A Democratic Reckoning on “Gender Identity”?
Another challenge Democrats face is the rise of interest-group liberalism—specifically, the “public interest” nonprofits that now make up the backbone of the Democratic coalition. These groups have no incentive to moderate their stances on controversial issues; they report to foundation and deep-pocket donors, and they increasingly recruit staff based on ideological commitments.
Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?
There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.
But I’m also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist (even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender solidarity were the main thing going on here.
If Britain can’t learn from its legacy in Ireland, it’s doomed to repeat those divides
If there is to be any hope of Keir Starmer’s government quelling the violent rioting by a small number of people, he must first placate the mass of peaceful citizens standing beside them.
The amount of people who gaslight on bills like this are staggering. Saying you “cannot be jailed” for pronouns while immediately turning around and saying repeatedly not abiding by someone’s pronouns is “hate speech” and you can be jailed for it. The semantics are blaring and obvious, but the people who support this idiocy are blind to its problems. As with everything in American politics nowadays (blm, women’s rights, immigration, etc).
Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.
I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘I never thought ideas were about signalling allegiance’
“I think we’re in a hinge moment where it’s on us — it’s unclear, and I think that we’re in danger of making very big mistakes. We’re giving up things that we consider indisputable, inalienable liberal values. We’re giving those up for cheap, short-term Pyrrhic victories,” he says, gravely.
They’re Voting for Trump to ‘Save Democracy’
Like during the eclipse a few years ago, the experts said, ‘Don’t look at the sun and if you look at the sun, you’ll go blind.’ And he just looked at it anyway. And they showed pictures, and of course, he’s not blind. That’s what we need. We need an idiot that looks at the sun when the experts say not to. Not forever. Right now. For the next four years. That’s what we need.”
Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation
But trauma is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation. Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life. But texts like Nanettecreate dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else, and reinforce an already widespread cultural prerequisite that women in particular continually define themselves by their traumatized selves. Attend any social justice event on matters like prison abolition and you will find panels of mostly women, mostly women of color, often LGBTQ-identified, beginning their presentations with their tales of trauma. People who do this have spoken (usually privately, and only in trusted circles) that they are often explicitly told, by funders and “allies,” that they must present their tales of woe if they want to be taken seriously.
The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?
An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.
Tems’ ‘Born in the Wild’ is a Searing Spiritual for a Tortured Generation
The album’s greatest success, though, is in the way its metaphysical themes eclipse any particular religion. This is especially resonant with the way recent generations have come to engage with spirituality. So many of us are amateur astrologers, yogis and meditators, we channel our moral compases into activism and music. We’re the generations that social media tried to destroy, living in an era where mental health crises proliferate and long-lauded institutions crumble along with their facades of integrity. All this has pushed many of us into often untraditional psychological and spiritual practices – some of us are the first in our families to go to therapy, some of us do tarot. Tems has her God and skillfully manages to make that unique relationship ubiquitous.
Afrobeats To The World: Nigerian History Is Repeating Itself
Afrobeats to the world is hanging by a thread. Without the local numbers to back our claim, we are at risk of being exposed and abandoned when pop music inevitably shifts its focus to another emerging sound. It’s another shiny thing. Look towards global music interaction with dancehall and the Caribbean creative class of the early 2000s for a lesson on capital flight, and how that can crush an entire industry.
Afrobeats To The World Gets Its Biggest Challenge
2023 gave Afrobeats to the world its most stark realization. We don’t mint enough stars for the capital we attract. We either solve for that or plateau. And you know what happens when a culture hits the stationary phase. To stand still is to fall behind.
Camille Paglia: Elite Trolling
Yet beyond the gross simplifications that have transformed certain philosophers into bogeymen for rightwing agitators, criticisms of poststructuralism’s legacy cannot so easily be dismissed. We have become extremely adept at describing what must be dismantled, unlearned and problematised, yet almost completely useless when it comes to creating compelling visions of a better society.
Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World
The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.
It’s Pablo-matic” is clearly filling the same function for the more recent era of superficial hyper-moralism in art— “a time when nuance and all the confused intentions, desires, and beliefs that go along with it are considered less a way of understanding human frailty than a failure of ‘accountability,’” as Hilton Als already put it in a sharply critical essay about Douglas, Gadsby’s follow-up to Nanette.
The solution is not to smash your idols but to recognize that they are not idols at all. For Dederer, this insight came with the confessional rituals of the 12-step movement. The humility required to stand before the group and describe “what is worst about me, what is most monstrous,” and the realization that most human beings have a monstrous aspect, allowed her to see “the humanity of monsters.” This amounts to a more dramatic enactment of a pretty common experience: As children, we adore our parents, and growing up is a process of realizing how flawed they are—often with a period of extravagant adolescent rejection—before we come to understand that we love them despite those flaws, as we hope to be loved despite our own. The obdurate truth remains that some of the most beautiful and profound things humanity has created are the work of terrible people. We can decide, in a fury of righteousness, to cast those works aside. Or we can choose to view them as a kind of grace, the miraculous salvage from the inevitable wreck of our lives.
Hannah Gadsby’s Song of the Self
Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
Coleman Hughes on the Separation of Race and State.
The same kinds of people who say that speech is violence, who say that they were actually hurt or felt unsafe because of my TED talk, are the same kinds of people right now that see Hamas slaughtering children in front of their mothers and say, “That’s not violence. That’s resistance.”
I watched ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’ so you don’t have to.
Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra. – The New York Times
For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.
Slavoj Žižek: The difference between ‘woke’ and a true awakening — RT Op-ed
While criticizing the PC canceling culture, we should thus always bear in mind that we share their goals (for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals.
Fela: The Beatification of an Embattled Saint: Taking a Glance at “Fela: This Bitch of a Life”
His charismatic charm drew in many, but charisma would never be enough to promote solid ideologies except it is backed by intelligent, well-researched, objective ideas. In Nigeria, this is however not the case. Since there are, and have been, very few people who stand up to defend our rights, many Nigerians love the outspoken, and more so, those who speak for them. However warped their ideologies, these speakers usually gain cult followings. In Nigeria, when a man’s name is said too often, he becomes a god. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Nnamdi Kanu, Naira Marley, Sunday Adeyemo, Omoyele Sowore, Hush Puppi, etc, all rose to prominence because they had the loudest voices or raised the most dust. Fela falls somewhat into this category, too. His ideology was humane and even strangely prophetic but stifled by the very miseducation he sought to correct.
Mo’Nique Reveals Why She Still Wants a Public Apology From Oprah Winfrey.
When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.” When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.”
Tibetans Say the Dalai Lama’s ‘Suck My Tongue’ Viral Video Is Being Misinterpreted
“I’m sure that the Dalai Lama had no bad or evil intentions, and that it came, to some extent, from the naivete of how such gestures might be interpreted in our modern, hyper-sexualised society,” he said.
“I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.”
Gwyneth Paltrow verdict: Why she divides, and fascinates.
Her avatar of privileged white womanhood – inconceivably wealthy, hyper-fixated on things that most have never thought about (vaginal steamers, anyone?) – is a curious mixture of generational influence.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years.
But, at a time when so many mainstream figures seem obsessed with appearing of-the-people despite being anything but, there is something admittedly refreshing about Paltrow’s cards-on-the-table approach. (As the hosts of the culture podcast “How Long Gone” have noted, she’s taking us back to “a different era of celebrity,” when stars didn’t bother acting as if they were just like us.)
Onyeama, who was banned from returning to the school after writing the book Nigger at Eton in 1972, which detailed the abuse he suffered, said he was surprised by the attention his story had received, and by Eton’s apology. “My attitude is that it is not necessary. It was neither solicited nor expected, it was not fought for. There’s no obligation on the part of Eton college to apologise for anything. So really, to me, it is a non-issue.
Eton College: Nigerian author recalls racist abuse
“My grandfather had no rudiments of any form of education at all and he knew nothing beyond the ‘kill or be killed’ way of life in those days,” Onyeama said. “It wasn’t done as a means of oppression. It was a means of livelihood and a demonstration of power and might. It was the way of life in the old Africa before the white man brought civilisation, so to speak,”
Harry and Meghan: Seven takeaways from their Netflix series.
Meanwhile Harry and Meghan, if they have any sense, will put it behind them and move on to the next chapter of their lives
If in doubt, be a victim, that’s the mantra of the modern world. Your parents, your employer, your siblings, some poor old biddy who got the wrong end of the stick…
Resilience, fortitude, loyalty and common sense: they belong to another era. The revolution is here, and you had better get with the programme – or face a long and harrowing march to your newfound ‘freedom’.
Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue was clever, but insidious
Dave Chappelle is, undoubtedly, a comic genius. But he’s not the only comic genius, and he’s one who, unlike many of his colleagues, hasn’t recognized that a different generation expects comedians to abide by certain rules. The first is: Don’t punch down. Chappelle can’t obey this dictum, because he embraces what scholars sometimes call a “standpoint epistemology.” Not without warrant, he regards his identity as an African American male as the most disparaged and degraded of identities. Hence, by definition, he is always punching up.
Four Uncomfortable Truths About Dave Chappelle and The Jews – U.S. News
There is a tacit dogma today that if something is funny it must also be morally good, while if something is morally bad it cannot therefore be funny. A whole lay taxonomy of comedy has arisen that insists jokes are good and funny only when they “punch up” — i.e., aim their barbs at the powerful — but bad and unfunny when they “punch down,” mocking the powerless.
But this just isn’t true. What makes something funny has nothing to do with what makes something good. In fact, it’s often the contrary. Humor is anarchic and impious. It draws its power from ridiculing whatever a society holds sacred, by saying whatever a society insists must not be said.
Netflix’s ‘Harry & Meg’ is beautiful propaganda
One can’t help but be moved in moments and it helps draw the viewer into a David and Goliath narrative. So much so, one almost forgets that any strife within the royal family is in fact, a Goliath and Goliath narrative
Uju Anya and the dangers of deliberate half-education, By ‘Tope Fasua.
The history of the world could as well be written as the history of plunders, from one society to another. Every nation on earth was formed by a group of oppressors, plunderers, enslavers, conquerors, whether from within or without. The history of Europe could be considered to be particularly bloody – perhaps simply because it was documented and made available for all to see and read.
Is it time to gatekeep Afrobeats?
“I feel gatekeeping is ridiculous, and it’s people outside the game that usually make statements like that because, at the end of the day, music is a business”, says Ini Baderinwa, an entertainment consultant and co-founder of TXT Mag.
Having children is “an amazing experience” for some, but added that “for a lot of people it isn’t, and the idea that we can’t talk openly about why that might be is a problem.”
JK Rowling sees through her enemies.
The critics rail away about her narcissism, her ignorance, her refusal to listen. But this book makes it clear that they’re badly mistaken: she has always been listening. Not with the empty-headed deference of the obsequious ally, but in the way that all good storytellers do, as a fly on the wall of the discourse, a keen observer of human affairs. And it is this — not her fame, not her money, but her ability to imagine an internet troll in all his sharp-edged human complexity — that ultimately makes Rowling uncancellable.
10 habits to stay grounded in life, according to Iyanla Vanzant
“Vanzant said during difficult stages of life, she reminds herself who she is, of her past triumphs and of her village who unconditionally support her. She said there’s one metaphor in particular that always encourages her during a rough patch.”
An open letter: why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness by Africa Brooke
If there’s one thing I’m NOT afraid of, it’s being ‘cancelled’.
‘If being cancelled means me living in integrity as a human being who thinks for themselves, CANCEL ME TODAY!
She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference.
As a celebrity on the internet, Merchant admits that he’s “quite dull”, a result of being skittish about causing offence. He remembers once being about to tweet about New Zealand, but then being unsure if the term “Kiwi” is problematic. “When you’re policing yourself in that way, because you don’t want the headache of it [if it goes wrong], it’s absurd to me.” Writing television, he adds, you have numerous people figuring things out behind closed doors and having the space to be thoughtful. The speed and brevity of Twitter, meanwhile, leaves no such room.
“I’ve become more and more cautious because I don’t want to get into a debate,” he says. “I don’t want to have to defend a tweet from 10 years ago. It’s not interesting to me to spend time defending a point of view or a glib joke that I made at 2am.”
My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon
He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV. He understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative. And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.
“At the core of their business is churn,” one industry insider said, noting that there are always subscribers who drop Netflix after a free trial period or a month or two later, and the goal is to get more people to sign up, which comes mostly thanks to hot new series everyone is talking about. As an asset, having 30 episodes of a series (three seasons) is considered enough to satisfy viewers discovering the show. Tacking on more episodes does not add significant value, I hear. “A show doesn’t serve a purpose [anymore],” an observer said. “There is no reason for the network to continue to invest in it.”
Dramas seem to be fading or just missing this season, but limited series are going strong
“Television is a complex, difficult, challenging process. There is something inherently easier in terms of executing a one-season show and all that it takes on thematically, and having a beginning, middle and end to it, versus challenging an audience with a thematic center of a show that needs to exist, say, three, five, seven seasons, where it runs the risk of becoming sort of repetitive or redundant,” Orsi says. “In some ways, [limited] is an easier path than the rigor of an ongoing series, having to explore the essence of a show in different ways but always still being the thing that was bought right out of the gate.”
A past/present rundown on Wolf’s interactions with NBC/Universal
NBC believes Mr. Wolf is being greedy. Provided his shows survive a few more seasons, he will make around $750 million for his work on five shows in the “Law and Order” franchise. His contract gives him more power than perhaps any other producer in the industry. It includes a provision that Mr. Wolf believes entitles him to a multi-million dollar “kill-fee” if the network cancels any of his shows. NBC disagrees. NBC also says its rerun strategy is good for business because it is one more way to promote the franchise.
Welcome to TV’s Era of Peak Redundancy
“I firmly believe this is a hit-driven business,” says Salke. You only need one signature show to become a player in the streaming space,”
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years
But, at a time when so many mainstream figures seem obsessed with appearing of-the-people despite being anything but, there is something admittedly refreshing about Paltrow’s cards-on-the-table approach. (As the hosts of the culture podcast “How Long Gone” have noted, she’s taking us back to “a different era of celebrity,” when stars didn’t bother acting as if they were just like us.)
Tucked into the very end of the Atlantic profile is a brief acknowledgment of what a train wreck Zucker’s first couple of years felt like. But unlike Licht, with his well-meaning higher-purpose-of-journalism bromides, Zucker was always going to chase the biggest audience. Which is why all the sanctimony from CNN staff over Licht’s Trump town hall seems a bit rich. Many of the people criticizing Licht for “platforming” Trump for one evening are the same ones who worship Zucker, the ultimate Trump-platformer who green-lit The Apprentice and offered Trump debate advice. CNN used to broadcast Trump’s empty podium.
CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism
In reality, there has never been a right to voice your opinion without the possibility of being shamed or shunned (terms without precise meanings) — and there shouldn’t be. Shaming and shunning people are free expression, too. What I suspect this editorial was actually calling for is for self-described Democrats and liberals to be able to express more conservative views (such as skepticism about transgender rights) but without being attacked in the way that conservatives often are for such views (being called bigots).
Why Are Some Journalists Afraid of “Moral Clarity”?
Essentially, Sullivan and other opinion writers decrying what they see as a new orthodoxy are arguing that everything should be subject to debate, that the sphere of legitimate controversy ought to be boundless. Part of the bedrock of this argument is the absolute belief in the value of debate unto itself. This is where the spectre of totalitarianism appears. These writers fear that what they see as an emerging new political consensus challenges the primacy of traditional liberal values that should never be debated: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other individual rights.
Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times
Bennet believes that Sulzberger, the publisher, “blew the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength,” he said. “He still could have fired me.”
“F–k Him, He Loses”: The Inside Story of How Disney’s Attempt to Buy BuzzFeed Fell Apart.
I watched Peretti imitate Iger, then watched Iger mirror Peretti’s own speech back to him, structuring his discussion of Disney’s plans to match Peretti’s monologue on BuzzFeed’s aspirations.
Commentary: James Corden and the ‘Late Late Show’ was so much fun, until it wasn’t.
Outing someone as rude should not be as big a deal in comparison to the scandals, beefs and egregious acts involving other public figures (examples surface hourly on social media). But acting like a jerk is a problem if the biggest edge you have over the competition is your jaunty, sparkling, goofy, good-guy persona.
Column: Ellen DeGeneres announced the end of her show. Then somehow, she made things worse.
Fame like that can be stifling, and if DeGeneres chose to insulate herself from her staff to avoid ongoing “There’s Ellen, she’s always up for a chat” interruptions, that’s perfectly valid and not necessarily unkind. Like every sought-after star, she is a finite resource and the fact that she doesn’t know the names of her employees does not make her a monster, just very busy and mindful of her own sanity.
Dril and other Twitter power users begin campaign to ‘Block the Blue’ paid checkmarks
“everyone has always Hated twitter, even before the day elon dragged a sink into the main office while grinning like a doofus,” @dril explained. “nobody respects it, it is almost certainly responsible for a sharp increase in overall human misery, and if my brand must suffer so that this entire Shit hole will perish, that is fine to me.”
Tech’s Harsh Censorship of Porn Is Hitting Very Close to Home.
The right for consenting adults to create and consume fetish content is worth fighting for. But it doesn’t make for a very marketable campaign. Sex—especially weird sex—isn’t considered an appropriate cause to rally behind. It doesn’t attract allies because people know they will be labeled sick, dangerous perverts. That’s why the rights of porn and sex workers are very often couched in something else. We’re pro-free speech, we’re pro-worker livelihoods, we’re anti-privacy violations. And we are all of those things, and those are reasons that people should care. But we should also care about the sex, about sexual variety and sexual freedom, even though it invites the thorny question of whether or not there is such a thing as an unethical fantasy.
Why Rihanna Won’t Get Paid for the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show
Anyway, before you continue to absolutely spiral, there’s a reason for this lack of payment: the Halftime Show basically functions as a 13-minute Super Bowl commercial for an artist’s catalogue of work. Not sure how I, for one, feel about that rationale,
Dave Chappelle rips transgender activists who use violence to protest him
He dismissed the suggestion that a push to cancel him was driven by “love.” “They want to be feared. ‘If you say this, then we will punish you — we will come to … f–k your show up,’” he said. “And they just don’t get to do that to me.”
Dave Chappelle Confronts Anti-Trans Backlash, Says Protesters Threw Eggs at His Fans.
“I’m not even mad that they take issue with my work. Good, fine. Who cares? What I take issue with is the idea that because they don’t like it, I’m not allowed to say it. Art is a nuanced endeavor,” he continued. “I have a belief that they are trying to take the nuance out of speech in American culture, that they’re making people speak as if they’re either on the right or the left. Everything seems absolute, and any opinion I respect is way more nuanced than these binary choices they keep putting in front of us. I don’t see the world in red or blue.”
Why, though, did Harry write it? To tell his side of the story, to blow the whistle on the behaviour of the press and the way his family works, to avenge (perhaps) his mother. In these, it succeeds. He is a man, though, ever in search of a purpose. By the end, one senses he has found a new one: to tell the truth and change the world. Those are noble goals. But they may not be easy to achieve. It is hard not to fear, somehow, that the likeable, sweet, rather simple prince may soon find himself in search of meaning once more.
Prince Harry ‘Spare’ Review: Frustrating and Sympathetic
Throughout Harry and Meghan’s post-royal productions, their lack of self-awareness can make even their legitimate complaints seem grating. Spare is no different.
The Real Villain of Spare, and of Prince Harry’s Life Story, Is the Media.
If you do end up caring about him when you finish this book, you may find yourself turning the last page and hoping that he does not wake up one day and wish he could take it all back.
Twitter sucked for trans people, but was also necessary
After all, Isabelle points out, even if there was no useful moderation on the bad comments, there was no moderation on the good ones, either
Surprise. The Villain So Far in ‘Harry & Meghan’ Is Not the Royal Family.
But settling into a comfortable new life with children in Montecito, Calif., has not seemingly eased the bitterness the couple feel, nor their determination to re-litigate past examples of mistreatment
The award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, also known for his cynicism, surprised Berlinger by reaching out to him and telling him that he admired his courage for going forward with an uplifting project he believed in, even though he predicted critics would harshly judge his decision to do so.
American Gigolo is no longer sexy.
It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”.
These reporters’ use of phrases such as “online violence” and their invocation of “trauma” when discussing mean tweets capitalizes on the natural sympathy people feel for victims of real trauma and violence and turns it to the journalists’ own professional advantage. It’s a good trick, because it’s difficult to criticize these journalists without being oneself accused of compounding the claimed injury.
The writer Michael Tracey described the deployment of what he calls “therapeutic trauma jargon” in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter: “Obviously, this harm cannot be externally adjudicated because one’s harm must never be subject to contestation or (god forbid) falsification. So the logic goes, every person has the right to say they are harmed without ever having the legitimacy of that harm questioned, because to question the harm compounds the harm.”
These reporters’ use of phrases such as “online violence” and their invocation of “trauma” when discussing mean tweets capitalizes on the natural sympathy people feel for victims of real trauma and violence and turns it to the journalists’ own professional advantage. It’s a good trick, because it’s difficult to criticize these journalists without being oneself accused of compounding the claimed injury.
The writer Michael Tracey described the deployment of what he calls “therapeutic trauma jargon” in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter: “Obviously, this harm cannot be externally adjudicated because one’s harm must never be subject to contestation or (god forbid) falsification. So the logic goes, every person has the right to say they are harmed without ever having the legitimacy of that harm questioned, because to question the harm compounds the harm.”
Engaging in repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague is neither a good look nor is it particularly effective. It turns the language of inclusivity into clout chasing and bullying. I don’t think this is appropriate…There is such a thing as challenging with compassion.”
Cancel Culture in 1832 Sounded Pretty Fierce
What I’d like to point out, in brief, is that while the technology is new, the phenomenon is not. The “tyranny of the majority” in public opinion — the way it enforces conformity and reprimands dissent — has been part of American life reaching back to the beginning. And there’s even a case to make that it is intrinsic to democracy and democratic life, an inescapable consequence of the leveling spirit.
