Substack Notes, Vol. 11.4
The Dregs of December: Dec. 16th - Jan. 2nd
The leftovers from 2024 are posted here. We’re starting 2025 on fire (not literally… unless perhaps you ride the NYC subway) but figuratively, as a nation and as an insurgent protomedia bloc. Things are going well in my life as well but I remain ready for whatever comes my way, good or bad. In truth most things are undetermined and only become one or the other based on our feelings and reactions.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” – Marcus Aurelius
Happy New Year
Dec. 17th, 2024
Feddie DeBoer:
Dr. Judith Butler, the extremely influential (to fans), notoriously obscure (to critics) academic gave an interview and was asked about everyone’s favorite totem, woke. It’s a rich text! I think the claim that Democrats did not lose the election because of “wokeness”/social justice politics/identity politics is plainly correct, indisputably correct. I think the ongoing pretense that the word “woke” has literally no denotative content is a bizarre and sad affect that a lot of progressive people are clinging to with white knuckles as a way to avoid the fact that their political movement has eaten shit as badly as a political movement can, in the past few years.
It’s a rich text. LOL.
Dec. 18th, 2024
Our rulers ought to appease the restless masses by preempting their political demands – not because they are happy benevolent paternalistic overseers with our best interests at heart, because it is in their interests to do so.
In the United States they should’ve dialed in the racial egalitarianism and the transgender nonsense as soon as it started to generate serious pushback, and they should’ve taken steps to restrict migration before Trump ever came within reach of the Oval Office. Here in Europe, they should be winding down climatism and also taking any number of steps to close the borders. Yet they are either not doing these things, or they are not doing them hard enough.
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preempting their political demands = executing the democratic will of the people
I agree, it’s a little mysterious as to how and why these powerful and well-educated groups have proven so inept at governing. I suspect it has something to do with ideological hobbling (beginning in college) which creates all kinds of stupid ideas and maladaptive reflexes, psychological fragility, and a stark distance from most of the people they’re ‘administering’.
Dec. 19th, 2024
“Safe spaces" on college campuses are not new. In fact, they're not a very old, very tired topic. So is all of the "Coddling of the American Mind" infantilization like we recently saw on campuses across America in the wake of President Trump's second electoral victory. The thing is, these obviously pathetic phenomena serve an educational purpose. That is, they're pedagogical. Their real purpose is to convince young minds that it is traumatic when politics don't go Left and then to "structure the environment to resolve that [trauma] productively" for Woke causes.
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This tracks. The logic of ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ are never extended to others, or to disagreeing viewpoints. No one cares about the psychological harm of conservatives or Jewish or Asian students. This is a knob that only twists one way.
Dec. 19th, 2024
You’d think that we could, at least, agree that there’s such a thing as too much exposure to screens and the disorienting rush of online life for young children. But you’d be wrong. Here’s Amil Niazi for New York, and here’s Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. They’re not quite giving everybody permission to let their kids rot in front of a tablet all day, but they are certainly chipping away around the edges at the arguments of those who worry about kids and screen time. They’re not saying, they’re just saying, you know what I mean? Their pieces have very different tones, but they’re both engaged in a kind of artful writing around the issue while constantly repeating that it’s just so so so hard to raise children, which inevitably means that their pieces trouble the supposedly-dominant opinion that our kids look at screens too much. In other words, they soothe the kind of hip parents who read New York and The New Yorker, reassuring them that what they’re already doing regarding screentime is fine, and anyway, it’s so hard that probably everybody else is already doing it. Of course, everybody isn’t doing it; there are many parent of digital-era children who carefully manage and limit how much and what kind of screentime their kids get. I’m friends with several such couples. I’m sure it’s work, but it’s important to them so they invest time and work with dealing with the consequences. They haven’t decided that it’s just too hard.
The media has less influence on the culture than I sometimes think. But whether all of this excuse-making is influencing cultural behaviors or merely providing ex post facto justifications for behavioral changes that have already happened, we’re living in an American social culture that has embraced the overarching, all-devouring excuse - life is too hard. Life is too hard to do what’s right instead of what’s easy. Life is too hard to put others before self. Life is too hard to do anything other than pursue maximal physical and mental comfort at all times. Real friendships are hard, TikTok is easy, so let’s stare at our phones instead of going out with friends. Good therapy is hard, bad therapy is easy, so let’s therapist shop until we find one who demands literally nothing of us.
-Freddie DeBoer
Dec. 20th, 2024
Biden was the cozy vessel. He was the comforting smile, a flirty wink that said, I’m normal and you’re safe. In the background, up very early and also very late, were busy bee staffers with a very different vision for the country: opening the border on Day One; $175 billion for student loan forgiveness; plus, for good measure, his presidential proclamation recognizing Trans Day of Visibility (what about lesbians, Joe!). Any given day, staffers just put on the Joe Biden bodysuit and did something absolutely bananas and then said whoa, whoa, are you calling Joe Biden a communist?
-The Free Press
Dec. 21st, 2024
… It assumes that racism, where it exists, is sporadic and randomized and not a complex part of the existing practices and norms within the military, which set the very context and terms in which these conversations take place. This assumption of neutrality ignores the structural nature of racism and the extant power imbalance and racial dynamics in an officer corps that is 77 percent white and 8 percent black.
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Power has a race in America, and it is highly gendered. What accounts for this disproportionate distribution of power in a multi-racial democracy where de jure segregation was legally abolished 56 years ago?
Cmdr Jada Johnson
~5 years ago we saw a strange phenomenon in officer corps and military academies and DOD trainings: lower-ranked individuals berating higher-ranked ones for participating in racism or sexism or ableism or…
This is not a good trend for discipline or morale. If you deny it’s happened I suggest you look for it. You will find hundreds of instances, easily.
To Cmdr Johnson I would answer: what accounts for the disparity is mostly personal choice and family priorities. If you want more black female officers convince more black young women to enter the navy and improve the quality of the ones who are there.
Disparities don’t equal injustice. Is it unjust that > 85% of HR professionals are women? Is it unjust that Asian Americans are over-represented in medicine?
Dec. 22nd, 2024
I’m actually a bit surprised to hear this narrative so often on cable news-it’s so feeble.
The basic claim is that X (which is somehow compromised simply because it’s owned by Elon Musk, even though ownership wasn’t a problem when activist progressive executives owned it) is inferior to legacy news. X has a pretty even balance of users, real-time debate, community notes, and largely unfettered opportunity of expression.
The legacy news-which is sustained by the pharmaceutical industry and has lied about or omitted every major political development in the past few years-is somehow preferable to X… presumably because 90% of its staff are Democrats? No one ever really explicates their claims (which is already suspicious) but this is a very popular point on television right now.
Is this strategy? Petulance? Blindness?
Jan. 2nd, 2025
:“My dear friends, I think you are in big trouble. Whether you believe it or not, YOU ARE AT WAR. And you may lose this war very soon, together with all your affluence and freedoms, unless you start defending yourselves… The driving force of this war has very little to do with natural aspirations of people for better lives and greater freedoms. If at all, these aspirations are being used and taken advantage of by the manipulators and progenitors of the war. The real driving force of this war of aggression is IDEOLOGY — something you cannot eat, wear or store for a “rainy day”. An integral part of this war of ideology is IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION — the process of changing the perception of reality in the minds of millions of peoples all over the world. The late comrade Andropov, the former head of the Soviet KGB called this war of Communist aggression, “the final struggle for the MINDS and hearts of the people”.
