Not all Pigs…or Something

Not all Pigs…or Something

Get it?

This is likely out of date by now, but I’ve been chewing on it awhile and it’d be good to get off my chest.

A couple weeks back, in the run-up to the American mid-term elections, I noticed a post on my facebook feed from a (Canadian) acquaintance, talking about the so-called ‘migrant caravan’ (funny how that has dropped from the news cycle right after the elections, eh?). Said individual is a pretty staunch ‘progressive’ liberal, and doesn’t usually post anything wantonly reactionary, so I was surprised when I noticed the tenor of the commentary – very much against the people making their way through southern Mexico, questioning how they could be so entitled as to dare to enter a country that’s “not their own,” and even going so far as to stoke the preposterous idea that this is all a ploy by the America Right to stir up their base. As I said, liberal, so I guess the legal fiction of the primacy of borders should have gone without saying, but, like, even the Young Turks got it right on that conspiracy theory. I guess I’d been spending too long in my Extreme Left echo chamber, but the whole thing caught me rather off-guard.

So far, so whatever, but then I noticed that someone else had swung in, presumably much further left than our original poster, spouting off a bunch of slogans and Marxist platitudes. In the face of this, OP doubled down on their original position, expressing esteem for rule-of-law, securely controlled borders, and, by extension, the carceral state. This was met with more platitudes, which were in turn responded to by repetition and the deployment of some sorely misunderstood economics and history. Then everyone made up and nothing of value was conferred.

People – this is a bad way to argue.

I’m not a fan of debating on the internet – way too much of a zero-sum affair, and there’s no way of knowing if your interlocutor is acting in good faith or just trolling – but if you’re going to, at least try to do it effectively. Slogans are great for riling up the faithful, but they aren’t going to convince any one on the fence, and are likely just going to push them over on to the other side. It’s something I harp on quite a bit, but, you need to figure out what you’re trying to achieve and set your behaviour to match: do you want to strut and preen and perform for the in-group (a la so much ‘woke’ internet conduct), or do you actually want to make your case in the best way possible? It’s a matter of immediate tactics vs. long-term strategy.

So, let’s take the carceral state for example.

If your opponent is a self-described ‘progressive,’ such as was our OP, or even if they’re a vanilla lib or even a conservative with a conscience (rare as they are – real conservatives, not those with a conscience, most “conservatives” in anglo countries are just laissez-faire liberals), they’ll likely have some common ground with you regarding the brutality of the modern industrial-prison system. Actually, if they’re a progressive, they’ve probably done a fair amount of research on their own, already. However, nothing is going to make them shut down faster than labelling all police fascist pigs.

It’s highly doubtful that a majority of people enter the police force for anything other than altruistic reasons. It’s sold to them as an honourable profession, they’re involved in assisting their community, and so on and so on. There are definitely a minority who go in to it for the wrong reasons, on a power-trip or what have you. But, chances are, your interlocutor has a buddy who is a cop, or a family member, and aren’t going to take too kindly to you dragging them through the proverbial mud.

It’s up to you to unpack how the job, by its very nature, requires the police person to work against their better nature. The job ain’t all defending helpless widows and nabbing drink drivers. Often, even the majority of the time, it’s about undermining the very class they likely come from, keeping the state rigidly organised to the benefit of the propertied against the working, punishing those who are selected by systemic means as the criminals of society. You need to show how, inherently racist as society is, it perverts what were otherwise reasonable individuals into the murderers of unarmed poor people. And this takes facts, and patience, and equanimity. It’s not easy.

And that’s what I was thinking in the wake of seeing that interaction.
Until I came across this article a day or so later.

The article details the current state of the organisation known as the ‘Proud Boys’ – one of the various alt-right (or alt-light, to hear other right-wing hate groups describe them) groups to attract attention post-Trump, and in particular their conduct at recent demos in NY and Rhode Island. The Proud Boys are the creation of Gavin McInnes, one-time Vice co-director, more recently on a constant drift towards the extreme right, burning bridges and causing offence along the way. The Proud Boys have been pretty effectively dunked on by the good people over at Chapo Trap House for their more parochial aspects, including the requirement that each member adhere to a ‘no-fap’ rule, ie., not masturbate or consume pornography. Jokes aside, though, the group has as one its core values the use and escalation of violence in public, and has clashed with antifa and the like numerous times now. In the aftermath of Trump taking the Presidency, I commented on the histrionic nature of labelling him a fascist, pointing out that, even if he has fascistic tendencies, it’s not as if he’s got a brigade of brown shirts supporting him. Since then, though, the Proud Boys have been renting themselves out as ‘security’ for Republican events, becoming, as the Baffler describes it, “the militant wing of the Republican Party.” It’s not as if they’re Trump’s personal death squad or anything, yet, but it is a situation that bears watching and dismantling, if at all possible.

More to the point of this post, though, is what played out at those demos. When a group of Proud Boys, outnumbering counter-demonstrators, beat them with impunity – under the watchful eyes of the NYPD, in full view of the media – nothing was done. The police were on-site. They watched it happen. They then arrested the counter-protesters. “I have a lot of support in the NYPD and I very much appreciate that, the boys in blue,” McInnes later said.

So, yeah.
Fuck the pigs.

Sing it, PatStew.

Two Recent Psychology Works that Miss the Mark

Caught this article a few days back, and, whilst I mainly agree with the arguments made, there are some important counterpoints I think need to be voiced.

The piece in question is a ‘review’ of two recent books, both published by people within the world of professional psychology, trying to get to grips with the current malaise of American society. Neither of which I’ve read myself, so, I can’t comment in good faith beyond what is being reported. Review of a review – this blog brings the quality!

The first, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, purports to be a cautionary statement regarding the current president, written by a collection of professionals. Importantly, they dodge falling foul of the Goldwater Rule – that unwritten law of the psychology community which prevents professionals from commenting on public figures whom they haven’t, themselves, examined – by saying that they are speaking not as practitioners, but as concerned citizens. As the article points out, if this is the case, that they are nothing more than another set of voices in a remarkably substantial torrent of commentary, do they deserve to be accorded any special status? Not really, especially when the main thrust of their argument is comprised of nebulous statements drawn from speciously broad tracts of ‘data’ or things that other people have already said elsewhere. This is little more than signal boosting, providing a veneer of professionalism (while carefully dodging even the commitment to that) to the standard, anti-Trump rhetoric we’ve been fed the past year and more. As I’ve mused before, this may have its instrumental use, but I’m hardly about to shell out for it. So much for that, then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the second book where I begin to depart from the article’s position. Rather than focussing so closely on a single character, such as the president, Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. takes a look at American society more broadly. The author, Allen Frances, is a bigwhig of the evo-psych movement, and brings that “methodology” to bear in looking at the current state of Yankiedom. At least from what the article presents, this is classic evo-psych overreach – we have broad-stroke, un-nuanced generalisations based off a wonky understanding of evolution being used to try and explain events and trends best investigated by other disciplines. Frances seems to end up at a neo-Malthusian position – the real evil in our world is not gross gulf between classes, or the perfidious ideologies of racism or sexism – no, the genuine article driving all misery is over-population. From here, he jumps into a righteous indignation that so many women had the gall to not vote for Clinton, actively undermining the access they would have to prophylactics, thereby continuing to burden the planet with their undesired and undesireable offspring. I grow ever closer to the anti-natalist stance myself, but this line of argumentation is just silly. Repeating the tired adage that people owed their vote to HRC, because she was a woman, or the Dem candidate, or was possibly the lesser of two evils, is at best to misunderstand how democracy works. The tenacity with which a certain stripe of liberal grips this canard is indicative of the hubris that was such a large part of why Trump won the election (even with fewer votes – it’s a stupid system, but he still won). Clinton was ultimately found to be undeserving, and the condescending expectation that it would be otherwise played a big role in that.

Reading the article comes at a good time for me – I’ve been working my way through Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True – which is a book on how Buddhist practice, stripped of its more metaphysical trappings, syncs up quite nicely with the modular theory of mind. A lot of Wright’s explanations stem from evolutionary psychology – it’s what he’s famous for, after all – but the way in which he brings it to bear is importantly dissimilar from the abuses the field is so often used for. Rather than some lock-step, “society-is-this-way-today-because-we-were-this-way-100,000-years-ago-so-your-manager-deserves-to-make-more-money-than-you” is/ought nonsense, Wright marshals our evolutionary history in a much more conservative way. Rather than go for the strong, ‘everything we see today is precisely down to our evolved nature,’ Wright presents the weaker claim that our bodies, and hence our minds, are not really interested in the things we might deem important (like happiness, truth or personal flourishing) – rather, they are geared towards genetic proliferation, and will cut corners to get there. They’re all we’ve got, but they shouldn’t necessarily be trusted. And meditative practice, so the argument goes (as well as the evidence), is a good way of both identifying where we’re being lied to, and eventually overcoming it. This accords with my own views, so, this critical look at another use of evo-psych is a good reminder that I shouldn’t be allowing my own prejudices to give Wright’s ‘just-so’ stories a pass. In omnibus operandus premebantur!

If you get any of them, get this one!

But, all that doesn’t really detail my divorce from the article. Assuming the presentation of the two works is accurate, I generally agree with the criticisms made. It’s the closing statements where I take umbrage –

“What are psychiatrists good for, in the political sphere? On the evidence of these books, not much…A therapist can’t offer to give you more money, or literal freedom, but they can teach you to tolerate your lack of it without acting out. They can help you to function in society as it is. This is a crucial function, and what the books bring us: a bit of foresight, but not a diversion from our fate.”

While this statement may be true for far and away the majority of main stream psych, and certainly the pabulum offered up by these two books, I feel as if it is throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater to dismiss the whole discipline. For the past couple of years I’ve been thinking of going back to school to study psych, with the belief that, if answers are to be found anywhere as to why people continually vote against their own interests, why solidarity and class-action constantly founder, why people so often bow to their dishonourable, rapacious desires in the face of what they know to be just, then it must be at the intersection of psychology and sociology. And if those answers can be found, perhaps the way to overcome these failings can also be discovered.

Furthermore, I feel like teaching a patient to ‘tolerate [the] lack…without acting out’ is falling grossly short of the ideal. It’s true that much therapy does aim for this, in particular the novel fetish for ‘mindfulness’ in the workplace, whose proponents should be driven from our communities with pitchfork and torch like the monstrous class traitors they are. But the real goal should be the shoring up of the person, providing them the skills to surmount their situation, to better push back against it. Psychotherapy shouldn’t be perceived, nor practiced, as a rearguard action, but rather as the buttressing of a position to better sally forth from in the next battle.

ST:D – A Most Unfortunate Acronym

ST:D – A Most Unfortunate Acronym

Came across this article over at 3:AM yesterday, and its focus on the thematic as grounds for critique of the new Star Trek series struck me as refreshing. I’ve my own gripes, which I’ll probably get to in due course, but they are rather more menial than those detailed in the article.

We get it, you were raised by Vulcans…

In brief, Daniel (article’s author) makes a surey of some of the recent criticism, and praise, for Star Trek: Discovery, highlighting the way in which it differs from previous series on a broad level. Apparently, there has been some approval for the shift to a more politicised approach to the content, unlike the way in which The Next Generation or the Original pursued a very pulled-back, future Utopian-esque feel. Daniel mentions in passing the now-super-cringe-inducing way ST: Enterprise had tried to grapple with current events, and, from what I’ve seen, Discovery has thus far avoided this, I suspect it is waiting in the wings. I appreciate the fact that all SF is really about the era in which is it written, but the plotting of ST:E was so ham-fisted it’s a wonder it lasted for the 4 seasons it did.

The article references the very perestroika-era nature of TNG and Deep Space 9, which lead to the rather smug, Utopian triumphalism on display, and picks up on Bifo Berardi’s recent work detailing the decline of a technologist Utopianism of just this sort. Berardi has been, up to now, someone I didn’t have a lot of time for, Autonomism striking me as one of those theoretical frameworks you get less out of than the effort you have to put in to understand, but the work referenced – After the Future – might be worth taking a look at. The bookends of the techno-Utopian project, that of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and the events of 9/11, seemed interesting, not least for the choice of these events in and of themselves.
This is not to say that the piece derogates the Utopian project outright – far from it, in fact. Counterpoised to Berardi’s pessimism for capitalist-technoUtopianism is the idealism of the early days of the Soviet revolution, espoused most particularly by Mayakovksy and the spirit of which is on display in Star Trek at its most succesful and heavy-hitting. Furthermore, there are good arguments that we need a Utopian focus, as it helps pull us through the drudgery of building a more equitable, worthwhile world.

For all its successes in carving its own trajectory, the article correctly upbraids the ST:D for taking the easy route on xenophobia. As was heavily discussed almost immediately, the presentation of the Klingons as religiously anti-Federation is meant to be a comment on the current state of American politics. However, as the 3:AM article points out, this has got the situation completely reversed. Thankfully, the data is coming to bear, and it is clear that the narrative of the ‘angry white working-class’ just doesn’t match the truth that it was affluent voters that allowed Trump his victory. But –

All of this points to the uncomfortable reality that hate and intolerance often emerge from within largely cosmopolitan societies, not from without. Nevertheless, in Discovery, the ideology of racial purity is assigned to an alien enclave entirely foreign to the Federation, suggesting that racism is not the left’s problem to fix.

It’s true that, despite good intentions, the previous series fell short of their “progressive” ideals in one way or another (<<cough>> <<cough>> rampant misogyny <<cough>><<cough>>). This, then, may be ST:Ds Achilles Heel.

Or it could be that the dialogue is wooden, the acting is crappy, the premise is dumb and rehashed, and the prosthetics are debilitating. Column A, column B?

I stopped watching after the 6th ep, back in mid-October, so I can’t really speak to any developments/improvements since. Still, it’s not too much to expect the series to have found its footing more than half-way through, is it?

This is the first I’ve seen of Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays the lead character Michael Burnham in ST:D, and I get that much of the issue lies with the really crap-tastic dialogue she is provided, but the human-acting-as-Vulcan really doesn’t cut it when it comes to building a likeable, engaging main character. Furthermore, can’t we put away this whole trope of “misfit learns to embrace their humanity”? The success of it in the characters of Spock/Data/Odo/SevenOfNine/whatever the fuck they used in ST:E was that they were part of an ensemble cast, and didn’t have to carry the whole of the series. As is, with the more linear narrative (as opposed to the potted episodes of previous series) of ST:D, Burnham is much too much the focus, and the struggle to come to grips with her human/Vulcan duality stretches pretty thin when it is constantly front and centre.

I know that I’m looking back on the previous series through rose-coloured glasses (I was a kid, alright?) and that they were super hammy, and the dialogue was often so stilted as to be somewhere in the stratosphere, but I can’t recall anything so grim as someone interjecting ‘Computer – add roasted tomato salsa. Cooked tomatoes are a great source of lycopene, remember that.’ Like, I get that they are trying to big up Burnham’s logical thrust, but, shit, it’s salsa. What the hell else is it going to be made from? Clunky.

Talking about clunky, can we address the prosthetics they’ve brought in for the Klingons? I’m not terribly down with the aesthetic changes they’ve made, as I’m not sure how you keep continuity (also, is this series meant to be in the same time-line as the other series? is it in the parallel universe of the reboot films? do we even know?) with what we see of  the Klingons later on, but I can appreciate that the show runners wanted to differentiate things a bit.
The problem is, while the visual presentation of the species is striking – or at least, the faces are, costuming is all a bit naff – the actors can barely move inside them, and it leaves the faces rubbery, devoid of emotion. It also undercuts anything they try to say – what used to be an expressive, highly dramatic species is left croaking out lines that are stripped of any impact. And it’s not as if they couldn’t do better – the work on the character of Saru, by comparison, is stellar. I just don’t know why you’d elect to have your major antagonist look as if they have no motor control of their face.

 

I think…he’s trying to smile?

If all this is meant to be in the main timeline, then the writers have done themselves a grave disservice. It irritates me no end when you get some tell-tale leap forward in a novel, some hint about a character’s fate, that completely undercuts any dramatic tension for the rest of the work, and it happens more often than you’d think. Here, if this is part of the same arc as TOS and TNG and all the others, well, we know that nothing actually comes of the Discovery and her crew, because the drive-technology that is so central to the whole series is never referenced in any other canon entity. It’s all moot. It’s bad story-telling, that hobbles itself before it’s even out the gate.

There’s a chance that Star Trek: Discovery will yet sort out its kinks and become a more balanced, interesting series. Sometimes it takes a season or so to hit stride, the start of TNG as a good example. All the same, it can do that on its own time – I don’t reckon I’ll be spending much more of mine on it. The 3:AM article, though, was interesting, and opened up lines of inquiry I hadn’t previously thought about.

A Nazi in the Whitehouse?

It’s been a good long while since I’ve written anything (that I’ve posted here, at any rate).
I’d been meaning to get back to posting regularly, in various forms, for a while now. Chances are the next few pieces, of whatever type, will feature stuff I’ve been chewing on these last few months.

This one, however, might as well cover some ground since last I posted.

Without further ado – Trump

“China”

I freely admit, I misjudged the situation in America in the run-up to the election. I was caught flat-footed on this as much as I was by Brexit. As evidenced in some of my previous posts, I was hardly rooting for a Clinton victory, but it was what I expected and what I was preparing for.

It might sound rather precious for me, a Canadian living in Britain, to say I was ‘preparing’ for anything to do with an American election, or even to believe that I’m warranted an opinion. On the other hand, though the States might not be my country, it is still the major imperial power of the day and that causes me concern enough to write this.

It’s no secret that Trump has been Bad News for Americans, and Mexicans, and Canadians, and the World, in very tangible ways. The emboldening of toxic, right-wing elements within the electorate has lead directly to the deaths of many. The policy positions, those few he has been successful in enacting, have posed even greater threats. I’m still not convinced the man himself is an out-and-out fascist. A bigot, a misogynist, a criminal, certainly. But, with the sloughing off of the most extreme elements of his coterie (Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, etc.) it seems clear that we are dealing with a more standard Right-winger we are lead to believe – which is, I should say, certainly bad enough.

The Democrats and their cheer-leaders have been offensively unapologetic regarding the -abject- failure of the Clinton campaign. HRC is now, of course, setting out on a book tour denying any fault at all of her own in the rise of Trump, doubling down on the hubris that played a large role in how deeply unpopular her candidacy was. There is no doubting that there is a gross tendency of misogyny in America, perhaps the worst example of it in the West, but this doesn’t, as many claim, explain in full the results of last November. The belated and poorly executed Democrat resistance to Trump, only now really getting up to speed, is just so pathetic, and is indicative of these deeper issues. I mean, I could go for nuance here, or link to detailed commentary on the Dem’s conduct over the last year, but this comic from the Nib more than gets the point across:

I don’t know that many, if any, Democratic officials have said it on record themselves, but the amount of rhetoric from the luvvies in Hollywood, talking heads of the liberal/centrist media, the hoi poloi of Facebook/Twitter, all declaiming Trump as a fascist and what all else is nigh on rendering the concept meaningless. Trump isn’t effective enough to be a fascist. If he were, he’d be a great deal more organised, a great deal more thorough in subverting the fabric of American democracy (such as it is) and a great deal more direct in his methods. Trump is a shambolic megalomaniac, who has ridden to power on the seething hatred and cynicism of various parts of the American electorate, and that is enough.

I’ve actually sat on this piece a half a month now, and the unfolding of this most spectacular of presidencies has forced me to change up my tack. Back then, I had just read a puff piece on Martin Amis which actually prompted me to write this – he’s recently released a collection of essays – and in the article Amis mentions his relationship with Christopher Hitchens. In particular, he talks about Hitchens’ propping up of American Imperialism in his last years, and this jogged the memory of those times. I was struck by the similarities in the run-up to the Iraq war, the lies that were told, the grandstanding, the lot of it, to our own times. I was, if only for a day or so, possessed of a belief that the world might actually be headed towards WWIII.

However, the news cycle has moved on – Trump has shown yet again how much of a travesty he is for his own people, using his trip to hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico to actively insult the residents of that colony; Trump has decided he’s tired of a far-East nuclear stand-off, and is trying to shred what seemed like a done deal with Iran – why one front when you can fight two? There was coverage of various angles following Trump’s diatribe at the UN, and one in particular struck me – Trump’s rhetoric is bred out of the one thing he half-way understands, that of machismo business conduct. Most of what he says about NK is likely, in fact, aimed at China. Setting the initial point far higher than what he wants at the end of the day, Trump is seeking to bring China to the bargaining table. We might yet bumble into war in Southeast Asia, but I no longer think that that is the direct intent of Trump and his administration. Most tellingly, the American military has made no obvious preparations for a large-scale adventure, and they’re the ones who’ll have to do all the heavy lifting.

I had, before I believed as I now do, intended to close this piece by coming round, half-way, to an endorsement of the liberal tactics mentioned above – this effort to paint Trump as, somehow, even worse than he is. He isn’t a Nazi, but, if making him out to be is effective in removing him from power more quickly than is telling the truth, perhaps it’s an acceptable fudge. Truth and the blind pursuit of it, especially after the training in Philosophy, has been something of a hang-up for me. However, more and more, this academically-manufactured foible is giving way to recognition that the truth is instrumental, and, more-often-than-not, completely side-lined in ‘civil’ discourse. The zeitgeist is laser-focused on ‘fake news’ at the moment, but this has always been the case – human beings are limitedly rational, and the heuristics we’ve developed to get on in an informationally-incomplete life sideline considerations of 100% accuracy. The unswerving pursuance thereof is a fetish for the secure and self-satisfied.

But, as I said, that was before. I’m still loosening up my miserly, pedant’s grip on the Truth, one finger at a time, but this doesn’t strike me as one of those moments to let slip the knowing lie. The truth has great power – it is in large part why Corbyn has found such success – and the abuse of it will inevitably result in trouble down the line (the current, recognised hollowness of the Dems is a case in point). Obviously, if we’re staring down nuclear war, onus should be put on current concerns, possible futures be damned. But, this isn’t the current project. If we right-thinking people do want to be rid of Trump, we need to root out his cause, for he is, ultimately, just a symptom. We will not do this by lying about the thing. As much as Cheeto Benito is an hilarious moniker.

There. Done. Back. Apologies for the meandering nature of the above. Next will be more succinct.