Saturday, May 24, 2025

Beyond Left and Right the future of discourse in a post-intelligible world "by" Judith Butler, Josef Peiper et al.

 Now what do I mean by "by" well that depends on what YOU mean by "mean"? [looks smug]

But practically speaking, I mean in plain English "not by" when I put the word "by" in scare quotes for the purpose of signalling my personal disdain for sophistry.

I want to write about the usefullness of "left-right" distinctions. 

For example if you watch media content that is critical of Elon Musk, the state of Israel and its prosecution of it's counteroffensive in the Gaza strip, Boris Johnson's prime-minister ship, and American government responses to school shootings OR you watch media content that is principally in support of Elon Musk's DOGE agenda, defends Israel's right and necessity to defend itself against Hamas, expresses sceptical views as to Labours' ability to address the problems created by the long tenure of the Conservative party in the UK, and expresses concern about taxing the rich due to capital flight, you have probably heard a sponsorship for "Ground News" where regardless of their own political bias, your podcast host be it Adam Conover or Coleman Hughes has talked about how much they love Ground News' "Blindspot" feature, and you have been impressed by how effective Ground News is at overcoming media bias and allowing its users get to the truth by the observable convergance of both left and right biased commentators converging on a neutral editorial stance of reporting objective facts that describe reality.

Again, I'm being facetious. There is an even simpler and more cost effective way to avoid being misinformed by media - and that is to consumer less media. Especially under conditions of an attention economy, which is our present media reality. If this is not clear enough to you, I am attempting to make the simple observation that given the probability that any piece of data is in fact misinformation the simplest way to reduce misinformation is to take in less data. 

By analogy, if 8 out of 10 apples were poisoned by the evil queen, you could buy a cheap "apple poison testing kit" or even cheaper, you just stop eating apples, much as is most people's policy towards eating puffer fish.

I do want to point you to Australian comedian and ALP shill "Friendly Jordies" video about Ground News, and in particular where he makes an argument that if Ground News scrapped the Left-Right analysis of news sources and replaced it with Astrology, it may be a more valuable service for its subscribers.

The Catch-22

Obviously, Left v Right has predictive power. Eg. if you know where someone stands on gun control, you generally know where they stand on abortion. People do cluster their beliefs into baskets largely driven by habit and sensitivity

"Left" and "Right" likely don't mean much in coherent intelligible terms, and of course they remain relative, such that it's possible for someone to be the right-wing faction of the anarchist collective, and another person to be a left-wing pope.

But though these terms may remain approximately right where "Left" can conjure pictures of a grey and drainbow haired Coburg lesbian in birkenstocks with an "Always was always will be" embroidery patch ironed on to her tweed jacket using her e-bike with dual kid-seats to ride the Upfield line shared bike-pedestrian path to deliver her kids to Steiner school, and "Right" can conjure a Toorak boomer driving their Porsche Toureg SUV to the opposite corner of their Townhouse block to meet at the new AFL player owned wine-bar to complain with their friends about the outlandish 1% capital improved value land tax on their $13M property being outrageous; they prevent discussing all the ways in which the members of these two market segments are alike, and simply causing an intractable power struggle that doesn't solve anything while a clock is ticking.

The Dependence on Not Understanding

Australia's recent elections were dramatic enough for me to pay attention. While the polling generally accurately forecast the "coalition" being the Liberal party, The National party and Queensland's Hapsburgian Liberal National Party losing, they lost quickly and the Liberal component of the coalition in particular could be described without hyperbole as being annihilated. 

However, since the election, News mastheads have proffered post-hoc explanations for just what went wrong that I believe are a concise and practical example of Upton Sinclair's pithy observation:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

I assert that while Sinclair's assessment has broad applications it applies specifically to Australian newsmedia's post election coverage, particularly in the analysis of where the ALP went right, and the Liberal Party went wrong. Articles like, but not limited to: "This election result shows Labor learned a lesson that the Coalition did not" by Laura Tingle for the ABC, "Australia rejected the Dutton-Murdoch agenda, now we’ll see if Labor does the same" by Amy Remeikis for the New Daily, "‘Far worse than Morrison’: where did the Coalition lose the election?" by Krishani Dhanji and Nick Evershed for the Guardian etc. and I should point out that news media with paywalls like Australian broadsheet The Age/Sydney Morning Herald are no better, but I can't be bothered linking to examples that are just paywalls and given their value can remain safely behind paywalls.

I'm not suggesting you seriously invest your time reading and understanding the above examples, though you are obviously free to. 

The conceit however, is this idea that in for example, an election the candidates put proposed policy or "election promises" out into the public domain, and then journalists employing specific areas of expertise analyse this data, processing it into valuable information that is then purchased by their consumer base who value it in terms of making informed predictions and projections useful to their decision making process as to how to cast their vote or some bullfuck.

In practice, it seems likely to me, as reflected in the polls that the election result while having multiple determinants is most easily explained by the US Trump administration's media event "Liberation Day" on April 2, (April 3 in Australia which is located in the future) and the subsequent destruction of wealth following market reactions - net-present-revaluations of assets given the probability of the announced Tariffs being implemented.

By Canley – get the code and data - Own work. Data is from the polling tables at w:Opinion polling for the 2025 Australian federal election., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130997458

Now the scale of the above image is a little small, but what we can see above is that for some reason on the two-party preferred basis, the coalition (in blue) were leading the polls up until January 2025, then coincidently as 2025 progressed and the RBA cut interest rates, which informed news consumers should understand has nothing to do with the Federal government as the RBA's monetary policy is based on target inflation and target employment and operates independently to the government, polls seem to indicate that coincidently for some reason, voters in aggregate grow less disgruntled with the incumbent ALP and less enchanted with the challening Coalition. 

Then on April 2nd, coincidently after the Trump administration announces wealth destroying Tariffs on uninhabited islands and China alike, the polls begin to diverge wildly into a massive landslide victory for the ALP.

Journalist George Monbiot sat down with comedian Richard Herring for a bookclub-style podcast and explains a folklore of how politics work, particularly how "the great majority of voters have no useful information whatsoever" now he cites an example of an election outcome effected by shark attacks that are dubious, and his qualifications render this interview opinion but I feel the opinion is broadly right and I like depictions of the reality of voters in Netflix series "The Politician" that even in a high-school context indicates the complete mutual disengagement between voters and campaigning politicians, and adman Bob Hoffman when discussing the three-word-ad-brief talking about how fame is the greatest predictor of political campaign success, not content.

So I better conclude this point rather than continue to overdetermine it. The news has this conceit that their income depends on, that all their reporting on the content of proposed policy in political campaigns is somehow useful and as such valuable and hence their salaries are justified. And so, it is almost impossible that something like the news, regardless of left-wing or right-wing bias, can come to understand itself the subjects on which they write about - like how an election was won or lost, or what is causing the housing affordability crisis, because if the news media understood how little value they actually offer, they could not in good conscious continue to operate.

It is very similar to Noam Chomsky's description of Post-modernist academia whom, cannot make a career out of stating simple truisms like "women are underrepresented in STEM disciplines" that are as obvious to a tenured professor as they are to the janitor that empties their wastepaper basket, you wind up having to write these painfully obvious truisms in an abusive style of language exemplified by Judith Butler.

Ideology

I am not going to claim I share an understanding of what "ideology" is that is shared by experts on the subject, and I leave it to you to do at least a cursory reading of it's wikipedia page and assess what I'm asserting.

What I'm asserting though, is based on describing observed behaviours of what I'm calling ideologues, being people who behave as though they possess an ideology. 

These people tend to approach the world as though some persistent wicked problem society faces (eg. inequality, violence, stupidity, environmental degradation, economic mismanagement and existential angst) are solved problems, which is to say, we have the answers, widely known answers.

This further presents as behaviour consistent with a held belief that the only reason these problems are not resolved is simply lack of commitment

What I personally think of as "the infinite recourse to lack of commitment" renders the beliefs of ideology unfalsifiable, which is to say, ideologues struggle to entertain the possibility that they are wrong, and that perhaps we collectively endure ongoing problems because we collectively do not as yet understand the true nature of the problem. This is what makes them so annoying, regardless of the content of their beliefs, but not just annoying, dangerous too.

Authoritarianism

I will now assert that ever holding the hand of any "infinite recourse to lack of commitment" is authoritarianism, it is a natural pairing like pork and fennel, lamb and rosemary, beef and pepper and chicken and bacon. I'd hesitate, but I'd be open to somebody smarter than I suggesting that more than a pairing, they are basically synonyms, like knowledge and wisdom.

This framework allows us to compare, for example 21st Century Wahhabism to Byzantine Iconoclasm as authoritarian ideologies despite being competing Abrahamic religions and movements separated by a millennia. 

But we can also use this framework to make useful analogies between radical feminism and Wahhabism despite the seeming vast left-right gulf between them. 

Copping to any potential allegations of shit-stirring but I've had this story open on my browser now for quite some time that I think is useful in talking about authoritarianism:

She Matters memorial to women who allegedly died by violence defaced in Melbourne's Hosier Lane

On the surface, looking at this news story in sheer practical terms, it is a pretty open-and-shut, one-sided affair. The memorial was defaced by a crude throw-up piece of graffiti reading "war on men" for which the obvious and reasonable inference is that some dickhead who feels angry and persecuted defaced an expression of a popular cause with a highly unpopular one, with any charitable interpretation of a "war" on men a very weak one.

But the real characteristic of authoritarianism, is that because ideologues believe in "solved" problems, and that these problems persist simply due to a lack of commitment, discussion cannot be tolerated because discussion is the real problem a symptom of a lack of commitment, that can spread like a contagion. The time to act is assumed to be now, and the time for discussion is assumed to be somewhere in the past.

Now, had the defacer not been some sexist dickhead, I want you to entertain the following shit-stirring scenario. That instead of hastily throwing up pitiful victimology, they had papered over the memorial of women victims of mortal violence, with infants who had died from diseases.

I put it to you, this this would not be a cut-and-dry news story to cover. I would estimate, that an argument that covering one memorial with another was actually disingenuous would win out, but it would be much much harder to cover and finesse than a story about something popular being defaced with something shit.

While I am capable of thinking like Niccolo Machiavelli, I am rarely if ever Machiavellian in my practices. I rarely visit Hosier Lane, I don't give much of a shit about Hosier lane, I am not interested in graffiti turf wars, nor graffiti terf wars, and I am not encouraging anyone to wage war with MRA stupidity nor Machiavellian cunning.

Indeed, if you had not gathered already, what I am opposed to is authoritarianism. I am not pro-it. As such, what I want, what motivates me to use this shit-stirring hypothetical, is discussion, for example:

"[Ms Moody] said graffiti-protection paint would be used to try to stop it from being damaged in the future, and she was considering hiring a security guard to watch over the mural until the protective layer dried."

Kudos points to you, if you can identify the irony in using graffiti-protection paint in Hosier Lane, to prevent graffiti being used in Melbourne, possibly Australia's most famous graffiti destination.

When I was in Rome circa 2007 I took a guided tour of the Colosseum, and my tour guide, so keep in mind the appeal to authority fallacy here, stated that the Vatican appropriated marble from the Colosseum to build St Peter's Basilica on the pretext that Christians had been persecuted in the Colosseum so the marble was taken as part reparations for pre-Holy Roman Empire's persecution of Christians. Now how true this claim is, I don't know, but hopefully an engaged mind presented with some Renaissance Pope's alleged argument can instantly start picking holes in it.

Similarly, I've lived in Mexico for 4 years, a country where roughly 1% of its population has disappeared since 2007. I ran the streets at night in my provocative outfits, and though I'm using an availability heuristic here, more ubiquitous than sculptural renderings of place names in downtowns, are "She Matters" style memorials of disappeared people of the sun made of their actual "have you seen..." pro forma missing persons posters pasted up on buildings, but most prominently recreated in larger poster/banner form and used to cover prominent "glorietas" or what English speakers would call roundabouts. In Guadalajara where I lived, the "Glorieta de los Ninos Heros" had been popularly appropriated to become "Glorieta de las y los desapericidos"

And for those of you who habla espanol at least as bad as I do, you may notice and infer from "las y los" a political bias that I would emphasize is not what I am interested in here, and much more interested in moving beyond, because the left-right analysis has in my arrogant opinion, been successfully used by authoritarians to divide and conquer the anti-authoritarian.

Because I can segue, just watch me, from the Glorieta de los Ninos Heros to Parque Rojo in Guadalajara that got appropriated by capatilism. The herald of this capatilist conquest, was feminist capatilism, some feminists cordoned off a corner of this public park, I can no longer recall if it is every Saturday or Sunday, with a market that was "women only" a safe space for women to browse macramé, crystals, jewellery, second hand clothes and books etc. They went as far with the cordon as to have security consisting of angry young women, not necessarily intimidating, but as effective as black-shirts, brown-shirts or the red guard, for the majority of non-confrontation seeking members of the general public.

Within a year, I would guess, this public park, once a multi-use space where people gathered to catch up, eat, rollerblade, skate, practice yoga, hold yoga classes, teach circus skills like juggling and tightrope walking etc. became edge-to-edge market stalls of which the women only section was a tiny sliver. It was a good market, popular even, but at what cost? This was a popular capitalist privatisation of a communal good - a public park.

Just as I can't fault the enterprising capitalists on strategic grounds for turning the commons into a thriving economic enterprise, I can't fault on strategic grounds Sherele Moody for appropriating a significant portion of one of Melbourne's most popular and promoted tourist attractions for a cause she and others believe in, for, I will charitably assume, as long as the problem of femicides persists (aka, realistically in perpetuity, but ideologically until sufficient awareness is raised to generate sufficient commitment to the ideology's assumed known solution.)

What I am critical of, is the status quo that accepts the actions of ideologues and forfeits discussion actively. Here we can return to objectively assess the usefulness of Ground News, with a search on "Hosier Lane" producing 5 news sources that covered the defacing of the "She Matters" memorial. Ground News' functionality tells me in this case study, that the coverage leaned 67% left, as in two of the three of the five sources that Ground News tracks for bias, lean left. I do not need to unlock extra features to assume that the right-biased source likely stuck to the facts. Because of a paywall, the only thing I can't see, but feel again I can safely assume, is that none of the coverage gave any significant consideration to the "war on men" position, by perhaps citing any statistics on how male violence effects men compared to women, and then perhaps pointing out that while generally men are far more directly affected by male violence, women suffer more psychologically - as in men go to the pub and wind up dead because they spilt another man's beer, but had up until that fateful confrontation not lived their lives in dread anticipation of their likely death at another man's hands, whereas women grip their keys in their hands as an improvised defensive weapon, and make obligatory phone calls while walking the streets at night, in the expectation that even while taking precautions a man is likely to kill them. 

Now certainly, an interesting discussion is to be had about capitalisms seizure of Parque Rojo, and even Christian capitalism's seizure of Parque Refugio for 3 straight months to sell Christmas ornaments, Nativity ceramics and Christmas trees, and I would be far less vulnerable to the authoritarian rhetorical strategy of questioning my motives in choosing the "She Matters" mural as my case study.

The reason I am drawn to it, and flag my own choice as shit-stirring, is because of the rhetorical power of "surely everyone agrees femicide is bad" because most everyone, including me, does. Where the difference lies, and the power of the case studies, is that we have ideologues who think that there is simply nothing to discuss about the She Matters memorial, and then there's fuckwits like me, who from the perspective of authoritarian ideologues stir up shit, not just unnecessarily, but antagonistically by wanting to know more about the manners of graffiti and street art, like among the graffiti subculture on what grounds does somebody claim wall space? how long can they reasonably ask of the community to occupy that space with their art? at what opportunity cost is the "She matters" mural installed in Hosier Lane with respect to other worthwhile causes? how are we to arrive at a consistent position with the defacing of "She matters" in Hosier Lane, and the defacing/destruction of the Banksy piece(s) in Tattersalls/ACDC lane? how does it compare to the Catholic Church's seizure of Orsanmichele grain market in Florence? (Again as explained to me by a tour guide, someone painted a picture of the Virgin Mary graffiti style, then later someone attributed a miracle to the painting and the Church used it as pretext to seize the premises. There seems to be some truth to this telling, though Ground News' non-existent "Catholic bias" feature can't tell me whether the authors gloss over the questionable behaviour of their own ideological institutions...)

Like I could go on, and because I can go on, my motivations can be questioned as to whether my intent is to filibuster progress perhaps via concern trolling consistent with the strategies of general sabotage outlined by the OSS (precursor to the CIA) which of course to ideologues, has to be the case because the time for discussion is over, femicide is a public health emergency, for which to use George W Bush terminology we have been on amber-alert for roughly all of human history, but was solved, presumably, by the social scientists, sometime in the late 20th-early 21st century and simply lacks commitment.

But to reject one extreme is not by necessity to endorse another, I am not saying no action can be taken by anyone on anything until all concerns have been addressed, I am saying that some discussion would be nice, if for no cause higher than it being diverting, as stated I don't particularly care about Hosier Lane, I think the de facto seizure of public space in a prime tourist location for a permanent installation without due process or public discussion is a triumph for an activist like Ms Moody. 

And then, what if at the opposite end of the lane, someone installs a memorial for those killed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine

My stated motivation, is that I see a problem with how we even begin to discuss such a development, due to the precedents established by righteous-idealogues.

Simples

By which I mean, useful distinctions are actually fairly simple in terms of separating out ideologues from the rest of the spectrum. Solving the problem is hard, because I would guesstimate, most people are authoritarian ideologues, it is a naive intuition, a default state. 

I tend to think of the dichotomy of single vs double. Single what? Double what? Why standards of course.

It's just that easy.

A few people believe in single standards, for example that everyone who makes an assertion is obliged to expose their assertions to questions, and defend their assertions against questions with arguments.

Ideologues tend to operate a double-standard where they are fucking Socrates when it comes to people they disagree with, but defending the detail of their own ideology is beneath their dignity, and can be freely dismissed.

That is but one example, but the pattern of toxic behaviour is the double-standard, that ties woke activists into the same bundle as christian nationalists. Wahhabis with Marxists, because we aren't wrong, we just haven't achieved the necessary level of commitment.

But in my experience, free speech, is for most people, simply too complicated and counterintuitive a concept to understand. Another example, most people through word and deed, cannot demonstrate to me that they even understand what was bad about the Nazis. They appear to think it was the whiteness, the swastikas, the toothbrush moustache (even though they are aware of Charlie Chaplin, and even "The Great Dictator") the salute, but curiously not the Germanicness.

And on this front, I am not myself, an ideologue. I suspect double-standards are a wicked problem, and moral progress/regress will forever be on amber-alert. I have a personal resolution to move away from left-right tribalism, but I am open to discussion as to why this may not be a sound strategy, at this point I am still gathering data.

I suspect a large obstacle is the robustness of Hanlon's Razor, I recently stumbled across a perfect example where in a New York times Podcast on "Modern Love" interviewed marriage therapist Terry Real where at one point, I infer incompetence rather than malice the interviewer asks on behalf of I guess, the audience, why Terry would dedicate resources to men, given their privilege.

This is just a specific example of ideologue behaviour, particularly in its tribal manifestations of us-them. I can only guess, but the journalist probably believes in doctrinal ideas like sins-of-the-father, and is using group identities as the prism of their understanding, they express a similar sentiment to the objection to addressing school bullying, by attempting to give identified bullies roles and responsibilities that will improve their esteem in socially constructive ways - for example designating the bully the task of welcoming other students to class. Allegedly parents object to "rewarding" bullies in such a way, because they see a role that is identical to that of the lowly esteemed Walmart greeters as prestigious like a prefect or class captain.

In the same way, the journalist seeing men and masculinity as the problem, appears to have the naive intuitions of justice manifest as this being only legitimately addressed by the apportioning of more resources into women, unable to conceive that apportioning resources to men could result in women as beneficiaries.

If you will, ideologues appear to make incompetence driven errors akin to "if the husband is sick why should he get the medicine? Give it to the wife as reward for her being healthy."

This is really bleak behaviour, and I just, at a personal level, want to chip away at it. This post is not about feminism, and if you can parse it, hopefully you'd agree with me it's not anti-feminism but pro.

My problem with the left is that they are too conservative and authoritarian, and my problem with the right is that they are not being conservatives and have gone radical and authoritarian. I am left of you all and attack via the narcissism of small differences. 

Authoritarian ideologues have done tremendous damage if for no other reason than their ineffectual and incompetent management has wasted precious time and resources with an unserious approach to serious issues that need addressing.

Lamba out.


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