I don't think that's grandiose at all. We don't need entities that encourage the absolute worst instincts of human beings. Every time an individual, forum, or institution has done this, it has resulted in terrible consequences.
I can’t tell you how many times in the last 5 years or so I’ve thought how I miss the Awl, and the Hairpin, and some of what Gawker and Jezebel published. Although even the Awl became kind of listless toward the end. It seems like a lot of the writers that came out of that era have either settled into the status quo or disappeared from the scene altogether.
Excellent points. It’s hard to “just throw things out there” for discussion when those things live forever, just waiting for a time when they will be employed by others to bite you in the ass.
Except that the right is busily passing new laws in Red states making sure that people on the left have a much harder time getting to that ballot box ...
I've never investigated. SOME claim that what's happening is more along the lines of restoring the laws to what they were before the pandemic. Like I "said," dunno.
Kick-draw a li'l fast on this one. Some OTHERS say the OTHER reason for the laws is to reduce the Millennial's participation, as much as to reduce black participation. Again, dunno. And didn't save any-a those links, sure of that.
The once every 2/4 year exercise of elections is itself abused by TPTB to convince Americans that their only chance to exert political force is at the ballot box.
Great point. Describes my own relationship with SM to a tee. I withdrew from Facebook and Twitter except pseudonymously. Same for any online comments anywhere else.
Is that an accurate description of Red Scare's audience? I don't pay too much attention to it, but every time I hear Anna as a guest somewhere, she seems pretty in opposition to that kind of "woke" (or whatever you want to call it) language.
"Red Scare is cool, and its gay army as a mass rides indifferent to the mores that its members dutifully honor as individuals in so many other contexts"
This is an accurate description of 90% of people who've heard of Red Scare, much less listen to it. Nobody talks to their friends or spouse the way they talk at church or Twitter.
I was a little surprised by that description as well. I also know Anna mostly from very non woke conversations. Eric Weinstein, Tim Dillion. She even made an appearance with Curtis Yarvin.
I heard her on Fifth Column and she seemed to put her aim on the same targets as Freddie - ultra-privileged, college-educated folks who mindlessly bob along with social justice politics while conveniently ignoring class politics.
I love Red Scare but don't know anything about their audience, but I could believe that Freddie's take is accurate. There's something about them that grants permission for people who are otherwise mired in miserable political scenes to push back during their hour.
I'm also worried it's going away. I feel like they've been a little less focused lately; they've got a lot going on, maybe they're losing interest.
A wise person I know believes that she creates nothing — it’s a “transmission” from the source, and she writes it down. Imperfectly or not — sometimes there are what might be called transcription errors. But she transmits as faithfully as she can.
Most people out there are trying to will something specific into being, for a purpose — political, financial, self-aggrandizing. You probably do, too, sometimes. But yesterday’s thing felt more like a transmission.
That's basically invoking a Muse, which goes all the way back to some of humanities oldest and greatest works of art. Homer channelled the Greek Gods, Milton the Holy Spirit. I think Lennon and McCarthy described their process similarly.
IMHO, his alleged "virulent racism" and allegiance to Hitler and the Nazis was a (n admittedly ill conceived and immature) provocation for provocation's sake. But in that same letter he said something along those same lines. He said that art is all in the public domain; nothing anybody creates is original as it all emanates from a collective subconscious and repressed or unimportant (at the time) memories. Wish I could find the full text of that letter; it wasn't very long.
Nothing 100%, right? But, true, true. VERY little original creation. I did one time. In high school. Long story.
Always meant to read Jung, so can't argue the point. But things coming from the subconscious. MY OPINION is that there was a scientific experiment that could lead one to think that most everything we DO (even if it FEELS like conscious choices are occurring)... Well, SUSPECT that the subconscious is the driving force, is all.
It really did. Short of Joan Didion, I usually find it a bit tortured and heavy handed when folks reach for that allusion, but not here.
I like most of Freddie’s posts (or your posts, presuming you’re reading this, but I can’t keep switching from third to second so I won’t), but I like his writing best when, as now, he writes in that slightly wild-eyed and very allusive vein. It’s a little Sebaldian, maybe.
Anyway this is why I pay the big bucks and would in fact pay more (not an invitation to raise prices IN CASE YOU’RE LISTENING) just to watch the pyrotechnics.
Also, I don't know if you're reading along with Demian, but I found echoes of Hesse in yesterday's post, without all the open contempt for "the herd." I think Freddie has been through enough to have what I like to think of as the equanimity of trees: to witness, to bend, to weather, but to remain. Nothing strengthens the roots so well as being cut back to the ground.
Hi again. Couldn't agree MORE. But would add that nothing strengthens the roots even more than being laid out in the sun to dry up and shrivel to next to nothing. Then sprinkle with water to taste. :)
100%. The long paragraph starting with "Genuine communion...." in "Eva" applies so much to the current moment and yesterday's post as well. Both the "herd" and how a conflict is imminent which may not bring anything better but will at least expose the bankruptcy of the current dominant ideas.
I almost have stopped with feeds. I come to SSauhtos to see what are the topics. A scroll through a feed makes you think the world is ending. I didn't have these feed before Internet t is very bad now unless you protect yourself--World Series helped.
The feed is the ultimate mind-killer imo and removing them from my life was a good way to inoculate myself from the very worst effects of the internet. I have a dummy twitter account that doesn't follow anyone and something about navigating to certain people's profiles instead of letting the feed goes by feels a lot more mentally stable and controllable. I also think there's a direct connection between removing feeds from my life and learning to read full books again.
There was no comment section yesterday. It was like that for everybody. Freddie does that occasionally. (He must be referring to feedback he got on Twitter.)
I just emailed a reply to your Substack's email from Nov 12 (200th birthday of Dostoevsky). If you receive it then Erin's method of contacting an author will have been proven.
Perhaps he just wants the piece to live by itself without commentary attached. FDB doesn’t seem like the type to get mad at, say, Kathleen McCook for a thoughtful reply.
That seems to me a reasonable and workable conclusion. On the other hand a posted comment is an essentially public act, while an email response feels to me fundamentally private.
My sense of things is that for the most personal of Freddie's posts - Nov 18 being a good example (comments were disabled) - there is something unseemly about responding in a public forum. It's too personal. Public comment on the Nov 18th post would be an invitation, for some, to a kind of cruelty. The Sep 27th posting follows the same pattern.
But then for these, a personal response might be exactly right, and very much welcomed.
I got what you were saying and I understood why Alex Jones was the photo. You are thinking ahead. One thing we know about history is that it repeats itself. It repeats itself so reliably that it's a reminder not to get too caught up in it (as you point out). Despite all of the times in the past we've seen the underclass rise up and topple the ruling class, somehow this country still thinks this is a good path forward. Alex Jones is about as insane as it gets. I spend a lot of time in Trump world and the truth is that Alex Jones is not a big part of it, or even an influential figure. He definitely dwells in a weird sub group but the populist revolution on the march is likely something different. Anyway who can make sense of any of it. I can't. But it is absolutely worth noting that the pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. This much we know for sure. The one way it isn't going to swing, unless our government goes full Stalin, is towards the administrative state and away from the people. That is probably less likely than it swinging towards the populists.
As far as call outs on Twitter - you gotta feel badly for people who get off on public dunking. I guess everyone does. It is an easy trigger to pull and it probably feels really good to know you are hurting someone. But yuck, gross. It always makes me feel like I need to take a shower. You have readers here who value what you think, value your honesty and value how much time you put into this newsletter. History will remember you well.
Not that my views account for much, granted, but the pendulum started swinging to the administrative state starting with FDR, right? LBJ? And now FDR and LBJ COMBINED, one JB. The philosophy of cradle to grave is so alluring I wonder if populists or much of anybody ELSE is gonna see the unintended consequences of it.
I've noted elsewhere in these comments I was just plain WEIRD. If You understand what it really TAKES to be REALLY weird, it's nothing to write home about. I left a job over an incompetent boss, and in the exit interview I guess I did a "call out." My views were, actually, factually correct. Didn't do ANYbody ANY good, least of all myself.
I've had so few contacts with people that I tend to not take them for granted much. If I KNOWINGLY say things that might offend, at least these days, it's INTENDED to be of SOME benefit to the person I'm intending to offend. Comes to mind here just lately, as I realize there's a measure of placing myself ABOVE my former mentor which probably should be lessened. But it's a FACT that he's suffering some pretty severe delusions. Weeeel, best to say PARTIAL fact, because he hasn't seen what I've written as factual much, so there is that.
But, again, In the end it's INTENDED to help him. Horse to water, tho. No matter, never mind...
This specific moment of eye-rolling, vaguely scandalized Twitter scolds and their attendant social justice politics will pass, and as you imply, it'll pass sooner than almost anyone expects. But there'll always be church ladies. There'll always be more "but" people than "if" people. And there'll always be, if not comfort, then predictably in deriding the risk-taker or pointing at the unclean. There's a really joyless pincer movement about it: if you're too cool to try anything new you can't fail at it, plus you've already succeeded because you've pointed out how fucking dumb some other guy is for even trying.
But, again, spaces are like this. Twitter might well be the worst of them, yes, but there was never a town square or a knitting circle or an intergalactic confederation that didn't have the beady-eyed curtain-twitcher, the vicious gossip, the nihilistic conformist with the thin smile and the raised pinkie. The only way out is to get out. Do as Freddie does - find a voice, find an audience, hang a shingle away from the madding crowd and say "I'm not doing this to be like everyone else. Stop by if you want something new." You'll cultivate a little garden of weirdos. And it'll be lovely.
Right. I also think there's an equally annoying, equally smug "anti-woke" voice that I've grown a bit tired of. Stuff like stupidpol or various other Substack writers. I like this blog (and the called-out Yglesias) because they both come from people with a moral framework talking about the things that interest them. It's not just bitching about stuff that annoys them.
Oh for sure. And now that the perceptive are seeing that there is light at the end of the tunnel, expect this voice to become more prevalent over the next couple of years. "Duh, of course Latinx was dumb, I knew it all along! I just waited til 2022 to say so while you, dear reader, didn't even see it until 2023! You obviously love great journalism. Democracy dies in darkness. Triggered much, snowflake?"
Truffaut said the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. I'd add that it doesn't count if you make a crappy movie and then say "triggered much???"
Long story short, people need create good stuff rather than creating bad stuff or criticizing lots of stuff while creating no stuff.
lol triggered much. I'm personally working hard at getting beyond the casual contempt of the newly awakened. I've had so many awakenings in my life, I'm tired of feeling contemptuous toward people on a different stage of the journey. And I'm also hoping to avoid feeling contempt toward myself because I know that someday soon I'll change again, and feel embarrassed contempt for who I am today--if I'm not careful, and let that shit go.
My worry is that the people who are at the "make something crappy to provoke and feel self-satisfied" stage will stay there. But I guess that's not my problem. At some point, though, they ought to know better. It's hard to grow beyond that stage when there's money and social capital at that stage, though. I guess I'm lucky I make no money and have no social capital :)
In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis lampshades and then lampoons the contempt humans always have for people going through the phase we ourselves have only recently emerged from. I’ve always appreciated that passage because the temptation is so universally real, and I didn’t really see it in myself until Lewis pointed it out for me via Uncle Screwtape.
Good on you for seeing it for yourself and reminding me that I still mess it up.
Been years since I've read Screwtape Letters and I'd forgotten that, but I'll betcha that's where the impulse in my mind originated. Don't you just flipping love books?
I'm a little surprised. Ah, going on a high-holy trip myself for a minute there.
But my opinion is so strong on this subject that I consider it a fact: There is the appearance of stages, looked at one Way. But I think (therefore I am ;) that it's actually more like a spiral. A spiral breathing is a thought/feeling that came to Mind.
Looked at that Way, there's no going higher or lower is there. I could quote some Zen sayings, but I'm barely keeping my eyes open.
As it happens, my former mentor who called me an "angel" two or three weeks ago is giving me the silent treatment because I pointed out some flaws in his behavior. Seemed obvious to me, but no.
So today is gaslighting me by saying *I'm* the one who has changed, and he's willing to give me his ear to help me out.
Lor' ha MERCY that's tiring. Dunno why I would relate such a personal problem, but if You read above, You may glean that I don't think my life is important enough to care how long it goes on.
Granted, THAT'S WEIRD. But, if I had to defend it logically I could make a fair attempt, and have to my two Sisters. But not here, not now, probably not ever.
I'm no longer religious; I guess I'm somthing of a pantheist. As someone who seems to know a bit about Eastern philosophy, we can probably agree that two opposing things can be and often are true at once.
Being insignificant does not mean being without value. Each one of us is infinitesimally small in the universe, but each one of us is an irreplaceable node in the universe's consciousness (that's not woowoo: we are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, and we are conscious. We are the universe, thinking about itself).
Each loss is a tragedy. On an individual level, it's impossible to feel for and value every other human (or pet, or favorite tree, etc.) the way we feel for and value those closest to us in our own network of being, but that's just a design problem.
I can't abide such talk as "my life is not important."
We are all insignificant, but we are all precious.
Re “of course Latinx was dumb” = “of course there were no WMD” = “of course Russiagate was a hoax” = “of course it came from a lab” = “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
perennial optimist and idiot that i am, i hoped some slackening of the total orthodoxy of mainstream woke-liberal politics would lead to more individual and idiosyncratic voices in the mainstream. and it has to an extent, like this blog, but it's also opened up a space in the market for a generic "anti-woke" punditry that just makes the whole discourse even dumber and more petty.
Definitely. I was one of the minnows purged along with much bigger, better fish, when a self-consciously unorthodox outlet decided to go full anti-woke.
I never intended to write for a living, so I suppose it's no great loss to me. But dang, did it make the place much less interesting. It's now (in)famous for being a parody of itself.
That's fair. My household just lucked into catching a cold, so I'm now too focused on Thanksgiving logistics to decide whether naming names is a good idea. Maybe I'm just being silly. But at the moment, I'd describe it, "Aspired to be City Journal for flyover country, ended up another Breitbart".
Funny just returned to this because of Freddie's rambling post on neoliberalism (no clue why he made it a proper noun). TMI and City Journal are pre-eminent neoliberals.
But THAT'S JUST NOT TRUE, dude. The Magellanic Supine Confederacy pointedly tosses the scolds out of airlocks during interdimensional conferences. Do the work.
I think what bothered people was less the fact that your post was poetically (as you seem to describe it) incomprehensible and more that it seemed to be intentionally vague, a sense that you were simultaneously trying to signal that you weren’t part of the woke contingent but also ambivalent/critical/unwilling to approve of any force that doesn’t straightforwardly identify as a well meaning leftist one. I think that ambivalence is a true one that transpires throughout your writing: you are a leftist through and through but there’s a sense (that some people reproach you, understandably) that you’re still avoiding grappling with the fact that maybe all leftism is at this point in history is this petit bourgeois managerial project that you often describe as the “bad” or “fake” left. Anyway as much as I understand the reproach, I don’t read your posture as cowardly but as a genuine moral ambivalence and questioning which is part of what makes your substack interesting (and you one of the only figures on the left I have any interest in at this point )
I think you're right, but there is (as you describe) a world of difference between a keenly-felt inner conflict or ambivalence on one side, and calculated fence-sitting on the other. Some of Freddie's critics (not all - some, I assume, are good people) may conflate these two.
The converse is a loose, malleable opinion strongly held. For example, it was enough for someone on the Right to be proto-canceled if they opposed GWB's Iraq invasion. (To my shame, I supported it.) This was because of the clear and imminent threat to the country from Saddam's WMDs. To deny this was to deny America. Then of course there were no WMDs. Oh well! The moral imperative remained just as strong but it was molded into something else - democracy or something.
"I think you're right, but there is (as you describe) a world of difference between a keenly-felt inner conflict or ambivalence on one side, and calculated fence-sitting on the other."
I wonder. When you're a little-enough fish (or at least you think you are), is there really?
(For example, seeking medical treatment for an unusual problem in this country may require much calculated fence-sitting, as a patient, to get past gatekeepers to the specialists who can actually help. And it's pretty common for it to come with keenly-felt ambivalence, too.)
I'm not sure I'm following exactly. If I'm reading you rightly then in this scenario the fence-sitting is performative and not substantive. Maybe instead of fence-sitting I should have said triangulation? Having cake and eating it too?
I'm scatterbrained today, so maybe not explaining myself or interpreting others well. Telling the truth as we see it can be a luxury. We may calculate our best shot at being believed about something important is to tell a story that we're unsure we believe, but that fits others' expectations and (we bet) is at least unlikely to be taken the wrong way.
Medicine went through a brief phase where it stopped thinking asthma was a physical condition, and started thinking of it as a Freudian hangup. During this phase, an asthmatic's options for treatment might be asthma cigarettes or psychoanalysis. Asthma cigarettes were cigarettes including bronchodilating herbs. Because of the bronchodilators, they might work. Because of all the other irritants, they might make asthma worse.
Suppose you're an asthmatic whose family believes you're malingering because you refuse an available treatment, asthma cigarettes. You refuse the cigs because they make your asthma worse. A psychoanalyst says they make your asthma worse because sometimes a cigarette is not just a cigarette. He says your asthma is a manifestation of deep psychosexual hangups, which cigarettes trigger. We now know that's BS, of course, and it's perfectly sane to believe his explanation does not describe your experience of asthma attacks. However, since it's an authoritative explanation giving you permission to refuse a treatment that harms you, you go with it. And since it's authoritative, maybe it's more right than your own perceptions are. Now you're on the fence about whether you have these deep psychosexual hangups, and you keenly feel inner conflict about it. In one sense, you stooped to calculated manipulation to create a socially-acceptable justification for avoiding a harm. In another sense, you're sincerely unsure. I say, why not both?
Writers would do well to take the advice shitty employees everywhere have been internalizing since the dawn of time: make yourself irreplaceable. Every asshole with an internet connection, some practice, and a free weekend can be a generic-brand Ezra Klein well enough to put the name brand out of business. How many people can ever be a non-union equivalent of Freddie deBoer though? Or Ethan Strauss? Very few. And that ALL comes down to voice. When you write as you nobody can replace you because nobody else IS you, and the simple act of being above duplication is in and of itself one of the most financially valuable assets any individual in any industry can have.
The importance of being weird cannot be overstated. Even among the "anti-woke". I stopped supporting a number of such writers, or declined to ever do so, because their takes -- though I agree with them -- can readily be found on Twitter or a subreddit's comments section for free.
Freddie, meanwhile, is offering a Substack like nothing else. I'm trying to train an AI to imitate the Woke Milieu. No fucking way I could do that with FdB; the poor thing wouldn't know how to patch this eclectic collection together.
You're flying high this week, deBoer. I'm filing away "performing confusion" to reference in future. I'm wondering if anyone on the left has ever performed confusion on Twitter about, say, Judith Butler (I really, honestly don't know because I quit Twitter after 5 minutes many years ago). Some of what you write may feel challenging, but it's never an obfuscation. For my money, it's gold.
"The Hinterland" is great at exploring whatever Justin Smith wants to explore. As I think Freddie is hinting at here, there's a lot more to talk about than whether being Woke is a terrible thing, an existential threat, or goofy nonsense for dum-dums. Smith pokes around into lots of other fun areas. I might have come to him through this blog, actually. Stack. Whatever. Here are some good ones (one or two are very slightly culture war-ish, but much of the rest of his stuff isn't): Click the Boats (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/click-the-boats), What are the Humanities? (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities), On the Job (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/on-the-job).
The House of Strauss, which I'm almost positive I found through Freddie recommendation, is just really well written. It's a sports blog - don't hang up! - but I follow no sports at all and still find it great enough to pay for. The cat's just a really good writer: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
Anybody have other suggestions that at least sometimes veer away from "man the Wokesters just really smell bad, don't they?" Maybe even something funny?
I checked out some of the links you posted and Paul Skallas has written something with a similar point about writing (and many other things). He mentions an AI called GPT-3 that can write articles in the "mid to late 2000s internet writing aesthetic".
I don't think that's grandiose at all. We don't need entities that encourage the absolute worst instincts of human beings. Every time an individual, forum, or institution has done this, it has resulted in terrible consequences.
I can’t tell you how many times in the last 5 years or so I’ve thought how I miss the Awl, and the Hairpin, and some of what Gawker and Jezebel published. Although even the Awl became kind of listless toward the end. It seems like a lot of the writers that came out of that era have either settled into the status quo or disappeared from the scene altogether.
Excellent points. It’s hard to “just throw things out there” for discussion when those things live forever, just waiting for a time when they will be employed by others to bite you in the ass.
Except that the right is busily passing new laws in Red states making sure that people on the left have a much harder time getting to that ballot box ...
I've never investigated. SOME claim that what's happening is more along the lines of restoring the laws to what they were before the pandemic. Like I "said," dunno.
Kick-draw a li'l fast on this one. Some OTHERS say the OTHER reason for the laws is to reduce the Millennial's participation, as much as to reduce black participation. Again, dunno. And didn't save any-a those links, sure of that.
The once every 2/4 year exercise of elections is itself abused by TPTB to convince Americans that their only chance to exert political force is at the ballot box.
Oddly, this is one of my sources of hope these days.
Great point. Describes my own relationship with SM to a tee. I withdrew from Facebook and Twitter except pseudonymously. Same for any online comments anywhere else.
Truly sad. Without the messiness of a good brainstorming session, how can we create anything new?
Is that an accurate description of Red Scare's audience? I don't pay too much attention to it, but every time I hear Anna as a guest somewhere, she seems pretty in opposition to that kind of "woke" (or whatever you want to call it) language.
"Red Scare is cool, and its gay army as a mass rides indifferent to the mores that its members dutifully honor as individuals in so many other contexts"
This is an accurate description of 90% of people who've heard of Red Scare, much less listen to it. Nobody talks to their friends or spouse the way they talk at church or Twitter.
I was a little surprised by that description as well. I also know Anna mostly from very non woke conversations. Eric Weinstein, Tim Dillion. She even made an appearance with Curtis Yarvin.
I heard her on Fifth Column and she seemed to put her aim on the same targets as Freddie - ultra-privileged, college-educated folks who mindlessly bob along with social justice politics while conveniently ignoring class politics.
I love Red Scare but don't know anything about their audience, but I could believe that Freddie's take is accurate. There's something about them that grants permission for people who are otherwise mired in miserable political scenes to push back during their hour.
I'm also worried it's going away. I feel like they've been a little less focused lately; they've got a lot going on, maybe they're losing interest.
The Red Scare listenership does have a scoldish periphery but it's not pronoun people, it's more TERFy legbeards who got their brains fried by Lolcow.
If you don't understand what any of this means, it's an indicator that you are living a normal and healthy life.
yes, and also "social tendency, typically mistaken for a political tendency" is good.
Yup, unfortunately politics has become a key source of identity for many people. Honestly, goth and emo were better.
A wise person I know believes that she creates nothing — it’s a “transmission” from the source, and she writes it down. Imperfectly or not — sometimes there are what might be called transcription errors. But she transmits as faithfully as she can.
Most people out there are trying to will something specific into being, for a purpose — political, financial, self-aggrandizing. You probably do, too, sometimes. But yesterday’s thing felt more like a transmission.
That's basically invoking a Muse, which goes all the way back to some of humanities oldest and greatest works of art. Homer channelled the Greek Gods, Milton the Holy Spirit. I think Lennon and McCarthy described their process similarly.
I wonder who Freddie's Muse is.
Bob Dylan said the same thing, that he "dipped into the river of song" and pulled out the lyrics.
Kinda reminds me of one Kenny Howard. https://www.ocweekly.com/von-who-6426922/?sfw=pass1637785520
IMHO, his alleged "virulent racism" and allegiance to Hitler and the Nazis was a (n admittedly ill conceived and immature) provocation for provocation's sake. But in that same letter he said something along those same lines. He said that art is all in the public domain; nothing anybody creates is original as it all emanates from a collective subconscious and repressed or unimportant (at the time) memories. Wish I could find the full text of that letter; it wasn't very long.
Nothing 100%, right? But, true, true. VERY little original creation. I did one time. In high school. Long story.
Always meant to read Jung, so can't argue the point. But things coming from the subconscious. MY OPINION is that there was a scientific experiment that could lead one to think that most everything we DO (even if it FEELS like conscious choices are occurring)... Well, SUSPECT that the subconscious is the driving force, is all.
Yesterday you made me think of Yeats. Was there a comment section? None came up for me. Yeats was involved with the Golden Dawn, too.
Amazing how just the word "gyre" is the whole allusion, and it worked so beautifully.
It really did. Short of Joan Didion, I usually find it a bit tortured and heavy handed when folks reach for that allusion, but not here.
I like most of Freddie’s posts (or your posts, presuming you’re reading this, but I can’t keep switching from third to second so I won’t), but I like his writing best when, as now, he writes in that slightly wild-eyed and very allusive vein. It’s a little Sebaldian, maybe.
Anyway this is why I pay the big bucks and would in fact pay more (not an invitation to raise prices IN CASE YOU’RE LISTENING) just to watch the pyrotechnics.
Also, I don't know if you're reading along with Demian, but I found echoes of Hesse in yesterday's post, without all the open contempt for "the herd." I think Freddie has been through enough to have what I like to think of as the equanimity of trees: to witness, to bend, to weather, but to remain. Nothing strengthens the roots so well as being cut back to the ground.
Aggressive pruning fostering resilience and integrity -- fantastic. I love this image, Erin <3
One of the hardest things to do as a new gardener, but boy does it work.
So true! My hydrangeas need exactly that and I just can't seem to make myself do it.
Yes. Nicely done.
Hi again. Couldn't agree MORE. But would add that nothing strengthens the roots even more than being laid out in the sun to dry up and shrivel to next to nothing. Then sprinkle with water to taste. :)
Of course, the analogy only works on certain types of plants. I mean, your tender bulbs need more care. Fungi is a whole other beast.
I actually worked in a greenhouse during high school and a bit summers in college. Know next to nothing about plants tho.
If I had-ta guess, I suspect I'm of the fungi variety. ;)
You must've missed the bit on Montessori school plant polishing that came up in comments last week. /sarc
hahahahahahaha
True, true. Just recently saw M. deBoer. But, in general, I'm pretty lame anyway. "/sarc?"
100%. The long paragraph starting with "Genuine communion...." in "Eva" applies so much to the current moment and yesterday's post as well. Both the "herd" and how a conflict is imminent which may not bring anything better but will at least expose the bankruptcy of the current dominant ideas.
Every time I look at my newsfeed these days, I think of Yeats.
I understand that news feeds for men get different kinds of proposals.
I almost have stopped with feeds. I come to SSauhtos to see what are the topics. A scroll through a feed makes you think the world is ending. I didn't have these feed before Internet t is very bad now unless you protect yourself--World Series helped.
The feed is the ultimate mind-killer imo and removing them from my life was a good way to inoculate myself from the very worst effects of the internet. I have a dummy twitter account that doesn't follow anyone and something about navigating to certain people's profiles instead of letting the feed goes by feels a lot more mentally stable and controllable. I also think there's a direct connection between removing feeds from my life and learning to read full books again.
Now tell us how you make that twirly icon.
substack avatars are just gif-friendly, surprisingly. i didn’t expect it when i uploaded it!
I like learning new things. Thx.
No SM -> No feed -> Too many Substacks -> less time for books. Pretty much how I get all my intuitions from.
Same here ...
'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity'
There was no comment section yesterday. It was like that for everybody. Freddie does that occasionally. (He must be referring to feedback he got on Twitter.)
Yesterday's essay made me think of Leonard Cohen's song "Everybody Knows": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
Thanks, I had a comment and didn't know there was another place to comment.
You can reply to the emailed article and he should get it on posts that don't have a comments section.
Great tip. I never knew that, and there have been a few times when I would have liked to be able to send an author a more direct message.
I just emailed a reply to your Substack's email from Nov 12 (200th birthday of Dostoevsky). If you receive it then Erin's method of contacting an author will have been proven.
Yes, I got it. Erin's on the ball. But I would think if he didn't have open comments he might not want them?
Perhaps he just wants the piece to live by itself without commentary attached. FDB doesn’t seem like the type to get mad at, say, Kathleen McCook for a thoughtful reply.
I think you are correct!
That seems to me a reasonable and workable conclusion. On the other hand a posted comment is an essentially public act, while an email response feels to me fundamentally private.
My sense of things is that for the most personal of Freddie's posts - Nov 18 being a good example (comments were disabled) - there is something unseemly about responding in a public forum. It's too personal. Public comment on the Nov 18th post would be an invitation, for some, to a kind of cruelty. The Sep 27th posting follows the same pattern.
But then for these, a personal response might be exactly right, and very much welcomed.
I got what you were saying and I understood why Alex Jones was the photo. You are thinking ahead. One thing we know about history is that it repeats itself. It repeats itself so reliably that it's a reminder not to get too caught up in it (as you point out). Despite all of the times in the past we've seen the underclass rise up and topple the ruling class, somehow this country still thinks this is a good path forward. Alex Jones is about as insane as it gets. I spend a lot of time in Trump world and the truth is that Alex Jones is not a big part of it, or even an influential figure. He definitely dwells in a weird sub group but the populist revolution on the march is likely something different. Anyway who can make sense of any of it. I can't. But it is absolutely worth noting that the pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. This much we know for sure. The one way it isn't going to swing, unless our government goes full Stalin, is towards the administrative state and away from the people. That is probably less likely than it swinging towards the populists.
As far as call outs on Twitter - you gotta feel badly for people who get off on public dunking. I guess everyone does. It is an easy trigger to pull and it probably feels really good to know you are hurting someone. But yuck, gross. It always makes me feel like I need to take a shower. You have readers here who value what you think, value your honesty and value how much time you put into this newsletter. History will remember you well.
Not that my views account for much, granted, but the pendulum started swinging to the administrative state starting with FDR, right? LBJ? And now FDR and LBJ COMBINED, one JB. The philosophy of cradle to grave is so alluring I wonder if populists or much of anybody ELSE is gonna see the unintended consequences of it.
I've noted elsewhere in these comments I was just plain WEIRD. If You understand what it really TAKES to be REALLY weird, it's nothing to write home about. I left a job over an incompetent boss, and in the exit interview I guess I did a "call out." My views were, actually, factually correct. Didn't do ANYbody ANY good, least of all myself.
I've had so few contacts with people that I tend to not take them for granted much. If I KNOWINGLY say things that might offend, at least these days, it's INTENDED to be of SOME benefit to the person I'm intending to offend. Comes to mind here just lately, as I realize there's a measure of placing myself ABOVE my former mentor which probably should be lessened. But it's a FACT that he's suffering some pretty severe delusions. Weeeel, best to say PARTIAL fact, because he hasn't seen what I've written as factual much, so there is that.
But, again, In the end it's INTENDED to help him. Horse to water, tho. No matter, never mind...
Thankful for you, Freddie! Now, let the Twitterites devour themselves and pass the turkey…
This specific moment of eye-rolling, vaguely scandalized Twitter scolds and their attendant social justice politics will pass, and as you imply, it'll pass sooner than almost anyone expects. But there'll always be church ladies. There'll always be more "but" people than "if" people. And there'll always be, if not comfort, then predictably in deriding the risk-taker or pointing at the unclean. There's a really joyless pincer movement about it: if you're too cool to try anything new you can't fail at it, plus you've already succeeded because you've pointed out how fucking dumb some other guy is for even trying.
But, again, spaces are like this. Twitter might well be the worst of them, yes, but there was never a town square or a knitting circle or an intergalactic confederation that didn't have the beady-eyed curtain-twitcher, the vicious gossip, the nihilistic conformist with the thin smile and the raised pinkie. The only way out is to get out. Do as Freddie does - find a voice, find an audience, hang a shingle away from the madding crowd and say "I'm not doing this to be like everyone else. Stop by if you want something new." You'll cultivate a little garden of weirdos. And it'll be lovely.
Right. I also think there's an equally annoying, equally smug "anti-woke" voice that I've grown a bit tired of. Stuff like stupidpol or various other Substack writers. I like this blog (and the called-out Yglesias) because they both come from people with a moral framework talking about the things that interest them. It's not just bitching about stuff that annoys them.
Oh for sure. And now that the perceptive are seeing that there is light at the end of the tunnel, expect this voice to become more prevalent over the next couple of years. "Duh, of course Latinx was dumb, I knew it all along! I just waited til 2022 to say so while you, dear reader, didn't even see it until 2023! You obviously love great journalism. Democracy dies in darkness. Triggered much, snowflake?"
Truffaut said the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. I'd add that it doesn't count if you make a crappy movie and then say "triggered much???"
Long story short, people need create good stuff rather than creating bad stuff or criticizing lots of stuff while creating no stuff.
lol triggered much. I'm personally working hard at getting beyond the casual contempt of the newly awakened. I've had so many awakenings in my life, I'm tired of feeling contemptuous toward people on a different stage of the journey. And I'm also hoping to avoid feeling contempt toward myself because I know that someday soon I'll change again, and feel embarrassed contempt for who I am today--if I'm not careful, and let that shit go.
My worry is that the people who are at the "make something crappy to provoke and feel self-satisfied" stage will stay there. But I guess that's not my problem. At some point, though, they ought to know better. It's hard to grow beyond that stage when there's money and social capital at that stage, though. I guess I'm lucky I make no money and have no social capital :)
In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis lampshades and then lampoons the contempt humans always have for people going through the phase we ourselves have only recently emerged from. I’ve always appreciated that passage because the temptation is so universally real, and I didn’t really see it in myself until Lewis pointed it out for me via Uncle Screwtape.
Good on you for seeing it for yourself and reminding me that I still mess it up.
Been years since I've read Screwtape Letters and I'd forgotten that, but I'll betcha that's where the impulse in my mind originated. Don't you just flipping love books?
+1 for Uncle Screwtape!
I'm a little surprised. Ah, going on a high-holy trip myself for a minute there.
But my opinion is so strong on this subject that I consider it a fact: There is the appearance of stages, looked at one Way. But I think (therefore I am ;) that it's actually more like a spiral. A spiral breathing is a thought/feeling that came to Mind.
Looked at that Way, there's no going higher or lower is there. I could quote some Zen sayings, but I'm barely keeping my eyes open.
As it happens, my former mentor who called me an "angel" two or three weeks ago is giving me the silent treatment because I pointed out some flaws in his behavior. Seemed obvious to me, but no.
So today is gaslighting me by saying *I'm* the one who has changed, and he's willing to give me his ear to help me out.
Lor' ha MERCY that's tiring. Dunno why I would relate such a personal problem, but if You read above, You may glean that I don't think my life is important enough to care how long it goes on.
Granted, THAT'S WEIRD. But, if I had to defend it logically I could make a fair attempt, and have to my two Sisters. But not here, not now, probably not ever.
I'm no longer religious; I guess I'm somthing of a pantheist. As someone who seems to know a bit about Eastern philosophy, we can probably agree that two opposing things can be and often are true at once.
Being insignificant does not mean being without value. Each one of us is infinitesimally small in the universe, but each one of us is an irreplaceable node in the universe's consciousness (that's not woowoo: we are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, and we are conscious. We are the universe, thinking about itself).
Each loss is a tragedy. On an individual level, it's impossible to feel for and value every other human (or pet, or favorite tree, etc.) the way we feel for and value those closest to us in our own network of being, but that's just a design problem.
I can't abide such talk as "my life is not important."
We are all insignificant, but we are all precious.
Re “of course Latinx was dumb” = “of course there were no WMD” = “of course Russiagate was a hoax” = “of course it came from a lab” = “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
Bingo.
perennial optimist and idiot that i am, i hoped some slackening of the total orthodoxy of mainstream woke-liberal politics would lead to more individual and idiosyncratic voices in the mainstream. and it has to an extent, like this blog, but it's also opened up a space in the market for a generic "anti-woke" punditry that just makes the whole discourse even dumber and more petty.
Definitely. I was one of the minnows purged along with much bigger, better fish, when a self-consciously unorthodox outlet decided to go full anti-woke.
I never intended to write for a living, so I suppose it's no great loss to me. But dang, did it make the place much less interesting. It's now (in)famous for being a parody of itself.
I'm curious as to which outlet you're describing.
That's fair. My household just lucked into catching a cold, so I'm now too focused on Thanksgiving logistics to decide whether naming names is a good idea. Maybe I'm just being silly. But at the moment, I'd describe it, "Aspired to be City Journal for flyover country, ended up another Breitbart".
Even City Journal has had its problems lately:
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/think-tank-in-the-tank/
lol at the notion that The Manhattan Institute was ever "unorthodox."
Funny just returned to this because of Freddie's rambling post on neoliberalism (no clue why he made it a proper noun). TMI and City Journal are pre-eminent neoliberals.
But THAT'S JUST NOT TRUE, dude. The Magellanic Supine Confederacy pointedly tosses the scolds out of airlocks during interdimensional conferences. Do the work.
I will Do Better™
“Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.” —Groucho Marx
Excellent.
Read this while on my migraine meds. Perfect!
I think what bothered people was less the fact that your post was poetically (as you seem to describe it) incomprehensible and more that it seemed to be intentionally vague, a sense that you were simultaneously trying to signal that you weren’t part of the woke contingent but also ambivalent/critical/unwilling to approve of any force that doesn’t straightforwardly identify as a well meaning leftist one. I think that ambivalence is a true one that transpires throughout your writing: you are a leftist through and through but there’s a sense (that some people reproach you, understandably) that you’re still avoiding grappling with the fact that maybe all leftism is at this point in history is this petit bourgeois managerial project that you often describe as the “bad” or “fake” left. Anyway as much as I understand the reproach, I don’t read your posture as cowardly but as a genuine moral ambivalence and questioning which is part of what makes your substack interesting (and you one of the only figures on the left I have any interest in at this point )
I think you're right, but there is (as you describe) a world of difference between a keenly-felt inner conflict or ambivalence on one side, and calculated fence-sitting on the other. Some of Freddie's critics (not all - some, I assume, are good people) may conflate these two.
The converse is a loose, malleable opinion strongly held. For example, it was enough for someone on the Right to be proto-canceled if they opposed GWB's Iraq invasion. (To my shame, I supported it.) This was because of the clear and imminent threat to the country from Saddam's WMDs. To deny this was to deny America. Then of course there were no WMDs. Oh well! The moral imperative remained just as strong but it was molded into something else - democracy or something.
"I think you're right, but there is (as you describe) a world of difference between a keenly-felt inner conflict or ambivalence on one side, and calculated fence-sitting on the other."
I wonder. When you're a little-enough fish (or at least you think you are), is there really?
(For example, seeking medical treatment for an unusual problem in this country may require much calculated fence-sitting, as a patient, to get past gatekeepers to the specialists who can actually help. And it's pretty common for it to come with keenly-felt ambivalence, too.)
I'm not sure I'm following exactly. If I'm reading you rightly then in this scenario the fence-sitting is performative and not substantive. Maybe instead of fence-sitting I should have said triangulation? Having cake and eating it too?
I'm scatterbrained today, so maybe not explaining myself or interpreting others well. Telling the truth as we see it can be a luxury. We may calculate our best shot at being believed about something important is to tell a story that we're unsure we believe, but that fits others' expectations and (we bet) is at least unlikely to be taken the wrong way.
Medicine went through a brief phase where it stopped thinking asthma was a physical condition, and started thinking of it as a Freudian hangup. During this phase, an asthmatic's options for treatment might be asthma cigarettes or psychoanalysis. Asthma cigarettes were cigarettes including bronchodilating herbs. Because of the bronchodilators, they might work. Because of all the other irritants, they might make asthma worse.
Suppose you're an asthmatic whose family believes you're malingering because you refuse an available treatment, asthma cigarettes. You refuse the cigs because they make your asthma worse. A psychoanalyst says they make your asthma worse because sometimes a cigarette is not just a cigarette. He says your asthma is a manifestation of deep psychosexual hangups, which cigarettes trigger. We now know that's BS, of course, and it's perfectly sane to believe his explanation does not describe your experience of asthma attacks. However, since it's an authoritative explanation giving you permission to refuse a treatment that harms you, you go with it. And since it's authoritative, maybe it's more right than your own perceptions are. Now you're on the fence about whether you have these deep psychosexual hangups, and you keenly feel inner conflict about it. In one sense, you stooped to calculated manipulation to create a socially-acceptable justification for avoiding a harm. In another sense, you're sincerely unsure. I say, why not both?
Writers would do well to take the advice shitty employees everywhere have been internalizing since the dawn of time: make yourself irreplaceable. Every asshole with an internet connection, some practice, and a free weekend can be a generic-brand Ezra Klein well enough to put the name brand out of business. How many people can ever be a non-union equivalent of Freddie deBoer though? Or Ethan Strauss? Very few. And that ALL comes down to voice. When you write as you nobody can replace you because nobody else IS you, and the simple act of being above duplication is in and of itself one of the most financially valuable assets any individual in any industry can have.
The importance of being weird cannot be overstated. Even among the "anti-woke". I stopped supporting a number of such writers, or declined to ever do so, because their takes -- though I agree with them -- can readily be found on Twitter or a subreddit's comments section for free.
Freddie, meanwhile, is offering a Substack like nothing else. I'm trying to train an AI to imitate the Woke Milieu. No fucking way I could do that with FdB; the poor thing wouldn't know how to patch this eclectic collection together.
You're flying high this week, deBoer. I'm filing away "performing confusion" to reference in future. I'm wondering if anyone on the left has ever performed confusion on Twitter about, say, Judith Butler (I really, honestly don't know because I quit Twitter after 5 minutes many years ago). Some of what you write may feel challenging, but it's never an obfuscation. For my money, it's gold.
This might be a fun opportunity to share some substacks that are pushing the boundaries in the ways Freddie outlines here:
You might want to give "Fisted by Foucalt" a read (it's a terrible blog name, sorry buddy). Here's the interview that introduced me to it, coincidentally with Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-zrich-interviews-anna-khachiyan.
"The Hinterland" is great at exploring whatever Justin Smith wants to explore. As I think Freddie is hinting at here, there's a lot more to talk about than whether being Woke is a terrible thing, an existential threat, or goofy nonsense for dum-dums. Smith pokes around into lots of other fun areas. I might have come to him through this blog, actually. Stack. Whatever. Here are some good ones (one or two are very slightly culture war-ish, but much of the rest of his stuff isn't): Click the Boats (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/click-the-boats), What are the Humanities? (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities), On the Job (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/on-the-job).
The House of Strauss, which I'm almost positive I found through Freddie recommendation, is just really well written. It's a sports blog - don't hang up! - but I follow no sports at all and still find it great enough to pay for. The cat's just a really good writer: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
The Lindy Newsletter tries some fun stuff, though I'm not a paying subscriber yet: https://paulskallas.substack.com/
And of course, the granddaddy of them all, Astralcodexten (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/).
Anybody have other suggestions that at least sometimes veer away from "man the Wokesters just really smell bad, don't they?" Maybe even something funny?
I checked out some of the links you posted and Paul Skallas has written something with a similar point about writing (and many other things). He mentions an AI called GPT-3 that can write articles in the "mid to late 2000s internet writing aesthetic".
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b