The Bluestocking, vol 101: Waking Up and Getting Up Has Never Been Easy
Happy Friday!
Last week I went on holiday to Jordan. I had joked in the office that I wanted to have a break while the borders were still open; not sure that seems so funny now. A couple of months ago, I decided to stockpile drinking water and loo roll* because I couldn't see a clear path to any Brexit deal, meaning that we could end up crashing out of the EU by accident.
That calculation hasn't really changed. Things look sliiightly more hopeful for EFTA/EEA-type deals this morning. And I have always wondered if Labour would eventually blink and abstain on May's deal, allowing it to pass. But I can't even decide if I think that would be the right thing to do. Theresa May has acted utterly recklessly, and part of me feels that recklessness should be punished. Only that won't happen, at least at first, at the ballot box. It will happen through flight delays and food shortages and panic and unrest.
Helen
For anyone keeping count, yes, this is another one of the Civilisation V wonders ticked off. (Previous achievements: the Pyramids, Alhambra, Notre Dame, the Globe Theatre, Sistine Chapel, Uffizi, Big Ben, Louvre, Broadway, Neuschwanstein, Statue of Liberty. I'm still bitter about missing the Pentagon thanks to Hurricane Sandy.)
* added extra to my Ocado order
Sort by Controversial
Reddit has a feature where you can sort posts by controversial. You can see the algorithm here, but tl;dr it multiplies magnitude of total votes (upvotes + downvotes) by balance (upvote:downvote ratio or vice versa, whichever is smaller) to highlight posts that provoke disagreement. Controversy sells, so we trained our network to predict this too. The project went to this new-ish Indian woman with a long name who went by Shiri, and she couldn’t get it to work, so our boss Brad sent me to help. Shiri had tested the network on the big 1.7 billion comment archive, and it had produced controversial-sounding hypothethical scenarios about US politics. So far so good.
The Japanese tested their bioweapons on Chinese prisoners. The Tuskegee Institute tested syphilis on African-Americans. We were either nicer or dumber than they were, because we tested Shiri’s Scissor on ourselves.
This is a perfect horror story.
Waking Up Is Hard To Do
Waking up isn’t just about using the right alarm clock, of course. It’s also about what you do once you’re upright. Dr. Harvey of the Golden Bear Sleep Research Center told me that she recommends what’s called the R.I.S.E. U.P. method to her patients who suffer from severe sleep inertia. R.I.S.E. U.P. stands for:
Refrain from snoozing
Increase activity for the first hour
Shower or wash face
Expose yourself to sunlight
Upbeat music
Phone a friend
This piece on waking up is great, but - who has a friend who is happy to hear from them before 9am?
The Death of Fascist Irony
Much of the manifesto—which begins with the line, “It’s the birthrates,” repeated three times—is fixated on reproduction, a classic preoccupation of white supremacist ideology. The author writes about his fear and rage at the thought of “invaders”—anyone nonwhite, but particularly Muslims—outbreeding “Europeans.” He claims, baselessly, that Muslims have preternaturally high birth-rates, and that the disparity between white and nonwhite births will lead to the crisis named in the manifesto’s title: the “Great Replacement,” an ethnic, cultural, and racial erasure. The theory was promulgated by the French racist ideologue Renaud Camus in a 2012 book of the same name; since then, it has spread through an international network of white supremacists.
Regular readers will know of my alarm about natalism as a political force - particularly since it's usually wrapped in with ideas about how the "wrong" women are having babies, so the "right" ones need to do the same.
This piece on the Christchurch shooter's manifesto also makes an important point about the use of irony as a smokescreen by rightwing movements. The references to "gorilla warfare" etc are supposed to entrap "normies" into laughing at how dumb the poster is, unaware that the joke is deliberate. Except there is one problem with the "who would be dumb enough to take our in-jokes seriously" school of thought. Because, as it turns out, the answer to that question is not just "old squares in the MSM" but "noxious nutters with access to firearms".
I had a grim moment when I saw that the New Zealand shooter had done the "OK" sign in the dock - veterans of my extremely lengthy Jordan Peterson interview will remember him scoffing at the idea that the media got taken in by its alleged use as a white power symbol. Funny story: it doesn't feel like such a great in-joke when it's being done by a guy who just murdered a lot of people in cold blood. I still don't know the answer to how we deal with "ironic racism", but it starts with acknowledging that not everyone involved really is being ironic.
Ta-Nehisi Coates Is An Optimist, Now
Allow me to play white moderate’s advocate. I want to get your response to the political case against pressuring Democratic candidates into endorsing reparations. The strongest version of that argument, in my view, goes something like this: In the United States, it is very difficult to pass laws that massively redistribute resources from those who have a lot of them to those who have little. This is because those who benefit from the inequities of the status quo can afford to invest their wealth into obstructing such legislation, through campaign contributions, public advocacy, and lobbying. Meanwhile, our governing institutions overrepresent white, rural areas (i.e. conservative ones), and also feature a plethora of veto points that give opponents of change many different places where they can apply pressure and kill bills. Thus, defenders of the status quo distribution of wealth and income are always competing with progressive forces on a field tilted in the former’s direction.
Given these realities, it simply is not possible to redistribute significant resources from the (disproportionately white) rich — to the the (disproportionately black) working class and poor — unless you can marshal mobilized, majoritarian support behind your policy goal. In these fights, working people’s only strength is their numbers. And you’re never going to build enthusiastic, majoritarian support behind a transfer program that exclusively benefits a racial group that represents 13 percent of the population.
The highlight of this TNC interview for me is the section on reparations - essentially, addressing the question of whether activists make demands without troubling too much about the politics of achieving them. It's so tempting to immediately go, "but that would be unpopular" or "there's no way to get people to vote for that". But a) that's defeatist; b) there's merit in opening up the space. Activists and politicians have different roles: there's nothing wrong with being an outrider.
This interview is also great because although Coates and Eric Levitz disagree, they both kick around the ideas in a non-defensive, non-partisan way; they both admit they might be wrong. You feel like they respect each other. It's a quality that so often feels missing from debates.
Quick links
"I was America's first non-binary person. It was all a sham."
Apologies for gender overload, but this interview with Lisa Littman, who published a paper describing "rapid onset gender dysphoria", is very interesting. Her descriptive study was published in PLOS One, which got cold feet after being criticised by activists. It conducted a thorough post-publication review, and the paper survives essentially unchanged. This is science working as it is supposed to: constantly questioning, never taking anything on trust, open to criticism.
CJR interviewed 18 journalists about using, or not using, tape recorders.
See you next time!