Bad Atheism

In today’s SSC post, Scott and his commenters come up with a lot of theories why the atheist movement isn’t a strong pillar of the left (like climate change, concerns about sexual harassment, and poverty), but rather a source of awkward disdain. This is in response to a long article in the Baffler making fun of New Atheists.

They come up with a bunch of theories (Islam became a protected group, atheists kept talking about the science of gender differences, etc), but the post is a perfect example of a wrong form of analysis.

1. Authority is making claims about a group.
2. I disagree with those claims, or the results of them.
3. Therefore they must just be making these claims up, and we must figure out wholly different reasons they must have for the end conclusion, and this argument is 100% post-hoc rationalization.

Instead, we should read the claims directly, and see them as evidence of how that speaker is thinking. Let’s look at the article.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. 

…

In a political cartoon by Ben Garrison, an ex-libertarian who now panders to the alt-right, Molyneux is drawn popping bubbles—labeled “Trump is a misogynist,” “Trump is stupid” and “my feelings”—using enormous needles tagged “logic,” “reason” and “evidence.” In another, Molyneux holds a golden shield emblazoned with “REASON EVIDENCE LOGIC” as Hillary Clinton fires arrows representing her various campaign slogans. 

Uh. I think the author doesn’t like (the way atheists use) logic, evidence, and reason. Hell even if the author is a 100% cynical propagandist, there’s a reason they felt these jibes would resonate with their audience.

What we’ve seen in the last decade with social liberalism is an embrace of one-directional subjectivity. Instead of gender-blind tests for hiring, the new left has discovered the tests themselves are biased (they are), and you need an out-right pro-women hiring policy in order to redress structural inequality before a level playing field can mean anything. And we’ve seen cultural social justice crash up against this again and again: due process, metrics of any sort but especially economic ones, anything that tries to use objective or extrinsic measurement, is deemed retrograde by an ideology that focuses on the subjective experience of the oppressed.

(In no small part because of postmodern academics who are able to poke holes in the biases of many objective measurements. And because of the many obvious cases where you can find these advocates fall to bias and prejudice.)

If the left chose subjectivity (a wise decision in theory, but in practice it’s been executed horribly), then where would we expect movements founded around objective tools to end up?

And I did this by looking at the words they themselves use, rather than solely my knowledge of what various scandals happened in an elevator and on bulletin boards afterwards. This doesn’t mean I think they are right, but I do think their own words are the best way to examine a groups grievances.

***

I find this type of analysis particularly important regarding the Trump phenomenon. A large cottage industry has sprung up of “understanding Trump voters.” Is it just because they are racist? Is it they want jobs that no longer and exist and aren’t coming back? There are so many reasons we can hypothesize, and the more we hypothesize the more our theories will just reflect our own preconceived notions.

We can ask them. We can go on reddit, and listen to campaign speeches, and just hear what they say about the other half of America. We don’t have to agree it’s true, but we can look at the logic behind it and conclude “this is how they are thinking.”

Sticky Conservatism

@slatestarscratchpad responds to an annoying Current Affairs article about a link he made on airlines.

4. Current Affairs wrote an article riffing off one of my links posts. I don’t think I can pad my response to the length of an entire blog post, but I want to address it here: I stand by my original sarcasm. I said it was silly to be angry at airlines offering a lower-fare standing option, since it’s just adding another choice to your list of choices. CA said I didn’t realize that actually some people are very poor and so couldn’t afford anything but standing room. I do realize that. My whole point was that if you are too poor to afford sitting fare, your only choice used to be “never fly”. Now it is “never fly” or “pay the affordable standing fare”. This is a gain for poor people, and in fact only for poor people (rich people will just sit regardless). This complaint reminds me of those people who put spikes on benches so that homeless people cannot sleep on them. It is true that in a perfect world nobody would have to sleep on benches. But you are not creating that world. You are just making sure homeless people can’t sleep anywhere. Likewise, in a perfect world nobody would have to stand up on flights. But you are not creating that world. You’re just making sure poor people can’t fly at all. If you want to help the poor, give them more money, not fewer options. 

@slatestarscratchpad ‘s rejoinder makes a bad-point-wittily, that you very often see from neoliberal or libertarian advocates. (And to be clear, the Current Affairs article he got dissed by, is completely incoherent and useless.*) You see this same logic from Matt Yglesias about mandatory parking minimums, or from Tyler Cowen, etc. Why would people, especially poor people with limited options, ever want there to be less choices at the low end of the spectrum?

The answer is so blindingly obvious that it’s clear none of the above put themselves in the shoes of the poor people they are trying to advocate for: because they don’t trust it.

The average working class consumer is cynical, pragmatic, conservative (in the small-c sense), and believes prices and wages are sticky. Their rough economic model is:

• Seats currently cost $150, come with a chair, and the airline makes $1 billion profit.
• With this new innovative pricing scheme, you will stand, seats will cost $150, and the airline will make $2 billion profit.
• The price won’t actually go down. Consumer just straight out loses out.

Same with why locals defend mandatory parking minimums. According to pro-development advocates, if you make parking less scarce, then rent will be a little cheaper because the greater availability of parking was operating as a sort of benefit you indirectly paid for. Except, whoops, in the practical and immediate case, rent ain’t going to fall, you’re just going to have more cars clogging your street.

One one hand, this is sometimes true. Especially if for some reason the price isn’t very liquid (like, say, because of rent control), then you are really bargaining with the sellers over side benefits. Or if the seller is a monopolist, and all new revenue just goes straight into profit instead of increasing quality to make the product more attractive. In economics terms, we call this “sticky”, and it’s extremely important for understanding the day-to-day experience of the economy.

On the other hand, sometimes it really isn’t true. Especially in the long term, pressuring companies to provide more, just means the price will be higher. Airlines used to be a hell of a lot more luxurious, and also way more expensive. On the abstract scale, the economists aren’t complete idiots.

But they completely fail to drop this academic mindset when talking about people directly effected in the short term by a change.

In any case, airline tickets or parking minimum’s effect on rental prices, the actual price change will be based on the context, and there’s no absolute rule here. For sure, sometimes the consumer advocates are wrong. But also they’re right, and instead of writing articles and posts about how “capitalists are always evil” or “leftists are always short-sighted” you really do have to say “what do we expect the actual impact of this specific change on the consumer will be? What do they personally believe it will be? Oh, do they distrust large corporations and expect to get screwed? Yeah, they might have a point.”

(And this was an awfully long post to say “people don’t think they’ll get cheaper fares, just crappier conditions”, but like, you have to lay out the paragraphs of logic so that neoliberal/libertarian thinkers internalize that cynicism and can come up with it on their own in the future.)

***

* Dear god it’s just really bad. If neolibs are annoying in some predictable ways, the standard bearers of the left are even more annoying in how they reduce any problem of exploitative systems to “no, you just haven’t thought about how evil and pig-eyed the super rich are.” Robinson is on one hand treating the reader like a member of the upper-class who can’t understand why these trade-offs are annoying, but also defining the upper-class around the experience of buying a $2000 Tiffany clickbait paperweight. It’s all “you don’t understand privilege maaaan” when, like, you could have convinced your target audience by saying “How do you feel when ISP’s claim that getting rid of net neutrality will mean they can give you more options?”

Review Types: Food and Therapy

Reading reactions to Justice League made me realize there are two ways of reviewing movies, in terms of the logic they present.

The most popular, and often mocked, is movies as food. You know the type “Sometimes I want an expensive steak, but hey, sometimes I want a fast food cheeseburger, and this movie was a good cheeseburger.” There’s plenty of snark about that specific metaphor, but the logic behind it is less absurd and worth critiquing.

In this sense, what matters in the movie is the ingredients. We’re asking “is the movie good?” and the determinant of that is “Were quality ingredients put together using a known recipe?” If a movie isn’t good, it’s just because you can point to one ingredient and say it’s bad. The pacing was bad, the writing was saccharine, or the director is overrated. Such reviews are not a discussion of how different elements work together to produce something, but just operate on the assumption that if one of the ingredients is bad, that explains why the whole thing is worse. Or in the positive direction, a review will tell us the actors have good chemistry, that the CGI is seamless, the director is hip and capable of working with politically challenging themes - though not how any of these elements interact, beyond goodness multiplying with goodness.

This all points towards a very mass produced view of art. After all, that’s how we think of hamburgers, right? Once you’ve figured out how to make hamburgers, well then, just keep getting good ingredients, put them together the way you know how, and viola, you reliably have a finished product that will please as much as the first time.

If you liked Iron Man 1, well then Spiderman: Homecoming has the exact same quality ingredients, why wouldn’t you like it.

(The moral public image and political leanings of the stars of the film, are just one more ingredient these days that adds to its goodness or badness.)

Empirically, the philosophy doesn’t really work (or else churning out box office successes would be as simple as running McDonalds), but it’s still the basis for almost all professional reviews. It’s just easier to understand.

I'm lazy and examples of these are everywhere, so here's a random Justice League review from Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.screenit.com/ourtake/2017/justice_league.html

The good news is that those behind the scenes finally figured out that audiences of superhero movies prefer them not to be as morose, grim and humorless as most of DC Comics latest offerings, and like them having a little Marvel style humor thrown into the mix. I can't say if the late in production replacement of original director Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon (due to a family tragedy for the former) had anything to do with that change, but it's a welcome one that greatly benefits the offering. 

I'd wager there's more humor in this single film than all of its immediate predecessors combined, and much of that stems from Ezra Miller showing up to play the hyperactive, lightning bolt activated The Flash character. Much like Quicksilver in the "X-Men" movies, he zips along at high speed (thus making everyone else seem frozen in a freeze frame collage), resulting in some similarly fun scenes. But his naive eagerness and interaction with others are what makes him stand out. 

Jason Momoa gets some less hyper moments of humor playing the loner surfer dude type Aquaman character, but it's the presence of Gal Gadot reprising her Wonder Woman character that truly saves the day...and the film. The actress is so natural and comfortable in the part and the character is so powerful (above and beyond the physical) that you simply can't take your eyes off her, and the film really excels whenever she's present. Ray Fisher is okay as the part-human, part machine Cyborg character, but isn't explored enough to make him that interesting. Ben Affleck seems tired and ready to hang up the caped crusader character (which sort of parallels his Bruce Wayne alter-ego), and a character from past films makes a return (guess who) and livens up the proceedings in the third act. 

Which is a good thing as both the villain (Ciarán Hinds, heavily assisted by CGI) and his plot (assembling some powerful boxes to destroy the world) aren't anything worth writing home about. Many of these films really fail to create compelling antagonists and this is yet another prime example. As a result, you're not as invested in watching him get his comeuppance that you automatically know is going to involve lots of CGI heavy, multiple character fight sequences where too much is occurring and looks fake up on the screen. 

Thankfully, the return of that one significant character along with the presence of Gadot, Miller and Marvel-like humor makes most of the film easy and sometimes quite entertaining to watch. I would have preferred a more compelling story (rather than the usual end of the world material), better villain and less reliance on special effects. But enough of the pic works, even considering its various issues, to earn a recommendation. "Justice League" rates as a 5.5 out of 10.

***

At the other end of the spectrum we have looking at movies… like a therapy session.

You would not say about therapy: the client was very charismatic, and the story of their childhood had excellent pacing, but the lighting was flat and boring. B+.

Instead of grading it at all, we’d discuss how the elements (which might be awkward on their own) worked together to say something larger. “The way the client stuttered while talking about his mother,” says one thing, and “the fact that the client brings up academic success at any opportunity” says another. We find meaning both in the plain content of their utterances, and the details around the way they are delivered. The result isn’t good or bad, but it’s interpretable.

This is where the Group 3 type of film critique (and most academic work) ends up. The type of acting (flat, naturalist, manic, sensual) is seen as a filter on the words said and the plot elements. A director’s history is seen as context for themes they deal with in this work. How does the beginning of the session/movie compare to where things are at the end - are things the same, are there important changes, and what does that say about the nature of the problem the characters were struggling to solve?

Sure the movie is ugly (or the client is disruptive.) What does that tell us? In what ways is it ugly, and how can those be seen as deliberate choices?

Compare the above Rotten Tomatoes to people deciphering David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which emphasizes various unpleasant aspects to tell us how they comment on the broader work. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-lynchs-late-style/#!

Lynch holds on this scene for an uncomfortable amount of time, lavishing seven cuts and nearly a minute of footage on Mr. C’s tactile show of dominance, the effect of his gesture passing from intimidation to a strange kind of tenderness, registering the tragic feeling of the strong for the weak they nonetheless mean to exploit. We later find out that Jack gets murdered in this scene, but we never see the act take place. His death, we feel, is already written in the lines of this gruff but malleable face, the skin gone slack, vulnerable, now just an unresisting sculptural material for the dark forces that menace and shape it. In this gloriously inexpressive pause, Mr. C seems to be asking himself: what can this goony, docile face be made to sing? 

In many ways, this long squeeze is perfectly representative of the oblique, beguiling aesthetic of the new Twin Peaks. It is not only that the pace is so exquisitely slow or that the scene’s narrative purpose is unclear. We are also left to wonder about the spotlight of lyrical dread lavished upon a character so soon to disappear from the story, just as we may be disarmed by the proliferation of arresting minor characters, stray images, and tangential action throughout the series. 

Lynch has always had a way of elevating peripheral performances to derail our sense of narrative logic (think of the man in Wild at Heart who quacks like a duck, or the inexplicable presence of anthropomorphic rabbits in Inland Empire). But no work of Lynch’s has been so gloriously digressive as Twin Peaks: The Return, nor has any work of his been so elliptical or so unforgivingly distracted by the characters, images, and scenes that seem to exist to the side of its story line. In this, the series embraces a narrative style that is arguably even more inventive and jarring than the narrative itself, with its baroque mythology of lodges, personified evil, and interdimensional rabbit holes. 

The new season challenges us most in the way it seems to undo the story it is telling, moving out of sequence and perversely out of rhythm, indicating a wealth of paths it has no interest in going down, spending long stretches of time in scenes that do not immediately further the plot, and jumping without warning from characters and locales we know to those we don’t (and never come to know). The result is a feeling of erratic, transfixing chaos. A greasy drug-addled woman sits in the Roadhouse talking with her friend about zebras and penguins, scratching the “wicked rash” in her armpit. A woman frantically honking her horn screams at Deputy Briggs to let her car through traffic because, as she puts it with incredible and hideous fury, “We’re laaaaaate!” while a diseased young girl lurches from the passenger seat, vomiting a dark trickle of green slime. A young girl waiting for a friend at the Roadhouse is removed from her booth by two grown men, drops to her knees in the middle of a concert, and crawls through the crowd of dancers before screaming at the top of her lungs. In any other series — even the original series of Twin Peaks — these scenes would have consequences: they’d be explained or taken up again or at least referred to in passing later on, in order incorporate them into the larger plot. In Lynch’s hands, they are left only as refractory trace variations of the show’s central action.

This way, every movie becomes a complex inkblot, a source for endless analysis and conclusions that are both more and less than “good, bad, should I see it.” This view has its flaws as well (such as the reader bringing so much subjective baggage to their interpretation that they can’t really provide useful information for anyone else) but the point is how different it is, and why it’s valuable to keep this attitude in your toolkit.

(This is not the same thing as SECRET MESSAGES delivered through a film, like explaining how random names are actually references to some historical event, a la a Wizard of Oz being about the gold standard, or Room 237 about The Shining. These sort of fan conspiracy theories aren't really substantive, anymore than if you believed your therapy client could best be interpreted by taking the first word of every anecdote, and stringing them together to find out their message from their Russian spymasters.)

The therapy mode is much more engaging with the Real of the work, picking up on random details and incorporating them. As I mentioned with Justice League, few of the professional reviews that wanted to tell us whether it was “humorless” or “grim” or not, said anything about the fact that the first minute is nothing but a diagetic paean to Superman, let alone what the meaning of that choice of introduction was. When you read a therapy review, at least you see the elements the critic is talking about - when you read a food-type review, you might wonder “did she even watch the movie?”

***

oligopsoneia

Or: “reviews” vs. “criticism.”

(Also note that these aren’t just different styles of doing the same thing but different goals really: reviews/”food” finds its fundamental value for people who haven’t eaten the burger yet, while criticism/”therapy” is most useful for people who have already been to the session. A RottenTomatoes-style aggregator of critical reception of a work would be as stupid as a printed collection of food-style reviews.)

bambamramfan

I mean really it’s “types of discussion”, I’m not really sure any words like review or criticism properly categorize the difference. Youtube videos that tell you 100 things wrong with a movie would be called “criticism” but are the highest example of this ingredient-based analysis.

I think you’re wrong with the “different goals” and that is related to how badly the food-style gets its own goal wrong. All reviewers, myself included, would love the ability to look at a work, and be able to tell someone else whether they will like this movie. That’s basically the holy grail of the entire review edifice (including as you say, aggregators) and particularly Hollywood planning departments.

Food is just a very simple way of trying this, and it fails fairly badly. It does not turn out that “script by Whedon, acted by Blanchett, plus social justice themes, plus famous IP” makes something you can actually predict people will like. Certainly not to the degree that I can predict a friend will like my risotto recipe.

Therapy is a different attempt/style to figure out “what is going on with this movie” that ends up in a very different place, but really does start with the same question “why did I like Empire Strikes Back, but not really Return of the Jedi?”

Not Good or Nice, Just Right

“I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.”

Let’s think about this in the context of the perpetual social media culture war.

You’re probably familiar with this. Some person who doesn’t like hostility and is uncomfortable about all these witch hunts says they just want to be kind and compassionate to people. And then some more aggressive warrior marches in, saying that person is just “nice”, while it’s more important to be good. They quote something about the worst masters under slavery were the one who treated their slaves “nicely” and smoothly perpetuated the institution, when obviously the only moral course when dealing with slavery was to be an annoying, mean, and stubborn as hell iconoclast who would tell the entire South that their economy needs to be torn down.

Nice, is short-term and short-range helpfulness and lack of hostility to the people you directly interact with.

Good, in their usage of this term, is doing what’s effective for their political cause. They say this good is better than that nice.

That’s nice vs good, and the latter has a point. Most of you readers probably flinch in regard to this, because you’ve seen a lot of pain and suffering done in the name of shouting down the nice people. You’ve seen a lot of idiots trample over functional groups in the name of being “good.” My sympathies to you. But it’s not that the “good” advocates are wrong, it’s that they don’t go far enough.

Really you could say that about every toxic social justice argument: they found a valid point, but never really committed to it. They took it only far enough to win an argument today, but they didn’t think about how it should inform everything they do, if they really seriously believed it.

The witch introduces us to a third concept on the same spectrum… Right.

How good is being good if you have chosen the wrong political cause? Then you’re just being an asshole, in service to a greater evil. (There are many such people who do that.) Or if your tactics are actually pretty bad and ineffectual. Before you can be Good you need to be Right, just to be sure your cause is actually good, and the anti-nice tactics you are using are actually accomplishing anything.

Because this, this arguing on tumblr? It may be “good” but it’s not right. You are not saving the world here. And the niche politics of fandom a troll may be advocating are ill-thought out and far removed from universal justice.

For instance, racial and gender equality will always be impossible without more economic equality. Which most on the left know and will pay lip service too. But actually fighting the economic order is damned hard. So most liberals… kind of throw their hands up in the air, vote for Democratic candidates, and get to complaining about toxic masculinity in last night’s Game of Thrones.

Their analysis and their praxis is flawed - no great sin, this is a difficult task - and so their ability to execute “good” actions is flawed. But culture war discourse discourages discussion of the greater goal or criticism of tactics, so you can’t work on being right. There is only trying to be good, harder and harder.

There is a place for nice. Sometimes being right is too hard, complicated, and horrifying to know the answer for. Then you might as well be kind to people because you don’t know what the fuck else you are doing.

There is a place for right. When being honest about your motives and how you should help the world.

The place for prioritizing good though… when you neither care about the people around you, or the real truth behind your actions… is heavily overstated to say the least. And the great middle mass of people concerned with being seen as “good” people, who are too harsh to be kind to the enemy but not harsh enough to examine themselves, who do the largest amount of damage in ideological crusades.

"Read Another Book"

One of the most common refrains in left-of-center twitter has been people making jokes about the current political situation via Harry Potter or Game of Thrones (often but not always, liberals with a focus on identity politics) and leftists looking for a fight responding with “read another book!” and denunciations of this sort of pop-culture focused political analysis. (Freddie deBoer was an obsessive of this particular contrarianism.)

My blog started as a 30 part series analyzing the political implications of the Star Wars Prequels, so I’m not exactly neutral in this fight.

But it’s also true that these tweets trying to serve as a rallying cry equating voters for Hillary Clinton with Dumbledore’s Army are repetitive and banal. They seem to be failing in a particular way, over and over again, that does invite some generalization.

And the distinction you want to make is between Immersion vs Analysis.

SMG:

The longer answer is that the memes reflect an extremely pervasive nerd ideology.

Nerdism places incredible emphasis on continuity, so a film that eschews this is incomprehensible. Note how, despite the film being incredibly stylized, the conversation over Fury Road is dominated by plot synopses and descriptions of the worldbuilding. Things like Max’s ability to predict the future are ignored. When the ultimate objective is to catalog plot points on wookiepedia, the fact that Optimus Prime disappears between shots is a threat.

There are also elaborate fantasies of Bay as a despotic sexual harasser, which overwhelm and terrify the Tumbler subset of nerds. In this view, Bay is responsible for the theft of society and we can have a pure liberal multiculture if we simply eliminate people like him through advanced twitter shame-campaigns. Reddit MRAs call meme-repetition ‘signal boosting’. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe is exactly such a Michael Bay figure: he loves big cars, explosions, and literally holds Rosie Huntington-Whiteley captive. So Fury Road provides a variant on 'Joss Whedon’ liberal feminism, where we enjoy Joe’s evil - but only so long as he’s badly beaten up at the end. Have your cake and eat it.

This is part-and-parcel with the above. Nerds demand an immersive franchise universe (e.g. the 'MCU’, the Star Wars EU, the Alien 'Quadrillogy’.) and ideological purity. Oppression cannot be presented as systemic. It must always be a moral threat from 'outside the universe’. Luke Skywalker is 'natural’, and Jar Jar Binks is an artificial imposition by Lucas, the degenerate.

(The same phenomenon occurs when a superhero is recast as black, or female. The normal crass commercialism of comic films is suddenly unacceptable, suddenly perceived as an artificial imposition by 'SJWs’.)

It is immoral for Bay to depict a woman as powerless. Megan Fox’s character 'dresses like a slut’, but not in an 'empowering’ way. Even though, in the films, this character trait stands for her misguided attempt to escape poverty by selling herself, class-ignorant nerds vacillate between slut-shaming Fox and demonizing Bay. The skimpy clothes in Fury Road are acceptable because they are imposed by Joe.

As I noted much earlier in the thread, Fury Road’s narrative structure is identical to the entire 6-film Star Wars series - but condensed into a single film, scrubbed of objectionable/satirical content, and presented in chronological order so that it ends with the triumph of the liberal rebellion. The meme-elevation of George Miller to greatest living filmmaker is likewise a condensed, inverted version of the ridiculous meme-demonization of figures like George Lucas and Shyamalan.

People who literally do not know what cinematography is now write book-length fantasies about how 'lazy’ JJ Abrams is, or devote entire webseries to debating whether Matthew Vaughn is racist. It’s a false progressivism based around punishing celebrities’ perceived sins - lust, greed, sloth, etc. - via endless twitter campaign.

No nerd has ever gotten insanely mad at (say) Wim Wenders or Jane Campion, and nobody gave a thought about Miller when he made Babe and Happy Feet. But once someone makes a film in a science fiction/superhero franchise universe… God help us all.

And most of these “rallying cry” tweets and macros can be read as the same desire for immersion into the franchise universe. What Hogwarts House are you? Or more politically, don’t you want to be there when Harry defeats Voldemort? Because your fight is just like the fight of the good guys vs bad guys in that franchise.

This is usually bad and I agree with the dismissal of it.

But if you’re using the art for actual analysis, that’s great. That’s what art is for. It presents a subjective truth about the world, that we can use to understand our own circumstance.

For instance, in Harry Potter, you could write about how Slytherin represents a fantasy of the reactionary elite who want membership to be determined mostly by birth, whereas Gryffindor represents a meritocratic elite, that definitely posits some people as better, more important, and worthy of special treatment above others, but instead of merely being based around birth, allow in special exceptions for people smart enough, hard working enough, or charismatic enough.

(There’s exceptions to these, like Slugworth or Diggory, but these are broadly the camps the people from those houses stand for – with Ravenclaw being the weirdo-uselessly-smart-people, and Hufflepuff being everyone-else-who-has-nothing-but-eachother.)

This makes Gryffindor of course, analogous to Western capitalism. Most people are oppressed, but there is hope for the Hermione’s of the world, etc.

See, I wrote a bunch about Harry Potter, but none of which is about a desire to be in that world. In fact it’s a resignation that we are already in that world.

Do that, and you can write as much about Harry Potter as you like. Hell write a 10 page tumblr post on the way movie Dumbledore says one line, that’s can still be interesting and insightful.

***

(This doesn’t mean immersion is a guilt-inducing sin. Fan fic and RPGs are often about immersion. That’s great as entertainment. Just don’t try to sell it as political activism too, unless you’re critically engaging with the work.)

Humor, Ideologically Speaking

Responding to a thread of people I respect talking about humor and politics, very wrongly. (@baroquespiral, @balioc, @kontextmaschine)

https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/164632139706/punching-up-ruined-comedy

I’ll have to start at the basics, but this will get to the issues they were talking about like Dave Chappelle.

One of the key forms of humor is a punchline that takes advantage of something the audience knows but is unsaid within the joke, and so the punchline only makes sense if you know that unstated fact. For instance a joke that relies on “Oh, Italians are stupid” or “rich men are entitled.”

Two men are sitting drinking at a bar at the top of the Empire State Building, when the first man turns to the other and says “You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, the winds around the building are so intense that by the time you fall to the 10th floor, they carry you around the building and back into a window”. The bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.
The second guy says, “What, are you nuts? There’s no way that could happen. “No, its true,” the first man says. “Let me prove it to you.” He gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and plummets toward the street below. As he nears the 10th floor, the high winds whip him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
He meets the second man, who looks quite astonished. “You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke.” “No, I’ll prove it again,” says the first man as he jumps again. Just as he is hurtling toward the street, the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
“Well, why not.” the second guy says, “It works. I’ll try it.” He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward passes the 11th, 10th 9th, 8th, floors… . . and hits the sidewalk with a SPLAT.
Back upstairs the bartender turns to the other drinker and says, “You know Superman, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk”.

This joke only makes you laugh if you know the various powers of Superman.

There are two important ways this can be used politically:

–To tell a joke that relies on ideological truths as the unstated assumption.

You ask a white guy who’s he votin’ for, like, “Hey, Bob, who you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy. So I was fuckin’ my wife in her ass, right? And let me tell you, it was something else.” “Yeah, yeah, but who are you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave, come on with the voting! I’m trying to tell you about fucking my wife in the ass, and you’re asking me all these personal questions.”

–To tell a joke that uses the ideological truth as the facade, with the ways that ideology fails being the unstated assumption. The is known as an encounter with the Real.

Have you ever watched, like, a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? I was sittin’ there with my nephew. I turned it on Sesame Street. And I was, like, “Oh, good. Sesame Street. Now he’ll learn how to count and spell.” But now I’m watching it as an adult and I realize that Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people. That’s right. They got this one character named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right to his face. “Oscar, you are so mean. Isn’t he, kids?” “Yeah. Oscar, you’re a grouch!” He’s, like, “Bitch, I live in a fucking trash can! I’m the poorest motherfucker on Sesame Street. Nobody’s helping me.” Now you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people, like, “Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch.”

The two examples I gave were from Dave Chappelle, the person people are arguing over as a particular unspoiled strain of humor. He’s not. (Though at his best, like the gameshow “Who Knows Black People?” he emphasized the latter style of joke.)

The point is not to reliably identify which of these categories a joke falls into, and to “only do the good kind of joke” – but to understand why ideology will always find humor a threat and a useful weapon.

There is no such thing as a humorless ideologue. The humorless feminist, the humorless christian conservative, these are all fantasies. The more someone shows umbridge at a joke that’s “not funny” because of inappropriate content, the more they love jokes that play by the rules of their particular ideological system.

(This isn’t about target, so much as about “agrees with my rules about how the world operates.” Someone who says “jokes about rape are never funny,” likely will laugh at a joke whose punchline is “frat boys try to dope drinks to get laid.”)

***

So what’s bad about all this discussion of “punching up” is acting like this concept is a remotely new thing. Every powerful ideology has felt the need to clamp down on humor, AND to use humor as a sharp weapon that enforces social order in a way most people can’t defend themselves against (ie, it’s just a joke you big baby.)

And the mourned libertine consensus of “everyone can take a joke” was just as doctrinaire about how humor was used as well. Most of what libertarian cultural advocates are complaining about is, after all, people making mean jokes at their expense.

***

To be more clear, what made Chappelle special and particularly good was not that he “offended all targets.” I believe the original analysis upthread was fatally flawed because of that. Obviously you can find endless comics who took that attitude, the Jeremy Pivens of the world and PCU. “Oh wow, he made fun of black people AND white people” is nothing to write home about.

Instead, so much of Chappelle’s comedy was about deconstructing societal assumptions rather than reifying them. His funniest pieces were both positive and surprising, such as a white dowdy-looking cop being eloquent in urban African-American slang, which held the promise that there really could be communication across communities.

(Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece on an SNL skit with a similar theme that gets at the point I’m making, except Chappelle did it a decade earlier, and with an entire show not just one skit.)

The joke is that we are all human. This is the second half of the distinction I made.

Or other skits, like “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” were less about the clubgoing boi who is the butt of the joke, and more about the traumatic encounter with the Real, where norms about masculine aggression are crushed beneath the weight of a nihilistic universe that does not give a fuck about your personal identity.

I find nothing to be impressed with the PCU / Bill Maher humor of the nineties, and I do not mourn its (vastly overstated) passing. Yes, yes, it is a particular cruel double punch to be told you are the butt of the joke and that’s because you’re evil, which is what “punching up” entails -- but ideological humor was always morally charged that way. You don’t think Nazi jokes about Jews were both mean, and leveraged the belief that Jews were immoral so that made the meanness okay, even positive?

I am genuinely sad there is less Chappelle show in the world, and I find current controversies about his standup extremely interesting. He’s making jokes exploring his hero worship of Bill Cosby and OJ Simpson, while believing they are a rapist and a murderer, with all the awkward ambivalence that entails. That is hella edgy, in a way that making fun of purple haired college chicks is not.

The SMG Gamergate Thread

In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media studies.

It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.

His posts from the thread have been copied here for posterity.

Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.

What is Capitalism?

This is a long explanation of capitalist ideology, in response to threads like these.

And direct asks for clarification by @jadagul, @silver-and-ivory, @not-a-lizard, and @kenny-evitt

(And a nice coda here )

Okay so what is capitalism.

Well sometimes people are just talking about the economic system. Goods are distributed according to markets, people have control of their private property, and we manage a global financial network by means of far-flung capital deciding what seems like a wise investment. This can be described in the positive sense with no value judgments - although it’s a very complicated system that is usually drastically simplified by anyone without a degree in economics or relevant profession.

But, much more relevantly for discourse, capitalism refers to the thinking that this is for the best. As @jadagul proposes:

Like, if you asked me to define “capitalism”, I would point to the idea that the means of production should be owned privately, and most economic activity should be privately contracted and transacted. And secondarily, I might talk about the ideological underpinnings of divorcing personal, private views from public, economic considerations, which I wrote about here. (Though properly speaking that’s liberalism rather than capitalism, the two synergize).

Emphasis on the word “should.” Which is why we can talk about capitalism in America, and Sweden, and Singapore, all countries with every different economic models and results. In all of them the dominant ideological strain is that a complex system of private exchange is for the best.

Like any belief, there’s a lot of luggage that goes with it.

There are two fundamental arguments for capitalism:

1. People’s stuff is their stuff. They should be allowed to do whatever they want with it, which includes selling it to other people who want it for whatever price they can get. We’ll call this deontic reason.
2. Markets are the most efficient distribution mechanism for our current stuff, and encouraging more production of it. We’ll call this the consequentialist reason.

These are both compelling reasons, and many tumblrs have made persuasive arguments based on them. But putting them both up there next to each other, we notice something.

…they don’t play nicely together. Like you can’t accept both of these arguments. Either people deserve true control over what they own and it’s okay people starve in order to support this principle – or goods should be distributed based on who will benefit the most from them, and your own claim over them is ethically irrelevant.

(You can try to explain that in our world it just so happens that both of these things are true. That would be very convenient – especially, as noted, this is the dominant belief of those in power. This is extremely unlikely, and in general you should practice skepticism towards claims that sacred values also are practically optimal.)

It’s true that some iconoclasts will bite the bullet, and pick only one of these arguments. Rationalists are pretty good about putting primacy on argument #2, and there are principled libertarians who put #1 above all. But by and large, what do most ideologues say, including “every Republican politician and most of the Democratic ones?” They claim both arguments are true at once.

And when you think of this, especially in the context of “Republican politicians justifying something” you realize that it’s really… just fatuous rhetoric in defense of something. They don’t really care if it’s the most effective system, not enough to test that claim in a falsifiable setting. And they aren’t really committed to deontic property rights. It’s just these are two powerful arguments throw out to win the debate and defend something.

So, to defend what? The naive radical here says that they’re just making these spurious arguments to defend the rich and powerful, but I don’t buy it. No one can buy toadies that passionate, that ubiquitous. They’re defending capitalism the same way you’d expect them to defend American actions in the Vietnam War - ignorantly, but with innocent faith.

So that’s what capitalism is. Capitalist ideology is the thing that people are defending when they make bad, contradictory arguments for capitalism.

The market is not always the worst way of deciding things. But it’s not always the best either. And we need to be able to make reality-based decisions about whether it’s the right principle to follow in any particular policy – but the intellectual forces made to defend capitalism in general, will rear their head to argue that “taxation is theft” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” no matter how pragmatic and necessary the left-wing proposal under discussion is. You have to resist that.

You have to ask yourself “okay, but in this area, is mandatory licensing a useful idea? What does the evidence really say?”

***

This concern is not limited to the policy realm, which is why we (who have so little influence over policy) end up discussing capitalism so much.

The biggest area where this comes up is the value of people.

Under capitalism, we believe that the value of a person is based on how much money they have. Oh, sure we don’t say this straight out. Every life is equal, etc etc. But whose judgment do we trust?

Who are we more impressed by: our unemployed friend, or the one on a hot track career that affords her a house and fancy vacations, and always buys everyone dinner? What’s the common demand of Republicans: get successful business people into office so they can run government like a business? And when you see someone, how good are you at resisting making assumptions about them based on the niceness of their clothes, their general health and hygiene, and other signifiers associated with class?

Even our judgment of our own productive activities is dominated by this. Here’s an increasing scale we are all familiar with:

• Oh you’re an artist. That’s cool.
• Where you hired by someone to make your art?
• Does it pay?
• Does it offer benefits?
• Is it enough to raise a family on?

… and on and on into even higher scales. The central question of your art (or whatever you do) should be “is it good?” But instead we establish sources of external validation. And capitalism manages to subsume all those definitions of validation, boiling them down to “will someone give you money for them.”

Now, there is often some logic behind these conclusions. The friend who treats everyone to dinner is at least benefiting you. And people paying for your work sometimes means it’s popular which we think sometimes signifies whether it’s good. But these are often short-cuts our mind makes, without thinking about whether that chain of logic really is supported by evidence.

The person who inherited a lot of money, and parlayed that into CEO jobs in their 20’s, and then used that experience as the basis for future claims of expertise, has an opportunity no one else did. And a lot of the companies trying to create media these days are throwing darts in the dark, hoping something hits. There’s a lot of luck, personal connections, and outright immorality that can go into making money, but we still have that shortcut “gets money = valuable.”

So usually what I am getting at when I rail against capitalism, is that I firmly believe unemployed people are valuable too. Not just in some utilitarian calculus, but that their work is interesting, their effort is meaningful, and I enjoy their ideas and think they have a real contribution to society. The fact that at the moment the market won’t pay for it, does not concern me as to the value of their work.

***

Obviously central planning and government can also fuck up. Stalinism and Chavezism can convince people to judge everything based on what the dictator thinks, and that is just as wrong. And statistical evidence shows that a minimum wage boosts income at some levels, and reduces take home pay at higher levels, and efforts to ignore either result are sticking your head in the sand.

But we don’t live under Stalin or another communist dictator. We live in a world where the richest are the most powerful and highest status, and they determine the class ladder. So the ideology we have to be on the watch for is “this that justify the existing capitalist system.”

Regardless, in all such cases - judging policies, or people - we can’t delegate our decisions to ideological short cuts. We must do the hard work ourselves of reading situations and forming our own reactions to them.

Life Under Polyamory Ideology

There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.

This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.

Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.

Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.

The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.

Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)

But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.

You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.

After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.

***

The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”

The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.

Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.

If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.

Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.

(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)

Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.

There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.

You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.

(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)

***

WW: Partners were already non-monogamous unless that was specifically defended, the difference is now everyone knows about it.

Obviously.

One of the key things about ideology is that it’s a public performance. With any of these beliefs - monogamy, social justice, Trumpism, rationalism - everyone says in private “oh, I don’t believe all that stuff. I don’t go that far, I’m just reasonable about it. It’s other zealots who actually take this seriously.”

A communist experiences himself as simply an instrument whose function is to actualise a historical necessity. The people, the mythic people - whose instrument the totalitarian leader is - are never simply the actually existing individuals, groups of people and so on. It's some kind of imagined idealised point of reference which works even when, for example in rebellions against the communist rule like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually resisting people raises up, is opposed to the regime. They can still say: "No, these are just individuals, "they are not the true people. " When you are accused of: "My God, "how could you have been doing all of these horrible things?" You could have said, and this is the standard Stalinist excuse: "Of course my heart bleeds for all the poor victims, "I am not fully responsible for it. "I was only acting on behalf of the 'Big Other'". "As for myself, I like cats, "small children", whatever - this is always part of the iconography of a Stalinist leader.  

- Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

So yeah, in private lots of people have been functionally polyamorous. But they still had to present the public face of monogamy, and would effectively enforce this. This is like the dozen Republican leaders who decided to try Bill Clinton on impeachment, when privately every single one of them was engaging in adultery or worse.


(This does not obviate that many people are not fucking around, and still have and have always had one partner. It’s just the transition from a system where society codifies and enforces that one-partnerhood for you, to one where you must manage it all yourself, is a big and real step that has happened.)