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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Looks like @KulakRevolt got a shoutout from Scott for his (her? Whence the catgirl branding?) review of a certain novel. Putting it in a Twitter thread was kind of weird, but I thought the piece was fascinating. The comparisons to Tolstoy and Tolkien are not only viscerally upsetting but also remarkably accurate. There are a couple points I wanted to address, but first, a little background.

The year was 20XX. I was a broke 19-year-old, fresh out of my freshman year, scrounging for scholarship opportunities. My mother ran across one held by some sort of Ayn Rand fan club. Read Atlas Shrugged, write an essay, and receive a decent one-off award. My memory suggests it was guaranteed, but a quick search only finds the more sane framing of a contest. They do apparently provide the book, though. In the end, I didn't bother with the contest, since I got an actual job for the summer, thus avoiding any creative output. How ironic.

This brings me to my first point: Atlas Shrugged in schools. A book which inspires diehard followers to spend their time and money bringing its insights to the unenlightened masses. A book which, simultaneously, people must be paid to read. That contrast is enough to make Atlas Shrugged useless in the eyes of public schools; it would be enough even if elites were united in their admiration for Rand's morality. In a vacuum, the book is Objectively a train wreck. But its true potential is revealed only under a certain sort of engagement, one which is anathema to public-school demands for measurable outcomes.

I'm talking about immersion. It is the same flavor of suspension-of-disbelief which lets humans devour hundreds or thousands of pages about hobbits. He who delves wholeheartedly into the book, populates its barren vistas and soulless boardrooms with art-deco trappings or noir atmosphere, fills in the caricatures with the look and feel and essence distilled from decades of American cultural mythology--yea, he shall be rewarded. And when he comes up for air, it is not the clumsy plotting or the inhuman dialogue which comes with him. Verisimilitude has been outsourced to his own mind.

No matter the flesh in which the well-immersed reader clothes it, though, the philosophy of Rand's heroes remains unambiguous. It is the one area where she leaves no room for improvisation. When the converts gather for book club, they are envisioning different Roarks and Tooheys, different Taggarts and Stadlers and Galts. But they know Objectivism when they see it.

Her works are remembered not for their style but for their steel spine.

I don't know where the catgirl comes from, but he's a man.

I assume it's the same reason as the typos in his Substack posts: to obfuscate his identity. He's said as much before on the Old Place.

I thought that was a great thread, and I'm disappointed it wasn't posted here. I can hardly blame him for choosing not to toil in obscurity instead of taking a shot for a wider audience.

When I read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager, I thought it was a great book, until I came to the 40+ page "radio broadcast" aka screed, skimmed over the last 3/4, and quickly tried to finish the book.

Kulak's meteoric rise on Twitter has been fascinating to watch. One of his threads — Are you racist or anti-semitic?, I believe — did numbers and put his follower count over 10K. His evocative style and grandiose ideas fit the medium very well, though I will miss having him around if he stops posting here.

It was back to Back "Poverty in the Past" and "The chinese Nightmare"

https://twitter.com/FromKulak/status/1629127671815741441?s=20

https://twitter.com/FromKulak/status/1629940660072505346?s=20

Both of them went over a million impressions and I added 7k followers in 3 days.

Which is weird because both were reposts. It was my 3rd and 4th time posting both of them...the algorithm's just that random that reposting threads which got 5k views the first time round can make them go viral if the stars Align.

Sadly "Racist vs. Antisemitic" Has never really done large numbers. I really wish it would start a hate storm... but I think its claim is too limited and its structure complex enough its really hard for people to start raging about it, also might have 1 too many inferential steps to get the angry mid-IQ types going

/images/16797214853878367.webp

Hallelujah! His prior follower count was leaving me deeply pessimistic about the virality of good writing. Glad to see, he's finally getting a fraction of the audience he deserves.

I was hooked since since he first posted Alex Jones Worsdsmith almost 4 years ago. Now he has the attention of people like Peterson and Scott Adams. I'm quite interested to see what kinds of ideas he will meme into the ether of right-wing twitter if he keeps this up.

It's a bit terrifying to me how well @KulakRevolt took to Twitter, like a fish discovering water for the first time. One of his threads was effusively praised by Scott Adams during one of his livestreams, and he's also followed by Jordan Peterson of all people.

It's a bit terrifying to me how well @KulakRevolt took to Twitter

Meritocracy still exists, bless the lord.

One of his threads was effusively praised by Scott Adams during one of his livestreams

Do you know which one?

It's kind of funny how Kulak's Twitter poasting style resembles Kamil Galeev's. Maybe it's just ending the final sentences without a full stop that does it

Also funny pics to keep the attention.

Kulak is finally living up to the libertarian/objectivist ideal of ruthless optimization.

Galeev, by the way, is lately posting in Russian on the futility of developing unique products in peripheral countries:

[…] 3. The most complex, but also the most interesting case. The development is there, it works, it is really unique - and yet objectively not bad. If it were at the centre of the world system, it might even have a future. But it is taking place on the semi-periphery, so there is no future for it and there won't be one. It will remain unique.

The relationship between the centre and the periphery/semi-periphery is asymmetrical. Original solutions - technological, economic, or anything else - can emerge anywhere. The problem with the semi-periphery is not that original solutions don't emerge here, but that they don't scale.

The scaling happens in the centre. Here an original and promising solution may be seen, invested in, polished and brought to fruition. And then, in a package with other ready-made solutions, they export it to the semi-periphery. Which in most cases is the most grateful and solvent consumer for the producers of solutions from the centre

This is generally understandable. From the point of view of the managers and authorities in the semi-periphery, buying a ready-made package of solutions from the centre >>> creating their own solutions. They are, incidentally, almost always right: imported solutions are indeed better. Largely because the centre has the environment and infrastructure to bring them to fruition, while the semi-periphery does not. And because of this fact, it is doomed to perpetual catch-up, while its truly unique and truly good solutions are doomed to remain unique

Uniqueness = (In the best case scenario) inability to scale

His tweeting style is designed to scale. So is Kulak's. It's not unique but it gets the job done.

Kulak is finally living up to the libertarian/objectivist ideal of ruthless optimization.

Yeah, apparently he keeps a spreadsheet of all his tweets to track how well they do and he's reposting old ones now that he has more followers.

Galeev, by the way, is lately posting in Russian on the futility of developing unique products in peripheral countries:

Yes, and note that Kulak is writing about the US even though he's Canadian. He often writes about specific things that have no applicability to Canada at all, like the legality of advocating for revolution. This is a criminal offence in Canada.

Its ambiguous... I avow Marxist political economy ( but libertarian actual economics)...

So it'd be a struggle for them to actually prosecute me without defacto claiming that all marxist deserve jail time or worse.

Fucking hell, don't even compare Rand to Tolkien, even in jest.

As to her success at sales - "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" are very American in theme. Strip out the Objectivism and what you've got left is your basic American "from the log cabin to the White House" legend. Brave, smart, handsome guy is lone pioneer fighting against reactionary social forces (and Rand being anti-Communist helped, as her villains and society are vaguely Socialist to Communism tinged) who succeeds via grit, moxie, and being just that darn wonderful, plus he gets the girl! Stuffy old convention is defeated, Progress, Science and Free Market Capitalism conquer all!

That's a theme and a style very appealing in the 50s and even 60s and 70s - after all, sticking it to the fossilised social consensus and striking out to do your own thing was in tune with the counter-culture. I read a fan book about Star Trek back in the day, and one sentence that struck me was something about "so-and-so of course read The Fountainhead, isn't it striking how most people in the fandom have done?". It was phrased in such a way that the assumption was of course everyone knew what The Fountainhead was, and it made me seek out Rand's books. Unfortunately, a short encounter with Miss Rand's prose and philosophy turned me off so completely I didn't even buy the book after flipping through it in the book shop. Speaking of the non-BDSM sexual relationships, the part I opened at random had Dagny Taggart rhapsodising about wearing the chains of the man she loved and, me being a convent school girl educated by the nuns, I bounced off a character who had so little sense of self she only found meaning in being the appendage of some man 😁 Yes, I do get the irony that if I had opened it at another part, this is not the impression I would have come away with, but I still would not be sympathetic to people who justify adultery on the basis of "your wife is a bitch, I deserve you more".

Rand would probably have loathed Roddenberry's vision of the future, but the politics don't matter - I honestly think most people who read the books have no interest in the actual politics, save for a minority who become "this is the way!". It's the theme that appeals - the lone genius who is exploited by society, looked down on, and who stubbornly sticks to his vision and is eventually vindicated. If you're a teenager, it's the ultimate "I'll show them, I'll show them all!"

As someone that has not only read but reread Atlas Shrugged, I don’t agree with your cause map of why I enjoyed the book as a teenager at all. In fact, it sounds like yet another indictment of libertarians as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” which has always been a poor effort by leftists to use their love of power dynamics and status games to try to explain values anathema to their own. My enjoyment of Rand’s work can be attributed to exactly one personality trait/flaw: I hold in very low regard the kinds of people who insist they have a right to my time or energy.

My enjoyment of Rand’s work can be attributed to exactly one personality trait/flaw: I hold in very low regard the kinds of people who insist they have a right to my time or energy.

So her work clicked with you because it was a compatible opinion. Her political stance didn't convert you, it was "yeah, she gets it about moochers and looters!"

If you will pardon me, it's also a teenage trait to be self-obsessed, because that's the time we're trying to figure ourselves out, who we are, and what our place in the world is. The depths of our own selves are endlessly fascinating, because we don't know what we'll pull up when we go trawling there. And that kind of deep gazing takes a lot of time and energy. So naturally "my time and energy is too important and vital, others need to demonstrate they've earned the right to my attention" is a stance appealing to the adolescent who feels pulled every way by the demands of family, school, peers, society and trying to set the quicksilver changes of mind and body into a more fixed shape to develop their own personality and character.

her villains and society are vaguely Socialist to Communism tinged

I wouldn't say "vaguely" at all. The USA in Atlas Shrugged is pretty much explicitly a Communist state.

It's years (might be close to 20 years, actually), since I read AS but if I recall correctly, even the end-state government in Atlas Shrugged isn't really communist. There's still private businesses (again, I think?), they're just regulated to hell and back, and the looter/moocher government isn't as much controlled by an explicitly ideological party on a crusade to implement a formal Marxist-Leninist ideology as just operating on general collectivist principles and being steered by ad hoc ideas and power struggles inside the ruling clique. It's more like a big Venezuela than Soviet Union. You might call it "Socialist", but "Socialist" is a fairly wider and more inchoate, as a concept, than "Communist". However, my feel is that the "People's States" that appear to be in power everywhere else are supposed to be communist.

Of course, I might be wrong on this, but I guess checking this would require reading the whole book again, which isn't exactly a quick project...

It's in the process of becoming one, not already one. A repeated conflict is the government nationalizing private enterprise.

Rand needed an editor but Atlas Shrugged is a good book. Like almost good books, it is good not because of the protagonist but the villain. Rand exposes so accurately the hollowness of the James Taggart type.

This brings me to my first point: Atlas Shrugged in schools. A book which inspires diehard followers to spend their time and money bringing its insights to the unenlightened masses. A book which, simultaneously, people must be paid to read. That contrast is enough to make Atlas Shrugged useless in the eyes of public schools; it would be enough even if elites were united in their admiration for Rand's alien prose.

What? Every book in public schools is foisted upon the students.

But most of them don't inspire some small fraction of philosophy fanatics. Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

It's the combination of stylistic suck and some ephemeral, hard-to-measure goodness which makes the school system uncomfortable. Immersion is not a gradeable category.

But most of them don't inspire some small fraction of philosophy fanatics.

To the chagrin of many of the teachers for sure.

But most of them don't inspire some small fraction of philosophy fanatics. Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

I will point, again, to The Cruicible.

EDIT: yes, I get the distinction; no one points to a Progressive-Favored Fiction as core to their philosophy, all the students complain about it sucking and miss the deeper themes unless they're hammered into the reader's head with a rock, and the people who end up internalizing the message either point to higher-class pop fiction or to conventional and respected philosophers. Yet the schools have long had no objection to doing it anyway, and to being the ones wielding those rock-hammers.

Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

Maybe not, but don't you think maybe that a lot of women took a chunk out of the national birth rate because of it, which is much more macro-historically important?

No, I don't think Jane Austen inspired a lot of women to hold out for Mr. Darcy, which is what I presume you're getting at here.

Granted that most folks today think of Colin Firth standing in a lake if you mention Jane Austen, but that's because most people today don't actually read books. None of Austen's writing actually carried the message "You deserve a hot rich dude." In her day, they were not considered "chick lit" and nobody read them as telling women to hold out for better, but rather, as comedies of manners that were also cautionary tales about how screwed women were if they didn't settle for someone, and also how unpleasant it was to be forced to settle for anyone.

Give me a break, it was a scathing description of predatory marriage habits among the idle class, like Dangerous Liaisons. They really missed the boat with the “Pride and prejudice and zombies“ thing. It should be called Parasites Versus Vampires, no additions needed.

Give me a break, it was a scathing descrption of predatory marriage habits among the idle class, like Dangerous Liaisons.

That's an inane comparison. Dangerous Liaisons is about 18th century French nobles; Jane Austen wrote about early 19th century English gentry. Not the same generation, the same culture, or even the same social class. (Aristocrats are on a completely different level than gentry, kind of like Mid to Upper Middle Class vs. the 1%.) Not the same themes or messaging, not the same stories. You're just throwing anything "European, pre-Industrial, not about orphans" into the same bucket.

Les Liaisons dangereuses is more akin to Pamela, both being 18th century epistolary novels written by men about the travails of virtuous women at the hands of depraved aristocrats, though Pamela has more moralising in its conclusion in the particularly English style (Pamela marries her reformed rake) while the French novel has a morally unhappy ending (everyone ends up in a bad ending, villains and heroines both).

Austen is not at all in the same sphere. Much more subtle gradations, less rakishness (Wickham is a cad but he's nowhere near the kind of wealthy, socially secure seducer as in Pamela or Les Liaisons) and a more naturalistic exploration of society in a narrow band.

Are you going to list all the differences, that would no doubt make the comparison more inane, as only identical things can be compared. One's an epistolary novel written by a man. Perhaps why the author was less deluded about the moral caliber and empathy to be granted to its vain, snobbish and useless protagonists. The similarity is the preoccupation with the sexual schemes of rich people who felt entitled to everything while never having worked a day in their life.

How many Jane Austen novels have you read? Because I've read all of them, and what you are describing sounds like none of them.

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a lot of women took a chunk out of the national birth rate because of it

I'm not sure what version of Jane Austen novels you are reading, maybe you're going by the bastardised modern movie adaptations? Mr Darcy as Mr Right, and waiting until you get Mr Right because you deserve the rich, hot, high-status hero rather than the ordinary guy? So women turn down chances at marriage and children because they won't take what they can get in the window of their prime fertile years?

That's not the message of Austen's books. She's very clear-headed about the vital necessity for women to marry, because for women of a certain class (stuck between the working poor and the gentry with inherited wealth), they can't economically survive without a husband. The entire plot of "Pride and Prejudice" revolves around Mrs. Bentley's desperate attempts to get her daughters married off. Mr. Bentley is, in fact, a bad father; he make Elizabeth his favourite, ignores his other daughters, and does nothing to assure Elizabeth's future. He teaches her and gives her a wider view of the world, but it's in effect making her a substitute son, and an amusing companion for himself. He regards his wife with indifference, and leaves the burden of assuring their daughters' futures on her (and she's not really capable, she is a silly woman, but she is genuinely doing her best). The crisis is that he only has a life interest in the estate, and the moment he dies, she and the girls will all be turfed out with no money of their own. Her elder daughters have to marry, and make good marriages to men with enough money to support them and the rest of their families, before that happens so that she and the younger girls will have breathing space and resources. She's also competing with every other mother with daughters for the pool of eligible young men - that's the interest in Mr. Bingley, who is good-natured but has nothing else other than his income to recommend him. That's why it's a disaster when Kitty runs off with Wickham (with no indication that either of them intend marriage, and you can tell at the end that Kitty will spend her married life sponging off her sisters who made advantageous marriages). Kitty has not alone ruined her own reputation, she is tainting the reputations - and hence the marriage chances - of all her sisters.

You only understand all this when you're older; reading the novels in school doesn't emphasise this enough, or rather, you're too young to get why parents worry about marriage and money and all the rest of it. "Persuasion" is about romance and marriage for love, but not the conventional teen romance notion - Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have their engagement broken out of not alone bad (her father's unwarranted snobbery) but good (family friend intervenes because she thinks this is not a suitable match) reasons, and wait years until - by the standards of the time, and maybe today's standards of "the wall" - she is out of her prime years. Theirs is an adult romance. "Sense and Sensibility" is about a family that do suffer the fate Mrs. Bennett fears - the father dies, the son inherits and prioritises his own family so the mother and sisters are turned out of the house with their own scanty resources. The 'sense' of the eldest sister is contrasted with the 'emotionalism' of the middle, who is all about the romance and the passion and not basing her attraction on reason. Spoiler alert for 212 year old novel: in the end, despite an 18 year age gap, the middle daughter ends up happily married to the second male lead:

Henry Dashwood, his second wife, and their three daughters live for many years with Henry's wealthy bachelor uncle at Norland Park, a large country estate in Sussex. That uncle decides, in late life, to will the use and income only of his property first to Henry, then to Henry's first son (by his first marriage) John Dashwood, so that the property should pass intact to John's four-year-old son Harry. The uncle dies, but Henry lives just a year after that and he is unable in such short time to save enough money for the future security of his wife Mrs Dashwood, and their daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, who are left only a small income. On his deathbed, Mr Henry Dashwood extracts a promise from his son John to take care of his half-sisters. But before Henry is long in the grave, John's greedy wife, Fanny, persuades her husband to renege on the promise, appealing to his concerns about diminishing his own son Harry's inheritance, despite the fact that John is already independently wealthy thanks to both his inheritance from his mother and his wife's dowry. Henry Dashwood's love for his second family is also used by Fanny to arouse her husband's jealousy, and persuade him not to help his sisters financially.

...Marianne recovers from her illness, and Elinor tells her of Willoughby's visit. Marianne realizes she could never have been happy with Willoughby's immoral, erratic, and inconsiderate ways. She values Elinor's more moderated conduct with Edward and resolves to model herself after her courage and good sense. Edward later arrives and reveals that, after his disinheritance, Lucy jilted him in favour of his now wealthy younger brother, Robert. Elinor is overjoyed. Edward and Elinor marry, and later Marianne marries Colonel Brandon, having gradually come to love him. The two couples live as neighbours, with sisters and husbands in harmony with each other. Willoughby considers Marianne as his ideal but the narrator tells the reader not to suppose that he was never happy.

It was Lydia who ran off with Mr. Wickham, not Kitty. Lydia married Mr. Wickham, Kitty married a clergyman, Mary married a law clerk at her uncle's firm, Elizabeth married Mr. Darcy, and Jane married Mr. Bingley.

Thanks for the correction, I'm always mixing up the younger sisters.

That's certainly the plot of Jane Austen's books - but the theme of the "bastardized modern version" is the conclusion a modern person would draw even if they read the originals.

Yes, the heroines of Jane Austen books have to marry for sound financial reasons. That is not an endorsement of marriage! It's an endorsement of having enough money. For a fun romantic fiction, it's still an excellent plot device to make your character have to go flirt with someone, and then you write about the ups and downs of the flirting versus the finances. The lesson a modern woman takes is that you should have your own apartment and job, and then you will never have to flirt with anyone except Mr. Darcy.

Of course, the point of the "Prejudice" in the "Pride and Prejudice" is that you might not want to flirt with Mr. Darcy either, and you might need to get over yourself and think twice to land a really good match, but that's typically not the theme I see emphasized by modern readers.

Sure, modern adaptations like to recast them as fun romances in pretty frocks. That's the success of Bridgerton, as it took the Regency Romance genre and just made a few changes to bring it up to modern tastes. But Austen is not a Regency Romance (though she might have influenced the genre) and her practicality about "these are the economic facts of life" as well as "what is marriage about? what is love?" are not the same "marry rich" or "get your own money then you can chase the sexual passion" tropes.

She contrasts the mere mercantile marriages for money, which are often unhappy for various reasons, and the romantic entanglements where it's all about passion and sex (from the imprudence of Lydia running off with Wickham, to other relationships in the novels where the attraction is superficial, based on a romantic notion derived from pop culture, and is often revealed to be shallow, fake, and undependable). 'Find someone who you can respect and who respects you, with similar values, and both of you live by a code of honour' is her ultimate message. Elizabeth Bennett gets a rich husband, but not all her heroines do. What matters more is someone compatible, honest, and virtuous. And that holds for what the men should be like, as well as the women.

Of course, the point of the "Prejudice" in the "Pride and Prejudice" is that you might not want to flirt with Mr. Darcy either, and you might need to get over yourself and think twice to land a really good match, but that's typically not the theme I see emphasized by modern readers.

Well, a superficial reader who only sees things through a modern lens, sure. But I could similarly recast the story of Les Miserables, Great Expectations, or Madame Bovary with shallow chick-lit themes. This is why actually reading and understanding literature is important, and it's hardly fair to blame Jane Austen for inspiring chick-flicks loosely based on her novels.

I think a lot of people do still read the old classics and "get" what the actual point was, but this is incidentally why I disagree with the popular sentiment that high school English classes are terrible and kill love of reading by making teenagers read old books they may not necessarily enjoy. Not all books are supposed to be "easy" or "fun."

(Though I maintain that Dickens and Austen are actually enjoyable reads; I liked Dickens even in high school. Madame Bovary, on the other hand, was not a book I think any teenager can really relate to. I found it horribly boring in high school, and reread it as an adult and appreciated it much more.)

Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

But many people took the lessons of Scarlet Letter, The Diary of a Young Girl, and Uncle Toms Cabin to heart. Books that are in curriculum to promote an ideology, even a non-controversial one, aren't the exception you attenpt to present them as.

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