A Moment Significant of Either Something Important or Nothing In Particular

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

There is this, from Jacob Hamburger for L.A. Review of Books—

What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? According to the Times writer Bari Weiss, most emphasize the biological differences between men and women, a feeling that free speech is “under siege,” and a fear that “identity politics” is a threat to the United States’s social fabric.

A listener of Harris’s podcast might add to the list a vociferous defense of the validity of genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups, a follower of Peterson’s videos might insist on the nefarious influence of “postmodern neo-Marxism” on college campuses, and a fan of Ben Shapiro might contribute a skepticism toward the reality of “transgenderism.”

The movement sees itself as an alliance that defies established political categories in order to defend these ideas against the creeping influence of thought control. This leads us to another important meaning of the term intellectual dark web, the suggestion that its ideas are not only controversial, but particularly innovative in our political moment. If the dark web arouses the anger of certain commentators in the media or the academy, it is for the same reasons that new technologies in the internet age are “disruptive.”

It would take a short memory, however, not to notice that these sorts of polemics over political correctness are anything but novel: they have been around for at least 30 years, ever since a strikingly similar set of media debates centered around college campuses took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Toward the end of the Reagan years, political correctness became a favorite bugbear of conservative intellectuals, who believed that college professors had latched onto illiberal or totalitarian notions of equality, and were indoctrinating their students with a subversive view of American society. Today’s “dark web” provocateurs rarely mention these predecessors, who not too long ago occupied a similar place in national media debates. But the comparison suggests that the “iconoclastic” ideas of these figures are actually a well-established institution in American discourse: an institution whose home is on the political right.

—and what stands out is that we really ought not be surprised. To the one, the general point is nothing new; to the other, what is the significance of this particular discussion getting this press at this time?

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Image note: Top — Detail of Lucifer, by Franz von Stuck, 1890.  Bottom — Detail of cartoon by Jen Sorensen, via The Nib, 17 July 2018.

Hamburger, Jacob. “The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Is Nothing New”. Los Angeles Review of Books. 18 July 2018.

Berlatsky on Manhood and Masculinity

Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat), via Twitter, 4 May 2018.

There are actual problems men face. They do not include the tyranny of women forcing them to sleep on the couch.
     Male suicide rates are terrifyingly high. Men experience workplace injury and death at high rates. Men make up the bulk of the prison population.
     Violence against men tends to target marginalized men. it also tends to be inflicted by other men.
     Patriarchy is incredibly cruel to (some) men. This cruelty and violence is enforced by the kind of proscriptive gender roles that incels, Matt Walsh, Douthat, Jordan Peterson, et. al., consign and promulgate.
     All these assholes claiming they’re helping men are actively working to kill, imprison, and immiserate men, as a sideline to killing, oppressing, abusing and [denigrating]^α women.
     It is frustrating, to put it mildly, to see someone like Peterson touted as a solution for alienated men, when his ideas and policy proposals will result in more of those men dying and living in misery.
     The biggest human rights atrocity in the US today is the mass incarceration of marginalized men. But when pundits suck their thumbs about the crisis of men or how we need to help alienated men, nobody ever mentions the single most important issue. Why?
     After a misogynist terror attack, we could be having a discussion about the toll misogyny wreaks on women *and* men, and how patriarchy is a death cult that we need to destroy.
     Instead we’ve got people furrowing their brows and seriously talking about a lack of access to sex, as if this is men’s first, or 600th problem in this society.
     If you want to help men, a good first step would be to stop hating women, and to stop hating femininity.
     Until we do that, we’re all fucked.

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^α Original: “… sideline to killing, oppressing, abusing, and immigrating women.”