The Bluestocking, vol 143
A beat detective in the Division of Problematics.
Happy Friday!
This week, there was some brouhaha around the Slate Star Codex blog. Its author uses the name “Scott Alexander” (his first two names, but not his surname), and was distressed by the fact that the New York Times, which had profiled him, insisted on using his full name. (He is a psychiatrist, and is wary of being Googleable by patients.) Tom Chivers wrote about why he thinks the naming was wrong; I’m ambivalent. I think that journalists should resist the idea that naming people in stories is “doxxing”; equally, I would have argued hard not to use Scott’s full name, because it adds nothing to the story.
As an aside, the best, most nuanced writing on internet culture is not happening in the big papers, is it? Places like Unherd are cleaning up. I think that’s because these beefs are considered too “inside baseball”, when actually, a BBC4 programme is reaching far fewer people than the average internet brouhaha. More people are interested in a viral controversy than opera, and yet . . . .
Anyway, Scott deleted his blog, which is a huge shame, because it was one of the most thought-provoking bits of the internet. His review of 12 Rules For Life, which compared Jordan Peterson with CS Lewis, was weird and interesting and unlike anything else I read on the subject. But my favourite piece of his, luckily, is one that I republished at the New Statesman, about a phenomena called the “toxoplasma of rage”. It explains our unerring pull towards edge cases, rather than slam dunks, when making a political argument.
That made me think about the online pieces which have most changed how I think, or which I re-read regularly; or which I refer to all the time. Here’s my list. I would love to hear other nominations for inclusion in a future Bluestocking.
Internet Classics
“Last year, PETA offered to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. . . . People call these things "blunders", but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of it.” The Toxoplasma of Rage.
“One of the most frustrating things about being on the left is the profound number of clowns who situate themselves beside me. We’ve got generational warfare clowns. We’ve got New Age gibberish clowns. We’ve got conspiracy theory clowns. And of course, we’ve got hippie drum circle clowns. I call these, and others, clowns because their behavior seems primarily aimed at personal performance and tends to be accompanied by self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” Matt Bruenig on “purity leftism”. Also worth reading: What does identitarian deference require?
“What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” I quoted this Claire Dederer piece for the Paris Review in my last book, and by god if I’m not going to quote it in the next one, too.
“The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. . . People are alienated and worn down and hopeless, and so they see their opportunity to finally be the one pulling over somebody else’s car, lazily tapping the glass with their flashlights. “I’m the one in charge now,” he thinks, as he sends an email to somebody’s boss over a Facebook status he doesn’t like.” Freddie de Boer’s Planet of the Cops.
“Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of”. Every reading of this denunciation of Buckle Up Twitter brings fresh joy.
Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted (New Yorker). Malcolm Gladwell on how internet activism is hampered by only creating “weak bonds”. Little did Malcolm know it would only take a decade for him to be proved absolutely right.
PS. All five episodes of Difficult Women on Radio 4 are here.
Can Domestic Abusers Keep Themselves Accountable When No One is Watching? (New Yorker)
In Strodthoff’s groups, men call in from cars, back porches, laundry rooms—anywhere they can find some privacy. They tend to be men living at the economic margins, who might scramble to find bus fare to arrive on time to meetings with parole officers or support services. For many, being able to join their support group from home is a stress reliever. “There’s a comfort level in the home, and a quicker movement to a level of depth,” Strodthoff told me.
Juan Carlos Areán, the program director for Futures Without Violence, a domestic-violence-prevention organization that provides training for batterer-intervention programs, said that the persistence of intervention classes during the pandemic “is breaking a fundamental paradigm in this country—that men will not ask for help voluntarily.” With the criminal and court systems in disarray, Areán said, it’s become clearer that “we have underused other ways to work with people who use violence. This is an opportunity to expand accountability outside of a punitive approach.”
I’ve been interested in perpetrator programmes for a while, because it seems as though we’re making the same mistake with domestic violence that we used to (and still) do with obesity: pour money into treating the effects, not the causes. Rachel Louise Snyder wrote this piece: her book, No Visible Bruises, is excellent.
How I Became A Poker Champion In A Year (Atlantic)
Seidel stands out from other players for his longevity: He still contends for No. 1, as he has since his career first started, in the late ’80s. That takes some doing. The game has changed a lot in the past 30 years. As with so many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker have taken a back seat to the quantitative. Caltech Ph.D.s now line the tables. Printouts of stats columns are a common sight. A conversation rarely goes for more than a beat without someone mentioning GTO (game theory optimal) or +EV (positive expected value). But despite predictions that his psychological style of play would render him a dinosaur, Seidel stays on top.
I really want to get good at poker.
Quick Links
“The truth is, in the eight months I was with Rolf, I saw plenty of red flags — I mean that quite literally — and I chose to remain silent as a white woman to protect myself.” Liesl Von Trapp’s apology post.
“It cannot have escaped your notice that this period of indictment of whiteness has featured many white people indicting whiteness in a way that excuses them from being indicted.” Bonus Freddie deBoer.
“Why Did The Washington Post Get This Woman Fired?” (New York magazine) A follow-up to the Halloween blackface story, which points out that the Washington Post seems to have been engaged in the age-old practice of “arse-covering” rather than the pursuit of social justice.
Thank You To Everyone Who Reviewed My Book on Amazon, Unless It Was One Of You Bastards That Did This:
See you next time!
With regard to clowns on the left ... . If it makes you feel better, it's not just on the left.
Speaking as an economist, the explanation is simple. Improving the world faces a public good problem — if you spend time and effort on making the world better, you pay all of the cost and get a minuscule fraction of the benefit. Since one person's effect on the world is unlikely to be large, one person's share of that effect is poor compensation for the cost.
As with some other public good problems, one solution is to act for a private benefit that is linked to the activity that produces the public benefit. Working to elect a candidate, or legalize marijuana, or whatever has the side benefit of putting you together with other people who share your values and are engaged in a common endeavor, which is enjoyable, and also a way of finding friends, perhaps even a future spouse.
Getting attention and status is another side benefit. While it can be linked to making the world better, optimizing for it doesn't optimize for, may indeed detract from, the broader goal. We should expect people in any political movement, as elsewhere in the world, to act mainly for the benefit of themselves and those close to them, only secondarily for benevolent general goals.
Taking a moderate and rationally defensible position doesn't let you stand out from all your fellow believers. Taking an extreme position, even if not defensible, does.