The Bluestocking, vol 170
Ayn Rand laundered through yoga memes and clod spirituality.
Happy Thursday!
This is where I’ve spent most of my free time this week—ancient Greece.
It’s like a holiday, only with more accidentally assassinating people when trying to mount a horse.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been deliberately seeking television and games which are set in places that I would like to be, or have previously been and want to revisit but can’t.
That gave me the incentive I needed to get round to Giri/Haji, a BBC series that’s now on Netflix. Set between Tokyo and London, it’s the story of a policeman whose brother became a yakuza. The hitman’s escape to Britain destabilises the balance between the various crime families, and threatens to enmesh the Japanese capital in gang warfare. So the policeman is sent to bring him back. The characters are rounded, the cinematography is stylish, the dialogue is funny and unobtrusive, and the narrative is elliptical, but not in an annoying show-off way.
Look at this great shot of Yuto, the Yakuza brother:
(In the programme, it carries on much further, presumably with a camera on a moped.)
The other thing I have rewatched is Bill and Oti’s dance to Enter Sandman, which is possibly my TV Moment of 2020. Bill Bailey wasn’t the best dancer — hard to be in your 50s — but he was the best entertainer. Which should give us all hope.
Helen
It’s All Arms And Noses (Freddie de Boer)
The self-care industry is dedicated to the proposition that everyone who buys into it should live a life that is about nothing but self-actualization, self-improvement, and self-interest. The individual is sacrosanct in every sense, and anyone that suggests that what the individual desires is socially undesirable is simply an energy leech who wants to stop you from ascending to your final form. It’s Ayn Rand laundered through yoga memes and clod spirituality.
Great short blog on the inherent contradiction in self-care discourse, which likes to “simply pretend like there’s no such thing as a conflict between sincere people”. This is what happens when what claims to be ideology is really capitalism.
The Glass Half Empty Left (Slow Boring)
Why didn’t the success of enhanced Unemployment Insurance [in the US] ever enter the narrative as a progressive success story? . . . There’s a norm in American progressive politics of looking at every glass as half empty.
Basically, the understanding is that whoever can paint the darkest possible portrait of the status quo is the one who is showing the most commitment to the cause. And you see this norm at work across climate change, health care, criminal justice reform, the economy, and everything else. If you’re not saying the sky is falling, that shows you don’t really care. A true comrade in the struggle would deny that any progress has been made or insist that any good news is trivial.
I’m fascinated by this impulse not to want to win, because it damages the case for change. I’ve experienced the fallout from it myself as a journalist: there’s a slice of the left which urges writers to cover the most miserable subjects in the most miserable terms. Anyone who writes about a success story (as here, where the US government basically gave out loads of money and, as Paul Krugman notes, killed off the intellectual underpinnings of Reaganomics) either gets ignored, or gets accused of Aiding The Enemy. Ian Leslie also covered this ground a few years ago in his piece on the “Nirvana fallacy” and it explains why bits of the left prefer the purity of opposition to the compromises of government.
The piece also picks up something I write about in Difficult Women: how every “moment of victory” is usually the culmination of decades of work. Compromise and build. Compromise and build.
Quick Links
New York Magazine has created a list of the 100 best pens (thanks to Oli Franklin-Wallis for the tip). My own weapon of choice, the Uniball Vision Elite, is at number 26. As ever with internet lists, there are several WTF rankings to keep you interested (what kind of savage puts the BIC 4-colour at Number 12?) and no, I’m not dropping $124 on a fountain pen, this isn’t 1890.
“I suppose I assumed she must be foreign; ‘Hilaria’ sounds too breathy to be American,” avers this Vox piece on Hilaria Baldwin faking a Spanish accent and changing her name from “Hilary”. Um. You are equating “American” with Anglo-Saxon there, honey. Can we not just enjoy Hilaria Baldwin faking a Spanish accent to sound more interesting without crowbarring it into a pre-cooked narrative about her “taking up space from actual Spanish and Latinx people”? Not on the American internet, apparently, where readers need to be informed that “being white doesn’t preclude her from being Spanish, she argues”.
“Parental consent is good enough for most medical treatment because its necessity or desirability can be established by objective evidence.” Interesting background on the upcoming challenge to the Keira Bell ruling.
This poor guy and his eels. When did leaving the customs union — and everything that entailed — get a look-in during the referendum campaign?
“[Olivia] Nuzzi can already tell that the dynamic will be different in the incoming administration. ‘On a purely social level, I don’t know that reporting critically on Joe Biden will feel as safe for reporters,’ she told me. ‘You’re not going to get yass queen–ed to death.’” (Atlantic)
Always like to check with what Independent Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn is up to. (Order Order)
I’ll leave you with another Giri/Haji shot:
Happy New Year! Thank you for your emails, comments, book recommendations and occasional salacious gossip. It’s been an absolute bastard nine months and I can’t wait to see the back of 2020. I didn’t bake any banana bread, I didn’t have any personal epiphanies and I would cut off my own finger to watch an overly long Shakespeare play starring someone off the telly hopelessly miscast as Prospero.