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pete wolfendale Profile picture
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17 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Just listened to this piece () by @jersey_flight about the responsibilities of leftist intellectuals and the ways these responsibilities are all too easily abdicated by academics. It resonates with my own recent critical comments (deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/video-…).
Here's a few related threads for anyone interested:

1. A conversation with @OlufemiOTaiwo and @deonteleologist about debate culture and discursive charity:
2. A thread on degenerate 'critique' and the epistemology of ignorance:
3. A thread analysis some of the most counterproductive arguments and ideas I've come across in the left academy:

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pete wolfendale Profile picture
18 Feb
There are times I wish we could have something like a 'symbolic amnesty' where we just wipe a particular terminological slate clean of connotations so that we can have certain conversations without constantly blundering into excuses to derail them.
Like, it'd be really nice if we could talk openly about the *incredibly tight* ties between governance and finance in countries like the UK without having to be on the defence about accidental associations with accusations of blood libel. It's a discursive minefield.
There's a perennial 'man covered in shit' problem here, where no matter how economically reasoned or anti-racistly seasoned your critiques are there *will* be people who turn up to agree with you dragging flecks of anti-semitic faeces on their shoes, if nothing else.
Read 25 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
17 Feb
I think it's worth recognising that death will always divide us. There are deaths that are intensely positive/negative for me that you don't and can't feel in the same way I do. This is a source as much as a symptom of enmity. Yet the only universal enemy is death itself.
When one dances on another's grave, be it literally or performatively, one is inviting those who feel strongly for the dead to hate you. There's no getting around that. It's the price of doing business in the market of mortality, sorrow, and grief.
But all the same, violating a heuristic taboo (e.g., 'don't speak ill of the dead') is a legitimate way of signalling value (e.g., '...unless it's important'). It's a way of saying: 'Look what this fucker made me do! I only stoop this low as a monument to their awfulness.'
Read 11 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
17 Feb
Here's a hypothesis I just explained to @mojozozoe that I may as well put out here. DNA is not a map of an organism but a sequence of densely interlinked instructions for constructing one. The Y chromosome provides a very minimal way of modulating this process of construction.
Any attempt to understand (statistical/functional) sexual dimorphism has to begin from this fact, which is made obvious by the size of the Y chromosome relative to not just the X but all the other ones. This has a lot of interesting consequences for thinking about sexuality.
If there's one thing Freud got right about human sexuality it's that it's something that's assembled as the genetic process of constructing an adult organism gets modulated by the social process of producing a (gendered) person. The genesis of sexuality can be *very* extended.
Read 22 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
17 Feb
'Talent' is a place holder term: a promissory note for some more concrete conception of ability, yet to be articulated. The same might be said of 'electability'. When the Labour right repeats these terms without even trying to cash them out, they're running on intellectual fumes.
It's particularly telling that the one original term they had for Starmer's talent was 'forensic', which by now has been widely and rightly mocked. This is because it shows how incoherent their conception of political communication is.
Corbyn was repeatedly painted as and criticised for not being a man of the people, for being unable to communicate with anyone outside of the metropolitan bubble of urban millennial progressives. There wasn't nothing to these criticisms, but they were mostly performative.
Read 14 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
16 Feb
I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.
It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).
To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.
Read 18 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
16 Feb
I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.
In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.
Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.
Read 28 tweets

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