The Bluestocking 378: Google Zero and getting older
the first human-algorithm hybrid president
Happy Friday!
I tried to sign up for a burner X account this week, so that I can keep reading politics news on there. This was the verification code. In any other circumstances I would say this was a mere coincidence, but . . . no. This is surely Elon Musk’s idea of a hilariously edgy joke1.
Talking about the far right, I guiltily gulped down all of Mehdi Hasan’s Jubilee debate, against “far right conservatives” who were, in some cases, admitted fascists. (Special shoutout to the lad who wants to elect a Catholic dictator like Franco and is then very confident this will not end badly for him.) The fella in the Iranian Hamburglar outfit never stood a chance.
As someone who shared an office with Mehdi for several years, I almost felt sorry for these people; his debating strategy can roughly be summed up as the exact opposite of “play the ball, not the man.” Mehdi is also a fact cannon. He will cite UN reports and US labor statistics until your eyes cross. Did anyone learn anything from this debate? Yes—me. People in America are now OK with straight-up admitting that they’re fascists, even though men in their grandparents’ generation died to help save Europe from fascism. Wild.
Helen
PS. For The Atlantic this week, I watched three hours of Hunter Biden talking about crack cocaine and his various grievances, and emerged thinking that Democrats could learn something from him: “Perhaps the Democrats, instead of spending another $20 million on their “man problem,” should find a candidate who has less baggage than Hunter Biden, but can attack Republican policies with his level of straightforward, pummeling aggression. Maybe someone who was only addicted to one of the more genteel drugs, or only slept with their cousin’s widow.” Here’s a gift link.
27 Notes on Getting Older (Ian Leslie, Substack)
People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies - I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on: “The human condition is that we want it all, and we're not willing to make trades…‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path - the path they could have taken - without considering the cost of that path. So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.’ It's like, well yeah, but you didn't, because you actually chose the path that you're on, and you weren't willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.”
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This essay has been going viral for a few weeks now, and it’s easy to see why. I’ve been surprised by how much turning 40 has weighed on my mind, when getting older never really bothered me before.
Quick Links
“My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy. He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.” This Stellan Skarsgard interview is full of bangers (Variety).
Matt Alt on the shock breakthrough of a rightwing populist party, Sanseitō, in the Japanese election. All the more shocking since you might think that if any country in the developed world wouldn’t develop anti-immigration politicians, it would be Japan, where just 2.4 percent of the population are born abroad. Sanseito want to make anime more patriotic (Pure Invention, Substack).
I also enjoyed Quico Toro on the hardcore politics of it all: “With a style deeply steeped in the culture of the online right, Sanseitō built a campaign juggernaut around the nonsense that obsesses Japan’s army of disaffected posters: shifty foreigners, disgusting gays, iffy vaccines, oppressive mask mandates, deep state conspiracies, and the weird chemicals they put in your food.” (Persuasion).
The best Agatha Christie adaptations, picked by Laura Thompson (Substack). In her next post, she also picks the worst, which is even more fun.
‘My mother had four children, my brother and I by her first marriage and my two sisters by her second. In her will she left me a small cash sum and a number of personal items but she left the remainder of her estate, including the house to my other siblings with the biggest share going to my youngest sister. In the will it says that, “I leave my daughter Daisy out of the estate not because I love her any the less but because I think she has less need of it.”’ Daisy Goodwin on being disinherited, which she couldn’t help taking as a sign her mother loved her less than her siblings (Substack).
Surgeon who did amputations lied about amputating his own legs due to sepsis when really he did it himself. Lads, we’ve got ourselves and apotemnophile. The fact his name is Mr Hopper really is the icing on the cake.
See you next time . . . Tired of the book plugging? Not as tired as I am!
The numbers are popular far right code: 14 stands for the “14 words” of the white nationalist pledge, and 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, making this HH, or “Heil Hitler.” Possibly 61 stands for “I am a huge groyper dweeb” in some way, but I don’t know that one.
Reading your wonderful post and then suddenly there I was - a lovely surprise to wake up to, thank you so much Helen!
Openly admitting you're a fascist makes sense in a culture in which celebrating violence and idealizing psychopathy have become common. Increasingly, it's modesty, humility, and decency which are treated as pathologies.