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New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
I don't care about sportsball, but I've also seen parents put hundreds of hours and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into their kids' sports, from the not-unreasonable analysis that they can get a pretty sizable college sports scholarship -- and sometimes even bump up a tier or so of college acceptance -- out of it. Even for the genderless STEM outreach program I volunteer for, their ability to bring these numbers plays a more prominent role in the marketing than the actual skill development; for rando sports teams where the skill is 'running into other people', the difference is far greater.
There's an argument that this should change, which I'd probably agree with; there's an argument that this is misguided or bad lottery thinking, which I wish were true but probably is more a systemic thing. ((It's also just one of a few issues that comes up.))
... which a nitpick, but it kinda points to the problem with this sort of analysis. Bulverism is a fun sin, but it's still a sin. It's easy to come up with explanations that your enemies have no real motivations of their own, just motiveless malignancy, but it reals far less often that advocates of the theory would like, and it's often clearly wrong in a way that people that don't advocate for the theory can recognize quickly, even without domain expertise.
You know, I never competed in school. But I did my share of martial arts competitions in my early adulthood. And I definitely remember the people who competed in school.
Now, at the time, being a nerd who's only thing I really had going for me was being "smart", I looked down on the "jocks". Even the ones in the AP classes with me keeping up just fine. Come college, a lot of my nerd friends had issues. They just struggled with the adversity that came along with more challenging classes, terrible unfair professors, and school administrators just nakedly fucking you over by not giving you the classes you needed to graduate. The "jocks" who were just as smart as us and hardened by competition? In my relatively small sample size, their faired far better. Turns out competition is a great way to harden yourself against adversity, and is just as important as being smart.
I got lucky. I had an AP Calculus teacher who saw the path I was on and warned me I needed more discipline. I respected him greatly, and I took it to heart.
I think the stereotype of the "dumb jock" or of sports being useless is nerd cope. Given two equal candidates, I'd take the one who's been forged in the fire of competition and adversity over the one just good at school any day.
Eh, in my rather long career in programming I've only run across one classic jock (as in, had played one of the major high school team sports) doing the job, and that was back in the dot-com days; he moved over to the sales side when that went away. Lots of nerds, as you might expect. There's plenty of dumb jocks, and plenty of not-dumb jocks, but the nerds are still smarter in general. And the tails come apart both ways -- the classic physically-useless nerd isn't very common any more, but nerds are still not likely to be at the top of sport.
As for competition... nerds compete. Yes, jocks make fun of "mathletes", but intellectual competition is still competition.
If we channel Vivek and go for Saved By The Bell analogies, Screech was the nerd and Slater was the jock. Zach was the guy you're talking about; problem with him is he's going to want not the job you're offering but your CEOs job.
Funny you should mention that, there was supposedly a Saved By The Bell reboot/continuation being made where Zach is now Governor of California, no joke
Edit: even worse, they actually made it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saved_by_the_Bell_(2020_TV_series)
Was 2020 really already 5 years ago?
I would argue since 2025 is still a relatively new year, it can be safe to guess that 2020 is 4ish years away.
Either way time flies, though!
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