#freddie deboer

[liskantope]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[st-just]

The CUNY political scientist Corey Robin once said something which has always stayed with me. I’m afraid I’m paraphrasing from a social media post that’s probably ten years old at this point, so forgive me if I’m a little inexact. Robin, who got his PhD at Yale, was talking about the problem with the superficially leftist politics of a lot of Yale professors. He said that they very well may espouse commendably egalitarian beliefs, preach equality, stand explicitly against elitism - but still, every day, they look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and say, “Holy fuck, I teach at Yale.” I think about that when I think about The New York Times.

-Freddie deBoer, The Times

[bambamramfan]

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

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

For the other 25%, well...

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Freddie deBoer

Published: Nov 8, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

==

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

[misomythus]

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

[soulsevaporate]

i am caught forever between a life to apologize for and one which rebukes everyone who ever demanded an apology.

― freddie deboer

[newrww]

[liskantope]

God, Freddie deBoer can be such a dick. Both this, and a proclivity for uncharacteristically careless and weak arguments, seem to be a risk whenever the triggering (extremely, for him) topic of mental illness awareness culture is involved, to the point that he's defending a ton of questionably ambiguous interpretations of another writer's language, where properly objective analysis would involve a carefuller look at the nuances of meaning of "deal with alcohol abuse"*, "moved to LA to become an actor" (as opposed to, perhaps, "became an actor in order to get to LA"), "embraced an eating disorder" versus "committed to my blossoming eating disorder with the diligence of a pious saint [within the framework of being addled by the disorder!]", and "diagnosis shopping". This kind of thing is incredibly sloppy on FdB's part, and it's hard to say that it's fueled more by his (in my opinion righteous) antipathy towards the "mental illnesses/disorders are inspiring and made me what I am today" ideology than by mean-spiritedness towards certain people who cross him. I'm a paid subscriber who can participate in the comments sections, but I think I'd better stay out of these ones (FdB is not known for his kindness towards commenters who disagree with him either).

I've often compared FdB's triggered behavior around this mental illness stuff to Scott Alexander's triggered behavior around feminism circa ten years ago, but Scott's decreased capacity for even-handed rigor and occasionally overly-harsh language never came close to anything like this. There is such a palpable underlying niceness to Scott that, I think, would make it impossible for him to be this unkind. Scott also was able at times to demonstrate self-awareness about his lack of objectivity.

*No, there's a difference between a young person drinking from time to time in an irresponsible or even abusive way, and a history of "dealing with alcohol abuse". This distinction is somewhat related to my recent suggestion that speech/behavior which is X (in particular for X = some bad thing) doesn't necessarily make a person themself X.

[st-just]

That’s the part I can’t bear - thinking of someone expecting the world to be soft the way that they’re soft, and finding that it isn’t. It makes me want to sprinkle magic powder into the water and walk foot by foot on a gelatinous sea, gingerly moving across its undulating face in search of a place where no open heart is ever met with the sandpaper touch of human unkindness.

-Freddie deBoer, It's All in Your Hands

[barbaragenova]

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

this is really good 

[arcticdementor]

The term “cancel culture” comes pre-mocked these days, mostly by white men who want to ensure that they’re perceived to be the right kind of white men. (Also the people who mock the idea that canceling is a problem are almost always people who lie awake at night in fear of being canceled themselves.) But whether you want to call it cancel culture or not, it’s indisputable that we live in a public condition now where people live in constant fear of facing immense professional and social consequences for minor offenses. To retweet a dumb joke (not even to write one, but to share one!) and lose your salary for a month is an absurd overreaction. You don’t want to call it cancel culture, Michael Hobbes, fine. That condition, the condition where someone like Weigel can make such a minor offense and face severe professional and financial consequences, is unhealthy, ultimately unsustainable, and contrary to justice. More importantly for me, it’s incompatible with a basic ethic of forgiveness. I’m against that state of affairs, and if you want to mock me as an anti-woke bro, fine by me.

On Monday I laid out my case that the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial has potentially dark consequences for free speech, and voiced my objection to the verdict on those grounds. But I also want to point out that Amber Heard has been canceled, publicly shamed, in addition to being on the wrong end of that verdict. And I would hope people could take a moment and grapple with what this means - not in terms of culture war, or feminism, or even civil liberties, but simply from the point of view that Amber Heard is a human being who has clearly suffered and is now facing immense public backlash in an industry where public perception is everything. I encourage all of you who oppose cancel culture to ask yourself whether we should be concerned about this situation.

…

An ethic of forgiveness and sympathy for those who have screwed up is of course not limitless. I’m not sitting around waiting for Harvey Weinstein to get another chance. But if we’re truly opposed to the endless hunt for heretics that has gripped our popular culture, we should have a generous definition of who we should consider forgiving. With the exception of those who have committed serious crimes or otherwise deliberately hurt others in a malicious way, I think we should err on the side of equanimity and a refusal to judge. Someone responded to Monday’s piece by saying that I lack credibility to speak on issues of defamation, as I have defamed someone in the past. Perhaps that’s so. And it is definitely true that I want a more forgiving and compassionate social culture because I know I’m a sinner who needs forgiveness personally. But I also know that all of us are, that the only people who haven’t yet been taken to task for their crimes are those whose crimes are yet undiscovered. I also know that every major religion and moral philosophy you can name contains an injunction against self-righteousness and sitting in judgment of others; none of us have the credibility needed to make those judgments. Vengeance is the lord’s alone for a reason, and we all have it coming.

You don’t have to like Amber Heard. You don’t have to buy tickets to any new movie she might appear in. But I think that it’s impossible to simultaneously oppose canceling or cancel culture or whatever and wish for her career to be permanently ruined. Canceling has become such a culture war-laden topic that it’s almost impossible to consider it outside of those terms, but I want to advocate for an emotional perspective instead. I think we need more sympathy, less judgment, more forgiveness, less quickness to condemn, more moral humility. And I can’t imagine accepting that ethos while still condemning Heard to the degree that she’s being condemned online. Even if you think she’s in the wrong - especially if you think she’s in the wrong - you should want better for her than she’s receiving right now.

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Couple years ago I got myself into one of these mini-controversies I’m always stepping in. The New York Times had put together this David Carr Fellowship. Ostensibly, the purpose of this fellowship was to bring a young, early-career journalist with an outsider’s pedigree to the pages of the Times. Carr having recently died, and himself being an outsider (at least, as much of an outsider as the Times is capable of conceiving of), it seemed fitting. I figured that they’d select some kid right out of undergrad with a strong portfolio from their student paper, someone who had lit some fires and caused some havoc on campus but was otherwise unknown. Or maybe some low-traffic, high-quality young blogger I had never heard of.

[liskantope]

Wow, my comment this morning, under Freddie de Boer's daily post when it was still very fresh, became the top comment in the thread (and is about to reach a triple-digit number of likes). And I discovered in the (brief) resulting back-and-forth what it's like to be at the direct receiving end of FdB's tendency to be kind of an uncharitable dick to people who say things he disagrees with. (A few hours later, comments are now turned off for that post, although I don't know what specifically spurred that.)

[st-just]

The Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin made a somewhat notorious prediction about the value of visual art in an era of photography; he thought that, in an age where an image could be mass reproduced with perfect fidelity, the value of original artwork would drop to zero. But of course, the opposite proved to be true: the mass production of visual art coincided with a vast flowering of public interest in seeing the real thing, huge lines at art museums, the reproductions simply contributing to the sense that the original was worth reproducing. Something very similar happened with those predictions about the demise of legacy media: as more and more independent shops opened up, the value of prestige only increased. The more opportunity writers had to publish anywhere, the more they jockeyed to publish at a place that everyone recognized as somewhere.

-Freddie deBoer, What is n+1 for?

[fieryfalcon]

Art’s first responsibility is always to be art, even when produced as propaganda. It has to satisfy artistic demands before any others, whether moral or political or other. If it doesn’t, we should just close up shop on art and movies and listen to lectures for entertainment. In an era where we’re daily subject to browbeating about our need to advance a particular political agenda, those of us who believe in art for art’s sake need to take a stand.

Freddie deBoer, “It's Not the Politics, It's Their Expression”