedicated to bettering the life street vendors as she chose to study the effects of globalization on an urban space at NYU. You can imagine how proud June was of her daughter. However, when her daughter got a job offer that could actually pay off her now outstanding debts, her daughter, unfortunately, found that the job went against the very principles she held and studied in college. Now June’s daughter is faced with a difficult scenario as she has to pay off her loans but the only job she found that paid well enough was immoral, and her mother June cannot do anything about it. Right now, numerous families in our nation are in this situation. The student debt crisis is endangering the well-meaning efforts of families and it is only rising. College tuition has only been rising for years and the economist, David Klein, wrote an article where he briefly explains the challenge our children can face when they graduated college, where he states “Some students are able to land jobs after graduation with salaries that justify the monthly student loan payments, but others are not able to do so, rendering their student loans a particularly heavy burden.” Countless parents and students are faced with this harsh reality, as more and more graduates move back home with their parents since it is too expensive to move out on their own, get married, or even start a family. (ONeil, Overcoming the Student Loan Crisis) Student loans work well when the students are able to get high enough paying jobs that can eventually pay back the loan and still support themselves and their future families, otherwise their lives may be placed on hold. Now imagine if that was your own child who could not move forward with their lives just because they chose to get a proper education and there is not much you can do. It is in situations like this where people can feel hopeless, but that is not the case, as there are many dedicated politicians that are trying to pass legislation to change this situation, and it is all up to us to be active fight for reforms not just for our sakes, but for our children and their children.

My fellow Americans, I am in awe of our wondrous nation. In such a short amount of time, we have grown exponentially, especially whenever we have been faced with a challenge. As we look back to the past and remember when the world was fundamentally changed on October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik, which was the first artificial Earth satellite the world has ever seen. While this was a momentous occasion for mankind and spoke well of our ingenuity as a species, our nation, the United States of America, was in a panic. Compared to our Cold War rivals, we were lacking in science, technology, languages, and all other aspects of education. It seemed impossible for us to catch up with the Soviets. In a way, we were at the bottom of the ninth, and it looked like the Soviet Union was going to come out victorious. In retaliation, our congress came together and passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958 or also known as the "NDEA," which was the first time our nation offered federal loans and scholarships to encourage enrollment in colleges, which not only shaped our government’s role in education as college enrollment increased fifteen-fold. This act also lead to us landing the first man on the moon. (National Defense Education Act of 1958, 85th Cong.) In the face of adversity, our nation has stood tall and withheld its value. Today, we are once again faced with an enormous challenge. After passing the NDEA, the U.S continued to give loans to college students, and while it did lead to increased enrollment, the Department of Education is more or less the largest bank in terms of loans, and the national student debt is at an all-time high standing at $1.5 trillion and rising. There are hundreds of thousands of borrowers that are being rejected from debt forgiveness programs due to being misled by third-party loan servicers or a general lack of education for these programs. (Friedman, Zack. “Why 100,000 Borrowers Were Rejected For Student Loan Forgiveness.") Our nation is also separated as many politicians and their constituents are stuck idly arguing over reforms. This debt crisis is also affecting us on a global scale. This is better explained as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)  did an article on the top ten most educated countries in the world with Canada being ranked first as more than fifty-five percent of the population being college-educated and the U.S. is ranked sixth with not even having forty-six percent of the nation being considered educated. Basically, we are no longer the top nation in the world. We are not leading the world in innovation as we once were and we are still being crushed by student debt. While many us feel hopeless in this situation, now is not the time to give up. Just as we pushed ourselves in the Space Race, we need to actively push ourselves once again to make long-lasting policy changes so that we can continue to encourage secondary education and make sure that our fair nation and that we can once again rise up and remind, not just the world, but ourselves that we are capable of overcoming any trial in our way, because this is America.

[tlatollotl]

There's no other way to put it: Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos is a supermom.

She's raising five children, does housework and chores — we're talking about fresh tortillas every day made from stone-ground corn — and she helps with the family's business in their small village about 2 1/2 hours west of Cancun on the Yucatan.

Sitting on a rainbow-colored hammock inside her home, Burgos, 41, is cool as a cucumber. It's morning, after breakfast. Her youngest daughter, 4-year-old Alexa, sits on her knee, clearly trying to get her attention by hitting a teddy bear on her mom's leg. The middle daughter, 9-year-old Gelmy, is running around with neighborhood kids — climbing trees, chasing chickens — and her oldest daughter, 12-year-old Angela, has just woken up and started doing the dishes, without being asked. The older kids aren't in school because it's spring break.

Burgos is constantly on parental duty. She often tosses off little warnings about safety: "Watch out for the fire" or "Don't play around the construction area." But her tone is calm. Her body is relaxed. There's no sense of urgency or anxiety.

In return, the children offer minimal resistance to their mother's advice. There's little whining, little crying and basically no yelling or bickering.

In general, Burgos makes the whole parenting thing look — dare, I say it — easy. So I ask her: "Do you think that being a mom is stressful?"

Burgos looks at me as if I'm from Mars. "Stressful? What do you mean by stressful?" she responds through a Mayan translator.

A five-minute conversation ensues between Burgos and the translator, trying to convey the idea of "stressful." There doesn't seem to be a straight-up Mayan term, at least not pertaining to motherhood.

But finally, after much debate, the translator seems to have found a way to explain what I mean, and Burgos answers.

"There are times that I worry about my children, like when my son was 12 and only wanted to be with his friends and not study," Burgos says. "I was worried about his future." But once she guided him back on track, the worry went away.

In general, she shows no sense of chronic worry or stress.

"I know that raising kids is slow," she says. "Little by little they will learn."

Breast, formula or goat?

Burgos learned how to be a mom by watching — and helping — her own mom, her aunts and her neighbors raise many children. Throughout her childhood, she was training to be a mom.

Here in the U.S., many parents don't have this firsthand experience before having children themselves. Instead, we often learn about burping, potty training and tantrum control through parenting books, Google searches and YouTube videos. But this information comes with two big caveats, which aren't always divulged.

For starters, parenting advice can give the impression that the recommendations are based on science. But a deep look at some studies reveals that the science is more like smoke and mirrors. Sometimes the studies don't even test what the parenting expert is purporting they do.

Take for instance a study often cited as evidence that the "cry-it-out" method of sleep training is effective. The method claims that if babies are left to cry themselves to sleep, eventually they will learn to fall asleep on their own without crying, and sleep through the night.

But what the study actually tests is a gentler regime, in which babies were left to cry for only a short amount of time before being comforted. And the parents were supported by a hefty amount of personalized counseling on their babies' sleep and eating habits. The babies who made progress also did not retain the ability to put themselves to sleep and stay asleep over the long term.

As psychologist Ben Bradley argues in his book Vision of Infancy, a Critical Introduction to Psychology: "Scientific observations about babies are more like mirrors which reflect back the preoccupations and visions of those who study them than like windows opening directly on the foundations of the mind."

And sometimes the data supporting the recommendation are so flimsy that another study in a few years will come along and not only overturn the first study but completely flip the advice 180 degrees.

This is exactly what happened last year with peanuts. Back in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents not to give babies peanut butter because one study suggested early exposure would increase the risk of developing an allergy. But last year, the medical community made a complete about-face on the advice and now says "Let them eat peanuts!" Early peanut exposure actually prevents allergies, follow up studies have found.

So if science isn't the secret sauce to parenting books, what is? To answer that, we have to go back in time.

In the early 1980s, the British writer Christina Hardyment began reviewing more than 650 parenting books and manuals, dating all the way back to the mid-1700s when advice publications started appearing in hospitals. The result is an illuminating book, called Dream Babies, which traces the history of parenting advice from 17th-century English physician and philosopher John Locke to the modern-day medical couple Bill and Martha Sears.

The conclusions from the book are as clear as your baby's tears: Advice in parenting books is typically based not on rigorous scientific studies as is at times claimed but on the opinions and experiences of the authors and on theories from past parenting manuals — sometimes as long as the 18th century.

Then there's the matter of consistency — or lack thereof. Since the late 1700s, "experts" have flip-flopped recommendations over and over, from advising strict routines and discipline to a more permissive, laissez-faire approach and back again.

"While babies and parents remain constants, advice on the former to the latter veers with the winds of social, philosophical and psychological change," Hardyment writes. "There is no such thing as a generally applicable blueprint for perfect parenting."

Take, for instance, the idea that babies need to feed on a particular schedule. According to Hardyment's research, that advice first appears in a London hospital pamphlet in 1748. Sleep schedules for babies start coming into fashion in the early 1900s. And sleep training? That idea was proposed by a British surgeon-turned-sports writer in 1873. If babies "are left to go to sleep in their cots, and allowed to find out that they do not get their way by crying, they at once become reconciled, and after a short time will go to bed even more readily in the cot than on the lap," John Henry Walsh wrote in his Manual of Domestic Economy.

Even the heated debate about breastfeeding has been simmering, and flaring up, for at least 250 years, Hardyment shows. In the 18th century, mothers didn't have high-tech formula but had many recommendations about what was best for the baby and the family. Should a mother send the baby off to a wet nurse's home, so her husband won't be offended by the sight of a baby suckling? And if the family couldn't afford a wet nurse, there was specially treated cow's milk available or even better, the baby could be nursed by a goat, 18th-century parenting books advised. (If you're wondering how moms accomplished such a feat, Hardyment includes an 18th-century drawing of a young mom pushing a swaddled newborn underneath a goat's udder.)

Goat udders aside, perhaps the bigger issue with parenting books and advice on the Web is what they aren't telling you. And boy, is there a large hole.

These sources ignore most of the world and come almost entirely from the experience of Western culture. But when it comes to understanding what a baby needs, how kids work and what to do when your toddler is lying on the sidewalk (just asking for a friend), Western society might not be the best place to focus.

"WEIRD," stressed-out parents equal anxious kids?

In 2010, three scientists at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, rocked the psychology world.

They published a 23-page paper titled "The weirdest people in the world?" And in it, uncovered a major limitation with many psychological studies, especially those claiming to address questions of "human nature."

First, the team noted that the vast majority of studies in psychology, cognitive science and economics — about 96 percent — have been performed on people with European backgrounds. And yet, when scientists perform some of these experiments in other cultures the results often don't match up. Westerners stick out as outliers on the spectrum of behavior, while people from indigenous cultures tend to clump together, more in the middle.

Even in experiments that appear to test basic brain function, like visual perception, Westerners can act strangely. Take one of the most famous optical illusions — the Muller-Lyer illusion, from 1889.

The Müller-Lyer illusion, devised in 1889.

Americans often believe the second line is about 20 percent longer than the first, even though the two lines are exactly the same length. But when scientists gave the test to 14 indigenous cultures, none of them were tricked to the same degree as Westerners. Some cultures, such as the San foragers in southern Africa's Kalahari desert, knew the two lines were equal length.

The conclusion from these analyses was startling: People from Western society, "including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans," Joseph Heinrich and his colleagues wrote. The researchers even came up with a catchy acronym to describe the phenomenon. They called our culture WEIRD, for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.

With that paper, the ethnocentric view of psychology cracked. It wasn't so much that the emperor of psychology had no clothes. It was more that he was dancing around in Western garb pretending to represent all humanity.

A few years later, an anthropologist from Utah State University, David Lancy, performed a similar analysis on parenting. The conclusion was just as clear-cut: When you look around the world and throughout human history, the Western style of parenting is WEIRD. We are outliers.

In many instances, what we think is "necessary" or "critical" for childhood is actually not present in any other cultures around the world or throughout time.

"The list of differences is really, really long," says David Lancy, who summarizes them in the second edition of his landmark book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. "There may be 40 to 50 things that we do that you don't see in indigenous cultures."

Perhaps most striking is how Western society segregates children from adults. We have created two worlds: the kid world and the adult world. And we go through great pains to keep them apart. Kids have their own special foods, their own times to go to sleep, their own activities on the weekends. Kids go to school. Parents go to work. "Much of the adult culture ... is restricted [for kids]," Lancy writes. "Children are perceived as too young, uneducated, or burdensome to be readily admitted to the adult sphere."

But in many indigenous cultures, children are immersed in the adult world early on, and they acquire great skills from the experience. They learn to socialize, to do household chores, cook food and master a family's business, Lancy writes.

Western culture is also a relative newcomer to parenting. Hunter-gatherers and other indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to hone their strategies, not to mention that the parent-child relationship actually evolved in these contexts.

Of course, just because a practice is ancient, "natural" or universal doesn't mean it's necessarily better, especially given that Western kids eventually have to live — and hopefully succeed — in a WEIRD society. But widening the parenting lens, even just a smidgen, has a practical purpose: It gives parents options.

"When you look at the whole world and see the diversity out there, parents can start to imagine other ways of doing things," says Suzanne Gaskins, a developmental psychologist at Northeastern Illinois University, who for 40 years has been studying how Maya moms in the Yucatan raise helpful kids.

"Some of the approaches families use in other cultures might fit an American child's needs better than the advice they are given in books or from the pediatricians," she adds.

Who's in charge?

So what kind of different philosophies are out there?

When I spent time with Maya families that Gaskins has studied, I saw a very different approach to control.

In Western culture, parenting is often about control.

"We think of obedience from a control angle. Somebody is in charge and the other one is doing what they are told because they have to," says Barbara Rogoff, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the Maya culture for 30 years.

Gelmy, one of the five kids in Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgosa's family, rakes the backyard of their home in Yucatan, Mexico.

And if you pay attention to the way parents interact with children in our society, the idea is blazingly obvious. We tend to boss them around. "Put your shoes on!" or "Eat your sandwich!"

"People think either the adult is in control or the child is in control," Rogoff says.

But what if there is another way to interact with kids that removes control from the equation, almost altogether?

That's exactly what the Mayas — and several other indigenous cultures — do. Instead of trying to control children, Rogoff says, parents aim to collaborate with them.

"It's kids and adults together accomplishing a common goal," Rogoff says. "It's not letting the kids do whatever they want. It's a matter of children — and parents — being willing to be guided."

In the Maya culture, even the littlest of children are treated with this respect. "It's collaborative from the get-go."

The idea is so strong that some Mayan languages don't even have a word for "control" when talking about children, Rogoff says.

After visiting the Maya village this spring, I've been trying this approach with my 2 1/2-year-old daughter. For instance, I often struggle to get Rosemary to put her clothes on the morning. In the past, I would nag and yell: "Put your shoes on! Get your jacket!"

But now I try a more collaborative approach. "Rosemary, mom, dad and Mango [our dog] are all going to the beach," I explain. "If you want to go to the beach, you have to put your shoes on. Do you want to go to the beach?" So far it's working.

And if Rosemary says she doesn't want to go to the beach? What would a Maya mom do? She would drop her off at an aunt's or neighbor's house and spend an afternoon without her. Because Maya families also have a different idea about who is supposed to care for the kids. One way to think of it: They don't keep mom in a box.

Get mom out of the box

In our culture there's a lingering belief that the ideal family structure for kids is a stay-at-home mom who devotes her full attention to the kids. That may sound like a relic from the past. But even just 10 years ago, 41 percent of people thought moms working outside was harmful to society, PEW research found. The result is a mom stuck in an apartment or a single-family home — which are both essentially boxes — raising children, alone.

But if you look around the world and throughout human history, this parenting approach is arguably one of the most nontraditional out there. The notion that the mom is responsible for raising the children, alone, is even strange within Western culture. Up until about 150 years ago, households were much larger and included extended family members and sometimes paid help, historian Stephanie Coontz documents in The Way We Never Were. And women were expected to earn some income for the family. "Women not only brought home half the bacon, they often raised and butchered the pig," Coontz says.

Anthropologist David Lancy compares the "mom in the box" approach to parenting to what happens with an Inuit family in the Arctic, when inclement weather isolates a mom and her child in an igloo and forces the mom to be the only playmate for the children. Most of the burden of parenting is placed on the mom. "There is every reason to believe that modern living conditions in which infants and toddlers are isolated from peers in single-parent or nuclear households produce a parallel effect," Lancy writes: a mom left to a perform a role typically performed by children — that is, siblings, cousins, neighborhood kids and whoever else is hanging around a home.

Human children didn't evolve in a nuclear family. Instead, for hundreds of thousands of years, kids have been brought up with a slew of people — grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, the neighbors, Lancy writes. It's not that you need a whole village, as the saying goes, but rather an extended family — which could include biological relatives but also neighbors, close friends or paid help.

Throughout human history, motherhood has been seen as a set of tasks that can be accomplished by many types of people, like relatives and neighbors, the historian John R. Gillis writes in The World Of Their Own Making. Anthropologists call them "alloparents" — "allo" simply means "other."

Across the globe, cultures consider alloparents key to raising children, Lancy writes.

The Maya moms value and embrace alloparents. Their homes are porous structures and all sorts of "allomoms" flow in and out. When a woman has a baby, other moms work together to make sure she can take a break each day to take a shower and eat meals, without having to hold the baby. (How civilized is that!)

In one household with four kids that I visited, the aunt dropped off food, the grandma stopped by to help with a neighbor's baby and, all the while, the oldest daughter looked after the toddler — while the mom fed the livestock and started to make lunch. But in Western culture, over the past few centuries, we have pushed alloparents to the periphery of the parenting landscape, Gillis writes. They aren't as valued and sometimes even denigrated as a means for working moms to outsource parenting duties.

In the past few generations, fathers have stepped up and started helping with a big chunk of parenting duties. Since 1965, American dads have more than doubled the number of hours they spend each week on child care, PEW research found. But moms still carry most of the load. They spend, on average, 14 hours each week on child care while fathers spend about 7.

The result is something unique in human history: A mom stuck in a box, often alone, doing the job typically performed by a handful of people. As Gillis writes, "Never have mothers been so burdened by motherhood."

[divergent-one-1984]

Organized Crime Ring in Astoria, NY. I have been the victim of TARGETED COMMUNITY HARASSMENT SINCE SUMMER 2016 because of my race and gender first, making this ongoing abuse DISCRIMINATORY HATE CRIME. I am an African American female.

This ongoing abuse since Summer 2016 is going on in a neighborhood under the jurisdiction of the 114th Precinct, in apartment buildings managed by Central Astoria, LLC.

In addition to me being stalked and harassed because I am an African American female, I am being harassed for who I am and my life views, based on personal, private, confidential information illegally accessed and leaked while I was employed at NYC Department of Education where the abuse started in the form of WORKPLACE MOBBING, forcing me to quit in 2016 because I could not take the abuse anymore.

Confidential medical information (HPV, ABORTION) illegally accessed and leaked, was also used to justify the abuse.

I am being abused also because of my life views, which are more liberal, individual, critical thinking, free thinking, and open-minded, including my atheism. Basically, I don't fit into boxes people try to put me in, I am being targeted and abused for who I am and how I think, on multiple levels.

Also, to be quite candid, these people appear to highly subscribe to a group think mentality, don't seem to think for themselves of to think critically and let their religion overrule common sense, intellectual, and emotional intelligence so much so that I don't even think most of them have the ability to even fully understand who I am, the complexities, and the importance of individualism, choice, free will, dignity, privacy, anonymity as basic human rights simply based on the fact that they are closed off in their thinking, operate at a low vibrational level, and probably lack education and knowledge about history and culture of this country because they chose to siloe by their religion and ethnic origins and have the nerve to flip things when they are the ones filled with so much hate, they can even see it, its natural to them and seems to be an extension of their religious beliefs and their own bigotry, they are projecting their hate onto me even though I have never done anything to them.

They are operating off of some lies, half truths someone(s) told almost a decade ago, simply because they have hate and intolerance inherently in their spirit and opposed to anyone who does not subscribe to the life views they have, instead of living and let live they condemn people for being themselves and try to exert coercive control (an actual crime in some European countries) to try to change them as a person as if they have a right to do this.

They also make ridiculous assumptions because of close mindedness, which does not take into account details, context, and nuance, pretty much a reflection of the way society operates today.

We live very much in a society where if people don't think like the labels / boxes they "are supposed to" think then they should be condemned and cast out and the assumptions / perceptions about them are true and make them entirely who they are. Instead of leaving people alone we have to get them to agree with us or see things our way, that is ridiculous.

There are many reasons why people don't see eye to eye on things and there is nothing wrong with that, it should be expected based on the sheer volume of people in the world and the diversity of people, this is healthy intellectual debate, as long as boundaries and beliefs are respected, noone should be trying to force their way of life or way of thinking onto another just because you dont agree, especially if you resorting to emotional violence to punish / change someone (especially when your point of reference is based on lies someone with mental health issues and an unhealthy interest im me started seemingly because I would not give them attention they expected), that's morally and ethically wrong.

Since this hate, abuse, and coercive control is mostly coming from religious people I find it quite ridiculous and hypocritical, and they say Atheists have no morals, that's a joke.

I probably have more of a moral and ethical compass and understanding of right and wrong than any of these people put together, obviously, or they would not be harassing, stalking, and abusing me everyday for going into 8 years now.

These people hide behind religion to justify hate and hateful actions against another human being.

Live and Let live and Agree to Disagree are my mottos, this is an adult, intellectually healthy way to be and live. Mind your own business and don't bother me if I don't bother you.

Many people are not just not one thing, we are multifaceted, if your intellectual abilities are diminished in some way you will probably never even be able to grasp that concept, but at the end of day regardless of all this, no one has a right to harm or abuse another human being for any reason, it does not take a high IQ to know this, it's basic right and wrong, but religious zealotry, fundamentalism, extremism, racism, sexism, etc. can make people do nonsensical, stupid cruel things just because.

I have been part of this particular community since 1976, I have never had problems with individuals or groups of individuals and have never done anything to anyone here or in the workplace so obviously the abuse is entirely NOT instigated by me. Someone(s) with severe mental health issues and an unhealthy interest in me started this purely based on something made up in their head and unwarranted hate.

Everyday in this neighborhood, the majority of people I am being harassed by are Muslims and Latinos, 2 of the most religious groups of people on the planet. I do not believe this to be a coincidence, its by design because what is being done to me comes from a place of pure hate, discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, misogyny and religious zealotry, along with straight up lies, truths, and half truths from a gossip and a rumor mill started as part of WORKPLACE MOBBING HARASSMENT while I was employed at the NYC Department of Education simply because someone did not like me and wanted to exert control over me for some reason, not because I did something to them.

Btw, I was awakened this morning around 430ish AM due to the ongoing, daily NOISE HARASSMENT in my apartment building and in the neighborhood, which is why I am up so early. Ongoing NOISE HARASSMENT and SLEEP DEPRIVATION especially this morning to agitate me because I have an appt to leave the house today for bed ridden relative. These stalkers / harassers / abusers want to not only harm me but exert coercive control over me and agitate me to try to get me to "act out" in public so that they can get police involved, this has been happening since the WORKPLACE MOBBING I experienced while I was employed at NYC Department of Education.

The last straw that made me quit was because I realized they were trying to not only fabricate a firing for cause they were trying to get me to lash out and put hands on someone so that I would be arrested and get entangled with the legal system, even though I have been a law abiding citizen and am not even a violent person. I suppose they wanted to fabricate situations repetitively in hopes I would act and fall into stereotypes of the angry black woman and violent black person. I knew it was time to go after a specific interaction with a staff member where she tried to block my egress from elevator upon my arrival to work. She was obviously trying to get me to lash out and put hands on her on camera even though she is the one in the wrong by physically blocking my egress. Multiple people in the woekplace had been harassing me for months at that point so I think they thought I was agitated enough that it could potentially cause me to act of violently but it did not and still hasn't after about 8 years now of daily stalking, abuse, and harassment.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

[songofmysnark]

The Bullshit Industry That Is Women’s Clothing

We’re gonna have a little talk, friends.  We’re gonna have a talk about the state of women’s clothing and how much it sucks.

I’m talking off-the-rack clothing aimed at adult, working women.  Your Ann Taylors.  Your J.Crews.  Your Banana Fucking Republics. The Nordstroms of the world. You know, the companies that are trying to get us to buy their most recent monstrosity of polyblended horror and the subject of plenty of thinkpieces, this one included.  “Are millennials killing the clothing industry?”  Yes, because you deserve to die, but also now we’re naked so can we please strike a plea bargain?

Before any of you get your panties in a twist, I’m counting stay at home moms as working women, because domestic labor is work, childcare is work, and juggling logistics is work.  If you can outsource it and the person who is doing it would reasonably expect to get paid, it’s work -- so don’t tell me being a SAHM isn’t work just because nobody’s paying her to do the job of a nanny, line cook, housekeeper, administrative assistant, executive director, coach, motivational speaker, teacher, or community organizer.  And also, no SAHM should have to resort to the MLM hell that is LueLaRoe in order to clothe her body.  Put the valentine heart printed butter leggings down, Karen.

So, working women, clothing ourselves is hard.  It has gotten worse over the past two decades.  Let us break this shit down:

Declining quality.  Don’t gaslight women over 30 and tell us that the decline in quality is all in our heads and that our expectations have increased as we’ve gotten older and more critical or educated.  A lot of us still have our blazers from J.Crew that we bought in 2007 -- at least I do.  I saved them because they’re gorgeous and sentimental, and now I save them as a physical reminder that clothing currently available to me as a retail consumer has sharply decreased in quality.  

Fit issues.  Between the unreasonably sloppy, inconsistent sizing (sometimes between two of the exact same garments), bizarre proportions, limitations on size ranges, and a seemingly universal refusal to cut garments for women larger than a B cup, women’s clothing fits horribly.  The solution to this problem seems to be to sew everything in stretchy, cheap materials that are clingy, unflattering, and translucent, which translates to...

...Awful styles.  Since the solution to lazy fit is stretch, the industry makes a lot of clothing styles that are not suitable for most women’s daily lives because they’re too cheap to use decent fabric in making clothing to account for the fact that they’re too cheap to invest in fit and quality construction.  Oh, you can’t wear a cold-shoulder top and a pair of stretchy black leggings to your corporate job?  Too fucking bad, that’s what’s in stock right now.  If we call it “Athleisure,” it’s all good!  And if you look shitty in it, it’s because you’re not athletic enough to be wearing it.

It’s funny how when women abandoned the corset, it was liberating -- until style started demanding that women become their own corsets.  No lumps or bumps or bulges allowed, but unless you want to wear Spanx (read: a girdle), you better diet yourself down to a flawlessly smooth size 2 if you don’t want to look horrible in a simple tshirt.

Sure, good style is available to those who have enough social or economic capital to access it -- and by social capital, I am including people who are thin.

The state of plus-sized fashion has always been appalling, but as the country tumbles into greater income inequality, the concentration of jobs paying a living wage into traffic-jammed cities with a lack of reasonably affordable or accessibly housing, the masses are not going to be getting thinner.  The workday has been getting longer, either by extending hours or by making it very clear that people who leave before 6 are slackers, or by tethering us to email in the spirit of “leaning in.”  Sorry, when you spend 1-3 hours/day commuting to your soul-sucking job that doesn’t pay enough to afford help to outsource all of the shit you have to do on weekends in order to function as an adult, the “obesity epidemic” is not going to end.  How about we call a spade a spade: the “obesity epidemic” is a side-effect of the confluence of income inequality and late-stage capitalism.  “Calories in, calories out, it’s so simple!” say people who are able to prioritize and afford to be thin, and are rewarded in kind with clothing that at least isn’t punishingly ugly or uncomfortable.

Let’s talk about uncomfortable clothing: there’s a lot of it when you get out of the stretchy-spandex land masking the laziness of corporate clothing behemoths behind 2% spandex in an already forgiving knit.  Wovens, friends, let’s snark on wovens.  Wovens are the fabrics that are stiffer -- think jeans without spandex, chinos without spandex, button down shirts without spandex, your wool coat without spandex, etc.  

Believe it or not, young people, most of these items didn’t stretch 10-15 years ago, or if they did it was a tiny amount -- enough so that you could comfortably drive a car while still wearing a garment that was purposefully cut and constructed so that it would lay close to the body.  Instead of spandex, clothing was constructed with more ease -- more space, looser in areas where a normal human body needs space to move.  And nobody looked shitty, because the clothing was made so that the structure of the garment kept it from looking like a sack of potatoes; that structure comes from quality fit, construction, and materials.  

And of course, companies will retort that if they did anything the way they did 10-15 years ago, costs would skyrocket!  Materials are expensive and skilled labor isn’t cheap, especially if paid a living wage in a country with labor regulations to protect workers!  To which I say: bullshit.  Costs won’t skyrocket unless you expect customers to pad the pockets of your shareholders and executives to make up for increased production costs that narrow the profit margin.  Essentially, you want the same profit margin that was established and became the norm when you switched to shitty quality while raising prices.

The problem is really of your own doing, Mr. Mall Fashion Executive Dude; you trained your customers to expect good quality clothing for decades, rested on your laurels while increasing your profit margins by cutting production costs, got everyone on the corporate end used to booming profits based on this giant margin, and then got confused when shit went south.  You went for short-term profits, banking on the reputation of your brand to carry the company through a quality control nosedive.  And now we’re rubbing your face in it.

So here’s some advice to the corporate powers that be: 

Make some fucking decent clothing.

Make the entire line in a wide range of sizes, 00-24+ with no differentiation between “plus” and “misses.”  

Give women’s clothing the attention, quality, consistency, and detail of men’s items.

Stop putting random shit on your clothing.  I want a goddamn tshirt without a sequin, weird design, picture of a bird, a saying, etc.

Don’t “bring back a classic” and mark it up 200%.  Take a hint: we all still have that item from 2003, don’t think we won’t compare them and put the videos taking you down for both an outrageous markup and a comparatively mediocre product.  Looking at you, Lululemon’s “full on Luon” (i.e. regular luon from a few years prior with a new name and higher price).  Looking at you, J.Crew icon trench from 2003 (i.e. the old trench marked up higher than it was before but with a shittier fit and cheaper materials).  

If your wovens look like shit on the average American woman, that means you need to hire people who know how to design a decent garment, use better materials, and learn about ease, drape, and tailoring.  

If your pants don’t fit women with hourglass figures, the problem is your pants.

And finally:  Listen to the women screaming at you on Instagram every time you roll out a crappy collaboration.  What do they want?  Natural fibers, better fit, a size range that is inclusive and reflects the general public without arbitrary cutoffs, good design, cohesive collections, solid basics, durability, functional pockets that can hold a fucking iphone, classic lines, and comfort.  

If that is too much of an order, maybe get the fuck out of the industry that makes clothing for women, because there are actually companies that have demonstrated that it is possible to do it right:  MM LaFleur (pricey, but excellent), Boden, Land’s End, etc. are all examples of companies that manage not to completely screw the pooch on selling clothing to women.  Hell, I’ll even give you Eileen Fisher.  Give me some linen and a functional pocket, Ms. Fisher, I’ll gladly look like a sexless therapist who moonlights at an art gallery.

But seriously, fuck right off with this cold-shoulder, poly-blend, lazy bullshit.

[sncs2021]

1) finding data mindmap

im thinking of finding individual experiences from social media using my own personal instagram because i already have followers who fit my demographic of genz people of colour, especially in south auckland. using their experiences i could produce specific mediums from that when it comes to the summative part. for now i think i will use general ones i can find in my research

2)visual meanings

colours i want to use should be vibrant and distinctive because i think it gives off a conversational and welcoming tone. so im thinking the rainbows colours, going a bit basic but direct enough. the illustrations i want to use should be colourful so im thinking towards artist inspirations that produce artwork like that. someone i have in mind on the top of my head is tess-smith roberts.

3) what should i even target for a topic within casual racism?

from doing my visual meaning mindmap i kinda just froze and thought "what even is my meaning for this campaign?" so i just wrote up some impacts of casual racism i could think of from the top of my head. one significant one is mental health/self esteem. when people say certain things, especially racist, it puts poc down, giving them a mindset that have to cater to a mostly White work/lifestyle environment, pushing away their own cultural backgrounds and appreciation. eventually overall mental health can be affected. in many ways, this boosts up/caters to capitalism, by contributing to making products that people really don’t need but they’ll find any way to convince you that your life depends on it. an example i have in mind and have personally seen and experienced is internalised hate for my own race and skin tone. i would see white people being treated better and basically glorified and wondered "why wasnt i born like them"/ "i want to be white", etc. things like that was unhealthily encouraged a lot in the indian communities here, fiji, and especially india. like i mentioned earlier, mindsets and low self esteem created by the media and general white privileges, capitalism takes advantage of that. in india theres a product called "Fair & Lovely", which is targeted to young girls and women that have darker skin tones. this product is a body cream that is meant to "lighten" and "enhance" your skin, hence making you "prettier" and more appealing to the beauty standard that we unconsciously follow, to be a white passing person. it is so messed up that even to this day, women are taught to hate their skin tone. something i saw the other day was when a POC bleaches her skin it is considered self hate, but when a white woman tans her skin, its just a normal “sElf CaRe” kind of thing you do during summer. notice, that whenever a POC does something it always follows up with criticism and backlash, but if a white person does the same thing or similar its “liberating” or “the best thing ever”. it really bothers me that we’ve all basically given into “white is right” in so many ways.

4) "NZ isn't racist?!l

when it comes to the demographic, in regards to nz, there's often arguments about whether our country is racist. as a poc i know for sure, that there is. there has been many Loudly shown racism, that is often pushed as side by the ignorants but there's so many subtle acts of racism, which brings us to casual racism. lack of education on poc, especially the indigenous people, the maori, leads to racist whites thinking they own the land they have stolen and have unnecessary amounts of disrespect for POC. the education system is a significant 'culprit' for this, because from personal experience, we barely touched on history of Maori and moreso on American history, which thinking now, why does it matter so much? we hardly know about the land we are in and we're just given work on a president who has nothing to do with nz. i remember learning about the treaty of waitangi, and thinking it was a happy agreement between the settlers and the indigenous people. i recently found that some of the maori, didnt want to sign and some were even forced. so it wasnt as pretty and happy as it seemed. things like this makes me question how some people don't understand the importance of the voices of POC and systemic racism, in all its forms.

[ooxiebooxie]

“ 'Twas a long time ago, longer now than it seems in a place perhaps you've seen in your dreams. For the story you're about to be told began with the holiday worlds of auld. Now you've probably wondered where [ nightmares ] come from. If you haven't I'd say it's time you begun. “

BASIC INFORMATION.

What is your character’s full name?

Tim Page

How is it pronounced?

TIM  PAYJ

Is there a meaning behind it?

Tim is derived from the Greek Τιμοθεος ( Timotheos ) which translates into “ honouring God “. His parents chose the name for their son, naming him after his great grandfather who was known for his compassion heart. Page is also derived from a Greek word παιδιον ( paidion ) with the meaning “ little boy “. The name is an occupational name meaning " servant / page " — and thus we do not need to ask question why Oogie chose to change his name.

Does your character have any nicknames?

Oogie Boogie. Oogie. Mr Oogie Boogie Man. Meanest Guy.

When and where were they born?

Tim Page was born on the nineteenth of april in nineteen-seventytwo in the town of Carthay.

What’s their zodiac sign and what traits do they most relate to?

Aries rules the head and leads with the head, often literally walking head first, leaning forwards for speed and focus. Its representatives are naturally brave and rarely afraid of trial and risk. They possess youthful strength and energy, regardless of their age and quickly perform any given tasks. Aries is one of the most active zodiac signs. It is in their nature to take action, sometimes before they think about it well. Their challenges show when they get impatient, aggressive and vent anger pointing it to other people.

What’s their nationality?

American – but that depends entirely on which paper he chooses to show authority to identify himself. He has several. Sometimes you just need to be a different person, when your name and the stories strung to it travel faster than you.

What’s their occupation?

Being a winning gambler. 

What gender do they identify themselves as?

Male.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

What’s their eye color?

Dark brown, appearing to be black.

Do they wear glasses or contacts?

Neither.

Hair color?

Black, although depending on the light it can appear to have a hint of dark brown in them.

Have they ever dyed their hair or wanted to?

In the young age of seven Tim has been obsessed with the colour green and wanted to dye his hair a bright neon colour ( maybe add some purple streaks for additional fun ) but fortunately, it was one of the things his parents did not allow their son to do. 

Height?

179cm ( back at it again, being European and this time lazy )

Body build?

Surprisingly slim considering his messed up lifestyle. 

Do they have any birthmarks?

No.

Do they have any piercings or tattoos?

It is no secret Oogie is as much a gambler at heart as a person could be, and thus it should not come as a surprise that his obsession has gone under his skin too. He has a tattoo ( that keeps getting added onto ) which proudly display his undying love for games, gambling and most importantly, winning. His tattoos tell a story and if you understand the language, you might just learn what ( or who? ) he has won too.

If not, do they want to get some?

Now let me tell you something about Oogie Boogie: He’ll never stop playing, and as long as there’s the chance to win he will take it, and thus more tattoos are to come.

Do they have a healthy life style?

No. His life is about as healthy as his shack is clean — his nights are too long, gambling always combined with alcohol and cigars, his days survived on coffee and cigarettes, his kitchen is used but only to stock the take-out containers in and literally lives among bugs — but honestly what do you expect? Oogie doesn’t have the time to have a healthy life. He is a busy man.

How easy do they get sick?

Let’s just say Oogie is lucky that he spends most of his time at the casino, because if he was to spend it in his shack between all the filth and his beloved bug collection he sure would get sick a lot more often.

Any marks on their body ( injuries, … )?

If you mess with the wrong people, you are bound to have some nasty scars. Oogie has several faint ones scattered across his knuckles though they are barely visible. The worst ones are those who needed stitches — if he takes off his jacket you can still see the messily stitched ( because there were times he just hadn’t been able to go to the hospital, knowing they would ask tooo man question ) scars on his arms especially, but his back and chest too.

What’s their personal style/how do they like to dress?

Comfortable but fitting clothing. His trusted black leather jacket is something he basically does not leave the house without, and the rest of his clothing is too rather dark in colour ( the only bit of colour he owns is in form of plaids ). Important to notice is that every piece of clothing is ridiculously expensive — that white t-shirt you see him wearing? Yeah, that was about 400 bucks. Now, you might wonder why Oogie of all people would waste so much money on ordinary looking clothing, but what can I say other than that he just really hates loose threads.

What is their favorite and least favorite feature about themselves?

His skills, and though this might not be a physical feature, it’s the one answer you will get from Oogie about his favourite thing about himself: He is proud to call himself a winner, one who does not need to rely on ‘ luck ‘ but can rely entirely on himself. His least favourite is a weakness and thus shall never be revealed — after all, a gambler never lets his pokerface slip.

PERSONALITY.

Positive traits?

Ambitious, Analytical, Attantive, Bold, Brilliant, Cautious, Confident, Determined, Devote, Efficient, Eloquent, Hard-Working, Intelligent, Inventive, Logical, Mature, Observant, Persistent, Proud, Punctual, Reliable, Strategic, Strong, Succesful, Tough

Negative traits?

Angr, Annoyed, Argumentative, Bad, Bossy, Cold-Hearted, Critical, Cruel, Cunning, Dangerous, Dark, Devious, Dishonest, Facetious, Greedy, Harssh, Hot-Tempered, Ignorant, Impatient, Lackadaisical, Lazy, Manipulative, Sadistic, Scheming, Self-Centered, Unforgiving, Violent

What do they consider to be the best and the worst part of their personality?

The best part is hands down his determination. For all the ‘ evil ‘ character traits Oogie’s determination is actually the most dangerous one, because the moment he sets his mind onto something, he doesn’t let go off it until it is his. He strongly believes there’s always a way — it has been proven to him nurmerous time by himself, and if that’s not trustworthy, what is? — to get what he want; you just have to set the stakes straight. His worst trait is the inconsideration, or rather, it has the worst impact on others ( which needless to say, makes Oogie fine with this trait too. Why would he care about others, right? ) but while he thinks everything through on a logical level, the lack of considering he does of the effect on others can get him into trouble. 

Are they more extroverted or introverted?

Extroverted.

Any talents?

Winning, and if you say that it is no talent, ( Oogie would first of all like you to know you are wrong, but fine ) it’s knowing how not to take chances when gambling. He can read other people’s face, can figure out if they are bluffing, can make the maths in his head to know what his, his opponent’s and the cards still remaining in the deck say — and if he can’t, he always knows how to turn the game so he’s the one to win with a little cheat or two. 

What are their fears?

Unravelling — not his clothes, of course, but the web of lies and cheats and crimes he’s built over the years of gambling with the worst of people. They are all secret, and though he is known to be a gambler across town and there are horror stories being shared at night in the darkest of alleys, they are all just that: stories. There’s no proof, his slate is still clean — unless, of course, the carefully crafted web starts to unravel and truth begins to spill.

Do they have any phobias?

No.

What is their soft spot?

Hidden behind a pokerface.

List 3 pet-peeves they can’t stand?

People believing in luck, talkativeness and optimism.

EDUCATION.

How far did they go in school? Are they still studying?

Tim successfully graduated from college with one hell of a good degree, always having given his best at any sort of school. He could’ve easily gone further and he’d already scored a solid and high-paying job, but unfortunately, he won a game in the casino then and everything changed.

Did they like school?

Tim was thrilled about school, glad to have the opportunity to learn new things ( admittedly, some of them were boring, but you have to do what you have to do, right? ) and even on the most annoying days, he had his group of long time friends to make any situation a billion times better.

What type of student are/were they?

In every school there are these type of students who somehow manage to get good grades no matter what, and Tim Page was one of them. One might call it luck ( even Tim did back then ), but the truth is that in his case anyway, Tim was just attentive. He listened in class, worked on the tasks which were given to him and though he did not sit down with a book and learn after school, he was focused enough inside of class to understand and remember what he’d been taught later during an exam. 

What was their favorite subject?

Math. It was the one class which made the most sense to Tim, which made sense everywhere around the world too. For that reason alone it came easy to him, and thank god that it did, because card counting is a lot easier if you know what the fuck you’re doing.

And their least favorite?

English, because he always found writing interpretation was stupid, because how would anyone ever know what the author of some long-outdated literature piece tried to say when they were long dead? It’s not like lying on paper is hard. The only way Tim survived the endless hours he wasted on writing essays was by making his interpretations as ridiculous as one could get. 

What were they/would they have been voted as “ most likely to… ” in the yearbook?

Most likely to suceed.

FAMILY.

Who are your character’s parents?

Belinda and Dunstan Page.

How would your character describe them?

Oogie Boogie would not waste a single breath on them, but they had always been kind and in the time Oogie was still their son, when he was still Tim Page they were the best parents he could’ve ever wished for, supportive and kind, loving him with all of their heart and without any conditions. 

Do they have any siblings?

No.

Are they close with their family?

Tim has always been close to his family, his heart staying close at home wherever he went and if he ever left them for long he made sure give them a call and check up on them. However, time changes everything and when Tim changed into Oogie Boogie so did his relationship with his parents. He didn’t give a shit about them anymore, too distracted by the constant need to win, and when they moved away he barely noticed and did not hear of them again until he found the invitation to their funeral in his letter boy. Needless to say, he did not go. 

ROMANCE & SEXUALITY.

What’s their romantic and sexual orientation?

Bisexual with a preference towards females, and he’s Oogie Boogie, he doesn’t have romantic emotions ( that we know of, anyway ).

Are they seeing anyone right now?

No.

Have they ever been in an relationship?

Yes, there have been several relationships in the course of his life, but none of them were particularly seriouss.

Have they ever been in love?

Yes. He was seventeen when he met her, and it took him not more than a few spoken words until he was head over heels in love with her. There just was something special about her, something that no one had ever had. After going on a couple of dates, their relationship began and their love has been growing ever since — until it ended, of course, like all of his connections did when Tim turned into Oogie.

How easy do they fall for someone?

It’s the toughest task in the world to get through to him and have him even notice you as a potential love interest, therefore not easy at all.

What do they look for in someone?

He doesn’t look for anyone. However, if he did he’d want someone who supports him, who joins his gambling and who he can rely on when they learn what exactly he has been gambling with.

Do they believe in love at first sight? or fate?

Definitely not. Neither exists. You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.

What’s their views on romance? Do they go after it or avoid it?

Oogie doesn’t care. In fact, he’s convinced romance in that sense doesn’t even exist. 

Did they have their first time already? How was it in their point of view?

Yes, and truth be told, it’s been so long Oogie hardly remembers it, but it was with the girl he was in love with... so probably awkward and sweet? who cares?

What is their view on sex?

It's the best part of any relationship he ever had and the only reason why he pities not having a significant other, because it means he can’t just come home to someone and share the joy and enthusiasm that comes with winning with someone... in his bed. 

What are their turn ons and turn offs?

Power is the biggest turn on. One might say winners like the companies of winners, and it could not be truer for Oogie. There’s just something about a person being able to meet you on a similiar level that makes them attractive. On the other side, he hates stuidity and he finds it comes in the most various of traits, making most people nothing but exhausting to him. 

Were they ever cheated on or have they cheated on someone?

He has never been cheated on, but he has definitely cheated. He is Oogie Boogie. The real question is who he hasn’t cheated on.

Do they want to get married in the future?

Hell to the no.

Have kids?

The greatest joy in the world is to have children, and let me tell you a little secret about Oogie: He absolutely does not agree. He has three little minions and they are already enough to handle, plus he can actually hate them and mistreat them without having to feel upset about ruining his own flesh and blood. The real joy in life is winning.

QUIRKS.

Are they right or left handed?

Right Handed.

What’s a word that’s always on their lips?

The name Lock, Shock or Barrel angrily being yelled.

Is there a saying they keep on repeating?

Not a phrase, but he does hum his ‘ Oogie Boogie Song ‘ all the time — that being said, make sure he never sings the lyrics around you for it’s never a good omen if he gets to the line ‘ this may be the last time you hear the oogie boogie song ‘.

Do they curse?

He definitely does. There are times which just need a little bit ( or a lot ) of cursing.

What’s their worst habit?

Spending his money. No matter how often you see him walk out of the casino with a thousand of dollars in his bags, you’ll never see him keep it for longer than a day. Either he pays his debts to the Fates, he spends it on his beloved bugs or he walks right back into the casino to wager it all again.

Do they drink or smoke? How frequently?

He drinks and he smokes cigarettes and cigars at least every week, if not every day.

Are they an early bird or a night owl?

Night owl, because the unfortunate thing about casinos is that they are rarely opened in the normal day to day hours. Oogie wastes his night completely in there, spends his early mornings in a coffee shop of his choice and sleeps the rest of the day away until he can finally go gambling again.

How tidy is their room?

His entire shack is a complete mess and though Oogie recnogises it as one, he does not give a care in the world about it. His belongings are piling all over the floor, his kitchen is filled with the containers of the many take-outs he’s ordered in and is that... a bone? Honestly, at this point you can find almost anything in there.

How long do they usually take getting ready in the morning?

Fifteen minutes tops. His mornings usually include him going into the shower, brushing his teeth and leaving the house a moment later. That being said, his mornings are rarely happening in the morning and more so in the late evenings.

FAVORITES.

What’s their favorite color?

Now, you might think his favourite colour is black because everything he owns and loves seems to be black, but while everything about Tim Page changed when he became Oogie Boogie one thing didn’t: His favourite colour is green, always has and always will be.

Favorite movie?

' Fight Club ‘ because it’s kind of a fucked up movie, isn’t it? and at the same time it is really interesting, allowing a look into the minds of others and how a group ( a colony, one might say ) can work together and create something purely brutal. Oogie always thought in a way they are gambling too.

Music Genre?

Rock’n’Roll.

Food?

Anything that comes per delivery.

Book?

' It ‘ by Stephen King.

Favorite non-alcoholic drink?

Ground black Coffee.

Ice Cream Flavor?

Dark Chocolate.

Indoors or outdoors?

Indoors.

[encephalonfatigue]

hybrid warfare and leftist alliances

this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.

I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.

This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.

As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.

I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:

“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”

I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.

I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.

I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:

“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”

In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.

So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:

 “Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”

Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:

"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"

This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?

Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel.  But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:

“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. In their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”

Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral ‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.

I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).

Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:

“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”

This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:

“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”

Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:

“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”

I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:

“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.

One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”

He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):

“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented.  The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage.  The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism.  From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War.  Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles.  It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.

This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”

I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:

“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”

The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:

“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”

One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:

“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”

The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.

So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.

They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC)  is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.

Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:

“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”

Hoffman later writes:

“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”

I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.

The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:

“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”

One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”

U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):

“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.

This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”

And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:

“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”

So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?

And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough. 

Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:

““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”

Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.

In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his ‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):

One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:

“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.

Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”

While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.

[exploringsocialinformatics]

Post #1: A One-to-One Utopia

I am basing this post off the article “One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality” by Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick, and Prakul Sharma, which I chose both because the timeline of the issue was very interesting and also due to my background in a Secondary Education program where I took courses related specifically to education and technology.

I am wary of anybody who says that they’re going to change the world, but the transition from reading about the Utopian vision of One Laptop, Per Child (creator Nicholas Negroponte once said that they were “invent[ing] the future” [“The Hundred Dollar Laptop: Computing for Developing Nations”]) to the slow but seemingly inevitable downfall was still somewhat surprising. The program is one that had been within my peripheral vision as someone who studied education in my undergrad program and I can understand how people got swept up in the concept, especially when the technology available was less accessible. On first glance, it does seem revolutionary and, in ways, it is. Revolution requires follow-through and support, though, and it inspired doubts even before its initial roll-out, with supporters expressing hesitant skepticism like, “We were excited about the prospects, but kind of scared by the over-simplistic plan, or lack of plan” (Robertson, 2018).

As Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma note, the issues behind OLPC’s original downfall were based in seemingly more consideration for the creation of the hardware than the people they were creating the hardware for (66 – 68). There are plenty of these issues to talk about—the entirely reasonable argument that basic needs like water and physical school structures should be met before the government spends money on untested technology, the notion that OLPC is just a “one size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems” that functions more as a “marketing ploy” (Robertson 2018) than any type of organized program—when it comes to observing why OLPC struggled to the point where they shuttered their organization until it was relatively recently revived. I would argue, though, that one of its fundamental flaws and potentially the most immediately debilitating was their lack of consideration for teachers and, in particular, their lack of follow-through when it comes to measuring their success.

In The Effect of One Laptop per Child on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Students’ Use of Time At Home, a very thorough study that had to be thorough due to a lack of substantive data from OLPC’s program, the researchers found that there was no significant impact on school performance when the laptops were introduced in Peru (Yamada, Lavado, Montenegro 2016). Additionally, Morgan G. Ames—who I will reference several times due to her excellent research in Uruguay—found that the laptop use was largely focused on media consumption: music, TV, video games (Ames 2015). While media consumption absolutely has a place within education, it’s clear that this usage isn’t falling within the realm of what Negroponte was envisioning: namely, programming (Ames 2015) and creation. Essentially, the laptops are often a tool to consume and not create.

In a presentation titled the same as her recent book, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child, Ames explains in-depth the fundamental issues that marred the program from its inception—extremely worth watching if this topic interests you and a fantastic introduction—and tells the story of how Nicholas Negroponte’s main goal was to get laptops in the hands of children and trust that they would make the most of it on their own (Ames 2019). Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma emphasize this, saying in 2009 that “it appears to some that the educational mission has given way to just getting laptops out the door” (66), which implies even more explicitly that the intentions skew a bit more towards business than ever stated by the organization—or, at the very least, attempting to save face when it became apparent they would not make their now obviously over-ambitious goal of getting 150 million laptops into the hands of kids in two years.

It’s important to note that OLPC has consistently stated that their program is about more than the laptops and is also focused on education. On their website, they emphasize, “OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the world. OLPC is a nonprofit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap in to their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community” (“OLPC: Mission”). Considering that Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma reference this quote in their article (68), which means it hasn’t changed since at least 2009 and likely since the first launch in 2005, this is an idea that they’re attempting to embrace without necessarily having the means to do so.

There is an explicit education philosophy—constructionism, which encourages kid to “think about thinking” and have tangible experiences (Robertson 2018)—behind OLPC. I see issues with the implementation of it but don’t want to be overly harsh about it as a concept—after all, I absolutely believe it has a place in classrooms and Seymour Papert, the original mind behind it, studied with Piaget and was openly praised by him (“Seymour Papert”), which is pretty amazing. The main issues with constructionism from my perspective, especially as it applies to the distribution of the OLPC laptops, are twofold: 1. Many teachers in a variety of different educational systems are highly limited in how they’re able to teach and 2. As an educational philosophy, it arguably requires the students involved to have some. . .instruction. Very few, if any, educational practices are studied without being properly implemented by an educator.

This isn’t to say that OLPC doesn’t involve educators in implementing their programs. This is to say that they didn’t do enough in their implementation to properly prepare teachers for how to use the technology in their classroom, including, for example, not even providing teacher training when they rolled out the program in Libya or contacting the teacher’s union in Peru before they were already starting the program there (Robertson 71). In her presentation, Morgan G. Ames describes the decline of use in Paraguay where she studied for several years due to the fact that OLPC didn’t provide any service or repairs to laptops that were imminently more breakable than they advertised (Ames 2019). OLPC’s ultimate plan was to get laptops to kids. I would argue that this does not function as an education plan or even do more than offer a potential tool without guidance to introduce a constructionist philosophy.  

We can see a hint of how OLPC values teachers by looking back to their charter, which states “building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment [. . .] is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world” (“OLPC: The Mission”). That really speaks to most of the major issues: if there isn’t basic infrastructure in place—physical schools with working water—and teachers to guide their learning, can students who haven’t been exposed to this kind of technology (or even those who have) truly benefit from it? How do we measure those true learning possibilities? Can we measure them? It might seem overly technical to try to apply statistics to some big, expansive dream but the dreaminess is, in and of itself, the problem.

Just because these issues exist doesn’t mean that we must write OLPC off entirely, though. The bones of the idea are genuinely well-intentioned and they’ve still managed to get a significant amount of technology to kids even if they didn’t meet their stated goals as their original incarnation. As of this October, they’ve given out 3 million laptops (Cameron 2019) and that certainly matters. Regardless of the outcome, sharing those laptops made opportunities that could help kids in developing nations change their lives and open up more possibilities in the future. 

While there is plenty to criticize about the program, many of the fundamentals  are worthy of praise: constructivism is an important educational practice that can unlock critical thinking skills and creativity in a way that many kids don’t have the opportunity to explore. Just the ability to own and hold and use a laptop is empowering and prepares kids for using other technology. And, overall, Negroponte’s philosophies and reasoning are absolutely inspiring. 

He talks about kids becoming “change agents” and allowing them to “connect with the world, think critically and challenge indoctrinations of intolerance” (Ashling 2010). He wants kids to have the whole world open up to them and has a singular vision for doing so which, for better or worse, is a vision worth exploring.

Also, in a vein I hadn’t considered, Jason Johnson argues in his 2010 article “Can a Laptop Change How the World Teaches?” that he observed sixth graders in his one-to-one laptop program educationally benefiting from their laptops outside of the classroom through things like tracking sports statistics, recording skits, and creating address books (72). While he also invokes the need for a teacher to guide students toward productivity, this is another important factor to consider: OLPC laptops have gone to all kinds of kids in all kinds of places and other one-to-one programs have also been gaining popularity throughout the years. Broadly looking at how kids in general use laptops could bring new significance and meaning to these programs.

From articles titled The Laptop That Will Change The World to articles titled OLPC’s $100 Laptop Was Going to Change the World—Then It All Went Wrong, it’s both fascinating and discouraging to watch OLPC’s struggle. As people, we want to believe that we can change the world—that good people stepping up can change the world—but this is an overly simplistic concept in a complicated world. One good idea constructed within one cultural framework and one philosophy of education that by no means represents both the majority of teacher’s experiences or their capabilities within struggling, flawed educational systems isn’t enough.

One laptop can’t change the world.

 With a sustainable plan, though—it’s not a bad start.

Ames, M. G. (2016). Learning consumption: Media, literacy, and the legacy of One Laptop per Child. The Information Society, 32(2), 85–97

Ashling, Jim. (2010). Laptops bridge gap in structured learning. Information Today, 27(5), 22 - 23

Johnson, Jason. (2008). Can a laptop change how the world teaches?. Knowledge Quest. 36(3), 72 - 73

Kraemer, K. L., Dedrick, J., & Sharma, P. (2009). One laptop per child. Communications of the ACM, 52(6)

Lavado, P., Montenegro, G. & Yamada, G. (2016). The effect of one laptop per child on teachers’ pedagogical practices and students’ use of time at home. IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Robertson, A. (2018, April 16). OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world - then it all went wrong. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now

Seymour Papert. (2007, March). Retrieved January 29, 2020, from https://web.archive.org/web/20150308021353/http://web.media.mit.edu/~papert/

The Hundred Dollar Laptop: Computing for Developing Nations. (2005). Retrieved from https://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16067-the-hundred-dollar-laptop-computing-for-developing-nations

The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child. (2019, March 5). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH13bVUfNuk&t=2s