The Bluestocking, vol 77: Sakura, lobster-gods and MBS
Happy Friday!
This was my first full week back at work after research leave, and I'm going to have to recover by having two days off next week. (I'm going to Amsterdam to watch a play. Yes, the play is in Dutch.) I wrote about the Belfast rugby trial, mentioned in last week's newsletter, because I just couldn't get it out of my head.
Also out today is the new Vogue, for which I've written a print-only piece about women working in counter-terrorism. (Preview here.) If you think your job is stressful, give thanks you are not a "kidnaps manager".
Helen
The case of the very, very friendly man online
I do not experience abuse online, but I do experience this kind of weird, humdrum sort of flirting from a very particular class of Man Who Spends Time Online. Sometimes he is an acquaintance but, more commonly, he is a man who I have either never met or met once. He is usually at least 12 years older than me, follows most of my friends, and will dutifully “like” all our responses to one another as if he were gawking at two girls kissing in a nightclub.
Ah, this guy.
One of the great things about being a man is that you can pose like you're a lobster-based superhero and people will still call you a "public intellectual"
"Jordan Peterson’s superpower is saying cliches and having them sound meaningful"
How come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.
“He, uh, told us that we should do good, and not do evil, and now he’s looking at us like we should fall to our knees.”
“Weird. Must be a prophet. Better kneel.”
Maybe it’s just that everyone else is such crap at it. Maybe it’s just that the alternatives are mostly either god-hates-fags fundamentalists or more-inclusive-than-thou milquetoasts. Maybe if anyone else was any good at this, it would be easy to recognize Jordan Peterson as what he is – a mildly competent purveyor of pseudo-religious platitudes. But I actually acted as a slightly better person during the week or so I read Jordan Peterson’s book. I feel properly ashamed about this. If you ask me whether I was using dragon-related metaphors, I will vociferously deny it. But I tried a little harder at work. I was a little bit nicer to people I interacted with at home. It was very subtle. It certainly wasn’t because of anything new or non-cliched in his writing. But God help me, for some reason the cliches worked.
Slate Star Codex is a consistently challenging and stimulating blog, even when I disagree with it. I was attracted to this piece by the suggestion it was arguing that Jordan Peterson is . . . good? That's not quite what Scott is saying, but it's a useful insight into why Peterson is so popular.
A Saudi Prince's Quest
M.B.S. gives the impression of being comfortable with Western mores. In meetings with American women, he shakes their hands and looks them in the eye, which not every Saudi official will do. Once, during a meeting at the home of Secretary of State John Kerry, M.B.S. spotted a grand piano, walked over, and began playing the “Moonlight” Sonata. His favorite diversion is Call of Duty, the video game. But his English is halting, and among his brothers—he has nine—he is unusually bound to Saudi Arabia. “M.B.S. is unlike his brothers, several of whom were educated in the West and one of whom has a doctorate from Oxford,” a longtime friend of M.B.S. told me. “If you look at them and you talk to them, they are basically soft. And there is this quality to M.B.S.—the guy’s not soft. He has a lot of charisma. He’s a lot like Bill Clinton. He makes you feel like you’re super important when you’re talking to him. He really puts on a charm that is unmistakable.”
HE LOOKS THEM IN THE EYE!!!! Add that to "things I can't believe are remarkable in the year of our lord 2018." This New Yorker piece contains some insightful statistics about Saudi Arabia: if oil prices continue to fall, it'll be broke within a decade. It exports only oil, basically, and imports pretty much everything (including water). 70% of its population are under 30. And 70,000 of them go to study in the US every year, and come back going, "Do I really have to live in this incredibly oppressive state?" People have become too misty-eyed over MBS, but this does suggest that he is generationally removed from his recent predecessors, even if his instincts are similarly authoritarian.
Side note: I want to read up on the possibility of water wars in the coming century. Have a good link? Bung it over!
Side side note: This interview with MBS by the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has further depressed me about the intellectual quality of Britain's leading politicians. The guy comes out with regular crazy-like-a-wizard interjections (the one comparing Ayatollah Khameini to Hitler is a particular delight), but he also says things like: "You say “absolute monarchy” like it’s a threat. If it were not for absolute monarchy, you wouldn’t have the United States. The absolute monarch in France helped the creation of the United States by giving it support." I mean . . . does Theresa May have strong thoughts about Lafayette's role in the Revolutionary War? (OK, OK, maybe MBS has just got his knowledge of this from Hamilton, like everyone else.)
Quick links:
This is very alarming. The media immediately deemed the Pulse massacre at a gay nightclub to be a homophobic attack, but the trial of the gunman's widow proved that it wasn't. Worse, because of the false narrative fed by the authorities to the media, she was locked up for 14 months ahead of a trial where she was acquitted of being his accomplice. Instead, she was a victim of domestic violence and rape.
A longread on Monocle's internship culture, and how it keeps journalism for the well-heeled.
A writer who watched all 600+ episodes of the Simpsons in a month discovered the show hates Lisa.
A defence of Trumpy Roseanne.
This book, on women opinion writers, sounds interesting. I would say that, though.
"I think as well that AI could totally jeopardize democracy." I know we're all supposed to hate and revile Macron now, for some reason, but god how I wish Theresa May were able to talk about AI and the future economy like this. Or the need for transparent algorithms. Or the problems of automated warfare.
"The field of ideas has gone from being the ground on which politics are fought to a side in politics, which is why it’s so difficult to find serious intellectual Trump defenders. Trump has resentments and interests, but not ideology; he governs more as a postmodern warlord than a traditional party leader." Always love some Michelle Goldberg in the morning.
See you next time!