The Bluestocking, vol 157

"Now Louis gets to feel what it is to be a female comic."

Happy Friday!

Just a quickie: it was my birthday this week so I’ve been on the road. The final episode of this series of The Spark is Chris Daw QC on why we should abolish prisons.

Helen

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The Joke’s On Us (Atlantic)

Actual-bigotry-camouflaged-as-ironic-bigotry seems like a new phenomenon, perhaps even a quintessentially 21st-century one, dependent on a mashup of consumerism and pop culture and being Very Online. Modern extremism often comes with elements of silliness and ridiculousness. Look at the “boogaloo” movement, a militia named after the obscure ’80s film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, whose followers expect a second civil war in the United States. They are preparing for that eventuality by attending anti-lockdown protests and gun-rights rallies in jaunty Hawaiian shirts under stab vests, carrying assault weapons. Look at the extraordinary set of beliefs held by QAnon conspiracists, about sex-trafficking satanists operating in family restaurants. Look at Pepe the cartoon frog, a symbol that white supremacists co-opted from its creator, who once shamefacedly explained that it was so named because it sounded like pee-pee. To misquote The Big Lebowski, say what you like about the tenets of national socialism, but at least the Nazis took themselves seriously.

I wrote about some of the themes I’ve been interested in for the past decade: the rise of the far right; meme culture; “transgressive” internet communities; the psychodynamics of being bullied and being a bully; irony and humour.

Chaser: Lester Bangs on “white noise supremacists”, aka punks who flirted with racism to seem edgy. There is nothing new under the sun.

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Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult (New York Times; non-paywall syndicated link here)

Planning for the harassment campaign began, naturally, with a movie. Mr. Baugh showed the analysts a clip from “Johnny Be Good,” a 1988 teen comedy, in which a villainous football coach must deal with a host of pests arriving at his house simultaneously: a delivery guy with hundreds of dollars of unwanted pizza, singing and dancing Hare Krishnas and their elephant, a rodent exterminator, a male stripper. Mr. Baugh asked the analysts for inspiration. One of them suggested sending the Steiners a coffin.

[…] A parade of disturbing deliveries began at 4 p.m. on Aug. 10, when a package containing a bloody pig mask arrived at the Steiners’ home. Fourteen minutes later, @Tui_Elei wrote: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????”

The Steiners received a book titled “Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse” and a funeral wreath. They got fly larvae and live spiders and a box of cockroaches. Copies of the September issue of “Hustler: Barely Legal” touting “eye-popping 18-year-olds” arrived at the homes of neighbors with David Steiner’s name on them.

This story, about how eBay executives formed a grudge against a couple of regular sellers who were mildly critical about them, is both insane and very anger-inducing. The final three paragraphs made me want to go full Kropotkin.

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When Harassment is a Laughing Matter (Unherd)

What does [Louis] CK deserve for systematically harassing women? Has he apologised sufficiently to earn his career back? When Hankinson interviews the stand-up Bonnie McFarlane, she also talks about CK’s return to the Cellar in terms of justice – but in a slightly different way. She uses the word “penance”. CK used to be a beloved star. Now, audiences are more hostile to him. “Now Louis gets to feel what it is to be a female comic,” she says. “Like, people kind of hate you when you get up there. You’ve really got to prove yourself.”

Andrew Hankinson’s reconstruction of the last days of Raoul Moat showed that he was a clever writer with an aptitude for experimental structures. His latest book, about the Comedy Cellar in New York, sounds equally intriguing. This Sarah Ditum review has only made me want to read it more.

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Quick Links

1. YouGov’s MRP model predicts a Biden blowout. My working theory of this US election is that everyone is remaining very open-minded, because of the embarrassment of 2016, and not wanting to seem complacent. That’s a good thing! I wrote last year about the journalistic danger of assuming an outcome and then working backwards to frame your coverage/questions/hot issues. But you cannot deny that the polls currently look very bad for Trump. On this evidence, he is vanishingly unlikely to win the popular vote (it requires him to be at the top of the 95 per cent confidence interval of his vote and Biden at the bottom) and has only a one in five chance of winning the electoral college, according to 538. (In 2016, the site gave him a one in three chance on election day.) The media and the Democrats are completely right to prepare for an inconclusive election night, because of the “blue shift”, where the initial returns look more positive for the GOP than the eventual, complete result. But let’s hope it doesn’t happen: America’s best chance of avoiding a huge armed rampage/civil war is a crushingly decisive result.

2. “Who does the woke playing field, as expressed through wokese, actually advantage? As a barrier to entry that is manufactured in universities, mediated by elite institutions and bureaucracies, and is intentionally complex and constantly changing, wokese is a tool that is most easily wielded by the credentialed elite—which suggests that the allegedly vulnerable cohorts in whose name this language is allegedly spoken are actually being used by others as rhetorical camouflage.” (Tablet)

I’m three episodes in to Lovecraft Country (Now TV), which is excellent. Sinnerman and a James Baldwin voiceover? Yes please.

See you next time. . .