Better late than never, I suppose? Would've been nice if ~120K of our country's most vulnerable didn't have to die in the name of a bad analogy though. Folk economics has had democidal consequences.
On the ~120K number, it is possible to quibble (cf. channel4.com/news/factcheck…). However, the biggest quibbles were always 'what even is an excess death, really?', an epistemic bubble that has unfortunately been burst by another ~100K excess deaths since.
The question is now solidly *how* to quantify such deaths, rather than *whether* to do so. If you look at Tory governance since 2010, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it has, through a heady mix of malfeasance and incompetence, been thoroughly democidal. Thanatopolitics.
I could talk about the specifics of this more, both the mechanics of the relevant policies and the dynamics of their rationalisation, but I want to point out the other important fact, which is that these deaths are the tip of an iceberg of immiseration.
If you want to see why the UK as a nation looks like a sinking ship piloted by a bunch of idiots who cannot see the terminal gash in its hull, you need to look at this iceberg, and replay the slow motion crash into it that was the 2010s.
Look at how the Establishment not only perpetrated such an econometric warcrime, generating wide spread and utterly horrifying human misery amongst its putative charges, but also how it suppressed every political formation that tried to rally around its everyday experience.
There is so much complicity here. So much blood passed from hand to hand by backroom handshakes and shared canapés.
To echo the sentiment of a good friend: SHOW TRIALS.
We're going to need to do something like this for the world historical catastrofuck that is the Tories' response to COVID eventually, no matter how much they're currently succeeding in the polls. Might as well plan to take it back to the beginning.
Til then, cultivate a frosty fury, and sharpen your dialogical knives. Revenge is a dish best served cold.🖖
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I like this piece, but there’s an aspect of it that doesn’t quite sit right with me. It’s really easy for leftist critiques to accidentally imbibe the imaginary of ‘the market’ as impersonal force by projecting it onto the objects of their critique. I think it does too much here.
The primal awkwardness of most incels is obviously shaped in bad ways by capitalism, neoliberalism, and their ideological apparatuses, but there’s diversity in this awkwardness beyond the stamp ‘the market’ has put on it, and I suspect that it’s worth delving deeper here.
I don’t want to provide a unified theory of the intel here, not only because that would require a lot of work, but because it would also undermine my point. My sympathies are open here: I know many men (not ‘incels’) who’ve been twisted into bad shapes by romantic incapacity.
This is close to @lastpositivist's #NoHeroes stance. I think I've a slightly different take on this, though not a substantially different one. I always try to begin with Stan Lee's maxim: "With great power comes great responsibility."
I think we have a responsibility to use whatever social power we accrue wisely, and this is the only thing that justifies such power. Yet I also think this is the flip side of Kant's principle of ought-implies-can: that we can't blame people for not doing things they can't do.
The (Hegelian) difficulty that the conjunction of these ideas faces is that, historically speaking, the growth of our (conscious) capacities for action precedes that of our (self-conscious) capacities for criticising/correcting these actions. We are destined to fuck up, a lot.
Since I've seen this argument made over and over again by Nietzscheans of various stripes over the years, let me address it one final time before sleep takes me.
The Real doesn't care about anything. To appeal to this blank indifference in discussions regarding whether you or anyone should care about anything at all is simply to dodge the question: "The universe doesn't care, I'm part of the universe therefore I don't need to care."
You can selectively render yourself into a mere thing if you want, but don't expect applause. This selectiveness is not a strength, but a weakness. A paradoxical form of self-indulgence that undermines selfhood as such: "I merely am what I am, I do whatever I will do."
Someone on FB asked for a definition of Hyperstition, and this is what I came up with: a narrative schema that allows us to aesthetically capture the ways in which our collective anticipations of the future have causal force in the present.
I’m no expert on hauntology, but I think it’s got very similar structure: it’s a narrative schema that allows us to aesthetically unpack the implications of unrealised futures contained in our collective nostalgia for the past.
If hyperstition concerns temporally weird forms of (futural) necessity operating in the present, then hauntology concerns temporally weird forms of (latent) possibility operating in the present. There’s an ecstatic theory of historical consciousness implicit in their juncture.
This was a very weird debate, precisely because it was me attempting to argue with Land on his own turf. I popped briefly into his class, and attempted to defend the position his course was dedicated to attacking. You can see me struggling to get discursive purchase in real time.
For anyone who wants to see the full thing, I think it starts around here:
If you want to know my unvarnished opinion, I think Land is a very capable rhetorician who uses a fairly stable set of rhetorical strategies to avoid being held to the consequences of the commitments he avows. In the limit, he denies even that he has commitments.
Since my Null Journal idea seems to have been popular, it’s probably a good idea for me to say something more about how I think distribution/validation should work in philosophy (and potentially elsewhere). Let me start with some context.
I have frighteningly little concrete job experience outside of seminar teaching. But the main exception to this was running a journal for 3 years (plijournal.com). I was an editorial board member, the editor for two issues, and administrator for longer than that.
I oversaw the whole sausage, from CFP, through review, meetings, editing, formatting, printing, distribution, and finances. I redesigned the whole back end and balanced the books in the process, liaising with libraries coming through intermediaries and individual subscribers.