: Thinking about bad things does not make you bad
It is very convenient to suppose that people who spend, for example, all day thinking about war and violence and horror might become desensitized to it, and therefore default to violence as a solution more easily, the same way that you might suppose that someone who is addicted to sexist video games becomes more comfortable with or sympathetic to sexism, or on the other hand, someone who works in health care or education might have a more practiced and gentle touch when dealing with someone in a difficult situation.
But it is self-evident, or at least evident to me, that there are plenty of elected officials and big-brain decision-makers, now and throughout history, who know next to nothing about the harsh realities of war or violence or worse, and if anything this position of ignorance makes it easier to send people to the frontlines and to their death.
And similarly, we all know someone who loves to perseverate on violence, perhaps by watching action movies or reading true crime novels, who would never dream of hurting another human being, may even be a vegetarian.
And anyone who has ever been to school (so almost everyone who can read this post) can attest that some teachers are in that profession for the wrong reasons and use the classroom to imprison students in a fantasy of power and control, and perhaps you can also relate to the phenomenon of so-called “empathy burnout” that lets your doctors and nurses perform perfect kindness at the side of a sick patient but, behind closed doors, snap at their loved ones or inferiors.
What you can conclude from this is that the human soul is not a robot arm that just does what it’s programmed to do; we have such a thing as megacognition, which lets us spend a lot of time thinking about a bad idea and then conclude precisely that the idea is bad.
Once you understand this, you begin to grow suspicious of people who want to change society by changing the “inputs,” for example by banning books with gay sex in them to prevent people from having gay sex. (Edit to clarify, I don’t think that gay sex is bad, but those who want to ban the books do.) People are going to come to their own conclusions about what’s right and then do that; you can make them ashamed of it, but you can’t stop them from thinking and knowing deep down the difference between good and evil.
: Shit's kinda rough
World is a FUCK nowadays, not a lot of great news out there AT ALL folks. Wee gratitude exercise—3 things I’m grateful for:
- Pretty damn good cup of coffee about five minutes ago
- Family drama BUT at a resort where a guy can swim
- And the air is very fresh and clean
: Gender moment at the civic center
I just overheard some girl telling a guy “your feelings matter” and realized nobody besides my therapist has ever said that to me in my entire goddamn life haha
: Why do we resist psychosexual explanations for bad politics?
(Writing this post in msedit because why not, lol.)
I sent some crazy texts out this week and the cold reception reminded me that I might be the only one who thinks like this—and now I’m wondering if I’m crazy, but it seems to me self-evident that lots of politicians (and their supporters) are making their decisions on the basis of crude power fantasies rather than some specific policy objective. And if this is true, then it has pretty big implications for how we engage in political discourse, because there is no hope in getting through to a Trump supporter with arguments about how tariffs are bad for the economy if the Trump guy supports tariffs not out of concern for the economy at all but, basically, because he thinks that the steel industry is hot and that’s a thing we should be doing more of.
Well, that’s the second example I could think of, because I wanted to put the first example in this paragraph: It’s that stupid visa social media screening thing. There is no justification for asking student visa applicants to provide their social media handles as part of their visa application. Even if you accept the flawed premise that it’s “bad” to admit people to the US if they have political beliefs that do not align with US foreign policy objectives (we have those?), this particular way of screening for it is laughably gameable. If you are applying for a student visa, all you have to do is scrub your account of anything but innocuous restaurant pictures, maybe a few token MAGA takes for good measure, and the embassy will have nothing on you.
This, of course, is the real point of the social media handle requirement: It’s a sexual fantasy; the whole point is to make the visa applicants kneel and beg, say “please let me study in the One Great Country,” fork over their phone to the consular officer and let them scroll their vacation pictures, participate in this spectacle of American Greatness™ and provide further fodder for the “best president ever” narrative.
I think many people’s reaction to this framing is that it’s hyperbolic, exaggerating to make a point, being edgy on purpose. And maybe it is, but also maybe: What if what I’m saying here is just literally, factually true? Do we have a better explanation for this kind of megalomanical power moves than that Marco Rubio gets off on it? Recall that this is “little Marco,” the guy whom Trump literally teased about having a small penis … it just makes too much sense that this is all a dominance fantasy of his; for the life of me, I can’t come up with a better explanation—can you? But even my friends to the left of me think I’m way out of left field saying shit like this.
(Msedit review: It’s actually … kind of good? Very responsive, has word wrap, has functional keybindings. I tried using Find and Replace and it said This operation requires the ICU library whatever TF that is but I’ve had worse Linux problems.)
: “Can we have a problem without a villain?”
I think/hope I have written before here about how much I adore Richard Reeves, who seems to be one of the only sane voices in the “crisis of masculinity” discourse. He has a great interview here in The Sun this month. Most if it is similar points to what he’s said in other places: that we need to be able to recognize that both boys and girls are struggling in different ways, that we need messaging targeted at men on the left or else they will vote for Joe Rogan, that family courts kinda suck.
But what makes me hopeful about Richard (we are on a first-name basis now) is that he is good at marketing. He always comes up with clever new phrases and anecdotes to illustrate the same basic points, which is critical if you want your social movement to get anywhere.
I really like this quote about “a problem without a villain,” because it tells you something not just about the masculinity crisis, but offers a kind of meta-insight about our larger discourse, and there’s a little something in the paragraph for everyone to relate to, which makes it feel much less condescending than what you often here from enthusiastic activist types:
Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues. For example, the school system doesn’t work quite as well for boys. It’s not intentional; there’s no feminist plot here. I have never argued that men are being intentionally excluded. Those are all myths—and dangerous ones at that. But that doesn’t mean that boys and men aren’t struggling in systems that are difficult for them to navigate. Can we have a problem without a villain? I think so, but that’s an unfashionable view right now.
Richard says he is planning to work with his local Big Brothers Big Sisters group, which made me think I should do the same, but unfortunately my city’s chapter closed down :(.