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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Polymarket removes prediction market on when the downed F-15 pilots would be rescued.

Yesterday, a two-seater USAF F-15E was shot down over Iran. One of the crew members was successfully rescued. The other is still unaccounted for. This was big news in the United States, and probably across the whole world.

Polymarket, being Polymarket, put up a prediction market on when the pilots would be rescued. United States service members are a sacred class in our society, and so this market got a lot of heat, including from congresspeople.

Polymarket responded by immediately removing the market, citing “integrity standards”.

We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards.

It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards.

Of course, the market doesn’t violate Polymarket’s integrity standards. No specific policy or clause is cited. Anyone browsing the “geopolitics” section on Polymarket knows that war markets are allowed. They even provide a helpful note on Middle East conflict markets to let you know what their position is:

Note on Middle East Markets

The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.

It goes without saying that removing the pilot rescue market flies in the face of the principles stated above. Maybe Polymarket never believed in them, and markets on foreign wars involving Eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners was a cynical way to get eyes on their website.

So if the stated rules are fake, then what is the real rule? I don’t think it is, “respect American servicemen,” exactly. I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.

So if the stated rules are fake, then what is the real rule?

  1. make money

  2. don't lose money

Polymarket exists in a legal grey zone, so they can't take pressure from Congress, because Congress could end their operation. If their operation ends, it's hard to follow rules 1 and 2.

In other words, the real rule is to follow the whims of Congress and the American political apparatus.

If they set themselves up as legal gambling companies, they wouldn't have as much of a problem. But they don't want to deal with the regulation, which includes being banned in a lot of states, including some big ones, so it's worth it for them in the short term to insist that they're in some vague category that can't be regulated and do the minimum to appease the people who have the power to sic attorneys general on them. If they can stay out of the headlines it's better for business.

No, the real rule is more along the lines of what @Jiro said above "Understand what normies hate and why."

Attracting the ire of the government is down-stream of understanding (or failing to understand) what people are likely to object to and why.

this is such bullshit. Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome. Markets "work" because there are rules that everyone agrees on ahead of time. When these rules are changed arbitrarily when money is at stake then people lose confidence in markets. Also, there is not even anything disrespectful about this. A betting market does not imply people do not want him to be found. It's possible to be pessimistic about an outcome in the short-term, while still hoping for an ultimately positive outcome. They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is the arbitrary moral posturing that makes people hate and distrust "big tech "companies. But this is where money is at stake. These prediction a markets are huge, with billions in funding. They can afford to take a stand. Caving to moralistic pressure will mean users losing trust in them.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is literally every sports betting company. They can ban you if you win too much.

I actually think its such bullshit. If you want to provide bets and be a market maker, you should have to take the wins as well as the losses. Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

You're betting against other people though. The marketplace/exchange doesn't care how much you win.

Not polymarket sports betting

Draft kings sports betting

Having worked at betting exchanges before you kinda don't want people who win too heavily for ecosystem maintenance. Generally that's gonna impact result knowers most of all, whether inside information or latency

Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

Minimum requirement all gambling companies should be required to adhere to.

It's funny since they could but they'd have to dramatically pare back the menu. So majority of people who complain about limits are picking off relatively niche markets which are only offered due to being able to limit counterparties

The problem is that if they're limiting counterparties to losers, then it's inherently fraudulent - they're selling a service specifically, and only, to those for whom it's of negative utility, and thus are reliant on explicit or implicit deception to actually get business.

So yes, it is better that those betting options not exist than be run in that manner, much like how shell games are bad and shouldn't be allowed.

Ok, make them pare back the menu, they won't be making as much money then with their reduced offering which naturally gives them an incentive to get better at pricing their odds so they can access more markets. Accurate gambling odds provide benefits to third parties who can now use them to see what the probability of some future event is. It's the minimum societal good which we should expect from these companies in return fr the societal harm thry cause.

I agree the menu is bloated way beyond sanity by the arms race between the majors (though most of the liquidity still goes to the liquid markets funnily enough). Accurate gambling odds vis a vis the PM thing is a completely different thing since the big PMs are barely moving any money on their original political markets.

Prediction markets are a casino in a top hat and a monocle, but with added opportunities for insider trading. Once they grew beyond an niche thing for eccentric techies, it was always going to turn out this way.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit

Isn't that basically what the insurance companies are doing now with Force Majeure? But yes, i agree that sites like Polymarket are at a pretty low level of respectability right now. Its like gambling in some underground mafia-owned casino.

Unilateral declarations of Force Majeure (or Frustration, depending on exactly which class of rules governing the insurance contract you're talking about) can usually be challenged by the other party under arbitration or via litigation where the declaring party risks being under a very serious breach of contract if the case goes against them, hence insurers and others have strong reasons to not declare Force Majeure unless something really serious has happened to the point where they're reasonably convinced that an independent arbitration body would agree there actually was a Force Majeure. None of that exists for these prediction markets.

Force majeure is pretty rare and reserved for exceptional circumstances, not that they don't want to pay on a policy. If that's the case, they'll usually find another reason not to pay.

I think people wrongly assume that because it uses crypto that it is more decentralized . this is not the case.

Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome.

This is something I have wondered about. Did Kalshi advise people that death doesn't count? If so, was it done in a reasonably prominent way or was it buried in the fine print, so to speak? As long as people were notified in a reasonably prominent way that they would not win the bet if the guy left office as a result of dying, this seems fine to me. Otherwise, yeah,

Agreed, this is absolute total bullshit, both the Khamenei market and this pilot rescue market. If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place, not retroactively voiding them. This breaks people's chains of trades where they attempt to squeeze out edge from multiple correlated contracts and also leads to higher spreads and more inefficient markets because now both buyers and sellers have to price in the risk that the market will get voided when quoting prices.

I can understand why people dislike markets on people's deaths (theoretically it can be used to pay for contract killings in a totally decentralized way) and why we might not want to allow them, but what's the reason to remove the market on the missing pilot?

If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place,

I think it's reasonable to have a death exception, but it should be extremely clear. I just checked the "Donald Trump out as president" market on Kalshi, and it actually has a disclaimer on this point:

If Donald Trump leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death)

Presumably the pronoun is screwed up because Kalshi added this provision hastily after the Khamenei fiasco.

Anyway, the thing about the Khamenei situation was that given his age (85) and position (supreme leader of Iran or whatever) the most obvious way he was going to leave office was by dying. So if Kalshi didn't include a prominent disclaimer about death, that's lousy of them and they should be on the hook to pay out all the contracts in full.

It's sort of like those life insurance policies you used to be able to buy at airports. If they don't cover death due to plane crashes, you really should make it very clear to your customers.

Reality giving them a lesson. If they want to go mainstream and grow and involve real money, then they need to realise that they are not, in fact, going to be the mass market wisdom of crowds how to set policy and govern society due to truth seeking oracle they started off with ideals of being, they're just one more big bookies and people make bets to win money and not find the optimum source of agreement on how to steer the economy via real-world feedback from superforecasters.

Khomeini one was more absurd IMO since it also raised a bunch of edgecases (like what if he's say injured badly by drone strike and doesn't die but relinquishes the position) and even puts into doubt stuff like if I'm betting into a market and somebody randomly gets taken by a traffic accident or heart attack.

I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.

Uh, no, I think the obvious fit is "do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit". This prediction market can almost certainly not impact American combat operations.

Related to that, there's a rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." If you can't do that, you have no business running any sort of a market in the first place. It doesn't matter how much you say "betting against something doesn't mean you oppose it", only a couple of weird guys either think or behave that way.

And not only will normies think that people who bet against the US military don't like the US, that will actually be true because not only are the rulemakers and public normies, the bettors are normies too. The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.

(And if you ask "what's wrong with letting enemies profit from our misfortune, they didn't cause it after all", you a) are a quokka and b) definitely need to talk to some normies.)

There's also the secondary question of keeping operations secret. The whole reason prediction markets like this are supposed to work is that people with accurate information can make money from them, and this is reflected in the market. This is equivalent to "prediction markets leak insider information to the public through the market". Leaking insider information about US military operations to anyone is a bad thing.

And not only will normies think that people who bet against the US military don't like the US, that will actually be true because not only are the rulemakers and public normies

In the context of the existing, adjacent sports betting market, I suspect most betters are fans of a team betting on their guys, not crunching spreadsheets of game stats. And it's probably a continuum: there are a few die-hard Jaguars fans convinced that this will be their season (with apologies to Jason Mendoza). So I'm not sure the connotation is unfair.

The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.

Is that so? Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?

Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them. For example, a Greenlander might bet on the US invading not because they want the US to invade, but because they anticipate that they will require funds to relocate if Trump invades, similar to how Catastrophe bonds (which sadly are not available for US adventurism) works for their sponsor.

Also, I will come out and say that I would have preferred the outcome where the crewman was taken PoW by Iran not because I am an Ayatollah fanboy (I am not), but purely from a utilitarian perspective, because it would raise the probability of a negotiated peace as opposed to Trump deciding to just bomb the shit out of Iran, which seems unlikely to get the regime to budge but will certainly kill a lot of Iranians. If that makes me your enemy, then your world must be full of them. FWIW, I did not bet on it though.

--

More generally, your rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." is a fully general counterargument for anything from the enlightenment to LW.

A lot of raising of the sanity waterline pissed off normies. The Copernican model. Evolution. HBD. Abolitionism. Suffragettes. Human rights. Pacifism. (I will grant you that there are plenty of horrible things which also piss of normies. We can't conclude anything about the morality of baby murder or Nazism purely from the fact that it pisses normies off.)

It does not help that your straw normie in your post displays all the sophistication of a sports fan betting on his favorite team. That is barely a step up from the small child who decides to close his eyes to make a scary situation go away, or the imbecile blaming his doctor for having cancer after a screening test.

If you run a society in a way which does not offend the 20% with the least cognitive capability, I think what you might get in the long run is something like Afghanistan. If people want to make a prediction market about things which normies find distasteful (and which might be genuinely distasteful, like when some serial killer will strike next), the liberal answer is to tell them that unfortunately, they are living in a free society where there are limits to imposing their sentiments on speech acts.

Also, speaking of things which normies hate, I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.

Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?

If they were allowed to do so, I don't see why not. Of course that would get Polymarket shut down. I would guess that it currently is mostly insiders and anti-US Westerners. There might be front groups or pro-Iranian NGOs betting, but I'd expect that to eventually get Polymarket shut down too.

There was a run on put options on airlines in the stock market just before 9/11.

Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them.

Normies don't do that. You get a couple of weird people betting based on statistics, and everyone else betting based on who they like or hate. (Plus insiders, if applicable.) The way gambling has worked in practice does not show statistical literacy among the vast majority of people who bet. (And it isn't just the 20% with the lowest cognitive capacity, either.) The only cases where most people who bet on something bet based on statistics (without being insiders) are those which have huge barriers to entry that prevent everyone else from betting.

I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.

I reckon you think that normie tolerance for autistic behavior is a lot higher than it really is. They may be offended by the word, but they hold autistically based opinions in contempt.

The kayfabe behind Prediction Markets is that they're somehow allowing 'superforecasters' to battle into creating stronger opinions through the use of pure logic and whatnot. Actual out-and-out insider trading isn't something that's encouraged or especially healthy for the marketplace..

i think robin hanson pushed the idea that insiders trading in prediction markets was a feature

It is, the point is to make better predictions, not to create a fair competition ground.

People thinking about what they'd think prediction markets should be == functional actual product

Profiting from the country's misfortune does not make you an enemy, you are just earning money. It is not a hostile action in itself.

But given the way normies behave, you'll get a couple of weird rationalists doing it and everyone else who does will be enemies or insiders.

"do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit".

Agreed. Prediction markets are trying to go mainstream and be respectable (even if right now they seem to be going for sports betting as the way to get the general public to use them) so pissing off the government is not going to help them. "Oh, you want a licence do you? Well remind me why we should do you any favours?"

It's an American company with American founder, American customers, and American employees being paid in American dollars. The principle is to live in the greatest comfort and not be bothered by others.

Americans, am I right...

  • -15

This is becoming tiresome, and you're very close to a permaban already.

I'm loathe to ban you for such a petty, low-effort comment that from anyone else would just be an eyeroll, but you have exhausted all slack and charity. Yes, I know, you were joking. (But not really.) You do not have the leeway to throw jibes like this.

You are duly warned. Next time, I will ban you. Yes, even for something as minor as this.

There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.

Nobody is worried about the former. Iran can certainly hire foreign superforecasters to predict all kinds of things, which should work just as well as a prediction market without insider info. This is certainly useful, and presumably every military is doing something like this, but at the end of the day you will only get quantified uncertainty, just like a prediction market for a poker hand might contain a broad range of possibilities.

With insider trading, you get something like a poker market which settles at 90% full house because some of the bettors have seen the hand.

Of course, with this administration, it feels like the primary purpose of Polymarket is to get paid for leaking classified intel. Of course, there are different levels of despicableness. Betting on Trump announcing tariffs an hour before he announces them is bad, but the demonstrable harm is limited. Leaking military secrets regarding ongoing operations tends to be the thing which gets you executed.

From a purely amoral point of view, I would not risk it. A gain of a few tens of thousand dollars seems insufficient compensation against any unknown risks, and if someone close to you makes even more than that, the deed becomes blatantly obvious. Not only would the USG have every incentive to block the payout, even if they could not convince a jury of your guilt, you would still destroy your career and get on the shit list of the USG.

Still, pushing for a ban of that market is basically admitting: "people who have classified intel have the incentive to leak, and we can not fix that."

Given that the US lost a 115M$ Hercules in the rescue, the obvious way to handle this would have been for the CIA to just take over the market. Spending a million on making bets which seem well-informed but are wrong to feed wrong intel to the enemy would probably be worth it.

There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.

There's an implied third way of actively swaying the outcomes being bet upon. In sports, this is uniformly against the rules (see federal charges against MLB players recently), but it's less clear how the rules work for other prediction markets: there's lots of discussion about whether "predicting" deaths is functionally an assassination market, but I'm not sure where I'd want the boundaries to be in the general case. Futures markets look a lot like (some) prediction markets, but it's downright encouraged to look at long-term oil futures pricing to decide whether to invest in new drilling and exploration, and it's not "unfair" that futures market members raise production elsewhere and at least temper the futures pricing impact of Gulf shipping woes.

A bet on sunshine next week and the electric grid spot price are pretty related, but the ethics of engaging in (legal) cloud seeding to change it isn't a clear "wrong", IMHO.

[disclaimer: I'll try to keep personal feelings and experiences out of this one, simply because I don't think most readers here are going to want to hear it, but it will inevitably color my takes.]

LGBT Talk / Conversion Therapy: Chiles v. Salazar

SCOTUS holds:

On matters of sexuality and gender, Ms. Chiles’s clients, including minors, come to her with different goals in mind. Some “are content with” their sexual orientation and gender identity and seek assistance only with “social issues, family relationships,” and the like. In cases like those, Ms. Chiles does not try to persuade her clients to “change their attractions, behavior, or identity,” but aims instead to help them address their stated goals. Other clients, however, come to her hoping to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies].” And in these cases, too, Ms. Chiles seeks to help her clients reach their own stated objectives. In doing so, she does not prescribe any medicines, perform any physical treatments, or engage in any coercive or aversive practices. All Ms. Chiles offers is talk therapy.

In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minors. The State reports that it adopted the law “in response to a growing mental health crisis among Colorado teenagers and mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Any Coloradan who thinks a licensed counselor is engaging in conversion therapy may file a complaint with a regulatory board. A complaint, in turn, triggers a disciplinary review process that can yield a fine, probation, or the loss of a license.

Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Ms. Chiles’s talk therapy, regulates speech based on viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.

The opinion, by Gorsuch and joined by a somewhat surprising seven other justices, is pretty standard free speech fare: the statute bans one view and not the other, the state offers little if any historical or legal support for its ban, and it's both an outlier and a recent outlier. The state tried to compare the ban here to requirements to disclose factual, noncontroversial speech during commercial activities, and ran into a brick wall when the case formalizing that standard did a Solomon-level splitting to start with.

The concurrence, by Kagan and joined by Sotomayor, tries to cabin this ruling to its four corners, and saying that viewpoint-neutral restrictions on medical speech would have a much lower bar to pass. Where the state here banned only one side of a controversial topic, but encouraged the other, a law that merely banned this topic in this context entirely could merely need evidence that the state's interests were significant enough and connected enough. Given that we're talking Colorado, here - home of Masterpiece Cakeshop - it's not impossible that the state will try to squeak a neutral-in-theory rule under this view.

It's... somewhat difficult to imagine what that would look like, though. Kagan, during oral arguments, motioned toward a theoretical law that prohibited violating the standard of care, but that would be so wide as to revive the nondelegation doctrine, not least of all because that can range from a creature of statute to a PDF thrown together by randos to five competing and conflicting opposing philosophies. A genuine universal ban by counselors on LGBT-related talk therapy would impact the LGBT movement far more than it would social conservatives. The Colorado statute here specifically excluded "Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition" for several reasons, but the necessity for such therapy before most reasonable doctors would recommend surgical or serious chemical interventions is no small part of it. Restrictions on types of therapy might be more easily be tailored to only hit one side or the other, but while aversive- or confrontational-focused conversion therapy are common focuses for progressive outrage (whether the underlying incident was genuine or not), they're both little-used and little-liked even by social conservatives now, and a restriction that leaves sexual orientation change talk therapy on the table is likely to be seen as an unacceptable compromise.

The dissent is, no surprise, Jackson, and it's a doozy:

“[T]here is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the police power of the States.”

There are steelmen to the Colorado law. Chiles does not contest it as applied to aversives, and even if they did work, they're well-within the bounds of behaviors that states have long-regulated (and which social-conservatives have argued for regulating as recently as Skrmeti). A lot of these programs don't work, don't seem to care that they don't work, and are unwilling to consider alternative approaches that would fit their goals or the goals of their patients but would not match expectations (caveat: not all of them, and some like the SF Kaiser clinic might have been a little more open-minded than the already-libertine-seeming publicly-disclosed records). There are a mass of complicated First Amendment caselaw, epicycle on epicycle, that have left too many opportunities for motivated justice to find outlier or non-representative historical support for hilariously unconstitutional arguments.

Jackson's dissent bulldozes them. She tries to draw the statute here as merely incidentally restricting speech coincidental to restrictions on conduct, by defining conduct to include wide varieties of speech so long as the regulators motivations were pure. Her view of the First Amendment and this statute do not merely condone prohibitions far broader than cruel or harmful ones. One note compares the law here to the speech requirements in Casey, where abortion providers were required to give 24-hour notice of the possible risks and complications of procedures - but the law in Casey specifically required providers to give both the risks of abortion and carrying the fetus to term (and other alternative procedures).

It's just a mess, and it's not just me saying that: Kagan and Jackson have dueling footnotes over it.

I'm genuinely confused what Jackson's goal is, here. Bulverism's a fun sin, and all, but for all I've been unimpressed by her Munsingwear asides, I'd at least expect some sort of deep strategic or tactical focus, and it's not just me finding it jank at best (cw: ai analysis of legal documents, aka worth about as much as you paid for it). If the best she's aiming for is to throw the First Amendment to the proverbial wolves of whatever third-party organization can define professional standards, it seems a dissent like this will only motivate people to burn those orgs down faster, and damn whatever happens to the commons in the process.

Some smaller notes:

  • Colorado tried to moot this case at the last moment, again, and the law has (supposedly) never been actually brought to bear. Part of Chiles surmounting that particular barrier is clearly support from SCOTUS (and Colorado's defense not focusing much on the mootness argument), but it's also partly downstream of Colorado seemingly not knowing or understanding what they were trying to moot: the final briefs are entirely talking past each other.
  • There's a more subtle problem that came up repeatedly in oral arguments, and in strangely absent in the final opinion: whether the law would apply to counselors, outside of the context of treatment. The state argued, at length, that it would not, just as it would not apply to non-licensed paid counselors (such as life coaches). I'm glad that SCOTUS didn't take it as an out -- there's a basically no coherent or consistent way to make the distinction work in practice -- but it's weird that it only gets mentioned as evidence that this regulated speech-qua-speech, because it doesn't really fit well there (indeed, this section of the opinion, pg 17, seems to conflate whether the state admitted that other people could give the same advise, with whether other people could lawfully act on the advise).
  • "JUSTICE ALITO: Three generations of idiots are enough?" Bell is still pretty clearly on the minds of SCOTUS, even if no one else of importance puts it high on the list. Hard to tell how much it's genuinely left them worried about following consensus off a cliff, rather than a tool to say they think consensus has gone off a cliff, but still bizarre given the case's status.
  • (As the mirror to Jackson's showboating, there's a section of the opinion that has Alito's fingerprints all over it, where the opinion points out that Colorado's idea of deference to medical consensus would have once permitted not just Bell-style eugenics, but specifically against recognizing homosexuality as acceptable. I'm... skeptical that this will be persuasive to anyone who's not already sold on the free speech arguments. The simple response of 'but my side isn't wrong' hits too hard, here.)
  • I'm generally skeptical of the LGBminusT perspective where trans stuff is primarily or solely an anchor, but I think it's very unlikely that that this case ends up here without the specific context of original-gender affirmation therapy focusing on minors. Even strong advocates of sexual orientation change therapy don't argue for a sizable success rate -- Nicholas Cummings rather infamously claimed an 67% success rate, of which only 20% (aka <14% of total) actually changed orientation rather than calmed the fuck down about being gay, and that for a sample with heavy selection effects -- while the persistent rates for very young children and gender stuff are a lot more favorable to social conservatives.
  • This isn't going to end everything, one way or the other. Trivially, this is just at the motion for preliminary injunction stage, and technically speaking it's just a remand for the lower court to issue a preliminary injunction. You'd think that would be a nitpick, but wouldn't be the first time.
  • One of Jackson's mentions is to Mathew [sic] Shurka's past experiences with sexual orientation conversion therapy, which reading the full background happened under an organization then called JONAH. Emphasis on the past tense, though, since it's been defunct since 2015. Because it got sued into rubble, under a legal theory near-certain to survive the logic of this case. At the time, there were widespread ground preparation for similar lawsuits. In an ideal world, versions focused on the actually-scammy organizations would become prominent and leave better therapists and providers to more seriously consider and describe the limits of their capabilities and theories. I'm not optimistic that there will be good target selection: even at the time, the feds were already getting aimed at other orgs that, while near-certainly wrong, weren't so obviously lying about it. And, of course, this law wouldn't have applied to JONAH or People Can Change (now Brothers Road), either.

A bigger note: Even on the strict law-of-the-case matter, this is going to be a mess. There's been active lawsuits dating back to at least California's SB 1172 in 2012, which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit in 2013, in a case that SCOTUS named and shamed in 2017. There's been a circuit split since 2020's Otto v. City of Boca Raton; cases had reached SCOTUS as far back as 2014, and as recent as 2023, only to have cert denied. 23 states have laws that are near mirrors of this one, another 4 states have partial variants. One was overturned days after SCOTUS granted cert in this case. I... do not expect clarity from the First, Second, Third, or Ninth Circuit in the next year, outright. We might not know for the Tenth Circuit, or just the bounds of Colorado, specifically, in a year.

From a legal realism perspective, it doesn't 'matter'. This specific law hadn't been enforced yet, and indeed (despite that decade-plus legal limbo and wide spread), I couldn't find any clear cases of legal enforcement. If a licensing board was going to pull a therapist's card over this sorta thing, they can readily and rapidly find other fig leafs causes, even while focusing on the exact same therapy.

From a more pragmatic one than even that, though, the court's intransigence seems likely to have a longer-term impact. At minimum, this points to a no-go-zone for a philosophy, and one that's been allowed to sit for well over a decade: whatever natural resistance the psychiatric world might have toward social conservatives, this one there on top of that, and coincidentally no one in good standing with the APA will ever argue in favor of these policies, a note that should be relevant even or especially if they are clearly wrong. Therapists are more law-abiding than average (at least on the job), and even a purely illusory law will lead the marginal therapists to be just that little bit more cautious, even if only in extreme outlier cases.

I benefited from conversion talk therapy. Nobody claimed a particularly high success rate, but I got the impression that most of these therapists thought a majority of people improved somewhat. I never heard discussion of aversive practices, I didn't get the impression it was common or normal, or even really part of the same world. Everybody was religious and had strong views about family systems and the like. It was, mostly, fairly standard therapy with some unusual homework exercises centered around a self conception as a man/woman designed by God for that role. These therapists took other, non-conversion therapy clients and cases, I suspect the bulk of their clientele were dealing with trauma or whatever. The list I was given was, overwhelmingly, male, and a few women were highlighted for those that preferred a woman to talk to(this was, clearly, intended for women who don't feel comfortable discussing certain things with men). Unlike with most therapists, they freely and frequently recommended talking to someone else, changing therapists often, etc, as it was thought that different people specialized on different specific issues within the complex that causes homosexual ideation. The theory of treatment was based on a book written by some Dutch reactionary psychiatrist, this was freely shared with me and I read it out of curiosity(unfortunately, I purchased it on an old kindle account which I no longer have access to).

I should note that it did, factually, work in my case. I not only lost disordered urges but also became more stereotypically masculine, developed a greater interest in sports and the like. I'm happier for it.

As far as the vote pattern goes, it seems like the most intelligent liberal justice is attempting to mitigate the damage done to state mandation of official social liberalism. This is an issue in which I am, of course, keenly interested in given my ideological views, but it does seem like Kagan and Sotomayor recognize at least some constitutional limitations, whereas KJB simply rambles in favour of whatever the current dem party line is. No wonder Kagan is reportedly tired of her.

I never heard discussion of aversive practices, I didn't get the impression it was common or normal, or even really part of the same world.

Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s. There's claims of it since, but they tend to revolve around extremely marginal cults and/or really sketchy political activist backstories. Even before it was marginalized in the social conservative sphere, it was considered (probably reasonably!) as likely to backfire, end up with asexual or otherwise less-sexually-functional-than-before outcomes, or trigger even weirder behaviors in the Nicholas Cummings side of the sphere.

(Although I was under the impression van den Aardweg himself was prone to flirting closer than most talk therapy-focused groups: there's always some fuzzy edges between exercise as process versus exercise and punishment, but the whole Failed Male and Failed Social Relationship framework seemed prone to leaping off that edge, in addition to just being hilariously wrong in a number of cases I know firsthand.)

I should note that it did, factually, work in my case. I not only lost disordered urges but also became more stereotypically masculine, developed a greater interest in sports and the like. I'm happier for it.

Yeah, that's not unprecedented or unbelievable. I was trying to keep to the legal arguments above, but the factual side of this is an ungodly mess.

My impression is that there's a small portion of people (either bisexual or malleable for other reasons like their approach to sexuality or very pressing in the 'every hole is a goal' sense sex drives) for whom even the 'standard' form of Man Up works, or could probably even work themselves into a pretty wide variety of results in the Dodo Bird Verdict sense. There have been a few bihackers that were successful going the other direction, and happy with it, and I kinda do have to mention that there's a ton of guys who were perfectly straight and then spent some time in the furry fandom and discovered Oh No He's Hot.

But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with. Likewise, you get bihackers that aren't grossed out by gay sex anymore, but wouldn't actually look out for the stuff, or might struggle to even top (or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).

I'm not kidding when I say Cumming's 14% number seems really optimistic.

The flip side to that is that we've got a lot more tooling available, now. At the moderate level, there was a long-standing theory that gay guys just needed to have a couple good rounds of 'healthy' sex with a woman to Become A Man, and contra the invasive therapies and wireheading from erwgv3g34's older example, these days some gay guys can do it with a Little Blue Pill and a weekend in Vegas. It doesn't work -- a few still can't get it up or keep it up, and a much larger number can pump away and just don't really feel satiated at the end -- but it seems like it should be something that redefines how a lot of frameworks around everything here should go, and it really hasn't.

People having widespread changes to their sexuality as a result of hormonal supplementation is common, if not universal.

(At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on, it's far from the most terrible idea to get massive support and grants. On the flip side, I can understand why both social conservatives and LGBT advocates think it's a really dumb weapon to invent and then leave around for someone else to mandate!)

On the flipside, with the possible exclusion of the Kaiser SF program, it's weird how messy "improved somewhat" is as a term of art. Does that mean they were still gay, just got perceived hypersexuality under control? Still gay, but could run on the masc4masc side of grindr? Still gay, but less conflicted about it? Could they now have sex with their wives, and if so did they enjoy it or see it as a chore? Or did they have reduced same-sex attraction, in the sense that they jorked it to gay porn instead of cheating on their significant other? Because some of these endpoints -- even and maybe especially if they are desirable for the patients in question -- seem like they could be confronted in ways that don't revolve around 'changing orientation' as the central result, rather than a rare side effect.

Even assuming as a given the whole progressive mainstream philosophy as true, there’s a lot of this stuff that could be relevant and interesting and important, completely divorced from sexual orientation change, and they’re not looking into it deeply either.

Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s.

I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert

But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with.

Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it. I thought you were talking about the straight-to-gay people here (I guess you call them the 'bihackers'?) and I was genuinely confused for a few minutes because I thought you were saying "they could only shove down" in the sense of "avoid throwing up because of" same-sex interests for short periods, and I was trying to discern how that was different from your next sentence about the guys who were no longer grossed out by gay sex. It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.

bihackers

I thought about making a matrix joke, but then I realized that making a matrix joke about gender and sexuality wasn't particularly original.

(or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).

Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina? I will admit that I've found some people who call themselves trans men attractive, but this is on the "I have changed literally nothing about my appearance--I am now wearing masculine clothing but I've done nothing irreversible--I am a proud trans-masc-femboy and this is a masculine pink skirt I'm wearing" spectrum of trans men, or in other words the ones where they could just say 'I am a woman' and no one would think anything of it. When male-pattern hair or surgeries start getting involved that's where my brain nopes out. I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying I'm not attracted to trans men.

At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on

I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.

I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert

Yeah. There's still some small groups trying it for smoking cessation and addiction therapy, but even in that specific context it's controversial, and for a reason. When using it with sexual arousal, it seems like giving people really unpleasant BDSM kinks is kinda the best-case scenario, and broad hangups or extreme social discomfort more likely. But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.

Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it... It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.

My apologies. This last interpretation is the correct one: of the small group of gay men who actively search out therapy to become less gay or more straight, a large majority either only find themselves 'less gay' in that they're able to go more time without a strong hunger for gay sex, or 'more straight' in the sense of having the ability to have sex with women but not the ability to enjoy it or to find it preferential to sex with men, and in both cases not being any more comfortable with their same-sex attraction.

This is separate from bihackers (mostly straight-to-bisexual-seeking), where there are a small number of unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual, a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones, kontextmashine's brain tumor), and then a large majority where it couldn't change their likely romantic (or grindr) focuses even as they became comfortable.

Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina?

Uh... I was kinda trying to motion around really-really-feminine guys, regardless of the anatomical side; that's just a comic that's really explicit about it without being actual porn on the same page.

But it does apply there, too. I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't seen fucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women. Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!

For that specific comic, with the warning that it's almost certainly too much information :

The artist TheSecretCave focuses heavily on a "slit play" fetish that's probably best understood a variant of frottage and docking based on certain furry anatomy traits. While the sub here looks extremely femmy and can wear a bikini (for half a page), his penis does come up (hurr hurr) in the very next page of that comic, and eventually the wolf gets spitroasted. So it's pretty classically gay with femmy guys in a way that probably wouldn't appeal to you, even ignoring the furry side of things.

I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.

Fair. And since I do have an actual orientation play kink, if one that doesn't overlap much with conversion therapy or orientation change (or mind control), so that also makes this whole matter complicated to talk about. I definitely don't want to mix real-world advice and smut-world logic, or pretend that pulling psychoanalysis from smut is going to give some broad and consistent view of human thought.

But I also have to recognize the limits of my introspection, so I can't just say I'm looking at the topic completely dispassionately, either for or against.

But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.

It's still shocking to me that it won the nobel prize. I understand the harsh experiences and conditions of the instutionalized and that people genuinely did 'improve' in the sense that they didn't express wild emotions any more, but the null hypothesis for any such change, especially when it came with cognitive impairment, would obviously be that you've butchered them and something about their internal experience has been seriously degraded. I wonder at times whether the lobotomy was a product of behaviorism, or of the medical neglect of the mentally ill. Probably both.

unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual

This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual." Even within a particular orientation there are obvious features that seem culturally determined, like of course the tension between the "I want me a woman as thin as a rail" guys and the "I want that venus tummy" guys.

a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones

Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?

I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't seen fucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women.

I will say that I think straight men love the general body shape and appearance of women more than they love the vagina, specifically. I guess 'pussy pics' are a thing, but it's telling that the main thing men want to see in a woman is really something more like the curves, the breasts, the buttocks. Even more than that, there's an angle on the female body positivity movement that's 'vulva positivity', because a lot of pornography selects for ladies with minimal labia minora, which suggests a kind of genital minimalism in men's attraction to women. Perhaps this contributes to why gynandromorphilia is so common as a thing that it has a whole porn category?

(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)

Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!

Chest hair specifically is very male, and it wouldn't be suprising to me if, in recent primate evolution, it became one of the primary selection points for males to tell themselves apart from females. Perhaps this remains as a sexual preference that subtly encodes heterosexuality. You might say something about breasts, but lots of women naturally have small breasts. Some men even prefer it -- "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" is apparently a lesbian film (TIL), but I've always heard the phrase online as a joking discussion of male preference for the small-breasted. It's not a wild leap from "this small-breasted lady is hot" to "this pectoral gentleman is hot" or even "this individual who once had breasts but no longer does is hot" (although mastectomy scarring can jarring to a lot of people), but body hair serves as kind of an immediate "THIS IS MALE, CANNOT BE REPRODUCED WITH, ABORT" signal in the broad and crude sense that lots of evolved preferences are. Noticable facial hair is also a major turn-off, perhaps for the same reason, and this is where a lot of trans men I think explicitly try to simulteneously mascmaxxx and minimize their attractiveness to the straights by growing a beard.

Women naturally have some level of hair (usually quite light, but sometimes darker) on their arms and legs, and while I think men overall prefer them shaved, I don't actually think it's actually a massive turn-off or an intense male fascination the way some feminist takes consider it. Obviously our distant ancestors didn't have any issues with females growing hair all over, so this is probably a recent adaptation in geological time scales and I presume the sex differentiation in hair was very crude and focused on key, noticable differentiators that could be sacrificed without harming survival.

I have a lot of chest hair, and my hair is very dark, women comment on this sometimes. My girlfriend said she showed a picture (fully clothed, so I guess it was just the hair peeking up over my collar) of me to her aunt, who exclaimed, "he's hairy!" Whether this is evidence of my androgens being high, a genetic inheritance from... someone, or just luck of the draw, I don't know. But I will say that this makes me polarizing, and only the true androphiles can understand my appeal.

For that specific comic

Ah, I see. I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.

It's still shocking to me that it won the nobel prize. I understand the harsh experiences and conditions of the instutionalized and that people genuinely did 'improve' in the sense that they didn't express wild emotions any more, but the null hypothesis for any such change, especially when it came with cognitive impairment, would obviously be that you've butchered them and something about their internal experience has been seriously degraded. I wonder at times whether the lobotomy was a product of behaviorism, or of the medical neglect of the mentally ill. Probably both.

I think personal interaction with a severely decompensated schizophrenic would help make it clear that lobotomy was a fantastic option when we had no other options.

You've probably seen street people - when your choice for your family member is let them live like that, during a time when that was mostly a quick death sentence, or sending them to an asylum to be locked up for the rest of their life....excising part of them while leaving as much as they could behind looks like a good idea.

This is what we do for cancer after all.

Thank god we have other options now, but before...

I think personal interaction with a severely decompensated schizophrenic would help make it clear that lobotomy was a fantastic option when we had no other options.

I bet it's fantastic for people who had to take care of them, but executing them would yield a similar effect in terms of taking a burden off their shoulder.

I mean poor quality of life or poor quality of life that drains on society less...

This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual."

Yeah. There's a handful of clear-ish cases (eg, latex kink seems like one of those things that's either an instant love or meh, with very few people changing opinions afterward) but even some stuff that seems like it should be less mutable acts weird, too (eg, foot fetishism seems like some neurological mismatch would be the best explanation... but it's really common for artists to pick up a taste for it, organically).

Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?

At least in self-reporting, it's pretty common but neither universal nor especially predictable in direction. The Blanchard faction claims up to 40% have some change over their lives (and I have no idea how that's supposed to fit the AGP theory), though they definitely merge in some unrelated to hormone therapy when doing so. Unfortunately, they seem the only people trying to actually run a survey on it.

The data is a hell of a mess, so I can't be too confident: at least some MTFs report a drop in libido as making gynophilic relationships more viable, which isn't of interest to most people, and some new-found FTM attraction is probably 'just' a general libido increase (and some loss of attraction might be downstream of sexual function problems), and of course there's the social identity effects for any self-reports.

(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)

Agreed. There's a lot of weird hangups that people develop because of indirectly absorbed beliefs, that it seems like there's a lot of revealed preferences as not existing, available pretty widely? I know there's a lot of 'intrasexual competition' as an explanation, and maybe that's a thing for shoes, but there seems a lot of low-hanging fruit if only the genders could more comfortably talk between each other.

((Admittedly, there's also a lot of weird hangups that might develop as a result. The average straight guy probably doesn't go out of his way to look at testes, given self_made_human's complaint at the end of this post, but even androphilic women tend to find them funny-looking in ways that are vaguely sacrilegious to my perspective.))

I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.

That's fair. And apologies for the squick.

How did it work for you? Were you exclusively homosexual before, and are now 100% straight? Or did you reinforce an existing attraction to women?

It was, mostly, fairly standard therapy with some unusual homework exercises centered around a self conception as a man/woman designed by God for that role.

What kind of homework exercises? I hope you don’t mind me asking - the stereotypical media depiction of conversion therapy is “teenager gets sent to an abusive camp against his will, pretends that it works on him and then has a happy gay adult life”, so how it actually goes on is something I don’t think many people know of.

I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.

EDIT: is the Dutch book you’re referring to from Dr. Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg by any chance?

That sounds correct, but I could not reproduce his full name on command.

I was bisexual beforehand, and not encouraged to befriend other patients. Support group dynamics were seen as unhealthy and to be avoided, and no residential programs existed in this world that I am aware of for that reason. So I do not know if this would have been successful for obligate homosexuals but that case was stated to be very rare- I don’t know if this was bubble effect or not.

I had homework that was a mix of standard therapy fair(journaling etc) and developing positive conceptions of myself as stereotypically masculine- bear in mind a positive stereotype of masculinity as conceived by conservative Christian clergy assisted by reactionary philosophers, there were no hooter’s trips etc. The most unusual thing I was asked to do was to admire myself nude and then in my underwear in the bathroom mirror, I think to appreciate the connection between my body and tendencies, but most of it was stuff like growing an appreciation for sports(this meant playing, not watching), doing stuff with my dad/grandad(fishing and working on cars were recommended), learning a new (tangible and masculine)hobby, and so on and so forth. I have no doubt that if I had been noticeably out of shape fixing that would have been considered part of the program, but I wasn’t and weightlifting wasn’t pushed- although undergoing physical discomfort and self discipline was, this mostly meant things like ‘not hitting the snooze button on your alarm’ and ‘walking around with rocks in your shoes all day’. There was actually a lot of attention paid to self image, I think I remember there being clear reasons for that in the book but not what they were. I was supposed to have straight male friends.

Interesting. This kinda supports my hypothesis that people who say homosexuality is a choice tend to be bisexual - it literally is when you’re attracted to both sexes!

At least they’re honest about it not being very effective on exclusive homosexuals, but calling that working conversion therapy feels like a stretch. It’s like having a program that can supposedly convert vegans into carnivores, but it actually just makes people who already eat meat stop eating vegetables.

In the LGBT community it’s already a meme that most bisexuals end up marrying someone of the opposite sex, even in progressive social settings. Add even the slightly bit of social pressure and encouragement to focus on your heterosexual attraction, and pretty much any “conversion therapy” would work.

When I said something about 'the sticks of men's enforcement,' I didn't particularly mean 'putting rocks in people's shoes and having them walk around,' but I suppose that's not too far off from what I meant.

There's nothing wrong with sports, fishing, working on cars, and fixing things in some vague sense, although that does lean a bit towards a red tribe and slightly older application of masculine behavior, where a lot of younger guys are fixing computers and installing cat6 in their walls, doing carpentry, and yeah, playing sports/roughhousing alongside competitive gaming or local multiplayer as a bonding ritual. I don't know about putting rocks in your shoes (and that seems very old school Catholic to me, they might as well have been wearing cilices), but it is true that men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them. I'm willing to admit I'm stereotypical enough to be a fan of Marcus Aurelius.

I do think that sexual attraction is malleable to some degree, and it's probably not all that hard to get someone who's 80% attracted to women to be 99% attracted to women, and perhaps even vice versa. There's probably some segment of the bisexual population for which sexual attraction can be a conditioned stimulus in one direction or another, but I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.

I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.

Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?

men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them.

Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…

I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.

I agree. In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.

Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?

Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.

Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…

No, probably not. I think if you're really interested in the masculine form, getting close and personal with it is probably going to be erotic. But more specifically, this world is full of gay bodybuilders and straight guys with a complicated relationship to sports.

My point was not really an apologetic for conversion therapy but was a personal reflection, I guess, on masculine norms and behaviors I see in myself and male friends, which I don't think have much to do with sexual orientation. Obviously, masculine norms are a sore spot for me and neither myself nor my father are very invested in sports culture, cars, or fishing, so I'm often a little amused and a little confused at this being considered constitutive of male identity. The overall topic is a Supreme Court decision, so in that connection, you can read what I said as as an urquan obiter dictum that's not really about the topic of conversion therapy.

In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.

I think conversion therapy is unlikely to work. That said, I have a very critical view of many of the therapeutic modalities that licensed psychotherapists often make use of in their practice, like psychodynamic and humanistic methods that are re-headed 20th century woo, but nevertheless popular. The US government actually sometimes pays for veterans to receive EMDR therapy which supposedly 'works' and is 'evidence-based' in treating PTSD, but its actual theoretical basis of bilateral hemispheric stimulation is... wildly dubious, at best, and Wikipedia lists it on the pseudoscience category (same as conversion therapy, humorously enough) because there's no evidence its unique factors do anything.

Basically all therapies are evaluated on the basis of patient self-report, which means that patients' belief that something will work may be as important as any actual therapy method. This means that a huge portion of licensed therapists are, from my point of view, just extracting money from gullible patients for treatments that aren't based on any reasonable theory of how the human brain and mind work -- and nevertheless some of those patients, afterwards, say "wow doc, joie de vivre! joie de vivre!"

I don't really love the whole teen pray away the gay summer camp thing, and Lord knows residential programs intended to cough straighten-out religious youth are often questionable-to-evil, but I have serious concerns that singling out conversion therapy as a broad concept becomes an isolated demand for rigor from a profession for whom 'rigor' means 'lots of people said they liked it.

I'm not sure what the situation is like in various countries of Europe, but unfortunately, in the US, even the licensing system doesn't do much to prevent significant ethical breaches and therapeutic abuse. There's some wildly dark quackery that licensed therapists claim is therapeutic and whose damage goes far beyond conversion therapy. Jodi Hildebrandt used her sway over Mormon couples to separate children from their fathers because dad occasionally watched a pornhub video, and also prescribed much worse in terms of direct physical abuse and starvation of children for disobedience. Nevertheless -- licensed counselor, with the stain on her record prior to her criminal conviction being her violation of patient confidentiality, not the fact that her psychological and therapeutic theories were, let's say, not on this side of sanity.

Licensed therapists are already permitted to practice therapy that includes elements of a spiritual or religious tradition if this is disclosed and desired by the patient, and many people of faith explicitly seek out counselors who share their worldview (which, given how significant patient belief in the therapeutic modality is, probably means this is more effective for them). It's hard to meaningfully distinguish this from spiritual woo, quackery, and even conversion therapy to some extent, and the freedom of speech concern is that this targets the therapeutic desires of people of faith in a way that violates the fundamental principle of psychotherapy that patients are the ones in charge of shaping treatment goals. At some point, what you're saying is not that therapists can't try to convert their patients' sexuality or gender identity, it's that patients can't desire anything that rhymes with sexuality or gender identity conversion, and that's where the freedom of speech/expression concern comes into view.

If what you're calling for is something more akin to a complete rewrite of standards for psychotherapists and counselors as a profession, or criticism of parents using psychotherapy as a worldview weapon against their children -- I'm with you. But there are some deeper concerns in play.

Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.

Ah, this took a turn I didn't expect. I can understand why a bisexual man might not want to be attracted to men (while pursuing a heterosexual marriage, for example), but it's interesting that a bisexual man or trans person might find being attracted to women distressing or guilt-inducing. I really like being attracted to women because women are pretty awesome, but also my pattern of attraction is almost exclusively to femininity, so I suppose it just works to my advantage.

"[T]here is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the police power of the States."

I can only take it that Justice Jackson thinks firmly that Roe (which admittedly has not been relevant precedent in quite a while) was wrong on the notion of doctor-patient confidentiality overriding state lawmakers. Not that it was ever applied to literally any other case, but I'm surprised to see it so explicitly put down.

You are forgetting the disruption fields created by Roe/Casey that were so large as to create "no free speech" zones around people entering abortion clinics "health care facilities."

I like this string of cases because the Supreme Court got roped into literal line drawing. Eight-foot radius no free speech zones are fine. Thirty five-foot radius no free speech zones are a grotesque violation of rights.

SCOTUS remanded this case. I expect to see it back in the high court in a couple of years, after the district court finds that Colorado has a compelling state interest in protecting gay children from deconversion or something.

It's definitely possible. I've been wrong on that in Fulton, but the facts of this case are so open-ended and the potential impact so wide, there's more cause to do so.

Thanks for this writeup, an interesting case. I'm sure Kagan regrets that someone like Jackson is going to be her ideological ally until she retires.

Do you see any more interesting cases on the horizon for this term? Do you see anything that's likely to get granted cert this term? Especially any gun cases?

Do you see any more interesting cases on the horizon for this term?

Absolute biggest is the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Probably drops last day of the term, between the late sitting and its controversial nature win or lose. The Trump EO is less obviously crazy than it seems at first glance, and Native Americans needing a separate statute for automatic citizenship is both a good argument in Trump's favor and what should be the correct solution here, but it's literally unprecedented stare decisis issues and I think it ends up with Roberts punting to Congress if anything is gonna change, maybe two dissenters. Other immigration cases are pretty well-known and not hugely likely to be ground-shaking. Noem v. Al Oltro Lado is gonna blow up and also be just embarassingly stupid.

Trump v. Slaughter is the big independent agencies question, and it's kinda a fact-specific mess, but whatever lines it draws are going to be weird and novel and probably impactful, if for stupid reasons. And the media's gonna love the name.

There's a Voting Rights Act case, it's going to Alito unless he pissed multiple other justices off in the last couple weeks (possible; he was trying to throw Robinson to overboard, and with some cause), and it's going to be a massive culture war touchpoint. I'll admit I don't pay a lot of attention to that caselaw, though, and it's possible it vanishes into paroxysms of technicalities. Bost, already released, falls into a similar boat - it's a good thing and important that questionable laws re: voting processes can be challenged, but I don't think the specifics of that case matter much.

For already-argued gun cases, the two big ones are Wolford (Hawaii's "vampire rule") and Hemani ("possession by drug addict" with a ton of other background stuff). Wolford's a gimme and unfortunately also likely to be extremely limited to its four corners as a result -- it's the exact type of law Bruen specifically said not to do, and SCOTUS only granted on the tightest limits of that question -- but Hemani (to my surprise!) is looking like it could be closer or even favorable rather than the pro-gun-control shutout I expected.

Do you see anything that's likely to get granted cert this term? Especially any gun cases?

Likely? Hard to say.

Trans stuff: Foote v Ludlow is getting a lot of relists; it's basically the question in Mirabelli, squarely presented (if in the most culture-war-heavy loading), the lower court decisions were a charlie foxtrot, there's a messy circuit split. But the facts are contested (and not just whether the kid is genderqueer: the school argues that the 'secret transition' policies might not exist, kinda?), and 303 Creative seems to have given SCOTUS more caution on that. But

There's a few qualified immunity / excessive force cases that are popping up, though I'm pretty convinced that's the libertarian equivalent of Lucy with the football, even compared to gun stuff. I think there's a few cert petitions up around voting policies, but I follow those very loosely.

For gun stuff, there's a bunch of them all scheduled for 4/17 now, but that's not really much info. From most to least likely cert (or GVR)...

Hardware cases: Grok has Duncan v. Bonta around 40%, and it's gotten GVR'd before. I'm... not quite so optimistic, given Snope. Still, Duncan (and Gators and Viramontes and Lamont and Higgins, all getting constantly relisted) are in many ways the last real chance to handle this case as a matter of first impression: every circuit that's going to have a hardware ban has something on final judgement coming up or resolved. Anything after this will get much more circumscribed legal and factual analysis, not to mention how much it would radicalize even the moderates post-Snope. Benson in D.C.'s left a circuit split, technically, even if it's certain to get en banc'd? But Benson's ultimately an as-applied challenge, significantly more controversial than any Safe Professional Nice Guy that SAF and such have brought for their carefully farmed cases, and it's DC. As ironic as it would be for Heller's Gun Question to end up before SCOTUS again over a decade later after Heller II, it just would be a weird case to wait for. But Roberts and Kavanaugh may just want to punt forever.

Concealed carry permits: Gardner is a potential sleeper: critical and strictly federal question, extremely gun-friendly facts, and ultimately is trying to throw an innocent woman in prison for not having a license she couldn't even apply to get. But the facts are hugely specific, it's something that could be thrown as requiring a futile expression and remanded, and SCOTUS has ducked on variants of this question before. It's also a major underdog: Gardner had to file in forma pauperis before the normal gunnie sphere even heard about the case, though she thankfully has real representation now.

Public transportation carry: Schoenthal's also up for cert, but it's an even longer shot. The lower circuit opinion cut an absolute hole in Bruen, but it's not even unusually bad on that at this point, and while public transportation is important, it's important in a way that the justices are near-certain to flinch from.

Prohibited persons: there's an absolute mess of them, they're almost all ugly and controversial cases, so I'd love to say zero shot from a court that ducked questions like "are counterfeit cassettes signs of future violence". But there is Hemani. On the gripping hand, the feds have (temporarily) put an appeal and reversal process for federal prohibited persons, so there's even more reason to punt the question here.

Schoenthal

Denied 4/6.

Gardner denied 4/20.

Duncan and its sister cases are now getting close to Snope when it comes to relist count. Grok gives 85% odds and Sonnet 4.6 says 55-70%, though I remain pessimistic and think that's a little less useful than reading chicken entrails.

Just to make sure I follow, is the TL;DR of this that it's illegal to not maximally encourage trans/queerness in therapy, even when neutrality is what the client is asking for?

Or is this sort of therapy really just laundered gay conversion treatment?

The statute provides for a fine, probation, or loss of license for a licensed therapist from practicing "conversion therapy", defined as:

... any practice or treatment by a licensed physician specializing in the practice of psychiatry that attempts or purports to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.

with exceptions for :

Acceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of an individual's coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, including sexual-orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practices, as long as the counseling does not seek to change sexual orientation or gender identity; or [a]ssistance to a person undergoing gender transition

The state further argued, not very credibly, that the law only really would apply to specific changes to sexual orientation or gender identity, and not changes to gender expressions or sexual attraction despite the clear text of the statute. In theory, it would also prohibit trying to teach a straight man how to be gay? Since the law was never applied, it's hard to say much about either hypothetical.

The plaintiff here was only asking in regards to cases where the client asked for that specific assistance, so this decision could plausibly be read to apply only when the client is specifically asking for not-queer/trans advice, though that's going to depend on what the lower court does when (if) issuing the injunction.

I appreciate the write-up. When I saw the decision, I was hoping you’d have something to say about it. That said, I couldn’t make sense of this:

At minimum, this points to a no-go-zone for a philosophy, and one that's been allowed to sit for well over a decade: whatever natural resistance the psychiatric world might have toward social conservatives, this one there on top of that, and coincidentally….

Essentially, if you were a social conservative considering a career in family or teen therapy, for almost a decade and a half, it's been open and common knowledge that these laws were present, informed a variety of professional accreditation bodies, and would be used as evaluation criteria during training and mentorship programs. The prospective therapist would be faced with patients who would want advise, the therapist want to give what they believed to be correct advise, and they would be required to give what they believed to be wrong advise or risk their entire future professional career. Depending on area of focus, local demographics, workload, and specific philosophy, a rough Fermi estimate gives a monthly or every-other-month basis?

((Assume 20 scheduled slots a week, an average of two clients per slot, gives 160 patients per month; demographic estimates for LGBT from 2012 was 3%, so five LGBT clients a month, but presumably not all of them will be having issues related to sexual orientation, and not all of those issues will be solved by 'calm down on the gay/gender' stuff even by the most social conservative perspective. The rate's a lot faster if you filter for specific fields or use more recent demographic numbers.))

Because there's a long training pipeline and a large monetary investment for therapists - Colorado requires a Master's degree and two thousand hours of post-graduate training for at least some categories - that can't be readily transferred, these incentives push people away very early in their career. There's a wide variety of other problems behind the pipeline issues, but it's still a cause for some of the pipeline issues, and many of them feed on themselves such that each marginal restriction makes the next more capable of dissuading potential outsiders.

I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.

No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.

I want to talk about books.

Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz

Is postmodern literature

  1. real? and
  2. actually any good?

To throw up some examples of what I mean;

  • Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
  • Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
  • Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
  • White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo

I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.

I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."

Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.

In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.

But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.

And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".

This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.

I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.

And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.

I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!

Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.

Background

I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.

David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.

I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.

Culture is not entertainment

I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.

Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.

Drugs are bad, actually

The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.

Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.

This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.

Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)

I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.

Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.

The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.

From Hans Bertens:

If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.

I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.

First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.

Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.

Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.

Super high value comment. Rec'd for an AAQC.

A couple points.

Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world.

Okay, that legitimately helps. I will admit I was hung up on the hyper-stylistic nature of this writing and, I guess, missed the point (score one for the "ToolBooth is too dumb to get it" clique). I'll still retain the point, however, that the highly stlytistic nature of PoMo writing undermines its mission. If I can't even tell who's talking, I sure as hell can't parse their "critique" of modernism.

Which leads me to;

Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive.

Then offer potential solutions! I remember when DFW killed himself. I was in college at the time and sort of adjacent to literary circles. His death was received as a Big Deal and a Major Loss. From time to time, I find myself re-googling DFW to look back at his suicide. The two thoughts I always come away with are 1) If only he had been a Catholic and 2) I think one cause of his permanent despair was that he was so problem oriented in his critiques of the current world and had failed to find a way to attempt to drive towards a solution. Yes, I am aware that many, many people (including quite a few here on the Motte) think that It's All Too Fucked Up To Save (TM) and that any effort to try is doomed to failure. I'll even acknowledge they could be right - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try because, at the very, very least, it gives you a reason to get out of bed, a sense of pride and purpose, and stops you from over-intellectualizing yourself to death .... literally (DFW).

Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths.

Hard, but respectful, disagree. I'm a practicing traditional catholic. I make fun of myself on here for being a n00b at it, but the truth is I work at it; I know all of The Most Necessary Prayers in English and Latin, I say the rosary daily, read The Imitation of Christ along with other devotionals and newer academic Theological Books. I'm currently working my way through the 700+ page Catechsim of Fr. Spirago. I can follow Low and High mass without a Missal. I'm considering taking some voice lessons so I could participate in chant and polyphony.

The Catholic faith is, by far, the most complex thing I have ever approached. I already know that I will spend my entire life trying to figure it out spiritually, intellectually, mentally, and emotionally and will utterly, utterly fail. To mix some metaphors; the Catholic faith makes a kubernetes deployment across availability zones look like a game of tic tac toe. It makes matrix algebra look like finger counting.

But I find all of this complexity legible.

I know what various theological points are trying to do, even if they haven't migrated fully into my mind and heart. I know what even the more mystical devotionals are getting at, even if takes time parse. I can read canon law and think, "This is above my paygrade, but I'm following the nouns and verbs and basic structure."

With PoMoLit, it's so esoteric at times (really thinking of Gravity's Rainbow here) that it loses meaning at the basic sentence level. I remember reading one passage and saying to myself, "Pynchon, I think, is using some sort of double nested reference to an event outside of the book as metaphor for the internal thoughts of one of the brand new characters he's just introduced ... and is also wrapping it in tounge-in-cheek irony." Being deliberately obtuse is often a feature of pretentious academics trying to hide their fundamentally ineptitude. I'm still not convince many or several PoMoLit authors suffer the same fate.

The point about the nature of postmodernism is good, yes. Postmodernism, as the name implies, is a critique of modernism, and modernism is a type of progressive model narrative that is itself at odds with traditional faith. I take one of the claims of postmodernism to be that no theory or model of the world can ever be sufficient to the reality - this to the extent that it is impossible, in principle, to adequately describe the world in language. Thus their obsession with using language in destabilising ways, to trouble categories once thought to be certain. Even though postmodernists usually include religious narratives (I would argue simplified strawman versions of religious understandings) within the category of theoretical models of the world that must be destabilised, they are just recapitulating the insight of Augustine and his seashell.

That said I think it is a valid critique of postmodernism to say that often its adherents have gone too far, or become obsessed with destabilisation for its own sake. By contrast I'd argue that theology must always find a balance between its kataphatic and apophatic modes - nothing we can say of God can ever be wholly adequate to his being, but nonetheless we are commanded to speak of him. Theological speech must occur, despite its always-contingent nature.

Speaking of religion, to Catholicism...

I suppose, as a traditional and even somewhat doctrinaire Protestant, I feel obliged to push back a little here, albeit in what I hope is a charitable manner, aimed at our mutual growth in faith. To the extent that you are deeply immersing yourself in the broader Christian tradition and growing in knowledge of God and love of Christ, I have nothing to say but "amen", and I affirm the necessity of growing in the understanding of the gospel, even knowing that you will never be able to wholly comprehend it.

Even so I would like to suggest, tentatively and as kindly as I can, that the heart of Christian faith does not lie in all the prayers you know, or in following mass without a missal, or participating in polyphony. All those things can be good, and the deliberate effort to discipline yourself so that you can more fully attend to divine things is good, but we must always be careful not to mistake the tools for the things the tools are there to point us to.

I'm sure you understand this principle, but just as a reminder, I suppose, there is little need for a lay Catholic to understand the details of canon law. The administration and good order of the church is important, but you don't need to understand the science of architecture to live in a house, nor the science of nutrition to benefit from a well-cooked meal. Sometimes I see converts, whether to Catholicism or to any other tradition, become obsessed with understanding everything, even things that are not needful for them, and they pile up so many burdens on themselves that they stumble in their walk towards God.

The catholic faith - both in the small-c, universal Christian sense, and inthe capital-C, Roman Catholic sectional sense - is in some ways the most complex thing in the world, but in other ways it is very simple, and to be received with the simplicity and humility of a child.

Master the intellectual doctrines, the liturgy, the public performance of worship, all these things are good, but it is worth occasionally pausing to ask ourselves the question, "Is my work at these things helping me grow closer to God?"

Another poster brought up LOTRad being relatively low brow compared to PM work. But your post reminds me of enduring truth JRRT embedded in LOTR: most of the time, knowing what is the just thing to do isn’t complicated. Instead, choosing to do good even when you know you are likely to fail is the important thing.

People often scorn LOTR because it lacks moral complexity (somewhat unfair criticism). But in reality, the simple truth of “do good even when it might cost you or you might not succeed” is in reality a powerful antidote to the “problem obsessed but no solution” attitude you identify in PM work. And sometimes, that good results in restoring the kingdom.

People often scorn LOTR because it lacks moral complexity (somewhat unfair criticism).

Which is what Rings of Power tried to do with their family man Orc (to great mockery). So what happens to our morally complex, it's a grey area, family guy Orc? Happily (to all appearances) engages in the siege of Eregion where priceless cultural artefacts are destroyed, literally engages in back-stabbing of (the new) Adar (the triggering incident apparently being "Daddy doesn't love me?") and ends up getting murderated himself in about five seconds by Sauron for daring to be "but what about all the Orc footsoldiers you are sending out as cannon fodder?" which, ironically, was the reason he initially switched loyalties from Adar to Sauron.

So much for moral complexity.

And from the selected letters, notes from 1956:

Of course in ‘real life’ causes are not clear cut – if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have ‘good motives’, real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today.

Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict. A judge must assign right and wrong according to principles which he holds valid in all cases. That being so, the right will remain an inalienable possession of the right side and Justify its cause throughout.

(I speak of causes, not of individuals. Of course to a judge whose moral ideas have a religious or philosophical basis, or indeed to anyone not blinded by partisan fanaticism, the rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked. But though ‘propaganda’ may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact ‘right’, that is not valid. The aggressors are themselves primarily to blame for the evil deeds that proceed from their original violation of justice and the passions that their own wickedness must naturally (by their standards) have been expected to arouse. They at any rate have no right to demand that their victims when assaulted should not demand an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.)

Similarly, good actions by those on the wrong side will not justify their cause. There may be deeds on the wrong side of heroic courage, or some of a higher moral level: deeds of mercy and forbearance. A judge may accord them honour and rejoice to see how some men can rise above the hate and anger of a conflict; even as he may deplore the evil deeds on the right side and be grieved to see how hatred once provoked can drag them down. But this will not alter his judgement as to which side was in the right, nor his assignment of the primary blame for all the evil that followed to the other side.

...In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. So even if in desperation ‘the West’ had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other Men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right. As does the Cause of those who oppose now the State-God and Marshal This or That as its High Priest, even if it is true (as it unfortunately is) that many of their deeds are wrong, even if it were true (as it is not) that the inhabitants of ‘The West’, except for a minority of wealthy bosses, live in fear and squalor, while the worshippers of the State-God live in peace and abundance and in mutual esteem and trust.

That last - the 'good' side do bad things, but those bad things do not take away from the rightness of their position - probably would be a leetle too morally complex for the critics!

the idea of the 'entertainment' from Infinite Jest seems relevant in our time with the rise of the 'algorithm' and now people becoming addicted to AI. The book was written before Facebook and Youtube.

This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth).

Steve Sailer made the same argument in 2009.

Also really enjoyed Infinite Jest and despite it being almost a decade since reading it I think back to it all of the time. Like many, I too bounced off of it in my first few attempts. I think finally making it past the first 200 or so pages (that Wardeen section) was all it took to get me invested through to the end.

"It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way."

I was reading Catch-22 on my subway commutes in NYC. Then 9/11 happened in the middle of it.

So I had this feeling of being at war, but not really sure who we were at war with. People randomly bursting out into tears sitting next to me. Overhearing some of the most jingoistic stuff ever. Huge delays because people were hallucinating suspicious packages and people everywhere.

The book suddenly felt very, very relevant.

The absurdity of war and bureaucracy. The true believers intersecting with the grifters. The loyalty oaths. Before 9/11 the book came off as a work of almost gonzo journalism and afterwards read like an autobiography.

I probably would have abandoned it out of boredom if not for 9/11.

I adored Catch-22 in high school so maybe I’m in the minority here. Made an entire essay on Milo Minderbender who I maintain is one of the greatest fictional characters of all time.

Half my usernames in the 00s incorporated “Yossarian” which is a great name in addition to a great character.

The Milo Minderbender character was just funny until I met people who were actually like him in real life, and then I decided every friend group needs one.

I loved Catch-22 in high school just because it was actually funny. I was predisposed to it due to experience with socialism, so absurdity of beurocracy and hollow slogans was something I understood quite well mostly from stories, but partially also from personal experience during my childhood. On top, it was part of the package of War Literature and to me it seemed more relatable to a teenager compared to pretending that I understand what happens to young boy in All Quiet on The Western front.

Even now if I read the reasons why the book is postmodern, I do not really get it. Supposedly the signifiers of it as postmodern book is as follows: gallows humor, anti-hero in the story, unreliable narrative also related to uncertainty if protagonist is hero or antihero, absurdity represented by literal Catch-22, non-linear structure, breaking the fourth wall etc. If these are the signifiers of postmodern story then all the stories of my uncles and great uncles especially those during their conscription into Czechoslovak army during communism are postmodern as hell.

Oh boy, literature sniping, my favorite kind of geek-out.

So, what is art? You're right to observe that "If I like it it's good" is a shallow way to judge artistic quality. Clearly the purpose of art is not merely to entertain and enthrall.

On the other hand, "To increase collective well-being?" Shades of Fredric Wertham–all that is not wholesome, morally fortifying, and artistically meritorious should be thrown out! Art can be just a thing to entertain.

Art, in my opinion, is all the things people look to it for: entertainment, escapism, a display of talent and craft, a few moments of amusement, but also meaning, reflection, new lenses through which to see the world, education, enlightenment.

No book or other work of art, of course, is going to be all of those things. Some will be none of those things.

I am one of those people who thinks there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" writing and that there are, if not completely objective, then at least generally agreed-upon rubrics by which you can judge it. It's more than style (19th century classics would be considered "badly written" by modern stylistic standards) but it's also more than theme or symbolism or capturing some essential essentialness of the human experience or your place in the world or the current zeitgeist or whatever.

I'm going to take the very unchallenging centrist view that you can like high literature and comic books at the same time. You can enjoy both experimental postmodernism and Extruded Fantasy Product like Brandon Sanderson.

If you are incapable of critically examining what you consume (at least to the degree that you recognize, "Yeah, this is kind of crap, but it's fun") then you probably aren't getting much out of anything you consume but whatever time it takes you to consume it. But that doesn't mean reading things just to be entertained is bad in and of itself.

Of the works you mention, I have yet to tackle Infinite Jest (I read DFW's debut novel, The Broom of the System, and was so thoroughly unimpressed I've been putting off tackling IJ). I have read Thomas Pynchon, and while I still love The Crying of Lot 49, it's not a coincidence that that's one of his shortest novels. Gravity's Rainbow was an ordeal to get through, and I only finished it out of sheer determination. Like several other commenters, I would not categorize either Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22 as post-modern. Satirical and cynical, certainly, but post-modernism is not just irony and counter-culturalism.

I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real" or there not being anything "there" (at least two of your books aren't post-modern at all, and they definitely do have clear themes and plots). Post-modernism is also not just a "stylistic" exercise. Post-modernist books are generally characterized by being "experimental" and defying the conventions of traditional novels–hence, non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, metatextual references, disregard for conventional plot and characterization, etc. But there are always ideas there, and I would argue most of those books do have a cohesive (if meandering and self-indulgent) narrative.

I'm bemused that you praise Blood Meridian (which is also one of my favorite books), as many people consider Cormac McCarthy very much a post-modernist writer, and if anyone can be accused of writing in an abstruse way as a "stylistic exercise," it's him. (He demonstrates both how you can break punctuation and sentence structure rules, and why they exist.)

The fact that what you love, someone else will hate, and what you find deep and meaningful, someone else will find cheap trash, is why it's very hard to arrive at any real consensus on artistic "quality." I've dunked on Brandon Sanderson plenty, but I have read a lot of his books, and I have seen people say that they got a lot of value out of his handling of various kinds of mental illness, etc. (To which I want to say, "read something better," but there I go again.) I both love and hate Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon (I'm 50/50 for any given book), and there are people who are fierce devotees and people who think they're both just orthographical prestidigitators.

The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.

But! All of them (except maybe Tolstoy, who was rich and also batshit crazy) were also writing for money! They were very much writing to their markets (Cervantes wrote the sequel to book one of Don Quixote because a rival was plagiarizing him!) And a lot of people dunk on all of them for being pedestrian or prosaic or culture-bound or just boring and consider them to have been the Brandon Sandersons of their day. (They had plenty of critics in their own time.)

I remember reading an interview once with Piers Anthony, the original Dirty Old Man of SF&F, who was once an enormously prolific bestseller before kind of falling out of favor with the fandom. He genuinely considers himself to be a Great Author who will someday be recognized alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. While it's hard to imagine the author of The Color of Her Panties being so remembered, who can say? It may well be that Brandon Sanderson is remembered as the great American fantasy writer of the 21st century. I think there is something to be said for telling literature snobs to get their heads out of their asses. At the same time, there is something to be said for telling Millenials whose literary horizons never expanded beyond Harry Potter and Twilight to Read Another Fucking Book. (But you could say the same thing to a lot of hippies and neckbeards who never read anything but Tolkien and Heinlein.)

So, what is art?

I didn't ask this question.

I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real"

I didn't make that assertion. I asked the question is it "real"?

Amadan, I think you're a great mod. Sincerely. You've banned me a couple times for being a dickbag. I find most of your bannings and non-bannings to be as fair as is reasonable for an unpaid mod. Even though I was (just barely) on the other side of the Hylnka affair, I think the decision was a valid one.

I have no idea what point you made, if any, in your response. There's equivocation after equivocation. In your closing you state "there's something to be said" twice ... what is it, then? Say it!

The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.

This is a quality paragraph (with a final, concrete point)

Well, I wasn't posting as a mod, so I appreciate the sentiment but you're allowed to dislike my posts.

I thought my thesis was clear enough, but evidently not.

This is not a criticism:

I wonder if dislike of post-modernism and dissatisfaction with Ama's post are tied together.

A bit of a meander, with much attention paid to form and structure, tendencies and purpose (and the meta of popularity in writing etc) - that shit is all post-modern as fuck.

Clarity and getting to the fucking point has a ton of value. So does taking a big ass puff of the reefer and going "hey man but what about..."

If you are more the former (especially when it comes to the domain of art and writing) some of this shit is going to seem like purposeless masturbation. Which it is to some extent! It has value also tho.

The Broom of the System is... bad. In many ways DFW's later writing is reacting to a feeling that stuff like TBotS is the only kind of thing that you can write in the exhausted conditions of late postmodernism, and that just writing more novels like that but with minor improvements would be a complete waste of time.

Like several other commenters, I would not categorize either Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22 as post-modern. Satirical and cynical, certainly, but post-modernism is not just irony and counter-culturalism.

Catch-22 is listed as seminal postmodern book everywhere from wiki to various literally journals. It is a seminal book, so some critics say that it is still a little bit modern - e.g. Yossarian is not completely insane, but they still say it is a postmodern book. It would be like arguing that Hamlet is actually Medieval as opposed to seminal Renaissance/Early modern book. By the way this is quite a postmodern analysis from you.

Well, not to keep getting post-modern, but who defines what is and isn't post-modern? Like I said, I think Cormac McCarthy is very much a post-modern writer, but there are critics who disagree.

Catch-22 didn't seem post-modern to me. But it has been a long time since I read it.

I wrote it elsewhere here, Catch-22 has a lot of postmodern literature signifiers: gallows humor, anti-hero in the story, unreliable narrative also related to uncertainty if protagonist is hero or antihero, absurdity represented by literal Catch-22, non-linear structure, breaking the fourth wall etc. I guess it was considered postmodern due to it being product of 1961 where it went against the grain, it was pre-Vietnam war.

Earlier you said that:

Post-modernist books are generally characterized by being "experimental" and defying the conventions of traditional novels–hence, non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, metatextual references, disregard for conventional plot and characterization, etc. But there are always ideas there, and I would argue most of those books do have a cohesive (if meandering and self-indulgent) narrative.

The first half is something you see in every new literally epoch. Modern literature was experimental compared to pre-modern one. People are now also fed-up with postmodern "experimentation" and want to try something else, they talk about post-postmodernism or metamodernism etc. If you go deeper, then no, breaking the 4th wall is not experimental, Shakespeare used it hundreds of years ago when characters addressed audience directly. Brooding antihero is your cookie cutter romantic trope, heck some people say that Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground have postmodern vibes. It is quite a postmodern self-parody, "there is nothing new only recycling of old" is quite self-aware.

I think that the best solution is not to be in awe with postmodernism and categorize it as any other literary epoch. It was product of its age, and it is characterized by usage of specific literary techniques - be it new or old. So yes, Catch-22 was postmodern literature and Notes From Underground was realist or seminal existentialist literature even if you think of it the other way around - is Yossarian not your typical existentialist hero and can there be something more realist than Hellers description of war in visceral detail? Sorry, the timeline does not agree with that.

It is quite a postmodern self-parody, "there is nothing new only recycling of old" is quite self-aware.

Also worth pointing out that this isn't a new thing either, and goes back 3,000 years to the Book of Ecclesiates.

De gustibus non est dispuntandum

TLDR: People probably like the things they say they like, even if there are people who pretend to like it they probably aren't the majority and definitely aren't universal.

I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre. I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."

Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.

So you haven't actually read any examples of post-modern literature, but you question whether anyone enjoys it because you don't think you would enjoy it if you actually read it?

I think you should probably be very hesitant to assume that no one actually enjoys thing because you don't enjoy thing, even if you yourself pretended to enjoy thing as a signaling exercise.

There are things that in my life, I tried to pretend I enjoyed because I thought it was the cool thing to like. Sometimes these weren't even things that would get me credit among my actual peers. When I was heavy into straight edge punk or metal, I'd listen to bands like Earth Crisis or atonal Norwegian black metal outfits because online forums told me those were the coolest bands to like, and I'd listen to them on my ipod and try to like them even though I didn't actually enjoy atonal screeching and lack of melody. But I thought for whatever reason that was the cool thing so I tried to like it.

At the same time, there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to believe that I like the things that I like. Amon Amarth isn't a universal taste. My workout playlist contains at least one song that will offend anyone.

My favorite books are full of things that people would call posing, or say that no one actually enjoys. I've read War and Peace four times, and loved it every time. Euros will tell me that there's no way I can possibly enjoy a boring sport like Baseball or Football, Americans will tell me that there's no way I can enjoy a BORING sport like soccer. The arguments over which sexual acts women actually like and which they are pretending to like could fill a new Talmud with disputations in volumes on BDSM, Anal sex, blowjobs; some contend that women don't actually get horny at all! Atheists claim no one can possibly enjoy going to church. People tell me that the gym is a chore and that one can't possibly enjoy it; the gym puritans even tell me that enjoying lifting is sin, indicative that you aren't engaged in proper lifting which must be unpleasant. For every one of my favorite things there's somebody who wants to tell me I don't actually like it I'm just a poseur.

Now for the genre arguments, Chuck Pahluniuk is normally labeled as postmodernist author, and I don't think Fight Club is a book that you can reasonably say that it isn't enjoyable. One doesn't have to like every postmodern novel for the genre to be real or any good, any more than I have to enjoy every piece of scifi for scifi to be real or any good.

I’ve read Catch-22 three times and Slaughterhouse-Five a couple. Both number among the best novels written in the 20th century. They are the seminal anti-war novels. Go read them, you will probably enjoy it! The former has a slow start, but picks up.

Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement. Other works in Vonnegut's oeuvre are far more overtly postmodern and meta (e.g. Breakfast of Champions), but Slaughterhouse-Five is remarkably straightforward.

*Although its author hates his work being so categorised.

I certainly would not include Catch-22 either. More a comic late modernist novel. Huge inspiration to the postmodernists, though, you don't get Gravity's Rainbow without Catch-22.

Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement.

Having read this for the first time around 10 years ago in my late 20s or early 30s, I generally agree. However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not. I listened to the audiobook of All Quiet on the Western Front after I read Slaughterhouse Five, but looking back, the latter book reminded me a lot of the former, in describing the horrors of war in basic, matter-of-fact ways, i.e. the famous "so it goes."

I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.

However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not.

I'm not sure if all editions of Slaughterhouse-Five include Vonnegut's preface in which he describes a meeting he had with a Hollywood person who scoffed when Vonnegut told him he was writing an anti-war novel, telling him that he might as well write an anti-glacier novel. In light of that preface, my read of how the Tralfamadorians perceive time is that it's Vonnegut's critique of a particular kind of fatalism which sees war and conflict as inevitable and inexorable. If the Tralfamadorian mindset (that it's pointless to try to change the future, because it's predetermined) seems alien to us, then that is intended to shock us into a realisation about war and conflict in our world.

I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.

Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.

Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.

Of course, the concept behind both these books could have been come up with independently by both authors, but given the time periods, the extreme similarities, and Vonnegut's stature, it would be truly shocking to me if Chiang had never read Slaughterhouse Five, or at least a summary of it. It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot never having read Hamlet by Shakespeare or a summary of it.

It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot

The Lion King is old enough that there could well be adults who've been inspired by it without knowing the work that inspired it!

I'm confused at the selection. Personally I find Vonnegut easy reads, and though I don't agree with him in the slightest about almost anything, I appreciate the propositions his novels create and the challenge they pose to my worldview.

Meanwhile Infinite Jest is... you have to have a motivation to read it because the book doesn't create the motivation to read the next page by itself. At least that's my experience. I like shorter essays by the author but Infinite Jest itself is a thing in itself. Like House of Leaves. What are you reading it for? To be one of those who read it.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Scott's attempt to explain postmodernism to a rationalist audience (which he later retracted, although I don't think he should have).

His explanation is really about the postmodern "mindset" rather than postmodern literature specifically, although it could be argued that postmodern literature is just a textual representation of the postmodern mindset. He sees the unreliable narrator as key to postmodern literature: much as postmodern readings of history challenge us to consider how historical metanarratives have been selectively constructed to favour the powers that be ("history is written by the winners"), postmodern novels routinely feature narrators whose testimony cannot be relied upon, forcing the reader to consider what "really" happened versus what the narrator wants us to think happened, and why they want us to think that. Unreliable narrators are likewise a common feature of films, video games etc. which have been characterised as postmodern.

He sees the unreliable narrator as key to postmodern literature: much as postmodern readings of history challenge us to consider how historical metanarratives have been selectively constructed to favour the powers that be ("history is written by the winners"), postmodern novels routinely feature narrators whose testimony cannot be relied upon, forcing the reader to consider what "really" happened versus what the narrator wants us to think happened, and why they want us to think that.

This isn't directly related to the top-level question, but having read basically this sort of explanation of postmodernism is before, the one thing that struck me as the completely obvious next logical step is to question how this particular meta-metanarrative about metanarratives has been selected by the "powers that be" and why they want the rest of us to believe that that's a meaningfully useful way to analyze metanarratives. How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike. The moment you realize that the turtle you're on is on another turtle, it's pretty trivial to wonder if that turtle is on another turtle, possibly all the way down.

Unfortunately, a stack of turtles seems pretty likely to be unstable even in finite numbers, to say nothing of when there's infinite of them. Unstable doesn't mean false, of course, but in this case, the instability manifests in the reality that there's no reason to stop on this turtle instead of the next one or the one after that or the one 13 turtles down which happens to be the one that concludes that all of history was actually just setup to justify you specifically getting everything you want and all your enemies being mercilessly crushed.

Scott sort of gestures at this in the linked post:

This leads to the classic freshman-philosophy critique of postmodernism: “Postmodernism says nothing is objectively true and it’s all just opinion. But in that case, postmodernism isn’t objectively true and it’s just your opinion.” Make this a little more sophisticated, and we can get an at-least-sophomore-level critique: “Postmodernism says that facts have enough degrees of freedom that they often get reframed to support the powerful. But there are bucketloads of degrees of freedom in how to use and apply postmodernism; it’s inevitably going to itself be twisted to support the powerful."

How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike.

In most anything related to postmodernism, I think of the midwit meme. Sometimes things are complicated and ambiguous, but that's usually a confusion about words and minds and uncertainty about the state of the underlying reality. But there usually is an underlying reality that actually is true or false, and all the words and perspective shifts won't actually change that underlying reality.

Here then, there is a recursively stable narrative climb of "I'm telling you a thing because it's true, and true things are good for people to know and understand." If you try to climb up to the meta-narrative, I AM trying to push this narrative because it will favor myself, because I am a straightforward and logical person, and therefore disseminating truth and objectivity, and increasing people's trust in truth and objectivity, helps make society better for everyone. People knowing true things is generally good for society, and I am part of society, therefore people knowing true things is generally good for me. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game, me benefiting from telling you a thing does not need to come at your expense. (And also I get a small ego boost from being right and explaining ideas to people, because it makes me seem smart, but that's predicated on them being true).

And if you go up another level, just reread the previous paragraph. I'm telling you that this narrative is self-recursively stable because it's true, and you knowing it to be true helps society (and gives me a small ego boost). Ad infinitum.

To be clear, I certainly understand that people can have dishonest motivations and biases making their narratives differ from the truth. But this is not the only possibility. Because objective truths exist, honesty can exist, and stable narratives can exist that become more coherent under self-reflection rather than devolving into infinitely complex recursions. Infinite sequences can converge.

My distaste for postmodern "writing" is usually for the way the authors write in their pet peeves or personal greviences, disguised as plot. The "deconstruction" usually goes one way. I'm happy for any examples where one of these deconstructed gender nonconformity or anti-classism or anti-statism or w/e with the same zeal as they are deployed usually to the other side. The only thing off the top of my head is Harrison Bergeron.

Why aren't the unambiguous literary achievements of Nabokov, especially Pale Fire and Lolita, on this list? If the defining feature of postmodernism is a metatextual nature and unreliable narrator, well, um, let's include king of it. Hell, there is quite a bit of Faulkner that is pretty close to postmodernism, too, including Absalom and As I Lay Dying, two of his very finest works. I personally view the critical achievement of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels as resting heavily on unreliable narration, though this might be more controversial and my idiosyncratic interpretation. In SF, it is precisely the postmodernism of Wolfe that puts him on a tier far above all others.

In your list, I really only see Vonnegut as having true critical achievement, so I am concerned that this is far more a critique of middlebrow than it is postmodernism.

Man I like Wolfe, and he's undoubtedly got a gift for the striking image. But I remember reading a critique once that said, basically: Wolfe takes a fairly conventional sf/f plot and storyboards it out a-b-c-d. Then he decides which parts of the structure to remove or obfuscate to get the reader to play literary guessing games. Ever since then, that critique has always been at the back of my mind. I think it works, but I get why some people thinks it's a writers parlor trick.

This criticism of Wolfe's obfuscation as a parlor trick reminds me of Wallace Stevens' critique of TS Eliot, with Stevens saying that Eliot fails to make "the visible a little hard to see". Not that Eliot's poetry is particularly obvious to interpretation, but I would argue that some degree of obfuscation is actually quite important for artistic achievement, kind of like how there is not much purpose to a merely photorealistic painting.

On what list? Did you mean to reply to the OP?

It strikes me as an example of "Every accusation is a confession." Perhaps this sort of thing hits better if the reader is a dissembling, delusional jackass.

In fairness, I have read none of these books, but in fairness, they mostly sound just dreadful.

I thought I had read Catch-22, but checking the wiki article, I now suspect that was a segment of a couple chapters in some English class, rather than the full book. Or I've just forgotten 90% of it over the last 20 years.

It strikes me as an example of "Every accusation is a confession."

I really doubt that everyone who accused Obama of having a faked birth certificate was secretly worried about their own birthplace.

I don't think that phrase is meant to be taken so literally, even if it's phrased as an absolute. It especially breaks down in very granular, binary political contexts... but then I'm the guy who harps on the point that political hypocrisy is almost always mirrored.

But please allow me to rephrase more carefully, and in my own words: If a person claims that there is no objective or knowable truth, that is Bayesian evidence that the speaker is a liar. If a person claims that all the bad stories about them are false narratives made up to persecute them, that is Bayesian evidence that the stories are true. If a person tells you that, really, everyone is a bad person, then that is Bayesian evidence that the speaker is a bad person. And if a person tells you that there is no "truth", only competing power narratives, then you need to start acting like you are in a power struggle because you are.

"Bayseian evidence" doesn't imply "enough evidence that it makes a practical difference" so that's technically true but useless. Otherwise, I can think of situations where it doesn't make a practical difference. Every narrative of the evil of Jews as a race is a false narrative made up to persecute them.

"Bayseian evidence" doesn't imply "enough evidence that it makes a practical difference"

My friend, set aside the politics and philosophy for a moment. In the real world, in your real life, if you meet someone who always seems to have an excuse for why everyone dislikes them for bad, unfair reasons, STAY AWAY. The reason appearances can be deceiving is because they are usually not. If your first encounter with someone matches that pattern, sure, maybe it's an unfair fluke (but probably not). If three out of the first four encounters match that pattern, you should accept that that person is a walking disaster, and engage at your own peril.

"Oh, yeah, I have to go to court tomorrow. No, no, it's a crazy story, my ex-landlord is a total psycho."

9 times out of ten, that's actually exactly what it looks like and the person speaking is meaningfully guilty and the kind of person who does crimes and constantly lies.

If you recommend seeking legal redress for their purported "crazy" persecution and they waffle and deflect, increase that certainty to 100%.

And certainly all the people complaining about hospice and daycare fraud aren't running their own fraudulent hospices and daycares.

It makes sense when you consider the context of the times: Is communism the inevitable future or a plot by satan? Was the westward expansion glorious civilization being brought to the wilderness or a standard nationalistic project of consolidation and extermination? Was the cause lost?

This is the time period where you could grow up learning all that shit, go from stick and hoop to moon landing in one life. Makes you question your received wisdom, and if wisdom can be received at all.

I've read three of the items on OP's list. I loved Slaughterhouse-Five, though as I said elsewhere in this thread I question its categorisation as postmodern literature. I also remember really enjoying Catch-22, but it's probably twenty years since I read it and I've been meaning to read it again. Of the three that I've read, White Noise strikes me as the closest to the platonic Ideal of what most people think of when they hear the word "postmodern", and I hated it.

As an aside, here are some works in other media that might be considered postmodern, which I consider to be very good:

  • Undertale
  • Portal
  • Inscryption
  • Magic the Gathering's Time Spiral block
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged
  • Tubular Bells, Tubular Bells II
  • Most of Edgar Wright's and Wes Anderson's films
  • Fight Club

Wes Anderson is so postmodern it's crazy. Those are movies that want you to know at all times you are watching a FUCKING MOVIE, but also accept that what you are seeing is a kind of hyperreal metaphor at the same time.

I'll always remember the scene in one of his weaker films where owen wilson is literally abandoning what weighs him down to get on the train in slow motion as a guy ROLLS A HOOP in the background, do you get it? Do you get it? But the heavy handedness is part of the point. The

No, I don't get it. This is why I don't like postmodern art, I never get the references, or only very fuzzily. It seemed like he was referencing things in "Asteroid City," but that I didn't get it, and also didn't enjoy it.

#4 really dredges up some memories. I don’t recall the block but the very first book of the whole franchise I ever read was the one with Karona(?) the angel that I think was a fusion between Akroma and Phage, if I recall right.

Tubular Bells, Tubular Bells II

deconstruction of the meandering prog song?

Is Catch 22 postmodern? Like it's definitely written from a position of irony but from my memories of reading it in high school it wasn't that complicated or byzantine

Postmodernism doesn't entail that it be byzantine and unapproachable. It's just often the nature of texts that see deconstruction as their main task.

Literary postmodernism is specifically "deconstructing" the form of the novel, the assumed nature of the text, etc.. Modernism has no shortage of stories "deconstructing" the idea that the World Wars were glorious affairs.

Is postmodern literature

real? and actually any good?

It's basically just literature that's very self-aware and meta about being fictional, like characters who break the 4th wall in a TV show to make fun of the show. Like you've got the old traditional classics that follow a structure, sometimes a very specific structure like the 3 volume novel, and often draw heavily on the same themes of greek myths and christian morals. Then you've got the modern literature, which blows up a lot of the old rules and is often kind of nihilistic in the wake of the world wars, but its still pretty readable as a novel with plot, characters, themes, etc. The post-modernist stuff assumes you've already read a lot of that stuff, and is sort of a meta-commentary. Like, catch-22 assumes you've already read a lot of war stories, both the heroic kind and the tragic kind, so it's just trying to show the madness and petty nonsense of war in a way that might not make logical sense. Slaughterhouse Five is similar, throwing in a weird time-travel plot that doesn't exactly make logical sense but does convey the madness. Infinite Jest is more about addiction and modern entertainment- what's the point of writing a novel when we're constantly being bombarded by other stimula that are way more entertaining? What's the experience of reading like when we're constantly being distracted? What do we remember, and what do we forget?

TLDR: it's any kind of literature that has blatant plot holes and it doesn't matter.

Catch-22 is both hilarious black comedy war satire, and highly quotable. I never really had trouble following the plot or parsing the time shifts. Can't speak for the rest.

Since no one has defended jazz yet, I will. There is signalling in jazz and perhaps moreso than the average music genre, but structurally it tends to stay inside the lines, it just has high level of potential complexity that does take legitimate skill to navigate. But listening to those complex songs with the technical improvisation can be extremely viscerally pleasurable and spiritual. You may have to get stoned. I got stoned with a young friend I made and played him Coltraine's A Love Supreme and afterward he was excitedly exclaiming "I get jazz! I get jazz!" and became a permanent fan. There's a passage about getting stoned and listening to jazz in the beginning of "Invisible Man" as well that was one of the best parts of that book.

Anyway I think progressive rock is the genre more like post modernism, which plays with structure in more experimental ways.

I took a good amount of formal music lessons as a kid and young adult. Much of the syllabus of instruction back in the 80s/90s for this was classical, marches, and jazz. Acedemic Jazz is a thing, and when its all you have experienced you have to take other people's word for it that jazz is cool, or maybe that it used to be cool? Then one day when I was 18 I got hired by a friend of my father's to take over for their recently departed drummer, mostly jazz standards and Great American Songbook stuff. Still pretty 'square', but some of these guys played in other jazz groups too, who performed at bars, who had drug and alcohol problems. Real Musicians. Thats when I learned that Jazz is a conversation. It has a huge history with a smaller present day, but the conversation has never stopped. An improvisational jazz performance, if the musicians are good enough and know about the history of the conversation, about the muscial past and present of jazz, is itself a small new addition and a reflection on that shared past. There are inside jokes, touching tributes to passed away friends, challenges and submissions, all expressed entirely through their instrument, wordlessly. There's an entire other world in there, as wide as it is deep, if you can speak the language.

I think jazz is one of those genres meant to be experienced live, especially given that improvisation is such a core part of it. Listening to recordings doesn't have nearly the same impact.

Counterpoint: You are right, but I think you undersell the value of recordings especially on the subject of jazz.

I got to experience a decent jazz scene in the 80’s and 90’s in Montreal. Montreal has always been a jazz city and the drop in/sit in random player thing was still happening at a club called Biddles. Way better than what NY clubs had become at the time in terms of the casual feel of working musicians meeting up.

Live jazz as it exists today is art music or nostalgia. The vanguard of live avant garde music is probably well past hip hop by now but jazz it is not.

When jazz WAS in its heyday the recording of music was also approaching its pinnacle. Jazz recordings of the 50’s and 60’s were a serious and intentional endeavor, and these recordings as of 2026 ARE the legacy of jazz (since no one wrote it down for one thing).

Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 are legit, although I can't say the same for every work of postmodern literature.

Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5 and White Noise are genuinely entertaining and powerful books imo. I admit to giving up on Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, but I loved The Crying of Lot 49 and quite liked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, so I am confident both David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon are capable of great things.

In summary, from my experience, postmodernism doesn't have shit to do with it. It's just that Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are stupidly long.

I find this to be pretty accurate. I look at modern art and I don’t think it’s real in the sense that it’s trying to explore or explain something the creators feel deeply about. I can generally enjoy well-made art that has a viewpoint I disagree with. But most modern art — films, books, paintings, or sculptures seem to be a very fraudulent thing. They make great claims of being great avant garde art, but their entire existence is the opposite. There’s no real commentary. A sculpture of broken glass that is commentary on the holocaust that begins with “the night of broken glass” isn’t clever commentary. It’s fraud, in my mind because it’s not deep, not even surprising (surprising commentary shouldn’t be identical to the accepted wisdom of the era. Being against the holocaust isn’t much of an original thought). It also takes little thought or skill to make something that says little and does so in ways that don’t make sense.

Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.

I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.

As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.

You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.

The same thing with Infinite Jest. The first time you read it, just let it wash over you. Maybe keep a bookmark on the timeline chapter when that comes up. Don't sweat puzzling out the story too much - you can always read Aaron Swartz's theory afterwards - just enjoy (or "enjoy") the characters, atmosphere, style. Also, thanks for bringing up Pale Fire, somebody had to.

What’s post modern about Name of the Rose?

I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:

  • It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.
  • It's a pastiche: high literature, philosophy, theology meets genre detective fiction
  • Intertextuality: abundant references to an expansive group of external texts
  • Thematically, it's all about no one overarching institution or system (even rationality and empiricism) having a monopoly on truth.
  • A major element is signs: we don't have direct access to the thing in itself, only references to the thing. Hence, the name of the rose, not the rose.

It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.

The characters in the later parts of Don Quixote have read the first part of Don Quixote.

Several people replying to you point out that the traits that you cite as quintessentially postmodern have antecedents in literature prior to the postmodern era. As ever, there's nothing new under the sun. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is often called the first postmodern novel despite having been written smack-bang in the middle of the modernist era. Many of the techniques associated with experimental postmodern literature were first used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), if not earlier.

I've heard the quip than Don Quixote was the first postmodern novel.

It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.

So is The Lord of the Rings, or Dinotopia.

It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.

Some of the earliest novels were epistolary novels, framed as a series of letters written by a fictional person. This would make it more premodern than postmodern.

Postmodernism is a historical attitude more than a rigid set of textual features, even if textual features point towards or away from a book being written in a postmodern spirit. The Voynich Manuscript is weird as hell, but it's not postmodern, and good luck drawing a line between modernism and postmodernism (and some even argue that we are now in a post-postmodern era, so good luck drawing that line too).

I vote that we call it metamodern. We can just change the prefix every time we reach a new era.

Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.

The "signalling" perspective is not really that helpful. Sure, people get into things to signal, whether it's becoming goth to hit on hot goth chicks or going fishing to make your red-tribey dad like you. What's the evidence that (1) this does not result in them actually liking the thing, and finding ways of deriving enjoyment from it qua itself? I suspect that (2) this is how most people actually come to like things most of the time, and (3) there is a pronounced tendency to only see the signalling component of preferences where we don't like the signalling component. (This is so obnoxiously outgroupy! Surely they're just doing this on purpose to shit on the ingroup!)

I know, because whenever I see this for US red tribe culture (like gratuitously mentioning your gun collection or (non-furbaby) dogs), my gut instinct is also to cringe and interpret it as "pure signalling", in much the same way. Like, who would actually enjoy hunting? "Dude, I camped in the woods for three days during the hurricane the other day, just me and my .22, and shot a 400 pound buck! Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" - "I'm not sure I get what's so fun about that" - "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely got pretty grimey, haha." with the snide implication being "But me and my big masculine outdoorsy self had a great time." If any of our red-tribe denizens think this interpretation is ridiculous and sneering, good; consider the possibility that that is also how Infinite Jest enjoyers feel about the above dismissal.

(...and I say this as someone who hasn't read any of these books. The most stereotypically pomo piece of literature I've made it through was House of Leaves, out of a sense of duty to xkcd, and I found it silly.)

The first and only time I encountered Infinite Jest, it was the guy so dedicated to social climbing he became a gay black communist to pick up college-educated white chicks. And he had suddenly started talking about infinite jest without ever mentioning anything about infinite jest. I was just there when he reliably brought it up with the same lines in every interaction with a new person. He was 30 though and knew exactly what he was doing.

I was frankly confused as to why he was so obsessed with a book he wasn't actually reading and couldn't explain what he liked about it.

I like genre trash, and am not embarrassed about it, and I have very low tolerance for performative waffling.

I initially thought the first paragraph was a joke about you meeting Obama in his law school days.

I haven't read Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow, or White Noise. However I adore Catch-22, and find Slaughterhouse 5 perfectly fine. YMMV.

Yeah Catch 22 is great and I wouldn't consider it guilty of being overly complex or allegorical. You can read it pretty straight up as 'man beset by the system' and it works

Gravity’s Rainbow left me feeling like I was intellectually nauseated and on psychedelics the entire time. Great book but it can catch you very off guard if you aren’t prepared for it.

You get kudos for reading any of those as far as I'm concerned. Last time I read any fiction my midwit ass was reading those paperbacks based on the Aliens franchise, with cool space marines on the cover.

St. Anthony of the Desert couldn't even read.

You are so far beyond most Mottizens, we can't even see you. Please remember us when you ascend.

postmodernism ... is... ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.

I would say this is exactly what GR and IJ do. GR is commentary on technology and the systems of control growing ever-larger. Think Seeing Like a State mixed with some of Uncle Ted's critiques, but in novel form. It's also really, really funny. I've read it three times and it keeps making more sense. There is a narrative present and the plotlines converge, even if not explicitly.

IJ is commentary on addiction, technology, and alienation. Large parts of it are tedious and terminally unfunny. There is a cohesive narrative, although it's jumbled up. As someone who has dealt with many, many addicts, the parts about addiction and rehab are especially poignant.

I would agree that plenty of other post-modernist novels fit your critiques and are sorely lacking as novels. I got very little from Gaddis' The Recognitions for example, even with a reader's guide, and wouldn't recommend it (J R, though, is a good one).

So, uh, why are you reading? Like what are you reading for?

You should read what you like if it's for enjoyment. Whether that's Tom Clancy(RIP) or Jane Austen(also RIP), or in your case Cormac McCarthy(RIP again). If you're trying to become well read, then read Shakespeare. If you just want to blend in with a certain crowd, well, that's going to entail plenty of other things you wouldn't necessarily choose to do, I'm not sure why the modern equivalent of Dickens is a bridge too far.

I have never understood the appeal of Shakespeare at all and I’ve tried to grasp it. Although the one book I suspect that has a chance at making me like him I haven’t got around to yet.

Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.

I have never watched Shakespeare on stage, but I have watched film adaptations that kept the original language, such as Romeo and Juliet (1968), Othello (1995), and Hamlet (1996). I prefer reading the plays; they have helpful footnotes, and in any case I can't understand what the movie actors are saying because they speak too fast. Besides, Shakespeare's directions are very minimalist ("exit, pursued by a bear"), with most of the action being implied through dialogue, so they are hardly distracting.

I'd recommend the Olivier Lear. TV version, stage-bound, and it started off (to me) slow. But when Lear hit "Come not between the dragon and his wrath" it just revved up and kept going from there on.

You can see why Edmund might have a grudge against his father, since Dad keeps insisting on introducing him as "Do you know my bastard son? Yeah, he's illegitimate. I have a proper born in wedlock elder son, but I never married this kid's mom." Yeah, thanks Dad!

The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).

The problem with Shakespeare is that he's (really well done) junk food that was so good and foundational that it has aged into literary prominence.

This causes problems - he has a lot of just funny shit, low brow humor, and satisfying basic chicken soup plotting (think Star Wars original trilogy). The facet of "you" that can enjoy Billy without engaging in classiness masturbation is the low brow blockbuster side of things.

But because most modern people require a reference guide or really turning their brains on they'll try and engage in a more "literary" way.

Those two things end up hitting at cross purposes.

The end result is that the most rewarding way is experience - know it well enough that you don't need to think really hard to realize that something someone just said was an upscale dick joke.

This is not helpful because a good response to "ehh I'm doubting" is not "watch it 50 times."

I guess I would recommend trying to see a stage version after recently having struggled through the written, and then just trying to vibe with the play.

This causes problems - he has a lot of just funny shit, low brow humor, and satisfying basic chicken soup plotting (think Star Wars original trilogy).

Yeah, Shakespeare is hilarious but some of the jokes definitely don't land without footnotes. Like in Hamlet:

"May I lie in your lap?" "No, my lord." "I mean my head in your lap." "Ay, my lord." "What, did you think I meant country matters [sex]?" "I think nothing, my lord." "That's a fair thought, to lie between maids' legs." "What?" "Nothing."

That scene is funny as hell if you know that "nothing" was used as slang for the vagina, and that Shakespeare was doing the equivalent of making "pussy" double entendres. But that's something most people aren't going to know without having it pointed out, which just makes the scene confusing to a modern audience.

An actor can probably get "country matters" across, perhaps by breaking accent and rhythm a bit so it's clearly "cunt-ry matters" (whether that's the derivation or not). As for "nothing" meaning "vagina" (or "pussy"), that's likely a recent fabrication.

I agree with @07nk. Shakespeare is meant to be performed, not read, and reading a play is almost always an inferior experience. Sure, some people do enjoy reading his plays because most of them have some banger lines, but the drama, the humor, the intensity, is all in the performance. It's why there are so many "interpretations" of Shakespeare using the same lines but completely different sets and costuming and you can still deliver a compelling experience even if they don't look like Elizabethans.

Are you not getting it because of the dialect issues, or because of something else? I find his plots very funny, but with writing that requires some footnotes(and of course, it often doesn't have a deeper meaning, it's entertainment)- but, the first folio and the KJV are, literally, the defining core of modern English literature, and if you want to understand literature in modern English, you have to read those two things.

I don't like Shakespeare either.

But to give him credit, I'm sure he was exceptionally talented in his time. I think it's like criticizing Newton because he only discovered classical physics: we've progressed not only material and objective knowledge but changed taste.

Likewise, I read Lovecraft and his depiction of eldritch horrors is tame compared to what he inspired.

(Although unlike material and knowledge, whether our culture's taste "progresses" is debatable. Especially because sometimes "what's old is new again". I do think it progresses in that some concepts, like tropes, are discovered then always remain in style; at least until we undergo change as radical as an apocalypse that destroys material and knowledge progress.)

Part of the criticism I have for him lies on me. How can I say I don’t like him if I don’t understand what he’s about? I just don’t see the appeal at all. I’m not sure if Newton is a good parallel case. And actually in his case, Newtonian Mechanics still has a ton of practical applicability today, specifically in fluid dynamics.

I enjoy Shakespeare because the language is beautiful (as @HereAndGone2 said), but also because I find the way in which he highlights the universality of the human condition to be deeply moving. I remember when I was young and I finally understood the meaning of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy (rather than just bouncing off the language). It was a formative moment for me, realizing that his topic (wishing to die, but being too afraid of what comes after to death to commit suicide) was something that was still relevant to modern people. It made me realize that humans through all the years have felt the same kinds of feelings we do, and struggled with the same kinds of things we do.

Also seconding that Shakespeare meant his work to be performed, not read. I still enjoy reading his plays, but seeing them performed brings a lot to the experience.

For me, anyway, it's the beauty of the language. I first tackled a Shakespeare play, "Hamlet", when I was about fourteen-fifteen expecting it to be a hard slog because it was Great Literature and more than that, Great Poetry, and all the Great Poetry I had encountered up till then was difficult to understand because of what seemed to be deliberate obscurantism and excessive verbiage.

So I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and expected to have to hack my way through the undergrowth. But it wasn't like that at all. First, I suspect, because I was reading a schools edition of the play which was in modern English and meant for idiot school kids to be able to follow. Second, because a lot of the terminology was recognisable to me as idioms still current in Hiberno-English (e.g. the bit about "walking abroad", I didn't need a note telling me this meant 'outside' because this was how it was used in my locale as well).

I ended up with bells ringing in my head because the words all struck against one another and chimed. When I finished, I understood why Shakespeare was considered a great.

Maybe you're not as susceptible to the mere sound-music of words, but yeah. The plays are meant to be performed and not just read, but even Iago's little speech here is just so hypnotising because of the slurring, murmurous repetition of the syllables if you read it aloud:

Look where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

I really enjoyed Infinite Jest, it's definitely a slog in the beginning. There's a real plot there, but it's well camouflaged and you have to search it out in the references and clues left in the text.

I still think the part about masks and video calls is probably the single most perceptive observation of the coming culture of social media and I'm amazed that it was written when cutting edge social media was a geocities my first text web page.

Also Kate Glompert's description of depression is so alien to my experience (I was raised on a steady diet of Norman Vincent Peale). It's a very useful reminder of how different other people's mental experience are.

The one thing I have to give post-modernists a point for is their observation that there is no such thing as objective truth, value or morality, in the strict sense. That, and that it is impossible to remove the filters that exist between us and "reality", the mind is a lens: in the absence of the lens, there is no mind.

The map is not the territory. This is true, it cannot be otherwise. I then immediately part ways with them: yet, you cannot remove the map and still have navigation.

There is no observation without an observer, and there is no such thing as truly objective, privileged observer.

This is, once again, true. But I disagree with every fiber of my being on the implications.

I think that is a poor excuse to entirely dispense with the idea of consensus reality, of shared standards, or even making moral arguments. It would be akin to claiming that since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out a perfect ruler or clock, your broken timepiece is just as good as the atomic clock in NIST's basement. Or that your eye balled estimate of your dick as actually 12 inches long is of any value, though accuracy would probably be preferable given the tendency/desire that some postmodernists display: they enjoy sucking themselves off. At least it would get in the way of the unproductive navel gazing.

We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.

The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works. The fact that we cannot deduce a universal system of ethics from scratch does not mean we cannot seek to find a theory of morality that most of us will happily subscribe to, or at least consider a directional improvement. You are telling me that we all wear glasses, but I will object to the sleight of hand you then employ, which is snatching them away and declaring that the myopia is honesty.

(I once had a lengthy relationship with a scholar who subscribed to post-modernism, if not as awfully as what I have described. It was... painful, even if think she's not a bad person, even if we parted amicably.)

Your comment reminds me of the famous Asimov line from an essay, which I agree with: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.

The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works.

The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.

E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?" The choice of the question is subjective, but this question certainly has an objective answer, which we can figure out or at least approximate, and then we can decide whether or not the answer has some use.

And anyone motivated to actually learn about beauty standards or anything else so fundamentally subjective would certainly be motivated to come up with objective measures like that. But the fact that so many stop before that step and just say, "Welp, I guess that means I can just declare that any arbitrary beauty standard that places me at the top is exactly as reasonable and proper as the mainstream ones that place me at the bottom, and enforce it through righteous violence."

I recall first encountering something like this back in 2014 during the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, when the exact same people who had decried the Jack Thompsons of the world in the 90s-00s for falsely (or at least empirically unjustifiably) attributing violent acts by gamers to influence from playing violent video games were championing the Anita Sarkeesians of the world for alleging that "misogynistic" tropes in video games would cause gamers to adopt misogynistic attitudes. When I pointed out the obvious contradiction, I was rebuffed with the notion that misogynistic attitudes aren't like violent actions because they're internal and subjective and whatever, and so we can just declare it to be the case through standard literary analysis.

When, of course, the simple, completely obvious next step would be to do some sort of study or analysis of comparing like-for-like gamers exposed to identical video games but-for the presence of misogynistic tropes, and then measure their behavior afterwards (or rather: measure the delta of their behavior afterwards versus beforehand) with respect to enacting acts or saying things determined to be misogynistic. And equally obvious is that without at least 2 different independent, ideally competing, parties doing the hard work of this kind of research and all having to inevitably, helplessly, conclude the same thing, we really can't make any confident statements of truth regarding that matter, and that anyone who does claim to know the truth is at best ignorant and most likely a charlatan like Jack Thompson was.

Pointing this out basically never got any response from such people.

The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.

E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?"

My answer is that you aren't talking about "true objectivity" but something that is about as close as we can get in practice.

When you that kind of study on aesthetic standards, what does emerge is not some kind of agent-independent, viewpoint neutral fact. What you have you established is a fact about the very subjective people and cultures you've studied.

(Assuming the statistics was done correctly, which does not happen as often as anyone would like in sociology or anthropology.)

It is an "objective" fact that X beauty standard is the most popular for Y (most humans, assuming your sampling was representative). That does not make it truly universal. Language is imprecise, so I will say that have found out an empirical truth about the specific subset of entities you have surveyed. In the same manner as we normally talk about truth, of course.

In other words:

Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color. You have a frame of reference, just a reasonably well specified one. An alien would possibly disagree, or the people who are colorblind and simply can't see blue. What you have won is a popularity contest (done scientifically), and not one about ontology.

You can't dodge this metaphysical headache, but most of the time, it can be ignored from a pragmatic point of view. If the NIST clock has the endorsement of the best physicists, if it predicts temporal events with better accuracy, if it matches the consensus of other clocks better? Then I will say it's the best clock, without worrying too hard about the fact that I can't help smuggling in my own preferences about what it means to be a better clock or even the importance of telling time.

Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color.

Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.

I would argue with God if he tried this, or at least I'd ask for reasons to believe in objectivity beyond the fact that he's God and thus could be expected to know better. So would I if he claimed that 1 = 2 (without definitional trickery). Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.

I've already been writing a detailed essay about the topic, and this is something I will address in more depth. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your arguments and their implications.

Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.

I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.

Perhaps and (probably yes), but just because an argument is compelling or the person making it rhetorically sophisticated beyond my ability to parse does not make it actually true. I'd say it's cheating, but I doubt an actually omnipotent being would care what I think if it was trying to make me believe false things on purpose.

I then immediately part ways, because I think that is a poor excuse to entirely dispense with the idea of consensus reality, of shared standards, or even making moral arguments. It would be akin to claiming that since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out a perfect ruler or clock, your broken timepiece is just as good as the atomic clock in NIST's basement. Or that your dick is actually 12 inches long, which would probably be preferable given the tendency/desire that some postmodernists display: they enjoy sucking themselves off.

Or that special relativity implies moral relativity.

That observation is one of those things that is a reasonable point, and then once you've given that inch, the worst people in the world steal a child-sex-trafficking mile. Everything worthwhile about the point is better organized as the map/territory distinction, and anyone who seems to be trying to disparage the territory in general is probably pseudointellectual trash.

Or that your eye balled estimate of your dick as actually 12 inches long is of any value...

I'll have you know that I didn't just eyeball it, I eyeballed it really hard

Better than eyeballing it flaccid, I can grant that much.

I'm literally reading Infinite Jest right now. Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me. The more well read you are otherwise the more you'll get out of it. Blood Meridian was a harder read for me the Infinite Jest (though it's an amazing book as well).

Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me.

Dude, you literally just became the imagined antagonist from my original post.

This is becoming one of themotte's great long-running arguments. I'm mostly in the Skill Issue camp, but it does forget the critical role that individual taste plays - I love Infinite Jest, but also put down Gravity's Rainbow. If you can handle McCarthy you can pretty much handle anything DFW throws at you (the main difference is IJ's nonlinear structure, both temporally and with the footnotes). You should consider picking up The Passenger/Stella Maris and seeing if you hate it.

Edit: my other advice is that you appear to have come away from Infinite Jest with pretty much the same critique of postmodernism that DFW makes in his essays on the topic. He Has Noticed The Bodies, and IJ is a kind of desperate thrashing against the limits of postmodern literature (the Pale King, too, and far more tragically). I think this is one reason that IJ is so long, because even with its postmodern style it's nearly impossible to finish the book without coming away from it with the kind of genuine love and care for its characters that postmodernism apparently forecloses. Every time I finish IJ, it feels like the end of a lengthy trip visiting good friends in a foreign country.

I don't know why your comment was the reason, but it made me remember that I did really enjoy Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist / Edward Teach.

It is drastically non-linear and starts with several dozen pages of footnotes that are longer than the primary text. I think you could call it something like "postmodern meta-psychology analysis" or something. And yet, I did find it good, readable, and deep.

Maybe that's the whole point of postermodernist literature? Different elements of it are highly resonant with a reader while others are not. It's less a bellcurve (like, say, 18th century American literature) and more of a stochastic matching algorithm.

Yeah I would call that about as postmodern, in a certain sense, as philosophy gets. It goes another level beyond the CCRU's "theoryfiction" (we all know Land, but Reza Negarestani would be a more fitting example). Where Negarestani is doing this wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how he's putting fiction in his serious philosophical work to problematize it, TLP makes that itself a central problem. I think the real issue is that we have no proper sense of a unified post-postmodernism - my bet would be that the next generation will see this as totally ridiculous, that there was a unified yet-to-be-named movement encompassing all the TLPesque/Landian/Wallachian/Cormago-Mullenite/Artheauxvian forces that were both unleashed by and reacted against the postmodernism of the late 20th Century.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo

Of these, I have read Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity's Rainbow. The others simply didn't appeal to me (Catch-22) or there is no way in hell I'd read them (Infinite Jest, White Noise). Vonnegut is Vonnegut, he's nearly always good. I did manage to make it through Gravity's Rainbow and came out the other end agreeing it's a great novel. About a third of the way through, I was "yeah it's fine", half-way through I was "what the hell" because it just about had hit me over the head by then, but I staggered on to the end and was glad I did.

Skill Issues? Eh, maybe. Some books just don't work for some people, and I have no problem with that. The problem I do have is sneering, if a book doesn't work for someone then it's because the book is terrible (to be fair, some books are terrible) and not because the person reading it doesn't want to put the work in/expected it to agree with their preferences.

I started in on Gravity’s Rainbow, but it was in no way a book I enjoyed. After three pages I returned it to the library.

I want to enjoy reading. My flavor is more in line with Weymouth’s Veddy British translation of the New Testament. His St. Paul is a true philosopher.

This is an area where I find utilitarianism helpful. What’s the purpose of art? If art is to increase collective wellbeing, however indirectly, then a lot of literature is worthless. It’s endless yapping and bickering, shilled by a class of people with a high verbal IQ who are paid to professionally yap and have no interest in considering the longterm outcome of their recommendations, and yet somehow have authority on what people should read. The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature, and every horrible monstrosity of today was designed by some pretentious bespectacled architect who surely claims to love “literature”. All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.

I find your comment nonsensical.

The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature

You don't consider the bible "literature"?

All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.

The elite of both the red and blue tribe are well read, they just read different things and want to be known for reading different things. OP has good examples of blue-tribe reading, so here's some examples of red-tribe coded reading: the Bible, ancient greek plays, Shakepseare, John Locke, Federalist Papers, Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Little House on the Prairy.

There are similarities between the medieval approach to the Bible and literature, but the differences are too significant to usefully classify them together under the same umbrella term. A medieval Christian did not read the Bible for entertainment, but usually heard the text within a solemn (and multisensory) context with the specific aim of learning from God as sole authority. The normal context of digesting the Bible was distinct from that of literature, even among those who were literate, as they engaged in rich devotional activities. Among literate monks who were taught the Bible for the purpose of teaching the masses, the books were analyzed allegorically and tropologically, yet this was always oriented toward something of Christ or the moral life. Symbols in Isaiah were not considered in light of what an author had in mind, but in light of what God was saying about Christ and what Christ was saying about the urgently-important things which a man had to know and believe. There was no interest in discerning whether the text was written well (an early complaint against the Greek gospels was that they were written poorly, and the early church fathers did not disagree). They had no interest in dissecting the structure, plot, character development, authorial intent, milieu, or anything else which characterizes the modern appraisal of literature. The Bible was treated in a contextually and psychologically distinct way, and analyzed in a distinct way, from the modern treatment and analysis of literature. (Modern “Bible study” has a lot more in common with literature. But that’s an aberration from the medieval era. The master masons who built the cathedrals might have never read the Bible and instead kept a devotional book at home, and the monks who commissioned the cathedrals did not read it as literature in the sense in which we we understand the category).

Red tribe normies read Clancy(if male) and Little House(if young and/or female), and sometimes Heinlein. But a lot of your list is just elite coded, not particularly tribal coded.

I mostly agree. My point is just that elites of all belief systems read. And so saying "my civilizational enemies are all well-read" as @coffee_enjoyer did as a way to associate reading with his out group is nonsensical.

All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.

Well some of them surely can't read... unless you don't classify them as civilizational?

Anyway, I agree with your main point. Going too meta and abstract is generally bad for writing. Professional authorities on writing don't seem to be very good at it. How many great novelists got a degree? How many NYT 'bestsellers' are actually good and fun to read? Not to mention all the destructive fads that have been spurred by books. In Germany for instance "The Cloud" terrified millions, written just after the Chernobyl disaster with a brutal description of a meltdown, radiation poisoning, social breakdown. It was taught in schools.

Then we see German denuclearization and horrendously costly energy policies, in part spurred by electoral realities from a generation who'd been brought up on these scare stories.

Specifically thanking you for this comment.

I wish people would dive to a deeper level of analysis rather than posting variations on "No, actually, I liked that book" - which is most of the other comments in thread.

I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative.

I think that there are two disjoint subsets of readers. One subset (including both you and me) prefers literature which has an obvious, engaging plotline. The other subset seems to prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring books which are utterly unreadable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of meaning.

For class membership signalling, saying that you have read The Lord of the Rings will prove little. After all, the books are very readable even if you stay on the surface level and never engage with the deeper levels of meaning. By contrast, saying that you have read some postmodern novel which is utterly unreadable on the surface level will assure your class peers that you are one of them.

Personally, I am a bit less prescriptivist about it than you are, as long as nobody is making other people read books without an engaging plot. (Decades later, I am still bitter about having been made to read Tod in Venedig and Effi Briest in school. Admittedly, neither was postmodern -- they both had some excuse of a plot -- but the surface level plot was thin as hell, something which could be paraphrased in two pages.)

It's amazing that the cutoff between "sincerely enjoying literature" and "poser" passes exactly through your own limitations and tastes. It's funny, I've never heard anyone who espouses your theory place that line anywhere else.

The signaling claim seems to have become the strawman of the other side of the "Skill Issue" dispute. I enjoy Infinite Jest, Faust Part II, Twin Peaks, etc. in part precisely because the plots and themes are weird and difficult. It means every time you come back, you can bring new questions, find new answers, and leave with new questions. Imagine saying that some people prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring videogames which are utterly unplayable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of strategy meta - do you think that's what they're actually doing?

I don't think this is necessarily the case. You may signal your sophistication by other means as well. For instance you can talk how you enjoyed Antigone or The Orphan of Zhao for classics and something actually readable by Roberto Bolaño - for instance By Night in Chile, which is just 150 pages as opposed to 2666 slog. You can pick any other "ethnic" author and you can be golden. I just randomly searched for some Indonesian author and apparently Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan seems to be a good read and also just 150 pages. You cannot get more sophisticated for cheaper, you just have to say that an actually readable story is an allegory for colonialism or that is shows the world through other ways of knowing or some such.

You can also show sophistication by reading something else and readable from famous authors. For instance I really liked Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell. It is not as edgy and plebeian as 1984, and it shows how you went deeper into famous authors.

The other subset seems to prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring books which are utterly unreadable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of meaning.

I've seen this in anime a lot. Evangelion is the most obvious one, but even lowbrow series can be so long and have so much material that understanding them as a whole requires basically as much effort. You have series which people are rabid fans of because they know some obscure thing that is needed to properly understand the series. The major difference is that unlike classical literature, liking these series gains no status in the outside world.

There's a lot that I agree with here in principle, but as I've said several times here on the Motte, when it comes to books I'm a cheap date. I think where I'd differ is that I don't necessarily need a cohesive narrative in order to enjoy a book. I have a yen for absurdist humor and surrealism (oh hai Illuminatus! Trilogy), so it isn't hard for me to take delight in the riffing of a stylish author, regardless of the presence or absence of plot, as long as I find the book engaging. Take this passage from White Noise for example:

We are quartered in Centenary Hall, a dark brick structure we share with the popular culture department, known officially as American environments. A curious group. The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York emigres, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe-shadowed childhoods--an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles.

Forget the punchy, rapid-fire prose, for a second. This is a main character that is pretentious to the point of having his head so far up his own ass that I can't even say that he rivals William Shatner simply because said MC still takes himself far too seriously. At least Shatner is self-aware! And just about every adult in the book, with the possible exception of Babette, is like this! And that last sentence in the quoted passage was enough to jolt me right out of my reading; juxtaposing Formalism with bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles was so dissonant to me that I had to think about it before I could grok it, which just made me love it, and the book, even more. Does White Noise have any essential meaning? Not so much, in my view. It's much more a collection of loosely joined commentary with some exceptional scenes and turns of phrase, but the skewering of the self-important academia types alone is worth the price of admission for me--everything else is just bonus points.

In contrast, the works of Samuel Delany would, I think, would also qualify for purposes of this discussion, and as much as I want to like his books, I just don't. I slogged through both Triton and Dahlgren, hoping that either of them would hook me, but they never did. Dahlgren in particular had more than enough surreality to potentially pique my interest, but Odindamn, if there's ever a book that embodies the literal meaning of YAOI!, which is to say that it had no climax, no point, no meaning, brother that one is it! Perhaps they are a little too much of their time, and/or personal to the author himself, but I had to give him up as a bad job after going 0-2.

Now Pynchon, that dude is something else. He is, to me, a unique mix of dense, rich, and oddly engaging that adds up to something like Neal Stephenson meets the Coen brothers on a mind-obliterating dose of LSD. When I first picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I think I read the first section introducing Pirate Prentice and didn't read any more for like months, if not a year. That said, when I returned to the book, it did in fact engage me enough to keep me reading all the way through, though the freewheeling nature of the plot, such as it was, combined with the richness of the prose brought it, if not exactly adjacent to, at least into the same zip code as, a slog for me, at least at times. There was so much going on, with so many plot threads and countless references that there was no way in Hel that I was ever going to be able to keep it all straight on a single reading! But unlike with Delany, above, as the madcap insanity of Gravity's Rainbow finally, inevitably ended in its utter decoherence, I admired Pynchon for his elegance in pulling off the ending. I found I had thoroughly enjoyed it! And I absolutely thought to myself, "what the actual fuck did I just read?"


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