The Bluestocking, vol 172
SeaShanty TikTok.
Happy Friday!
The Spark is back on Radio 4, with the first episode online now: it’s me talking to the journalist Paul Vallely about philanthropy “from Aristotle to Zuckerberg.” We talk about “white saviourism”, Victorian social reformers and whether generous billionaires should just pax more taxes. Next week (Wednesday, 8pm) is Linda Scott on the “double X economy”.
Helen
The Roleplaying Coup (CityJournal)
Does this mean that the Capitol extravaganza was trivial or unimportant? Not at all. In some strange way it was more significant than a real coup. A coup would at least make sense, while the almost complete replacement of serious politics by subterranean fantasy and roleplaying induces a sense of vertigo. Our traditional way of relating to the world has increasingly collapsed. Nothing seems real, and doubts persist about what to think or say in the face of this new situation. In the Senate debate that preceded the chaos, Ted Cruz was heard shouting to his colleagues: “Be bold. Astonish the viewers.” Prophetic words. We were astonished.
This piece about the riots at the Capitol really struck a chord: there were some organised dangerous people involved (check out the guy with the cable ties) but also some accidentally dangerous ones, who seemed not to have a plan beyond storming the doors and wandered round, taking souvenirs and selfies. It’s like they expected someone else to have a well-developed plan to “stop the steal” and they just wanted to be around when it happened.
They were, essentially, LARPing a coup: live-action roleplaying. There’s a Susan Sontag quotation I think about a lot: “photography has become a way of refusing experience”. But it’s now more than that. Photography is the experience, more real than the real world. There are people — god knows how many of them — who have confused posing with doing. That’s why they confess to their crimes on camera, or livestream themselves breaking the law.
And Donald Trump is their perfect leader. As Maçães writes: “Trump is not a figure of authority but a figure of freedom—freedom understood as the realization of every desire, no matter how extreme, in the here and now—and therefore someone representing powerful and growing forces in contemporary American society. In this vision, the world exists to provide a stage for our fantasies. This is harem politics on the grandest scale.”
Chaser: Bellingcat has traced the internet rabbit hole that the woman shot to death in the Capitol fell down. She was an Obama voter in 2012. By 2021 she was tweeted about the “coming storm” (a QAnon phrase) and trying, fatally, to storm the debating chamber.
Additional chaser: This Ben Smith column on how two people he worked with at BuzzFeed are now far-right activists. Turns out that when you optimise for shareability, bad ideas get amplified too! Like I said on Twitter, reading the accounts of those involved in social media optimisation in the late 00s and early 10s is increasingly like reading the memoirs of scientists on the Manhattan Project: the awakening realisation that you wield terrible power.
TikTok Duets Are The Only Wholesome Use Of Social Media, Part 324980
(I like the electroshanty dance remix too. Imagine this coming on at 1am in a club. HO!)
((I am also enjoying the ongoing Bridgerton musical project.))
Isn’t She Good—For A Woman? (Atlantic)
At its worst, well-meaning feminist rehabilitation can create a new prison to replace the old one. The quest to reverse our condescension toward muses, the novelist Zadie Smith has argued, resulted in off-putting biographies that were often “unhinged in tone, by turns furious, defensive, melancholy, and tragic.” These underdog narratives “kept the muse in her place, orbiting the great man.”
The court records in the National Gallery’s exhibition also keep Gentileschi orbiting her rapist. “In my view, and the view of most people who are writing about Artemisia today, we want to throw up our hands and say: Enough already about the rape trial; let’s talk about her as an artist,” Mary Garrard, an art historian and the author of Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe, told me. “It’s not the fact that she was raped; it’s what she made of the experience.”
My latest for the Atlantic, on the problems with feminist rediscovery.
Quick Links
“We really noticed that all of these campaigns, other than, I guess, Joe Biden, were embracing these really unpopular things. Not just stuff around immigration, but something like half the candidates who ran for president endorsed reparations, which would have been unthinkable, it would have been like a subject of a joke four years ago. And so we were trying to figure out, why did that happen?.” Ian Leslie is obsessed with political consultant David Shor, and reading this transcript of Shor talking about whether political campaigns behave rationally (no), I can see why. It also includes an argument for greater racial diversity of Democratic candidates that I haven’t heard before, but which makes total sense: “There’s just a lot of evidence that picking messengers in our party, who say that they believe in God, who talk about things in a normal way, is really beneficial. And I think in practice, the way to do that is to elevate more non-white people, and particularly non-white people from these historic institutions [like churches].”
“This week, one of the five trusts that oversees hospitals in the region closed its abortion clinic when a health care provider went on medical leave. Another trust shut its abortion services from October until Jan. 4 because of a lack of financial resources. Travel restrictions have also exacerbated an already difficult situation, as many women in Northern Ireland have travelled to England to have the procedure.” Abortion was legalised in Northern Ireland last year, but NI now has the American Problem, ie it might be legal, but in practice it’s incredibly hard to access. (NYT)
Some bastard carved “Trump” into a live manatee.
“Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.” BITCOIN!!! (NYT)
“Rather than standing their ground, many infected players panicked, teleporting out of the dungeon before dying or killing Hakkar, and taking the disease with them. And lower ranking players, with fewer hit points, would ‘die’ very quickly upon exposure.” Thanks to Prashant for flagging up this great piece on what researchers learned about epidemics from World of Warcraft’s “corrupted blood” incident.
Is this the worst response by an advice columnist ever? Submissions for other contenders welcome.
See you next time!
No.6 - yes, it really seems to be! Thought that when I read it earlier this week. Wow.