Substack Notes, Vol. 8.8
May 21st - May 28th
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The graph above shows that as students move further to the left, they are more likely to have poor mental health — suggesting that it’s not just liberal ideology that impacts mental health, but also the extremity of their beliefs
Reading Haidt’s work helped me realize that I was stuck in depression precisely because I subscribed to the tenets of social justice ideology. Once I let go and started reading books, and stopped using Instagram, my depression vanished. I stopped needing therapy. I love life. The implication is that conservatives are less bothered by inequalities, but I’m no longer convinced that equality and fairness are the things to chase. I saw an argument somewhere that liberal women’s obsession with fairness is an expression of vanity, envy, and self-absorption. The implication is that the person who has more than me got it unfairly, which is an unhealthy way to see the world.
From Antipode - Chapter 7, by
“The best bet for a night’s lodgings in Maroantsetra was still the Coco Beach, where Bret and I had stayed the year before. Coco Beach’s grasp on electricity is somewhat tenuous. I specifically requested a room with electricity, but found, when I plugged my computer into the single outlet, that I got no response. My voltmeter told me there was no current coming out of the wall. I went to the main building to ask if it could be fixed, or if we might get a different hut, one with juice. Monique yelled for a small barefoot man to come back with me to investigate the problem. He brought a fork.
When we got to our hut, the man went straight for the socket, looking at it inquisitively. I explained the problem, then produced my voltmeter as evidence. I put the two leads into the socket, and it read zero volts. The small man wasn’t convinced by my electronic answer. He took off his shirt, and wrapped it around his left hand. Placing that hand firmly on the wooden bed frame, he then grabbed the fork with his right hand, and jammed it into the socket. I was shocked, though I knew he wouldn’t be, as the socket was dead.
The man came to the same conclusion I had, and motioned for me to follow him. I took my voltmeter with me, and we went to the bungalow next door. He found the socket, and began to arrange himself in a similar manner. I tried to stop him, suggesting that I could again test it with my voltmeter. He would have none of it, however, as he had been called on to do a job, and he was going to finish it. So, this time in horror, I watched as he wrapped his left hand in his shirt, grasped the wooden bed frame with his mummified hand, then, grabbing the fork firmly in his right hand, jammed it into the socket. A small spark, and the man flew backwards onto the bed. 220 volts could easily have killed him. He got up, retrieved the fork, which had flown to another corner of the room, welcomed me to my new room, and left.”
“It is this sense that Adventure Is Dead, I think, that eats at the souls of young men more directly than the death of God.”
“For Nietzsche, democratic man was composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. But he was completely lacking in any megalothymia, content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.”
In simple terms, the Last Man is what you get at the End of History, when there’s no longer anything particularly important worth living for. When the great ethical, economic and political questions have all been settled, what higher purposes exist for men to strive towards? The answer is: none. Life becomes dull not through any individual defect, but on an ontological level.
“When you reward victimhood, weakness and suffering with praise and attention, you get more of all three.”
[Y]ou don’t have to be a firm ideological believer in Bangladeshi nationalism to think that trying to dissolve Bangladesh would be a bad idea. But as part of the post-10/7 discourse, some on the left have been attempting to normalize the deflationary account of Zionism that I gave to Peretz. Unless you think that Israel is so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be dissolved, you are a “Zionist,” which is understood to be a sharply derogatory term.
If you find yourself enraged by a news story, pause, and consider that the story has likely been crafted to enrage you.
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
-Delmore Schwarz
For urban warfare against a foe who has made a point of hiding behind civilians, the Gaza death toll is horrible, remarkably low and not remotely genocidal. (Hamas’s policy is genocidal and always has been.)
