BOOK CLUB: Kill All Normies Ch 4+5 (Patreon)

[Pictured: Pat Buchanan's "Culture War Speech" at the 1992 Republican Convention] 

Chapter 4 zooms in on "previous American culture wars". It's easy to think of this past decade as so unique in its social media skin suit, but Nagle's comparison and contrast to previous culture wars kind of orients us in history a little bit. Pat Buchanan seems like such an iconic bigoted conservative crank:

Merit point towards intersectionality embedded in the reminders that gay rights and womens rights were part of the same post Cold War Red Scare in prior culture wars.

I wrote down William Jennings Bryan and Herbert Marcuse to google. I was interested in their little appearances in these chapters. Always use books as ciphers to discover new books!

I never really had Milo on my radar, and this book talks about him so much, and he sounds so annoying and ugly and i look forward to continuing not to think about him very much after being done with this book.

Chapter 4 felt like a kind of extension on the previous couple of chapters, ultimately tracking the roles of transgression and piousness has shifted around the political lanscape.

"4chan is also more of a product of the sexual revolution than of conservatism" (p. 64)

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Then we start punching left! Attacking the gender fluid snowflakes like God intended!!!!

Someone mentioned in the first checkpoint thread that reading about these extremely online zietgeisty events in the early 2010s made them feel angry. Like dont remind me!!! I don't want to go back!!! We're beyond this!!!!!! 

I kind of felt that way about chapter 5. I have never loved what felt like the ineffectual excesses of well meaning leftists in Universities, but I have always had faith that these impulses will mature into a more useful form over time. Maybe with naïveté and bias cause that's where my empathy and allegiance lied, or still lies, on some level. I guess for the nature of reading this book I should buy Nagle's premise and feel self critical as a card carrying vessel of the Woke Mind Virus. I have 100% seen the sort of anti-social ahistorical oversensitive behaviour criticized here. 

I dont know what campuses are like now, and I'm not sure that messy leftwing hegemonic censorial speaker-cancelling university drama is the most important thing in the world. But I dont like thinking about it. It upsets me. I dont want to pick a side, it just all upsets me.

!!!!!!!!!!!!JORDAN PETERSON MENTION ON PAGE 80!!!!!!!!!!!!

Interesting to see some familiar faces throughout. Didn't know about Mark Fischer's moment critiquing Cancel Culture.  I haven't read Mark Fischer but people tell me to read this books all the god damn time. And I will!! Just give me a SEC.

Jonathan Haidt I have just recently been getting into because of his refocus on social media's impact on society in his fantastic After Babel Substack. I have never been into him previously, maybe because I vaguely registered him as an anti-woke professor and was just disinterested. But life is interesting and it moves around. At the moment he and I are perfectly aligned in our desire to see collective action and policy to limit phone use, limit social media, heal our minds and change our processes. He comes from a maybe more centrist-y position, and I from a kind of radical anti capitalist fervour about social media companies colonizing our minds, but we want the same things and have the same interests at the moment. I admire that he just identifies as "a-political" at this point. He's pointed himself at a good problem, and I'm very excited for his book on the subject to drop this year. 

Some of these other critiques of the left hold strong. Worship of weakness, failure to provide tangible solutions and alternatives, viciousness lurking underneath the moral intents. We've met em!

"The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics..." (p. 73)

"And yet, amid all the vulnerability and self-humbling, members of these subcultures often behaved with extraordinary viciousness and aggression, like their anonymous Pepe-posting counterparts, behind the safety of the keyboard. (p. 74)

I do have to say I dont think I intuitively jive with Nagle's little thesis about "Creating Moral Scarcity". Maybe upon seeing a couple more examples I might see more value in this idea (I imagine it will come up again) but I kind of think the obvious truth is way less sophisticated. Soc media just makes people bitchy and angry and anxious, and reputation savaging is just kind of... fun? The mediums just invite people to be terrible and being terrible and fighting for social status is addictive.

I do think there's a broader leftist cultural issue with purity testing. I think the destruction of heroes and policing on consistency and exaggeration of harm is maybe an ugly misapplication of big ideas about systemic critique, which in theory is supposed to presume individuals are all actors with larger ideas and effects, and so in theory should shift collective focus to solving larger issues rather than judging individual purity of intent. But then it can be used instead to judge everyone and one by one cancel all imperfect allies. oops!

That's about all i'm gonna say here, cause I am soooo sleepy. Let me know what you think! Don't hold me to any opinions expressed here! I don't know anymore!!! Conscientious Objector to the Culture War!!!!!!!!!! GOTTA SHOOT THE PHONE THAT'LL SOLVE IT

Bigotry & Tone Policing Below!