#it feels like the ideology-critique language has been a bit out of style lately which is probably the result of an important trend-correctiv

[bogusfilth]

genuinely though how ought we engage with hypocrisy from say universities/democrats/etc. etc. like. it feels both useless and essential to spend time pointing it out. and you know to riff on the norm joke the hypocrisy is not the bad part. the bad part is the genocide. and like obviously the democratic party does not care that their hard policy line is both effectively evil and very bad electoral politics.

[qqueenofhades]

Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which  is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

[writsgrimmyblog]

I’ve been thinking a lot about Harry related discourse lately, including some suggestions that the way his statements get scrutinised is unbalanced in comparison to the way the other 1D boys are treated when it comes to song lyrics, statements they make in interviews and the general bar we set for them.

I get that it’s annoying that Harry appears to meet more political challenges in relation to the stuff he puts out there, but I’m going to put a positive flip side to that observation. I think Harry attracts particular scrutiny because he’s been more vocal and nuanced about issues which have a social justice lean, such as women’s rights and LGBT activism and that he’s even thinking about this stuff is a very good thing. I know that’s one of the reasons why, as a solo artist, he’s held particular appeal for me and I’ve been so excited to hear more from him as an individual. I think the reason he attracts more extensive critique is because he has consciously positioned himself as someone who gives thought to these issues, as someone who cares about, as he puts it himself, fundamental equality. He comes across in his marketing as someone who thinks about things like gender, women’s rights and LGBT identity and that’s a very, very inspiring thing to see in a 20-something popstar who could frankly choose to be a ‘rich kid of instagram’ and enjoy wealth and privilege without giving a fuck about anything or anyone.

If I’m right in my read of Harry, then surely there’s no harm in engaging with thoughtful critique about why this idea of ‘good girls’ allowed to meet mum and women wearing short skirts play into a narrative which isn’t particularly empowering? I come at this from the perspective of someone who LOVES the album and has had SOTT on repeat pretty much from the get go. This isn’t bashing, or character assassination. I actually think nuanced discussion about portrayal of women in pop culture (and entirely removing ship related motivations and emotions from the debate) very much get to the heart of the things Harry himself has gone on record to advocate for. The powerful voice of the young, female consumer. The resistance against buying into narratives we’re fed blindly, the empowering way we can interrogate and engage with things we see going on in the world around us.

I get the sense Harry WANTS to empower his fanbase and he wants to be a vocal supporter of women’s equality. However, Harry is a dude. A lot of micro-aggressions we experience are so insidious and systemic we don’t even notice them ourselves until we start piecing together all of those moments that begin to paint a pretty unhappy picture of binary constructions of gender and the deep, insidious inequality in supposedly ‘equal’ post-feminist societies. This gender imbalance is something he will never have experienced first-hand. That's why I’m behind elements of thoughtful analysis from articles like the Pitchfork piece and why I feel uncomfortable with critique of certain lyrics being read simply as buzz kill or, worse, condemnation of someone I actually have an enormous amount of time for.

Societal problems do not rest on the shoulders of Harry Styles and perhaps some will say it’s unfair to scrutinise what he’s doing in the manner I’m suggesting, but part of me can’t help but think he’d welcome it. There’s a difference between piling on and labelling someone a misogynist and using aggressive language to make a point and just making an observation about things not sitting quite right. I’m going to say the ‘good girl’ thing bugs me because it’s a puritanical kind of narrative which advocates for women being something respectable in the public sphere and a little bit freaky in the bedroom. To not question any of this at all particularly jars with me in a culture which is so ready dogpile female stars for bullshit co-opting of neoliberal feminist ideology, for being ‘too political’ (Queen B, Little Mix daring to comment on Syria) or the endless scrutiny and recrimination of stars like Miley Cyrus who had to grow up and find herself in the public eye or Katy Perry for her not sure quite where she’s coming from stance on LGBT related issues.

The thing is, I like the fact people question Harry’s lyric choices, because they should. It happens to female stars all the time. Interrogating every single word of the songs or the ship driven discussions of lyrics, although diversionary, are not what I’m talking about here. I do think that thoughtful critique can work alongside absolutely loving and supporting someone. I want it to be okay to acknowledge not everything a person I stan does is unequivocally cool. It doesn’t mean we have to start throwing slurs around and hating on someone.

One of the reasons I’m so here for Harry is because of the way he’s engaged with various issues which mean a great deal to me. Without bashing the other boys, he’s distinguished himself on social justice related issues through his own actions. The gender neutral pronouns. The unflinching support of the fangirl. The eagerness to challenge the idea that he somehow has to distance himself from a boyband past or the notion that there’s anything remotely shameful about that musical legacy. Precisely because Harry himself appears to be someone who wants to be an advocate, an ally, a person who positions himself as a supporter on these matters is the very reason why I think engaging with the content he produces in a critical way shouldn’t be such a problem. The fantastic stuff his sister does must be influential to his own approach, and Gemma does not hold back any punches with the issues she writes and blogs about with such eloquence.

My thoughts on this have been prompted predominantly by a handful of lyrics in a couple of songs on Harry’s album which jar with me. I think Harry’s focused a lot more on the way he deals with his frankly fairly crazy life than he has on the perspective of the women in his songs and for me, that comes across. I don’t think we have to beat him over the head with a big stick and call him a terrible person because of that, but I also don’t think we have to feel forced to celebrate the way women are written in all of the songs. Harry is going to grow and change musically and I hope he’ll pick up one of the more persistently negative points about his solo material, which tend to hone in on somewhat trite depictions of the sexually charged woman versus the ‘good girl.’

If you’re still reading (sorry, omg it got so long) I agonized over whether or not to post this. I have been thinking really carefully about how to frame my thoughts, because when it comes down to it, Harry is, I believe, a very good egg. A positive ally. Someone who has a voice which resonates and one I hope he uses more and more, because he’s incredibly influential and has real potential to go far in the music industry.

I think the fact we interrogate Harry more than the other 1D boys is perhaps has more to do with the fact he consciously wants to support exactly this kind of thinking. He has said so himself. That’s not hammering him and calling him names, it’s just a debate, a discussion, a way of processing feelings in a fandom space which is largely female centric but driven by the music, lyrics, interviews and narratives put out there by men. Although I’ve been lurking in the fandom for years, I’m relatively new to speaking out here and I have a small number of followers who I would hate to lose by not putting forward an unequivocally positive perspective. However, I also hate the feeling of not being able to say anything at all and I wanted to set out my stall.

I firmly believe that we can be critical without being damning, supportive without wilfully ignoring anything that might feel problematic. I also think the fact we hold Harry to a particularly high standard is not a bad thing. It’s a very, very good thing. It’s a testament to the fact he’s been pretty much saying the right things to date, and long may that continue.