Career vs Vocation

 I'm going to assert there's an idea out there, floating about society, and I leave it to you to decide how plausible my assertion is. The idea is some version of this:

"In the future, anything you don't want to do will be done by robots, leaving everyone free to only do what they want to do."

There is certainly, some history that supports a future hit by this trajectory - for example the washing machine largely automated what was previously a gruelling, time consuming task greatly diminishing the domestic workload such that it is possible to have two adults in a household both work 40 hours a week somewhere else, and get the laundry done without paying wages to someone to do it for the household.

In my lifetime, I can vaguely recall at one time garbage trucks doing weekly garbage collection used to employ crews of three, with two men running behind a stinky truck tipping the contents of bins into the compactor. Two of these jobs have been replaced by a robot arm, though I've lived in countries where it is still a manual exercise.

I open with this, because the idea that we are approaching some future where people do not do things they don't want to do, only things they want to do while explicitly promising an end to dirty jobs, shit jobs or whatever, implicitly promises an end to careerists.

At which point I have to define my terms. A vocation is a calling, you want to do the work. A career is more like a game, you do what you must to get what you actually want.

For example, being a volunteer worker at a mental health crisis line - someone who speaks to people who call in distress, is more likely to be a vocational calling - someone wants to do the work because it means a lot to them to do the work itself. There are examples of people who work such a job to some other end, than the job itself, Chris Voss, founder of Black Swan Consulting Group and a former hostage negotiator for example volunteered at a lifeline call centre in order to get a job as a hostage negotiator, youtuber Theramin Trees tells the story of a client who worked at a call centre for unhealthy self-serving reasons.

Similarly consider a sales team that sells pharmaceuticals, as has been portrayed in recent movies about the US opioid crisis. Here is a career that probably selects for careerists. People who don't particularly care about the work they do in and of itself, just what the work can obtain for them - high commissions incentivising "gaming" the regulations. For them, a highly addictive expensive drug is great as compared to a cheap non-addictive drug that resolves the same problem for the patient.

I would point out, that people have real needs for which, often, working is a reality. David Graeber distinguished between "bullshit jobs" and "shit jobs" where the former are jobs that are often well compensated but leave the people who have them with a strong suspicion that the job does not even need to exist. Shit jobs are jobs that need doing, but are not a great experience to have. 

To be clear, I have no problem with somebody working a shit job as a careerist. It might be hard to think of say, getting up at 3am every day to turn on all the deep fryers and ovens and grills so they are ready for a 6am breakfast service at a fast food restaurant. Or sitting in a booth policing a road boarder between the US and Canada for the night shift, checking passports, asking stock questions and pressing a button to make a boom gate go up and down. Or being a baggage handler at an airport. These are jobs people may feel no passion for, but they do them because they have rent to pay and children to feed clothe and send to school.

Further to the point, it's not like people with a true inner calling to be a veterinarian or field surgeon or civil engineer, don't also need to obtain food clothing and shelter. People who are more vocationally inclined may still desperately need the coincidence of being compensated for what they produce.

Then there's vocations, like in the arts. I am convinced that people actually need art. Whether it is observing that hunter gatherers used their downtime to paint on cave walls figurative representations of themselves and the animals around them, maybe deities and supernatural beings since 30,000 years ago or something, thru to people who get cranky when you interrupt the netflix show they've been streaming on demand and can pause and resume at anytime.

But, while society needs art, they don't need as many artists as society has, resulting in to some degree a style of toxic vocationism where people persist in roles that most people are indifferent to them doing. The problem is, how does an unpopular artist determine whether they are Joe Nobody or Vincent Van Gogh? There are multiple candidates to explain any artists lack of success, though probably it will be a lack of talent.

Alas, investment plays a role. Consider the following list: The Cruel Sea, Machine Gun Fellatio, Something For Kate, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, Silverchair, Grinspoon, Jebediah, The Living End, Powderfinger, Custard.

Compared to: Saskwatch, Eagle And Worm, Hiatus Coyote, Blackchords, The Bombay Royale... 

Those two lists comprise largely of Australian Indie Rock Bands. The first list are bands that toured and recorded largely from the mid 90s through to 00s. At the time, Nirvana had happened and the 90s saw a brief implosion of manufactured pop acts between like 93~94 to 97 when the Spice Girls dropped. I was too young, but the impression I have is that record labels literally walked into bars amid Nirvana induced confusion and gave record deals to gigging artists of the time. 

Triple J and Recovery were state funded institutions that were developing artists in the 90s and early 2000s with programs like "Unearthed" that discovered acts like Silverchair most notably, but many other acts that managed to top charts, sell out venues, tour profitably and like, buy houses and have a living as a musician. 

The later lists are like some of the biggest acts I was aware of by 2010. By that stage, if you signed with a record label, it meant they put your cds in some shops. Before you signed, you had to gig enough to get good, build a big social media following, pay to record and mix your own album, launch your album and sell enough copies to impress a label, crowdfund enough money from your fanbase to go tour a festival like SXSW or Glastonbury, then the label turned up and gave your seventeen piece multi-instrumentalist arcade fire inspired band a deal that meant they'd pay the cost of producing more copies of physical cds and you'd get royalties from sales. 

I don't think that early to mid 90s Melbourne was producing more talent that 2010s Melbourne. Music had changed, synths were back on stage, vocalists pounded on floor toms, men wore skinny jeans, but it's not like the population stopped producing talented artists who want to pursue a career in Music. Nor did live venues disappear despite a brief issue with retirees moving into the city and making noise complaints. I know Regurgitator are from Brisbane, Silverchair are from Newcastle or something and so on... my point would be in any given year of the 90s when I lived in Ballarat and went to exactly 0 live concerts or performances, I could name ten Australian indy bands, and my friends be they erudite culture vultures or meatheads with frosted tips and globe skateshoes would know who I was talking about.

I struggle to name 10 Melbourne bands from the 2010s when I lived in Melbourne and for three years or so was going to 3 gigs a week that I could expect anyone but a gigging muso from the period to recognize. Hiatus Kaiyote are probably the biggest act, and I would never expect anyone to recognize the name. They supported Erykah Badu when she finally toured Australia, they are multiple Grammy Nominees and have had their songs sampled by some pretty big names in hip-hop. 

Similarly if we consider the names: Leonarda Da Vinci, Donnatello, Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Fra Angelico etc. I don't think anything mysterious happened to make the High Renaissance take place in Florence conveniently where most of all the greatest artists of the time originated (with the notable exception of Raphael from Urbino) in Florence? 

I think the simplest/parsimonious answer to the mystery of why all the greatest artists in the world were born in the same place at the same time was because they weren't. Rather, that's where the money was to invest in art, so artists became excellent. 

It is probably the same with the 90s, we got so many great indy bands because there was money in being an indy band. I'd make a slight concession that there might have been a lot of money for indy alt-rock acts because the beginning of "The End of History" was more disorienting and more interesting than 30 years into "The End of History". 

So all that said, whether careerists or vocationalists are preferable is somewhat going to rely on context.

What's the meat though? What's the beef? 

I think the difference between careerists and vocationalists is likely the actual division that is tearing our world apart. Vocationalists can destroy themselves, and if grossly incompetent technically someone could be so passionate about performing a role that they could destroy an institution. But generally, I predict that if you investigate the slow decline and failure of once pride-worthy institutions, we will find a careerist fucking it up.

Someone who had to be King, but had no interest in ruling. 

Careerists are I suspect, the far more numerous of the two broad populations. Being a vocationalist may even be seen as being somewhat defective in most working contexts. Think of the detective or soldier in a movie that refuses to take a desk job, preferring to be out in the field, or volunteers for more tours because the theatre of war is their home. These characters are often viewed by the others as abnormal, some kind of freak, though useful. Movies are not generally made about a detective who refuses a promotion in order to continue to fuck up cases and let criminals go free, but I'm sure it happens.

Many people, are likely a subtype of careerist I might dub passive-careerist. These are people who may end up in middle management, because they took a promotion because it was a promotion, not thinking that if they became assistant manager of a two person department (say a logistics department that mostly just calls up warehouses and asks where packages are) they have stepped off the path to much higher positions had they remained in the sales department with a lesser title and lower wage.

I would also hedge against any "Great Careerist" theory of history. I don't think the damage is just done by individual careerists getting into critical positions of power, with former British PM Liz Truss being a notable example, trashing the UK economy in a matter of weeks and serving the shortest tenure of any British PM. 

Careerists being numerous can quickly create a careerist culture, for example - gamefying the work. For example, a chef at a fastfood restaurant is told that his performance is measured by minutes-from-order-time. This metric is meant to encourage him to respond to orders quickly and efficiently, instead he grills up and prepares a bunch of burgers before orders start coming in, so that when they do, they are ready to go. His manager gives him his monthly numbers and says something like "way to go you're getting orders up in under a minute! That's phenomenal!" The chef gets promoted to a management position supervising other chefs that work the grill because his numbers are so good. He wants to look like a good manager, so he actually encourages the chefs that work under him to start pre-cooking food before orders come in.

Meanwhile, though never investigated, because the fast food restaurant went out of business, around the time this careerist started gaming his job, Yelp reviews started to drop in average score, and comments about their food being overcooked, or having got their order fast but it seemed soggy or had gone cold etc. start appearing. Also, the administrator responsible for stocking the pantry and fridges notices that they were ordering more from their suppliers, and that they also had to start paying for additional garbage hauling because the kitchen's waste output suddenly increased. Due to a lack of communication between management, the business didn't realize that these were the product of a line cook gaming his stats. So costs went up as customer satisfaction went down. The only positive comment left in reviews was how quickly customers got their food, and tragically this meant the chef-cum-manager was actually encouraged to keep making the problems worse, while the dilligent quartermaster trying to keep costs under control, was blamed for the increased expenses.

I've always liked the heuristic "What gets measured gets done." because it's more instructive than first glance. The first glance leads one to intuit it is advice - if you want something done, start measuring it. The second glance might reveal that it is also a caution - if you are measuring something, people will do it. Mindlessly.

My beloved NBA is heading toward disaster, and I suspect it is largely due to careerists. Perhaps it is no more poignant than to look at recent All-Star games. For those out of the know, and from different countries (as I am) to the US, in US sports-codes there's an almost bizarre tradition of an All-Star weekend, this is where fans, players and journalists get to vote on who the best players in the sporting code are, and teams are made up of the highest vote getters, then those teams play eachother in an exhibition match.

Perhaps most bizarrely, professional athletes used to take these games really seriously. You can see videos on youtube of the All-Stars sprinting up and down the court and trying their hardest to win the match. There have been few serious injuries, but Dwayne Wade did break Kobe Bryant's nose one all star match, and he had to wear a protective mask in regular season games while the bones healed. Kobe Bryant once called the All-Star Game "The Greatest Pick Up Game In The World" and the award given to the best player in the All-Star Game is now called "The Kobe Bryant Trophy".

In recent years though, the game is a poorly rated farce. Nobody plays defense, the scores are absurd, you can literally watch players standing around as they just watch someone run up for an uncontested dunk or to shoot a wide open three-pointer. Even coaches, bestowed the owner of coaching the Eastern or Western conference teams, have called recent All-Star Games "the worst" games of basketball ever played, and absolutely disgraceful, in their victory press conferences. I believe current plans, are to simply scrap the All-star game.

The other mainstay of the All-Star Weekend, was the Slam Dunk contest. previous winners include Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Domonique Wilkins, Spudd Webb, Nate Robinson, Dwight Howard, Blake Griffin...big names. 

Admittedly, it is hard to keep a slam dunk contest interesting for half a century. At some point the creativity got ridiculous, with choirs and cars driven onto the court to be jumped over. But the last two slam dunk contests were won by Mac McClung, who doesn't even play in the NBA, he is on the development team roster. He is a great athlete with creative dunks that deserved to win, but the big issue is that star players no longer compete.

This is careerism 101 - you want to get paid, but you don't want to do the job. Except it isn't. The All-Star Weekend is not the job, its a bizarre thing that interrupts the regular season and competition and though it distributes a recognition of sorts, it if anything jeopardizes the ability of pro athletes to do their job, as they could injure themselves in a contest that doesn't count towards what gets them paid the big bucks.

There probably is some cash consideration paid to the athletes that make the All-Star teams, in order to fly out and play. They are unionized. (I looked it up, players on the winning team get $100k in prize money, losers get $25k, you wouldn't know that losing the all star game just cost you $75k before tax though to look at recent games, an amount substantially higher than any fine the league levies against players for criticizing refereeing etc.) 

Admittedly, only relatively recently did NBA players start earning Michael Jordan mid-90s Chicago Bulls money for playing. Rules were put in place so no one team could pay one player so much money again. Inflation basically allowed Steph Curry to be the first player since Jordan to earn such money. But overall, most NBA players earn way more than 90s counterparts. 

Sadly, it seems, that is why they are there. This current season, the NBA had to implement a rule stating that a player was not eligible to win awards like "MVP" if they played less than 65(?) regular season games. Playing all 82 games of the season used to be considered a badge of pride, athletes played through injuries, no doubt sometimes foolishly. Now, a practice emerged called "load management" and the results have been dubious. 

I mean, there's actually so many factors contributing to the NBAs current relevancy crisis, that I could get bogged down in it. Suffice to say, I believe it to be a highly visible example of an institution destroyed by careerist tendencies. Almost everyone involved wants the results of a pro-athlete organisation - Accolades, Esteem, Sponsorship, Money etc. but there has been a sharp decline in playing competitive basketball. 

This divide has come to inform my brief history of humanity - someone does something of value and gets recognized, then the next generation comes along and tries to recreate the recognition without recreating the value.

Most people don't create, they surpass. They see what someone else has already done, and try to do more than that. So they try to beat a sales record, they don't generally create new products and services. 

Vocationalists tend to think about why the job exists, and with deep enough introspection can lead to innovative solutions. Careerists don't, their creative act is often gaming the proxies by which we try to determine that value is created, that jobs have been done.

Alas, we live in a careerist world. Careerists aren't going anywhere and I'm not advocating a careerist genocide. I'm advocating that this divide should be discussed, because it creates real problems.

I might conclude this post, this thought, this sketch, by circling back to David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs", that article created an immediate impact because Graeber an anthropologist described something all around us that wasn't really discussed. It still is inadequately discussed, the discussion has in my opinion barely evolved.

This is likely because bullshit jobs are a product of the inherit inefficiency of trying to organize society. We wind up with these situations where nurses earn hourly wages close to the minimum required by law, yet a few blocks from the hospital is an office building, where someone spends their day browsing real estate websites not because they are a realtor, but because they don't really have any real work to do but are paid enough that they can borrow funds to buy superfluous housing to their needs. 

I defy anyone who has worked in a workplace with more than 8 people, to have never wondered if one of their coworkers would create more value if they didn't turn up to work at all. An easy target is middle-managers of course, but in my experience this can be true of kitchen hands, waiters, technicians etc. 

Perhaps distinct from bullshit jobs and shit jobs, are people who are simply shit at their jobs. For example, for all the supposed efficiency of the market, in economic downturns when firms are forced to downsize their payroll, it is incredibly rare for an efficient firm to go out of business because they can simply no longer afford to pay their 100% efficient and necessary staff. No company, I have ever heard of, runs that lean.

There is always fat to be trimmed, and careerists can be the biggest victim of this, as often their career path has involved becoming quite expensive while producing dubious value. 

I once worked for a company, where I often got into quite chaste arguments about the jobs priority with a supervisor. We both had the same goal - protecting people's jobs. However, he felt that the way to look out for everyone's jobs was to, for lack of a better expression, play the game. Try to be as productive as possible in accordance with what was measured. I did not, I argued that we should question the game in order to ensure we were doing what we were actually paid to do, so maybe do the work instead of play the game.

At one point, I was delegated to head upstairs to the suits who had questions about why certain jobs weren't being done. I somewhat incredulously explained that the reason was that those jobs took a long time, which meant our jobs per hour rate dropped and people got punished based on that, so that nobody wanted to do that job because we were, simply put, punished for doing it.

This was my first inkling, that the company I worked for was dysfunctional, predicting a trend of decline, long term collapse.

At another point, the guy I used to argue with received a promotion to the next tier, literally a few weeks later he was made redundant, along with everyone else on that tier of management. I felt no schadenfreude, to see someone's philosophy so spectacularly refuted. It was a tragedy of myopia, a fundamental lack of understanding that corporations don't exist in a vacuum, but in an environment. That "what gets measured gets done" is also cautionary. 

What was worse, was that level of management, was the level of management that actually managed the department. Making them redundant resulted in sudden and collosal brain-drain regarding how things were done. Near as I can piece together, the manager the company thought ran the department had some years ago persuaded them to let him hire an assistant because he was swamped or something. That assistant was supposed to do his job, meaning he could now take home his pay check without doing any work. I literally cannot imagine what he did all day for years upon years.

The thing was, his new assistant followed his lead - delegating almost the entirety of their job to the next level of managers down. They were very hands off. I infer this because on the few occassions I witnessed them stepping in to "run things properly" it quickly became clear they had no idea what they were doing or how things worked. And I mean no idea. 

Fucking careerists. These two had hit the jackpot finding a way to generate minimal value for maximum return. Then unfortunately, some higher ups fired the entire level of management that actually managed the business. After this, it was too late to win those managers back, they quickly discovered the assistant manager was useless and fired them, leading to the discovery a short time later that the manager of the department was also utterly useless.

I feel somewhat comfortable about writing this, because after a long dysfunctional decline, that company no longer exists. 

The question that remains is, does all of human society operate more or less like that company?

Is Homophobia Eternal?

Which is to say, I am not quite persuaded by the notion that homophobia is something we can predict will always be around. For today, I am merely entertaining it. The notion that there will always be homophobia was put forward by Andrew Doyle - "Homophobia finds a way". 

I should say, I am also not a big fan of faux-"phobias" that I shall specify I mean that etymologically phobia probably just means "fear" regardless of whether it is rational or irrational, by convention specifically a 19th-20th century psychology convention "phobias" tended to describe irrational fears - hydrophobia, agoraphobia, arachnaphobia etc. to which there probably are fair analogues in homophobia, islamaphobia etc. but the distinction can be lost, for example, in describing someone who is irrationally afraid of spiders in the same way as someone who is irrationally afraid of homosexuals; continuing the example, people who are irrationally afraid of spiders may refuse to conduct a conversation in the same room as a house spider until someone else has removed it and people who are irrationally afraid of homosexuality might beat up a male with earrings regardless of his sexual orientation.

I think there was historic utility in the faux-phobia (in the sense of analogies) of homophobia, but because the analogy was false, the term is now, given the legal status of same-sex couples in most of the G7 nations, particularly the Anglo-sphere and Europe, causing as many breakdowns of useful discourse as it used to construct useful discourse. (I also suspect that "homophobic" was perhaps specifically targeted at people with "macho" concepts to specifically needle them with the contradiction between perceiving themselves as masculine and tough, but afraid of effeminate men.)

Lastly in my pre-ramble, I'd say that as I'm entertaining the idea that homophobia is a phenomena that can fluctuate but not progress toward resolution, I am certainly rationalizing toward that conclusion. Because of that, I'm not necessarily going to accept the conclusion.

Premise: Reproduction is Important

I'm not sure what is technically possible these days. Whatever the case, I feel it is at the quarter-mark of the 21st century, still the case that most people alive, and certainly most of the people that ever existed are the product of human reproduction.

As such I would expect this situation to be riding on some quite profound psychological reflection that reproduction is important. People tend to get preoccupied with it, give attention to it, ruminate and fantasize about it, and furthermore do so for things that could lead to reproduction without reproduction itself being the end they are conscious of.

To put it crudely, I'm saying a teenage boy abusing himself over an image of a woman's tits, does so because of reproduction, but are not necessarily having the conscious experience of thinking "I want to have a baby, a little baby that would breastfeed!" 

Similarly, this premise suggests that there is a reason when a distressed person walks through the door of a clinical psychologist that they will likely be questioned at length and upfront about their mother and father, at least until this recent blip of history. 

I suggest that happens as a result of the import of reproduction, even though across the tree of life we can see it take many forms - fish laying eggs to be fertilized outside the body, insects laying fertilized eggs inside another insects corpse, sharks birthing live young that have already fed on their slow to hatch siblings, birds that push their young out of their nests, birds that lay their eggs in another species nest to have them raised in their place, jellyfish that age forwards and backwards, microbes that reproduce asexually etc. we primates reproduce in a general primate way, as a social species.

I'm dimly aware that there are some scant cultures that might hold beliefs in multiple paternity and what not, beliefs I suspect that do not hold up to the scrutiny of genome sequencing.

Premise: Existential Angst

It takes a triumph of reason over instinct, emotion, to think how few days you spend morning the fact that you cannot name all 16 (in most cases) of your great great grandparents, nor all 32 of your great great great grandparents. Not even the least detail of their names. 

You might have an affinity for a particular indirect relation, some great uncle you share a name with if not named for, yet you probably know Isaac Newton, who had no children at all. I would guess the vast majority of some 5~6 billion conscious adults on the planet know Isaac Newton and have no idea who their ancestor was or what they did that walked the earth at the same time. If Newton doesn't do it for you, there's Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, Joan of Arc, Jesus of Nazereth whom we are not sure even existed. You of course know Adult Hitler's name, but in a few generations, most people descended from the Allies won't know their relations' names that went off to impede the Third Reich and Hirohito's ambitions in the pacific. 

Not everyone wants kids, but some people do, perhaps most at some point think about having kids in a desirous way. Even when they experience enough, perhaps the majority, of children around that they do not particularly like. 

People that have kids worry about their kids. Feel sick to their stomachs if they lose track of them, if they deviate from the routines they are accustomed to. I have even heard it described as an analogy, motherhood to having phantom limb syndrome. People use the term "a part of oneself" to describe all kinds of relationships, and kids are not excluded from the subjects of this expression.

Such that, a way to cope with the dread of leading a trivial, meaningless and forgetable life as a brief flash of illumination between two infinite darknesses in an indifferent universe, is to have kids. Children to survive you as a way to cope with your own mortality.

Even same-sex attracted couples, who despite all the historic messaging and environments that suggested that they did not and could not exist, but awaken in some proximity of puberty to realize that they like the sex which reflects them rather than contrasts them, still desire children as evidenced by the battles hard fought for the right to adopt, to employ surrogates and ongoing research to enable multiple paternity and maternity.

Argument

If it is the case that heterosexual people, among others, but are the subject here, feel anxious about reproducing, having kids. If they lay awake sometimes at night, wondering how old they will be at their child's graduation, or what they would do with the long rest of their lives if they do not spend them rearing children, then it makes sense to me, that parents would also get anxious about their kids reproducing.

And if for example, a parent has some reason to fear a doctor's office where they are informed their child will die of some incurable condition, and to a lesser extent finding their children will suffer from some condition that will diminish their chances of finding a mate, or some condition that renders them incapable of having children and perhaps even adopting children given the care they themselves will require, and if in those ultra-rare incidents where a father discovers he is not the father of the children he has been raising for years where upon the discovery of the facts about his mate and his children he spends any time at all feeling any negative affect at all before concluding "this changes nothing" then

It logically extends that parents in some number will experience a dread that their child is same sex attracted. It is just one generation removed from their concerns that they would not have children. I am easily persuaded that there is some undercurrent in all our lives, perhaps only salient for brief moments as bereavement is processed when people utter things like "it really puts it all in perspective" that people to some extent view having a child who doesn't then have their child is in some ways a waste.

I am inclined to think, simply, that them's be the breaks. I think, there is always going to be, a case at least to be made, that their will be some homophobia emanating as an existential dread from the vicinity of parents. The logical conclusion of Steve 38, and Tracy 34 deciding to marry simply because they both feel they are running out of time, having one child who doesn't conform to a gender stereotype long before they have the barest sexual thoughts but even so when their child is 6 Steve is 44 bald and fat, Tracy 40 and though they will have a full and enriching experience of parenthood, now they are preoccupied with the fear that they will never experience grandparenthood.

And so, just as I can't exclude my "bros" who upon becoming fathers of daughters impressed upon me their own discomfort with daughters and femininity perhaps because they had not realized how chauvinistic or misogynistic their own attitudes had always been, and it is of sudden import that sex not define interests, preferences, abilities and aptitudes, I can't exclude the possibility of parents who suspecting their investment in immortality might mature into homosexuality, start opening their mind to the possibility that sexual orientation might be in a parent's control.

Would that I could make the point that even though technological and legal progress may have made the getting of children by same-sex couples a non-obstacle, there is a fairly straightforward meaningful difference between the ease with which a heterosexual mating between teenagers might result in a child, versus a long and expensive process results in a child for same-sex couples and couples that struggle to conceive.

As such, much as your dog, has no fucking idea how society works, and they will find a toy poodle a more immediate threat that needs barking at than a drug addict with a screwdriver trying to break into cars in the same street. People possess reason, but are not that often possessed by it. As such, even if having a gay or lesbian child might actually, statistically predict they are more likely to produce a child than maybe having a straight child, this may not be understood and parents seek for something they understand, something more akin to their own experience.

So, having said all that - and I do not think it an exhaustive case, I'm not for example particularly interested in all the homophobic people who for example - hate themselves or have inflexible ideas of gender roles etc. That might produce the effect of homophobia being present in society without any connection to existential angst over genetic reproduction.

I conclude that if there is demand for solutions to same-sex attraction, just as if there is demand for snake oil, the market will find efficient and sophisticated ways to provide snake oil, subsequently if there is a predictable eternal demand for conversion therapy there will be a predictable eternal supply of conversion therapies.

The last thing that I would add, is emphasis on sophisticated ways to provide conversion therapies, because it is too easy to imagine a future where in Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere in the minds of a western anglo audience, there are church camps for praying the gay away. Given that same-sex attraction and orientation seems to crop up mostly unpredictably* the world over (I do not believe that Iran is free from the phenomena of homosexuality) the market will find conversion therapies that are palatable to someone whose self-conceit is that they are secular, progressive and liberal, but cannot overcome their fear that their offspring will go through life debilitated by same-sex attraction and simply wish, life was more straight forward for them.

Doyle's Argument Afterthought

Andrew Doyle, argues a position, that I doubt is in totality, that medically transitioning children (puberty blockers etc) is a new form of conversion therapy and a new form of homophobia. 

I simply do not have any access to any parents participating in such a process to form a non-speculative opinion. I'm not even sure if it's legal in my jurisdiction.

My impression is he also allows that other things are going on too, like social contagion among teenage girls perhaps.

So the idea that in some cases, transitioning minors is being employed as a conversion therapy seems plausible to me, and compatible with my prediction that there will always be some degree of homophobia inextricably linked to the same emotional centre that makes many people anxious about having children before it is "too late."

It comes to that dog-like lack of understanding as to what the fuck is going on. That one could feel the anxiety that their child might grow up to be same-sex attracted and irrationally hope for a diagnosis of gender disphoria initiating transition processes that can result in sterilisation.

Much as, say black parents of a black child don't have to worry about putting their foot in their mouth racially (if not culturally) when their child brings home a black partner, vs bringing home an asian partner, I can imagine parents that are more comfortable with the idea that they were mistaken in thinking their boy a girl, or their girl a boy, than navigating a dinner conversation with their boy's boy or their girl's girl. (and irrationally not accounting for the prospect that after transitioning their child, they may still bring home a same-gender partner). 

That's really just speculation, and having spoken to thousands of members of the Australian general public, as similar as they are to each other, I must testify there is not much of the general public I actually understand. 

The conclusion is plausible to me, that there always has been and always will be some form of homophobia fluctuating in localized contexts between peaks and troughs. We are certainly in a bizarre climate where Douglas Murray and Dave Rubin can make up half the panel at a US conservative convention, but the same two gay men could inspire picketing and protests from LGBTQIA+ activists.

To me it is plausible simply because if straight people feel anxious about having children, it stands to reason they will feel anxious, provided the opportunity about having grandchildren. For me, while not all parents need react to their child coming out badly or destructively, wishing nobody they knew or cared about had to deal with it, is likely to lead to behaviours and attitudes we could meaningfully label homophobic.

I don't condone homophobia, I predict though, it will keep happening.

Two Attempted Applications of Marcus

"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong, and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own (not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity), I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism." ~ The Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Book 2.1, translation from Greek sourced here. Emphasis mine.

Contemporary to writing, I have the slight perception, as per "The Cancelling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, a book I admittedly haven't read but am curious to, and from what I can glean from publicity interviews - in it's chapter "the Perfect Rhetorical Fortess" they allude to the lazy rhetorical shorthand employed that if someone is conservative, they can be dismissed without having to listen to them all.

There has been a rush of fools embracing the cosmetics of stoicism in recent years. Likely sold on the promise that it can make one manly and rich or some shit, in the same way elite female private schools in Melbourne and perhaps the world over use sanitary advertising to sell themselves as finishing schools to parents with a veneer that they are educating future titanic female leaders. Such that, I'm aware an invocation of stoicism for many is enough to be dismissed before even reading this far.

I can't help that, but thanks for reading this far. If you have a hard on for stoicism as some shortcut to being right in stupid culture war arguments, I invite you to enrich yourself by considering that Marcus didn't live up to his own stoic ideals, couldn't. He wrote his meditations as admonishment to himself and it is hard to point to anything from his reign that demarkates it as a particular golden era, with his most consequential act being the appointing of his son who came to be known as Commodus ("The toilet/latrine") co-emperor before his death being an utter disaster. As Sam Harris points out, all of us have the capacity to offer great advice to friends as though willpower were no great constraint, such that to be wise is to be able to follow your own advice. Marcus probably opens Book II with his daily reminder that people are people, given that Book I is what today many would call "Acknowledgements" because it was something he struggled with daily.

In some sense, provided you aren't so devoid of imagination that you can't extrapolate the meaning without "men" being expanded to "men and women" or "men, women and non-binary" which is to say, you have no power to include yourself and must beg inclusion from those you cast as superior, like the Torah, The New Testament and the Quran have nothing particular to say about Tik Tok, I'm going to attempt the conceit of pointing to two contemporary examples of mannish behaviour it is wise to accept and work with rather than against as Marcus appeared to perceive. Things people are going to do because they are fucking people. 

These are attempted applications of a principle only, applications I find useful:

People Who Think It Would Be Cool If Computers Were Cooler

Probably the simplest way to allude to the kind of people we needs must stoically accept the ongoing existence of is to describe two potential people: 1: People who enjoy the game of chess. 2: People who enjoy building machines that do things.

These two groups will have some overlap, such that naturally some component of the latter group will feel inspired to build machines that can play chess. Not only do they enjoy the game of chess, but they enjoy things that can play chess. They think it would be cool if not only can they build a machine that plays chess, but if they could build a machine grand master of chess.

So they do, and it doesn't destroy the game of chess. What happens, is that someone is faced with the question "why play chess when a machine can play it better?" they may even ask this of themselves. They arrive at the perfectly valid conclusion that the point of playing chess, is to play it. 

And so, I'm told, because I don't find chess that interesting or fun, that people are way more interested in watching Magnus Carlson play chess, than AI play chess. Playing against computers I'm also told, is how kids get good at chess now, and the internet has transformed the path to grand masterdom. 

Is it cool? Well that's subjective. It's also what has to be accepted. There are people who think it's cool that they built a powerful tool that makes humanity even better at chess, even if those tools are better at chess than humanity is.

It changes slightly, when someone sees a kid delivering pizza pies, and thinks "wouldn't it be cool if drones could do that?" or they see someone drive them across Los Angeles, and think "wouldn't it be cool if that guy didn't have to do that for me?" 

Now, when I asked my brother, who is much closer to the demographic of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" than I, and he thinks the dream of silicon valley is getting super rich really young.

So I'm possibly too generous in casting this demographic as naively thinking they are helping people who grumble about their job sucking. Besides, they already fixed the economy, we plebs just need to start using cryptocurrency because...fed prints money? Therefore profits. 

I digress too much, need to get back on the old trackola:

Mrs. Doyle says it best, though that needn't be the pathos motivating all. Much of the world is fucked up, telling some international student they don't need to deliver pizzas on an e-bike anymore, may not help the international student delivering pizzas on an e-bike. You just made the world slightly more fucked up for him by selling a fleet of drones to Door Dash. 

The guy willing to pick you up from LAX at 5am to drive you to Santa Monica, I would hazard a guess isn't doing it as a favour to his cousin who owns Uber. I suspect he is out working those hours to make a living because it is sparing him from work he finds much worse.

With some economics training, I am open, even perhaps a believer in the general trend of automation providing massive productivity gains for all society.

I'm also open to the idea, that the washing machine was more impactful than the internet. I'm open to the idea of enshittification, a more general "tech-hype" that is unwarranted, and I am reasonably confident that the music industry was irreparably damaged by digitization even, if it ironically means that music will be easier to preserve from an archival perspective.

You would be correct to point out that phenomena like enshittification and the pitfalls of monopolies aren't so much the progeny of computer nerds as running companies to the exclusive interest of shareholders. 

What must be accepted, is that enough people out there just want computers to be cooler and they'll help make that happen because they can't help themselves.

Now, as for subjectivity:

Image taken from Yahoo! News, for the purpose of commentary only.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that for some chair moistening neckbeards out there in internet land, you are convulsing with incredulity saying "you think those guys aren't cool, they captain the top League of Legends teams in the world!!" and yeah the winning team won $445k so like, in 2023 a team of athletes win the equivalent of the loser of the US Tennis Open's Women's/Men's singles quarterfinals loser.

I'm tempted to get into the economics, because I am interested in whether young attractive women are learning to be attracted to the e-athletes in their high school, but there's just too much going on, and I don't want to commit a conjunction fallacy - it seems plausible to me, that someone who spends a lot of time playing video games, might be more likely to land a lucrative IT job than someone good at kicking or throwing a football, but it isn't necessarily so. Such that I would guess that LoL contender e-athletes' can consider themselves lucky to have girlfiends at all still.

The thing I would point out, is that I believe the avenue is there, to take an esports tournament and market it to a broad audience in the exact same way that the Simpsons' marketed Soccer/Associated Football to a US Audience, which is to say, condescendingly. I look at the photo of the LoL champions and can't help but wonder which country is the greatest in the world Mexico or Portugal?

So what I need to accept is that it's okay for kids to want to spend time with computers, enjoying every minute but for the desire that computers somehow could be even cooler. I also need to accept, that those computer hipcats won't accept my nigh total disinterest in how cool computers are. I use them, sure, but for fuck's sake, I'm still blogging in 2024.

Recently I watched "Devs" and even more recently the 1st season of "3-Body Problem" giving me pause to reflect that I do not enjoy a genre loosely described as "hard sci-fi". 

It doesn't begin there though, hard sci-fi probably goes back to Jules Verne, I've read 10,000 Leagues Under The Sea which compared favourably to a text-book on marine biology and not much else. It's a tedious book with an interesting scene in which electric bullets are used to kill marine life. Upon reflection, the most charming thing about 10,000 Leagues, is that the characters, being French, eat absolutely everything. But I also reflect that that's going too far back into the genre of hard sci-fi.

Both Devs and 3-Body Problem had the same problem for me. Devs more so because it is a smaller story. I can't relate to any of the characters and was indifferent to any of them dying, hence, for me the show had no stakes.

3-Body Problem is most interesting because it is sci-fi written by as near as I can determine a Chinese Chauvinist, it is on my to-do list to learn more about contemporary Chinese Intellectuals, but obviously this was Netflix's English Language adaptation, so I'm sure getting a taste of Chinese sci-fi was heavily filtered. 3-Body Problem I would concur, is mostly boring and despite being hard sci-fi, I'm reasonably confident its science doesn't work at all.

It does however feature perhaps the very epitome of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" in the form of it's "sophons" which, is a photon sized supercomputer, depicted in the Netflix adaptation as a photon that is "unfolded" into 2-dimensions making it incredibly large and then presuming some alien technology, engraved with a planet sized circuit board which can run a sentient computer software, before being collapsed back into a 11 dimensional photon or whatever and entangled with another sophon and then sent at the speed of light to earth. Pretty cool huh? No.

In 3-Body problem you don't get Ripley taping a flamethrower to a pulse rifle and climbing into an exo-skeleton to take on the Xenomorph Queen. You get physicists in shapeless khaki pants calculating how far away super colliders would have to be to prevent two sophons from disrupting all scientific experimentation and spying on the Earth's counter-invasion leadership while they plan for an invasion 400 years from now.

Benedict Wong is good though. He usually is.

Devs, what can I say, the actress playing Lilly actually gives a compelling performance as someone I do not give a shit about and do not want to know. Nick Offerman gets to play someone who isn't Ron Swanson, but the overall plot again, I am guessing is supposed to appeal to people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because they have a quantum computer, which I'm under the impression, scientists the world over are still trying to find something they are capable of, that ordinary computers aren't.

Again, my brother explained to me that it is hard science in so far as apparently the Universe is either deterministic, or it has many worlds. 

This show could have been in some sense "brilliant" even with unlikeable characters I do not care about. If it was making the same point, and it really flirts with this point, that "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story" was making - that tech-popes of silicon valley are stupid. If I had any confidence that that was the point of Devs, I would consider it redeemed.

I have no confidence.

Let me give it to you straight, if you didn't see Lilly throwing the gun out of the elevator, not necessarily specifically, but just using the computer's prediction of the future to make an alternative choice, you are an idiot. You are a fucking moron if you reacted like the in universe morons who had their minds blown by Lilly breaking their illusion of determinism.

At that moment, the show had the opportunity to be brilliant, because they'd set up everything to be brilliant - these tech morons thought they'd made a computer that showed them the future, believing it to be determined they did in the future what the computer said they would do, and due to psychological anchoring, these morons never bothered to test whether they could defy the predictions. 

Lily sees a prediction that she will get into an electromagnetic lift with Nick Offerman, holding him at gunpoint and then shoot him with that gun, causing herself to be killed by radiation or some bullshit. This also plausibly explained why the computer couldn't predict anything beyond that point, because it was forecasting that it would be shut down. Yeah we can predict things happening after our death, like I predict there will still be crabs hanging out at volcanic vents under the ocean after I die, but whatever.

As soon as Lily demonstrates that they all have the agency to not do what the computer told them to do the bad guys, who were misguided into being bad guys, realize they are culpable for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, obstruction of justice, desecration of a body etc. 

Beyond Lily breaking determinism, by using a prediction to determine her non-compliance with the pre-determined prediction, manifest by her throwing a gun out of an elevator so she couldn't shoot Nick Offerman; none of that potentially brilliant and satisfying conclusion happens. 

Instead, Lily and Nick Offerman are resureccted in a quantum computer simulation of all possible worlds, and living in Silicon Valley with resurrected loved ones is deemed by Nich Offerman to be "paradise" (which it probably is for Lily and he, because they are normcore) but newsflash: it isn't for most people. It also heavily implies that simulated Lily with her illusion of consciousness, is but one of a multitude of simulated Lilys many of whom are experiencing simulated breast cancer, simulated early onset dementia etc. It's fucking stupid and the whole show is stupid.

There's a particularly painful scene where Alison Pill explains determinism to Lily, that I think assumes that the audience for this show are absolute morons. This scene could have worked, if it was intended to establish that Alison Pill, Nick Offerman et al. were all morons with a really cool computer. I'm not left with the impression that that was the intent. I'm left with the impression that its target audience was meant to be all like "whaaaaaaaaaaaa...[mind explodes]" when they have determinism explained to them - poorly. That they are tellingly supposed to identify with Lily as maybe good at maths, good at coding, but like Lily who somewhat satisfyingly again and again plays herself with her own plans by not thinking them through - do not think things through.

Bringing me full circle, to the need to accept that I share this planet, and society, with people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because such a demographic is not in my experience, reflective, imaginative or thoughtful. I cannot emphasize enough that the impression I am given is an almost monomaniacal obsession with it being cool if computers were cooler.

I've never watched a single Lex Friedman clip, and felt a reassuring "good, I'm glad that guy is a bulwark for humanity while he works hard at disrupting things." I feel Lex Friedman is some kind of idiot savant, personable enough to enjoy his podcast success, and his audience, I cannot credit with the savant or personable part.

Why are they a problem at all? Alain De Botton in a BBC series adapted from his "consolation of philosophy" book, went out into London traffic with a commercial driver, and he really demonstrated the practical application of stoicism, by consoling the frustrated driver that his rage at shitty drivers was born of hope - that today of all days - would be the day that everyone on the streets of London will drive competently and considerately. He points out that getting frustrated with bad driving is irrational because bad driving is the norm.

Consider, that cars are a powerful technology, that many societies actively turbo-charged the public adoption of them - with subsidies for manufacturers and lax lending standards for financing new vehicles. People who think it would be cool if computers were cooler, that's largely what they helplessly facilitate in our society - putting powerful tools in the hands of idiots and incompetents. They aren't the only culprits - industrialists did this first, and I have similar opinions of financial tools like superannuated retirement funds.

Nice People Who Want Things To Be Nice

I guess these people are the antithesis of "Realpolitik" or "Realism" maybe they could be succinctly described as "Unrealpolitik" but that might have you thinking too Kafka-esque.

This was certainly my experience: In highschool, sometimes the population of my year level would effectively be halved for two weeks. The reason being, one half of the year was sent off to school camp, then the following week, we'd switch places.

My school had fairly arbitrary "houses" and that was what determined who went which week. This could disect some cliques, leave some inseparable friends temporarily separated or even remove some cliques in totality. Everyone would likely notice that social dynamics changed, and that it wasn't necessarily bad.

You might get more attention from the girl you had a crush on, because your romantic rivals were gone. You might get relief from the anxiety of possible rejection because your crush was away on camp. Someone who normally caused you angst, chilled out because they were relieved of the need to impress someone they normally did. 

The sudden halving of the population, more generally just reconfigured a bunch of dynamics, but reliably in my experience, always provided an opportunity to experience what life would be like if some quantity of dickheads you usually had to live with, were gone.

"Gee," you would muse, "some people are like clouds: once they are gone, its a beautiful day." 

Of course, all this reprieve was only temporary, because the fact is those dickheads aren't gone they are merely away. They still exist. They come back. 

Sure, in life, some dickwads get expelled, some might even get arrested, some die. But a hell of a lot of dickwads we have to endure, because they are just dicks, they aren't doing anything so bad that we can justify not tolerating them.

All of which, is calibrated by the sensitivities of an individual.

I think nice people who want things to be nice are largely fantacists. These are the people stuck musing, stuck painfully musing how good life would be if we could just remove all the bad people and keep the good people.

Their fancy might be that their children never cry, never suffer. Their fancy might be that comedy:

"Excuse me, ma'am. Do you like to laugh?" "Oh, yes. As long as it's tasteful. And never at someone... or with. And not-". ~ Marge Simpson, The Simpsons.

Graduating from highschool now, my first real encounter with a nice person who wants things to be nice, was sitting around as a student council for my residential college that was struggling, and we struggled, to field teams in intercollegiate events.

We were an if not the international residence. The population was 50/50 local/international students. Our perennial problem was that domestically the residence was marketed as a multi-cultural melting pot for the then largely generalist ideal Australian high-achievers. It was marketed internationally as a safe place to send your kid where they wouldn't get pregnant, be exposed to drugs and alcohol and could study under lock and key 23 hours a day. 

The result was a bunch of exhausted 18-22 year old Australian kids who wound up having to play every sport, simultaneously, run every social event, sew sequins onto everyone's costumes and the reward was often failing a semester of Uni and having to repeat it.

I suggested that in the future we might stipulate that as a condition of residence, one had to participate in a sport or cultural event of some kind each semester. 

A nice person who wants things to be nice attempted to shut me down - not with an argument about the legality or feasability of my proposal, but because they hated that in highschool.

I tried counterempathising, that at first I had hated compulsory extra-curricular activities, but had come to really appreciate it as one of the most enriching things in my life.

They hated it, and that was that.

This is the thing that needs to be stoically accepted, nice people who want things to be nice, waste our time. 

They are a demographic that basically see conflict as illegitimate, everyone should just chill out, go with the flow, mind their own business. 

As I am attempting to phenotype them "nice people who want things to be nice" (npwtbns/nipweebs?) generally have the consistent personality trait of assuming that issues are much simpler than circumstances suggest they are. 

An example I came across today was in a video talking about how Comedy Specials were killing comedy. I watched it because I agree with the broad thesis, but the video maker was fixated particularly on what we would hopefully both use scare quotes to describe as "edgy" comics. 

He had a bit in his video essay which I'm reasonably confident was meant to mock "edgy" comics, rather than nipweebs. The bit went thus:

Comic: What's the deal with trans people?

Heckler: They're just trying to live their lives.

Comic: Oh...

While I'm sure that the heckler's characterization is broadly true of most trans people. To me it reads as largely in line with my own position - that gender rights are human rights in the domain of freedom of expression. But if that is your take on why the culture is obsessed with the issue, you are probably an unhelpful nipweeb.  

It is the distinct combination of holding as the loftiest ideal "niceness" a kind of edgeless, cornerless, toothless ideal fundamentally free not only of struggle, but discomfort, combined with the wantoness the sheer avarice for things to just be nice that make this psychographic so necessary to endure.

These people are paradoxically incurious as regards everything they perceive to be "not nice" and yet are for their wanton nature are quite obstructionist, active. They do not just nicely mind their own business.

So if the issue is a more perennial and ubiquitous one like bullying, the nitweeb in the room performs the role of - say someone suggests disciplinary action, even powers being extended to teachers, the nitweeb says "no I used to hate when a teacher yelled at me at school, they are so big and tall and intimidating." okay, someone else suggests that they've heard researchers find if you give the bully a special role like welcoming all the other students to the class, it satisfies their need to dominate and the bullying behaviour can actually stop. "No!" says the nitweeb, "That's rewarding them for being a bully! I'd feel awful if I was in his class and saw him getting recognized and rewarded when I was a good student."

Okay, the facilitator says "don't be stern, don't be nice, no carrot, no stick, what do you suggest nitweeb?" and the nitweeb's practical suggestion is: "They should stop being a bully."

It puts me in mind of the days I spent down at the Ballarat Library, they had a series of introductory paperbacks like "Introduction to Zen Buddhism" "Introduction to Nietzsche" and "Introduction to Wittgenstein." etc. In one of these short illustrated books, one on one of the eastern philosophies, came an account of a Chinese Emperor meeting with a Buddhist Monk and asking what the essence of Buddhism was the monk replies: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify your heart." and the Emperor is like "Even a child of 7 knows to do that." and by my recollection of the tale the Buddhist monk replies "Then why can't you do it?"

Similarly Soljenisky memorably wrote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In terms of disorders like narcissism and psychopathy, I would have to say I'm a believer that while not simple, society could do a great deal more to protect itself from these personality disorders - it would do well to keep such personalities out of positions of real authority.

Beyond that though, recognize how unhelpful the simple ideas of good and bad are, and subsequently we can recognize what a tiresome pain in the arse nipweebs are with their impractical and useless suggestions combined with their oppositional defiance of any more practical attempts to address their genuine complaints (people shouldn't harass trans people, kids shouldn't be bullied, racial slurs shouldn't be thrown, fat women should be able to buy and wear bikinis to the beach etc.) 

I propose that accepting the fact, even inevitability of their existence means appreciating their ability to provide useful friction to deter overexuberance if no real insight, and work around them. 

For example, if there's a meeting about bullying, take the response to a vote after open discussion, not a consensus. Take the nice person who wants things to be nice's ability to shame and coerce others into polite solidarity with them away by making the voting process anonymous. 

There is no need to be driven nuts by these people, as per Marcus Aurelius, the tedium of nitweebs is literally born through their "ignorance of real good and ill." 

Like Marcus, I often fail to live up to my own ideals, but I endeavour to respond to nitweebs not with ire and frustration but curiosity. 

Anybody who has not thought things through is curious to me. 

 

 

Left-Right Scraps

This is just some shit that I forgot to work into the previous two posts somewhere, abridged over, if you will. Those posts have proved less engaging than talking about a historic left and right that possibly never has and never will exist. 

These scraps tickle my brain to irritation though, so here you fucking are: 

"Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" ~ Disgraced Former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison

A big conservatory sentiment that is both regressive and mainstream among the right, is the idea that if an industry exists that creates jobs, it has basically crossed the threshold of two-big-to-fail.

There are probably some artifact "company towns" still existing in the wealthy educated industrialized r-something democratic nations of the world, perhaps none larger than the city of Toyota in Nagoya, Japan. And I as an individual am not sensitive really to department of labour unemployment statistics. I will confess I can't fathom news headlines that read "$56bn project will create 1500 jobs in Palookaville, Anywhere." I do not know whether to be pleased or outraged by such a headline.

It took way too long for the gears in my head to click however, why for example Jordan Peterson since becoming an employee of The Daily Wire, spends so much time on "climate alarmism" to the point of upping his production values while lowering his relevance, I mean the regressive left almost doesn't bother with him anymore, and they were bothering with him while he was in a coma.

Near as I can guess, climate change is perceived as an existential threat in a very different way by the regressive right, than by both the productive left, and counterproductive/regressive left. It is seen as a threat to some kind of perceived social contract that says something like: You are allowed to live so long as you go out and find a job. So long as someone pays you to do something, you exist.

The regressive right's opposition to even acknowledging that something has to change I think is born of an anti-enterprise spirit that by definition renders this faction of the right regressive.

Suppose for a second that there were no issues with climate change. None whatsoever. We could find, extract, refine and burn oil without having to worry about icecaps melting and vast swathes of productive land becoming arid deserts. But someone was just inventing small personal aircraft made from bamboo and powered by hydrogen with feasible fuel cells that were cheap and safe to run, and could even remotely haul cargo and goods.

Absent a problem, this would be technological progress (maybe) in so far as it would be better than a bunch of people driving road trains on no sleep, and people having to go to airports to cram into middle seats for long haul flights. 

A traditional right I posit would simply try and foresee the unintended consequences - maybe the visual and noise pollution of congesting the skies with personal aircraft in numbers approaching that of cars, or as may still be the case with electric vehicles, pointing out the massive ecological footprint of getting the rare earth minerals and the trade off between the lifespan of e-vehicles.

Certainly, there is much technological progress that is an illusion, but I don't wish to digress too far from the point that the regressive right is anti-enterprise. 

Upon someone estimating that the sea is overfished, or the forrests are overlogged etc. I notice that the effort to conserve jobs often takes precedence over the effort to conserve industries. There is of course, a major part of this equation, being the demand side, that likely is independent of political leaning or manifestation.

No doubt it is argued by the regressive right that people neither wish to eat less fish, nor pay more for their fish, therefore, overfishing should continue to employ the 10,000 commercial fishermen until fish stocks collapse. Rather than resolving that to preserve the fishing industry, less fishing licenses will be issued and perhaps a full half of the people will have to embrace enterprise and endeavour to change careers. 

This isn't just saying "learn to code" because, as we should all now be aware, those coding enthusiasts have written code that can learn to code for you. One thing I appreciate about Mexico, is that Mexico is a country where if you lose your job at the plant or the mill, it is extremely viable for you to support your family by opening a food stand. In Australia, you would probably need to have $50k~$180k to open a food truck, in Mexico to become a hotdog vendor we are probably talking hundreds of dollars in start up capital.

Granted, Mexico is no paradise, but it is filled with entrepreneurs. 

I myself have been keeping one eye on AI art, as a potential existential threat to something I want to do. Thus far, because it is a potential post in itself, I mostly feel AI art is garbage-in-garbage-out:

By which I don't even mean that the figure in the above AI generated image is either missing an arm, or about to fall off her seat. I mean AI is being largely embraced by careerists, people who want to be artists, rather than vocationalists who want to do art. I don't think tell-tale mistakes that only a machine would make because it doesn't comprehend what it is trying to do, will last, those will be learned away, the big tell remains how generic the art is, everyone's AI art looks in some significant way, the same, even with multiple projects, like everyone is printing zine's in helvettica now. Because writing text prompts into something that spits out fully rendered composite images for you can only be fun for so long.

What it does promise to do, is liberate me from the need to put energy and effort into horrible art-job drudgery, here is a really long talk titled "Concept Art is Dead" from 5 years ago, basically asserting that if you are an artist working for a game development company, forget doing anything creative it is ll about churning out joyless photo-bashed concept art for the next installment in the Call of Duty franchise. Generic art for generic projects. I couldn't do that job, what I could do is get paid $50 an hour to get AI to shit out generic art for generic video games.

I suspect what makes me not-regressive right in disposition, is that I've never had a concept artist job, nor have I bought a house in an area proximate to my work and had a bunch of kids that depend on my salary. The thought of being nobody for a while until I figure out the next thing to do is not a terrifying prospect for me. But I can understand it being terrifying for most people.

It is likely analogous among the regressive right, to the misguided belief by the original classical economists that recessions would end by firms lowering their prices and workers lowering their wages (and landlords lowering their rents) etc. until the market clears again. Keynes pointed out firms don't lower their prices, workers don't negotiate for lower wages, landlords don't read about an economic downturn and think they better ease the squeeze on their tenants. 

All these corrective actions seem antithetical to progress. 

An ideal conservatism, to me, might look at overfishing, and sort of combine it with a UNESCO heritage vibe, to say "we need less fishing, lets regulate for more traditional, less productive fishing." Because there are likely unintended consequences to losing from the culture, people who make their living by going out to sea. Fishing is part of human identity, from every coast and island of the world. It is a living heritage that deserves to be preserved. 

It would to me, be a matter of regulating for example, that fishing boats have to be wind powered, with a diesel engine solely for emergency use. You know, just a continued exploration of the same principle as specifying tuna has to be line caught not net caught and shit like that. Consumers be damned, they can pay a premium for sustainable fishing practices.

"Maybe Cheapness Is A Sense"

I'm sure I'd written about this before, certainly in my post "Polarization by analogy" that Identity Politics are very cheap. It really should be a red flag for anyone who thinks that things need to change - for example, real wages have been largely stagnant since the mid 70s, since the early 90s left-wing parties like Tony Blair's "New Labour" and Bill Clinton's Democrats adopt in essence the same economic policies as the Reagan-Thatcher era better known as neo-liberalism, carrying through the dot-com bubble of the 2000s, through to the Global Financial Crisis, and yet, between 2014~2016 the left wind parties, who treat an increase in minimum wage, or regulating employment contracts, protecting gig-workers etc. like pulling teeth, embrace identity politics. 

I think it is because unintended consequences aside, identity politics and in a dark reflection of the regressive right pandering to single-issue voters over abortion rights. The culture wars in general are really cheap compared to tackling socio-economic issues. 

Possibly, like Cersei Lannister not apprehending the consequences of allowing their in-world religion to revive it's militant arm, career politicians and bureaucrats did not apprehend that creating a few cheap cosmetic positions and departments to hand out on the basis of identity politics, might then attempt to function in some way. 

At some point, I think the regressive left will, moreso than the right, have to answer for dedicating so much oxygen to identity lip-service.

Embracing the Paralegal

This is a bit of a story, but I think it is in many ways a reasonable candidate for the story of the left losing its way. 

British-US Citizen Jon Oliver ran a story some years ago on his comedy-news program "Last Week Tonight" ran a story on chicken farming. You can click through and watch the segment, but in a swift recap, there are a lot of chicken farmers in the US going bankrupt because of predatory corporate practices.

Almost like a corporate version of the cuckoo, farmers sign deals where they are responsible for all the aspects of farming chickens that cost money (sheds, feed, equipment, utilities etc) and their supplier owns everything that makes money (the chickens and the eggs they lay).

Furthermore, the piece establishes that attempts to regulate this practice such that chicken farmers aren't fated to go broke, or go into debt and commit suicide, can't find the political will among elected legislators.

The silver ligning, came in the form of a paralegal remedy - namely activists pressuring large consumers of chicken products like McDonalds, KFC, Chick Filet, Popeyes or whatever, to essentially adopt "fair trade" chicken branding. Appealing to corporate greed.

End of recap, now, based on other stories Jon Oliver has run, I don't trust his coverage to be, shall we say, true. The situation, as described by Oliver's show, has the potential to meet a criteria outlined by Prof. Timothy Snyder, "The situation is this [our elected representatives cannot legislate to protect us] it's unbearable, therefore we rebel [by targeting corporations with activism]"

This story, doesn't translate however to what I feel is fairly characterized as a left-wing movement, in the context of "#metoo" a movement that was initially intended to have the limits of women voicing there experiences of sexual harassment and assault, so victims of such abuses did not feel alone, and to raise consciousness in the population in general as to how frequently that was occurring.

Original intent aside, in some manifestation, #metoo became a paralegal movement, particularly in the media industry, where person's usually men, were named and then their employers would terminate their employment. 

I would describe, however frequently or infrequently this occured, and regardless of guilt or innocence, a paralegal process, because people were getting fired not out of an interest in justice, but brand equity. I cannot exclude that corporations were not so much contacting HR and asking "how many complaints have been lodged against Harvey?" but consulting accounts who were saying "Harvey brings in $1.2m in revenue, we pay him $600k salary per year, and we estimate the damage to our brand from the press coverage of this allegation to be $1m and an additional $1m in PR and advertising to restore our reputation. The cheapest option is just to cut the turd loose."

It may not even have been predicted, by anyone who ever shared a #metoo experience, that corporations would go into damage control quickly and forcibly, and that it might feel like justice.

Of course, with or without an investigation, and barring some neurological/psychological issue, the only people who often know the truth of an event, are the assaulted and their assailant. Even in a court of law, the standard would be "beyond reasonable doubt" for criminal offenses.

Our legal system I think we can describe, for all it's floors, as being based around the heuristic "serious allegations should be taken seriously" and I recognize the limitations of resources and competence that impede reaching high legal standards. I would not be surprised if in the act of reporting a crime, our legal system fails to take a serious allegation seriously.

This however, is a much better heuristic than "believe women" or "believe victims" I'm sure it's best arguments refer to studies that show how statistically rare it is for a woman to make a false allegation of sexual assualt or rape. I suspect the error made by people willing to embrace paralegal activism are making is thinking that just because the amount of people who steal cars or stick up liquor stores at gunpoint are statistically rare, perhaps close to absent in demographics like 30 year old women, it would be naive to assume that legalizing or otherwise endorsing the practice of stealing cars and holding up liquor stores at gunpoint would not, in short order, result in people doing just that.

What is perhaps noteworthy, are in all the forms of cancel culture, which are paralegal practices, of which I think there is enough credible testimony to suggest it is a tactic that exists among, if not exclusively so, the regressive left. We can also state the right has regressed in this polarized age, because the dismantling of legal avenues is a great example of Chesterton's Fence. 

You have to literally not understand why courts demand evidence, discovery, an adversarial trial presided over by a judge who represents the law to a jury drawn from the community who deliberate as to whether the state has made its case on a preponderance of evidence, or for criminal charges beyond reasonable doubt.

No matter how many criminals are hopping the fence of our judicial systems, those judicial systems did not fucking build themselves. The right should only allow the dismantling of due process and presumption of innocence, when the left can demonstrate they understand why these things exist in the first place, and I would assert, that anyone who understands why due process and presumption of innocence exist, would not call for their destruction.

Bringing us back to cheapness. I'm sympathetic to Fran Lebowitz' theory that #metoo only came about when it did, because the movie industry has declined to decrepit. That it also explains why #metoo has done little for hotel maids and fastfood employees earning minimum wage, and often subjected to tyrant shift managers.

Abridged Regressive Left

 I'm not sure where to begin, because after writing about the regressive right, much of what there is to say about the regressive left seems redundant. So maybe just get the redundancy out of the way:

The regressive left, like the regressive right is tribal in nature and operates double standards depending on whether it identifies you as the in-group, or the out-group.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, albeit to a lesser extent has withdrawn the consent of the loser. It does not regard dissent as a legitimate right, or democratic exercise.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, are anti-liberal, anti-individual.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, has the fatal conceit of believing itself in possession of the ideals, subsequently all problems are merely a lack of commitment all opposition is a malicious waste of time, barely worthy of contempt.

That there is a regressive left, and that the left can be regressive, at this point in 2024 has been overdetermined. The work has been done to argue that case, even if the message hasn't penetrated. What is underdetermined, I feel, is how unconscious the regressive left is, relative to the regressive right, and even the more traditional left that criticize the regressive left.

When I hear: "We should all go to a free Palestine protest!" I feel I am hearing: "We should try the new Korean BBQ place, I hear it is fantastic." or "I want a pair of Nike Blazer mid-tops, I've seen people wearing them and I think they look really cool."

Which is to say, I feel the regressive left has the feel and flavour of a largely cosmopolitan fashion trend. I suspect it survives as a social phenomena by having, built in, a hostility to argument. 

On this front, I have described a traditional and useful conservativism as being routed in the idea of Chesterton's Fence, a vanguard, or check-and-balance, against unintended consequences, and a functional historical left as grounded in the observation that the Universe, World and subsequent society is dynamic and things therefore need to change. 

The regressive left seems fixated largely, on controlling the Overton Window. Probably what the regressive left has become most notorious for, are their attempts to police speech. To make certain subjects, or positions on subjects, unspeakable. I would guess the naive assumption being that, for example if people can't discuss fascism in public forums, then fascism will go extinct. 

That is largely how the regressive left self-organizes. It likely begins with an ideal, say for example that "Alegria" is the ideal art style. By the time an individual, such as you, notices the phenomena of the Alegria artstyle, it is basically presented to you as a fait accompli. The regressive left then tries to close the Overton Window's shutters such that the only publicly permissible discussion is about how great Alegria is, if for example, you personally have nothing against Alegria, but you really like comic-book dark-age over-the-top artstyle of 90s comic books, a la Rob Leifeild, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo etc. you would be assigned to the right, in a unilateral act of discrediting, because suggesting that other art-styles can viably co-exist with the ideal of Alegria, is to detract from the achievement of the ideal.

I presume that Sepultura fans lean largely left. "War for territory" seems to have seeped into the collective unconscious of the regressive left, who see the landscape of ideas as a warzone where all is fair, rather than holding positions that can be argued for.

So circling back to the Alegria vs 90s-Dark Age artstyles example, there are arguments, and probably compelling ones as to why, if you want to sell furniture or consumer software packages Alegria is superior to 90s comic book artstyles. The regressive left however, sees the very process of arguing for a position or against another, some kind of affront.

Subsequently, it isn't really the content of the regressive left's basket of causes that concerns me so much as their methodology. Like the regressive right, they are prone to being people who "believe in lies and therefore will lie for their beliefs."

Another example, the slogan "Love is love" employed in Australia in the leadup to a postal survey in which all Australian's of age could state whether they were for or against same sex marriage, the result of which was a large majority and though non-binding the incumbent conservative government of the time allowed a conscious vote (party members could vote with their conscious instead of along party lines) in which the legislation for marriage equality passed. "Love is love" is as effective a slogan as other superficial slogans like "build that wall."

You may feel the comparison is unflattering, until you have to argue why "love is love" is somehow an argument for same-sex marriage, but not an argument for bestiality, statutory rape, incest, pedophilia. The regressive left will get up in arms and incensed that same-sex attraction is being compared to criminal sex acts. That distinction that is the basis of offense - the difference between consenting adults and predatory behaviour is not made by a slogan as vacuous as "love is love" a deepity if ever there was one.

The regressive left doesn't argue, it just loses its shit. I do not see it as an ideology, such that the content of its ideas are the main thing to consider, so much as the spread of a bunch of rhetorical strategies to control the Overton Window, likely through an unfounded belief in the power of media effects.

Now, as Michael Shermer points out, there are no pseudoscientists, nobody wakes up and says "off to my pseudo-lab to perform pseudo-experiments to advance pseudoscience" they most often have convinced themselves that they are doing real science. Just so, I'm sure nobody believes themselves to be on the regressive left or right. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm off to drive moral progress backwards by resurrecting racism, suffrage sessions and repressing free speech!"

On the left there is the distinct issue of what to call what Coleman Hughes refers to as "the thing", I have written before that I reject the self-identification of progressive. This is based on simple observations like if the Gender Wage Gap (adjusted or unadjusted) was 60c to the dollar in 1960s, 70c to the dollar in 1970s to 88c to the dollar in 2023, then the system we have is progressive. Progress is being made an an actual progressive should seek to conserve the system we have. Instead the wage gap appears analogous to crime, where I could be convinced that just as crime goes down, reporting on crime goes up leading to less direct suffering from crime but more psychological suffering from the perceived ubiquity of crime.

"Woke" is a useful and predictive descriptor. If someone says a movie franchise has "gone woke" it reliably predicts identity characteristics of protagonists, and of antagonists, the presence of heteronormative romantic relationships on screen, and the amount of dialogue that will be dedicated to lecture style content or if you will overt-social commentary vs. covert-social commentary.

The unfortunate thing, is that any short hand used to refer to the regressive left, will be denounced by the regressive left as a pejorative. It is quite consistent with the fixation and belief in the Overton Window. The regressive left itself, cannot be the subject of public debate.

Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs" gave an abridged history of the confusion caused by the simultaneous movements of second-wave feminism born out of Roe v Wade and the Sexual Revolution that also was born out of access to reliable birth-control. The regressive left, is still, unsurprisingly prone to confusing unintelligible collisions of movements. Feminism that I do not pretend to understand, has in part being trying to break down stereotypes of femininity, assertions that women are constrained by some essential female nature to be agreeable, risk-averse, emotional, abstract, etc. such that it could be seen to be championing the idea that there is nothing it necessarily means to be female. This naturally gets entangled with trans-rights, which can be broadly interpreted as fundamentally maintaining the right to transit from one identity to another. Such that you wind up arguing for a position that allows someone to transit from an identity with no real characteristics to another identity with no real characteristics. 

These confused and unintelligible positions I suspect are why the regressive left survives on rhetorical memes. I will concede this to postmodernism and power-knowledge. It can work in the short term. I suspect the regressive left are largely self defeating however, because things don't work in the long term.

An example of this, could be the Academy Awards, that I don't know, were possibly seen as a lever by which to control the Overton Window. I think it is fair to say, the right regressive or not, are particularly concerned with the employment of and representation of marginalized groups in cinema, I hope it is not a bridge too far, to call diversity qualifications to be considered for an Academy Award, as a left-wing reform. The trouble being, that you might eliminate the literal best picture, from nomination, or the literal best actor or actress, the best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay, all from pictures that were made because a WWII era biopic featuring every white male actor in the world and three white women was something a cinema going public were willing to see, so it got made, and a small indy-film competently made about a refugee community that live in a trailer park seen by a few thousand people but not meriting word of mouth is among five similar competent-but-forgettable movies that are all acadamy members are permitted to consider.

Leaving an awards ceremony where a shadow looms large, that we are watching what used to be an open professional competition that is now the under-12s flag football competition. I suspect the initiative will be quietly relaxed, and the modernising of the film landscape allowed to naturally progress on its natural timeline - it is worth pointing out that movies like Spiderman: Homecoming are diverse (cast wise) successfully, because modern NYC is different from the 60s NYC in which Stan Lee originally set Spider-Man. The same is true for forthcoming films like Ghostbusters: Frozen Kingdom, in which the 80s cast who are as diverse as 80s NYC was, will star alongside kids who are as diverse as contemporary NYC. It was the same deal with Gene Rodenberry's original Star Trek series, with Nyota Uhura, Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov. Rodenberry's optimistic vision of the future can be characterized as propaganda, as can late-Dr.Who series, but propaganda selling a brighter tomorrow is progressive whereas propaganda retconning the past is regressive and does not appear to be working.

Similarly, since joining a gym I've noticed that ads for Channel 7 and Channel 9 news teams, are not diverse. In fact their news teams look indistinguishable from each other, just a bunch of white people. These will be in between ads where an affable Polynesian male buying sleeping duck mattresses, affable Polynesian male buying property apps, affable Polynesian male buying underwear (I can't remember the brand) and affable Polynesian male choosing healthcare providers or something. You get the idea. There's nothing that doesn't really work although if I were a Polynesian male, I'd be concerned about being considered the human embodiment of the Alegria art-style.

There's an episode of BBC's Travelman, when Richard Ayoade was hosting it, where Richard meets John Hamm in Hong Kong for the show's natively advertised "mini-breaks" the horrible practice of jacking up your carbon footprint to spend a mere 48 hours in a foreign country. Their local guide takes them to sample local Hong Kong food specialty "Stinky Tofu" which the two foreigners do not like. Their guide explains that this vendor is one of two remaining shops that still serve Stinky Tofu, a food that is dying out and John Hamm remarks "So not only does it taste bad, it's also unpopular."

There are things that die out, like the chequebook, you can go watch old movies, perhaps none so memorable as "The Big Lebowski" where characters write out a cheque. Cheques still exist, but nobody pays for groceries or restaurant meals or clothes shopping with a cheque anymore and people do not generally carry a chequebook. Then there are things I suspect that there are simply supply and demand issues - like martial arts. A lot of people get a hard-on about fighting and dominating an opponent, but being good at martial arts is kind of redundant in a largely safe world. It is much cheaper and safer to just give your assailant your iphone, than to invest in getting good at BJJ. 

One of the things that makes the regressive left obviously anti-progress is likely a supply-demand issue. People who want to fight racism, often need to innovate more racism, with the unintended consequence of further racializing society and resurrecting racism. Taking people who do not as a rule, generally think about race, and "educating" them to think about race all the time, is likely to result in greater racism and bigotry. Furthermore, on the subject of race, we can see a symptom of the regressive left in 2023 media darling and sporting hero Sam Kerr, recently arrested for a racial slur directed at a police officer. She likely had no idea of the gap between one social sciences discipline theorizing that racism = oppression + power broadly conflated with it being not possible for BIPOC individuals to be racist, and another social science namely legal studies, defining bigotry as prejudice based on immutable qualities or something like that.

I think Sam Kerr probably has a genuine case to be made that she actually wasn't capable of distinguishing right from wrong before the law. I have written before that the last decade has left me with the distinct impression that the education I received failed to impart to most people any understanding of why Nazism was bad, what is wrong with racism. Most people merely remembered they can pass an exam by recalling that Nazi's are the bad guys, and racism is bad. The likely know nothing of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao.

The regressive left is profoundly ignorant, much like the regressive right is when it comes to knowledge of their own holybooks - I have linked before to The Atheist Experience's playlist of calls regarding biblical slavery. The ideals the regressive left assert differ from the regressive right because they are looking to an ideal fictitious future with some grounding in truth, rather than some idealized past.

For example, though I'm dubious that anyone who invokes "systemic" or even "covert" racism are actually talking about the concept explained in various explainer videos, there are notable truth's at the basis of this.

The regressive left for example, for all it's concerns with racism overidentifies and favours a US-centric worldview. Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Barrett's appointment to the US Supreme Court when compared via google-trends to the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, dwarf the latter in terms of topic interest. An argument can be made that the overturning of Wade vs. Roe and affirmative action are issues more far reaching than the dismantling of Hong Kong as a special administration zone within China, but there's plenty of room for both. I suspect it is more to do with who we identify with and the narcissism of small differences.

Trumpist insurgency failed, and though shocking, was a poorly organised uprising by a group of people that could generously be called clowns. Meanwhile, President Xi quietly became paramount leader of China for life. The regressive left, it can easily be observed is more concerned with when a woman of colour can be president of the US, than when a non-Han Chinese will be paramount leader of the CCP, something presumably far off, given that Xi will not step aside until he dies or is forced out. Simultaneously, the regressive left would likely roll their eyes at me, if I suggested that the three female Prime Ministers and incumbent South Asian Prime Minister of the UK (all from the conservative party) are indicative of any moral progress.

On this front, the regressive left is particularly ill-equipped in my experience to appreciate that as bad as it would be to see Trump serve a second term as president, and as bad as George W Bush and Ronald Reagan were, even Clinton and Obama (remember Rage Against the Machine - they recorded most of their songs in response to the Clinton years). As bad as Mitch McConnell is, and everything going wrong with the US republican party in the past 30~40 years, do you have any idea how bad they would have to be to cause anywhere near the abject human suffering and attrocities of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism? 

My understanding is we are talking about regimes that killed some 120 million people. I would concede that the brutalizing of one's own people indiscriminately, seems more palatable than the Nazi brutalization of the Jewish diaspora. Compared to the problem faced by the Russian people when the Bolsheviks seized power, modern political disputes between left-and-right are truly trivial.

For my money, which is admittedly, not much, Karl Popper provides the best bulwarks against regression into horror: the first is tolerating anything but intolerance. I struggle, given the difficulty of dealing with the regressive left, whom I have access to in a way I do not the regressive right, with the moral obligation to not tolerate their intolerance. The second, is to insist on clarity, the regressive left is fairly characterized as being intellectually opaque to the point of unintelligible. There is nothing Judith Butler has said or written, that she could not have said or written in plain English, except for the fact that it would make obvious, that she has nothing much to say at all.

"Gender performativity" is just an obtuse and specific (therefore inferior) way of saying "we are what we do" except that behaving in a masculine way as regards attitudes toward sexual intercourse, will interact with human biology. The consequences of an unplanned pregnancy differ greatly between sexes. As do legal consequences. One can become in my experience enraptured with the seeming promise of complicated esoteric language that produces memes like "performativity" while not critiquing the dubious process at which such conclusions (were more often than not, not even) arrived at.

Bringing us, if not full circle, to that extreme of the left on a shoe-horn where the far left, the regressive left winds up resembling the far right. The process is the same, the commit the fatal conceit of thinking themselves already in possession of some determined ideal, a universal ideal being probably impossible (hence favouring Popper's intolerance of intolerance) that being a lie, the regressive left is forced to lie for it's beliefs. It becomes not political but totalitarian, Machiavellian. Believing itself to understand the wonderful ends, all means are justified. Debate, argument, engagement become a waste of time. Consent to lose is withdrawn. Opposition is illegitimate. Suicidally, the regressive left eats its own and assigns the left, increasingly to the right. Through rigid intolerance, a complete lack of epistemic humility that borders on grotesque hypocrisy, the right, even the "alt-right" or far-right, becomes anyone right of you, creating a further cannibalistic cottage-industry of inventing new "problematics" to denounce those impeding you and advance you further left. 

I would conclude, by saying that my amatuer diagnostic that the regressive left is obsessed and overly invested in the Overton Window, is my attempt to be charitable. That the regressive left isn't merely a modern phenomena of exposed cynical narcissist careerists fighting eachother for dominance over a society that is worse for their interventions. I believe at core, it is just a naive assumption that if people cannot discuss bad things, then bad things will cease to exist. Most often I assume, left wing voices can be characterized as "Nice people who want things to be nice" and we must stoically accept them. Making analogous errors to the devoutly faithful, that naively believe that some holy book if adhered to by everyone, would make a kingdom of heaven here on earth.

That if straight men can only look at "body-positive" lingerie ads, everyone will be better off for the expanded dating pool. When it is more likely, some complicated feedback loop where advertisers notice what women notice men pay attention to, even catering to distorted lenses resulting in women thinking men prefer thinness over muscularity and vice versa. 

I know skinny jeans on men baffled me.