#freddie deboer

[st-just]

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

-Freddie deBoer

[bambamramfan]

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

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

For the other 25%, well...

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[liskantope]

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly, thank you, Freddie.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Freddie deBoer

Published: Nov 8, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

==

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

[misomythus]

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

[barbaragenova]

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

this is really good 

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[st-just]

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

-Freddie deBoer

[janusfranc15]

I agree with him (Freddie deBoer)- it feels like this sometimes. That being said, people should also be allowed to criticise and speak up about Problematic Things. Otherwise nothing would change.

“The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves. […] You simply cannot say, in polite society, “basic fairness requires us to avoid a rush to judgment and to give people the right to respond to accusations.” To do so gets you lumped in with the criminals. Like a friend of mine said, “the only acceptable reaction to an accusation is enthusiastic and unqualified acceptance.” I don’t know how people can simultaneously talk about prison abolition and restoring the idea of forgiveness to literal criminal justice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kangaroo court system. Like I wrote once, we can’t simultaneously be a movement based on rehabilitation and restorative justice AND a viciously judgmental moral aristocracy. You know who thinks everybody’s guilty until proven innocent? Cops. You know who thinks people don’t deserve the right to defend themselves? Cops. You know who says those who defend basic fairness and due process are as bad as criminals themselves? Cops.”

—

Freddie deBoer, “

Planet of Cops

”

(via

weil-weil

)

me after I get dragged for conflating white nationalism with decolonization

(via anarchoclintonism)

this piece made me cringe

[sawthatmountainburn]

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

[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?

[king-of-men]

I feel like the core thesis here, that people are ignoring Actual Goddam Politics (tm) in order to focus on splashy, headline-filling gender stuff that has neither fibre nor nutrients, is really very similar to Freddie deBoer's thesis, most recently expressed here:

“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated.

That really looks a lot like what Hanania is saying, only expressed as "the Left has forgotten to fight on everything except wokeness" rather than "the Right has won a lot but supinely surrendered on wokeness". If those two agree on the point, perhaps they have a point?

Richard Hanania is one of my poster child writers for the "he is an complete idiot and also very smart" genre. I disagree with him on virtually everything, particularly core beliefs, but he nonetheless is an actual critical thinker who will come up with and explore interesting ideas, and so he is valuable to follow for exposure to good discussion from a world you are otherwise not gonna touch (and for a good laugh the other half of the time).

This is definitely one of those posts - the US right (not that the left is immune to this by any stretch, this is just about the right) is so infused with an instinct towards perpetual victmization that it becomes easy to buy into their own framing that the Right has been losing front after front in the culture war. This is the foundational premise of The Cathedral, the Moldbug-coined New Right tenet that "Cthulhu Always Swims Left" aka the left's structural advantage in controlling ~institutions~ means that in status-quo modernity culture will shift left over and over, endlessly...and therefore you need to violently overthrow the state and purge the corrupt neoliberal bureaucratic order to realize the will of the silent volke embodied in a CEO-Monarch to turn back the tide. Anyway, Hanania does a good job of pointing out that its really kinda bullshit. Tons of our culture has turned right over the past decades; gun control, education, and economics are the big topics that he mentions, and of course more exist, and its been a result combinations of public opinion shifting and the power of the state implementing agendas, aka normal politics.

Some of this is a bit of an overstatement - victories on like abortion for example haven't shifted minds, but instead exploited the US's ludicrous legal system to back-door legislative reform through the courts, its not a replicable experience in many other contexts or any other country. But the point overall stands, which gestures at the real problem - the only topic where the New Right's analysis 'holds up' is onthe sexual revolution and queer rights, revealing a movement irrationality obsessed with the sex front of the culture war. Here Hanania stumbles into his stupidity on why the right hasn't been successful fighting this, not really grappling with the fact that for example gay marriage is just really popular, this is a bottom-down fundamental sea change in how people view sex and society's role in policing it.

The mistake The Cathedral devotees make in analyzing society is that they take a single sip from a branch of the river of History and assume they have drunk it dry; Society swam left from 1950 to 1980, and the New Right cannot help but obsess endlessly over that transition as The Future. Note how common this is - so many people harken to "the 1950's" as the steady-state idyll of American society, the American economy, identify as 'traditional' everything from holiday songs to food recipes that were all invented around this time and have no older origin than that. Its all myths, and The Cathedral is an extension of that trend - by identifying US society in 1950 as a centuries-old continuity of tradition, it sees the changes of the ensuing decades as a radical discontinuity, and therefore a terrifying new normal.

It is wrong the same way nostalgia-memes are wrong; history never had a steady state, and people's ideas of even the 1950's themselves are primarily myth. Turns out historical conceptions of queer relationships have varied widly across time and space - none have been as progressive as today, but societally sanctioned spaces for queer relationships are legion. There has never been a steady state on sex and society.

But! Modernity *is* different from the past, and certain things have changed irrevocably - there is a verison of The Cathedral that is true. Technology & economic development have radically changed how we lived, from a society of farmers and their rulers to a society of urban professional workers. Cultural norms around sex & society varied all over the place; but (to radically simplify, there are a bunch of other factors) marriage for children to work the farms was near-universal, it was a structural necessity culture was built upon. This was a harsh limiter on sexual norms - said marriage for children needed to undergird it. That limiter is gone, forever, today. To not dive into it because its not the focus, with the limiter gone I don't think the 'sexual revolution', feminism, and queer rights is going to revert in a major way in the future.

Which will permit the right, as long as it stays maniacally obsessed with the idea that people don't have 1950's sexual morality anymore, to claim that they Always Lose. This is why Hanania stumbles, making the opposite mistake - seeing the failure to fight the sexual revolution as just a failed southern offensive in comparison to a successful northern attack on the front of education. The real trap is to not understand that culture is not freely malleable, only some of it is 'up for grabs' from the perspective of activists. Within the new status qup equilibrium of modernity, shifts right and left are not only possible but inevitable - but the rules of game have to be understood. Hanania may have only gotten halfway there, but props to him for opening my eyes to the contradiction.

[joons]

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

No One Is Kenough, Freddie deBoer

[king-of-men]

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

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

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

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

[loving-n0t-heyting]

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

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

[azspot]

Here’s the reality, for women and everyone else: you can’t actually determine someone’s character from their costuming. None of us can see past every mask, every time. If guys who yammer on about how white men need to just shut and listen for awhile were reliably good people, if they never DM’d teenagers or put their hand on a woman’s ass on the subway, the world would be an easier place. But I’m afraid that sometimes Try Guys cheat on their wives with subordinates, and sometimes nice guys are only nice until they can get women into a vulnerable position. Sometimes lunkheaded Joe Rogan-worshipping video-gaming men who complain about woke Star Wars and belong to Barstool’s shirt of the month club are fundamentally moral beings who don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they have stupid politics. And sometimes vice versa to all of that. The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort. Rebecca Traister doesn’t know Tim Walz’s character, and while sometimes a Try Guy is just a scared man trying to navigate an evolving social world as best he can, sometimes a Try Guy is a predator. You don’t know until you know.

Freddie deBoer