Obliquely Weekly #3
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OW1
Who blew up Nord Stream 2?
Why is Russia prosecuting the war with Ukraine?
Is it better for Europe to be in entente cordiale with Russia or aligned with the US?
Ask anyone who's engaged with 'the news' or 'current affairs' and the chances are they'll have an insta-opinion.
Obviously Russia sabotaged its pipeline because that's how Putin plays.
Obviously NATO-sponsored actors sabotaged it because it's the US who benefits.
Obviously Russian security concerns about Ukraine are a bad faith excuse for expansionist aggression.
Obviously Russia has been provoked into drawing red lines in blood under relentless NATO creep.
Obviously Europe is at risk from evil Putin and the US are our natural friends.
Obviously the US is prosecuting a proxy war with Russia against Europe's interests.
The either/or answer is comforting in various ways, which cognitive science explains ad infinitum. Psychology abhors a vacuum, we prefer to conform to the approved opinions of our groups, one sees oneself as the kind of person who thinks x rather than y.
The either/or approach is also endlessly useful for the liars whose interests are served by enough of us falling for their shtick.
Take a position and you're not just saving yourself cognitive overhead, you're making life easier for someone else who may very well have your interests well down their list of concerns.
So it seems with this war and how it's portrayed, the precursor events that have somehow been erased from public consciousness and the relentless flattening of arguments into simplistic tropes about 1938 and so on.
The usual tribes line up to lob insults at each other across the no-man's-land of uncertainty, blithely unaware of their own internal inconsistencies. Nationalism is BAD. Wait, no, not Ukrainian nationalism. That's definitely GOOD. Whatever suits in the moment, eh.
So it's rare to find writing that coolly examines something that everyone is desperate to see as settled as a simple A/B proposition and concludes that A+B may offer a realistic account of what's happened.
has done this with America's war against Europe.Do watch the video montage of reactions to the Nord Stream 2 incident, embedded within.
OW2
The popular version of the 'culture wars' is that it's about two sides battling with each other.
While there's always some of that going on, it's not the substantive game in play.
What's really happening is intra-group tussling for good standing.
Nowhere is this more blatant than in liberal-dominated US media spaces, for which Freddie deBoer has now coined a name - the Maw.
To remain in good standing one has to suspend belief in obvious truths, while the Maw chews over the Latest Thing, before pronouncing on the Correct Position to take. Then it's up to group members to dutifully assert whatever the group has determined to be the Correct Position.
The right does this too, but because the cultural leftish is hegemonic in US media - and western institutions in general - it seems to have a lot more impact on events and greater influence on conversation than cultural conservatives, who continue to mainly flail at how unjust and intellectually corrupt it all is.
So it is with the Twitter Files. You can only be ignorant or dishonest to describe them as containing no new or relevant information, which is what the leftish are pretending at the moment.Â
But most people aren't on Twitter and couldn't care less about which Twitter staff regularly met with which government agency to discuss whose visibility should be reduced. So it's clear that the huge number of published takes on Twitter’s manipulation of public discourse around the pandemic and 2020 US election are not intended for a general readership.
They are intended for an audience mostly consisting of the in-group, who obsess about Twitter because it's where they like to hang out, accumulate status and influence people who also prefer to hold the Correct Positions.
When things are true, but inconvenient, in this alternative reality they are simply given the label 'right wing talking point'. This warns curious onlookers off the topic entirely.
This is how many facts end up by definition a right wing talking point, so they aren't exactly lying about that. Just lying by omission about why some things are only a right wing talking point.
It's where discussion of the Twitter Files is now headed, because there's only so many opportunities to keep describing something as a 'nothingburger' before everyone involved needs to move onto the next inconvenient truth to suppress.
Arguably the most revealing thing about the Twitter Files is not what they contain but how they're being discussed in (mostly) US media and that's where Freddie deBoer lands with it too.
OW3
Leftishist (my preferred term for 'ideological liberal', because not every reader is American) crushing of spiky subjects into simplistic flat binary templates obviously annoys conservatives but it's crazy-making for those of us who identify as intuitively left-leaning.
The go-to tool of the leftish for 'analysing' anything like the Twitter Files is an epistemically unsophisticated set of heuristics that seem better designed as slogans than accounts of reality. See 'right wing talking point' above.
explores that tendency this week in Why Liberals Cannot Acknowledge Twitter Discrimination Against Conservatives.Whilst liberal defensiveness is understandable, the serious nature of the allegations means that outright dismissal is disappointing. But such behaviour is increasingly common. When partisans encounter feasible allegations of malpractice on their side, most dismiss the accusations outright, reflecting crude heuristics (i.e. mental shortcuts which dictate that one’s side is always right) and increasing social divisions.
Bonus bit
The recent piece about longer reading sparked some high quality reader reactions, prompting the occasional inclusion of a sort of comments of the week section in OW.
So, this, from
>> For a long time it seemed that cultural capital was mostly accumulated by consuming literature, music and art (before that was superseded by having the right beliefs). It still paid social and professional dividends at various times when being excellent at maths or tennis might have just seemed kind of meh.
This is a really important statement because I think it could honestly tl;dr about half of the essay (don't actually do that, though).
We are NOT grazing on the cognitive fast food of social media and Buzzfuck and blog posts with time estimates at the top as an apology for their length for anything like the same motivations as reading a book or even a longer-form post like this.
We are mostly consuming this kind of "information" not as enrichment but to keep up with the instinct to remain apace with The Discourse in the same sense that broad awareness of celebrity gossip, trending music, and broadcast TV was 30 years ago. It's just the rat race element of popular culture in its final form- and I do mean final, because I think the media of delivery have run up against the cognitive maximum for humans; we have arrived at being completely out of attention and cannot possibly consume any faster.
"Reading" social media and other shit is motivated by wanting to stay apace. Reading a book (or similarly "challenging" experiences) is usually motivated by other things.
Pop culture and (please forgive me) FOMO are hijackings of primal brain social instincts to keep up. When I look at how information is presented online, there's very little doubt in my mind that it is largely crafted, and consumed, in alignment with that urge- not curiosity, a will for self improvement, or anything else that prompted you to pick up Dostoevsky.
I started reading when I was 2. It was a tremendously accelerated, high school kids handing me their textbooks to read as a freakshow kind of thing. Fathermouth was obscenely proud of this fact and bragged about it far into my childhood well past any value it had to impress. I was and still usually am an obsessive reader- if something is sufficiently engaging I will sit at it for many hours to get the job done. It had a voracious quality to it- at one point I recall being so bored, having exhausted everything in my room, that I began reading the fold-out pamphlets that used to go in prescription medication bottles in the bathroom.
If I had been that age with that sort of cognitive practice today, with devices being among my first reading sources, Freyja pity me. My mind would have broken on 8-hour Reddit binges and I'd probably have been intellectually useless- a midwit at best (being able to spout quite a lot of verbal content as shallow as a plate), literally cognitively impaired at worst.
I really pity a lot of the developing minds I see around me when I'm in a child-rich environment and am disproportionately happy to see a kid who has no apparent access to a tablet or smartphone.
Housekeeping
Rarely Certain isn’t a hobby, it’s an attempt by a professional writer to pay the bills. To that end this is an early notice to free subscribers that the whole archive will soon be paywalled. Free articles will continue to be generally available for a while each time, before access is restricted on a case by case basis.