One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

I am generally skeptical of breathless “AI” boosterism. LLMs have given us some astonishing surprises in the last few years, and we can expect more surprises over the next few years at least, but it is preposterous to see artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. LLMs have differently-shaped strengths and limitations from familiar proceedural computing systems, but the contrasts with what we see from human cognition make it obvious that there are a lot of things humans do which they simply cannot.

I am generally disgusted by the disdain both for the arts and for artists in how “AI” boosters imagine replacing artists with robots. Surprising and weirdly impressive as developments in “‘AI’ art” art have been in the last few years, I cannot imagine thinking that “AI” is on a trajectory toward replacing novelists, painters, filmmakers, et cetera. I join those who refer to “‘AI’ art” as “slop” because of its deeply schlocky quality.

But I don’t want to be a one-dimensional “AI” hater, and have been challenging myself to think about ways these tools can be useful. So here’s an idea I’m not sure is right, offered as a provocation to my thinking and others’.

Maybe “AI” illustrations are not a big problem because their distinctive janky quality signals what they are, meta-communicating I am using this as an ephemeral little instrument to communicate a simple intent, rather than as a subtle work.

When generative “AI” image tools were new, I experimented a bit. I made this little meme image quoting a Lou Reed song by asking “AI” to give me a “sneering Statue Of Liberty”. I am satisfied with it delivering a little something I could neither draw nor afford to pay an artist to do.

I think that plays because it is not a subtle work. A picture is worth a thousand words and I wouldn’t ask “‘AI’ art” to do that … but sometimes you just need an illustration worth less than a dozen words. There are plenty of bland corporate filler illustrations which express no profound human intent. I know using “AI” deprives illustrators of jobs making this stuff, but isn’t that the kind of elimination of toil we should embrace as enabling Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

Maybe the right regulatory solution to “AI” images is to lean into their janky soullessness. Might we force them into a few house styles so we always recognize that they were not created by an artist?

Over on the Bluesky thread where I first articulated this idea, someone countered …

“Fully automated luxury gay space communism” should have a higher aspiration than to feed money to the VIC collective to torch miles of rainforest and fresh water to generate an image of partying seniors with 9 fingers per hand for a failing rural elder care program.

Put a tick more precisely I think a use case for LLMs of artists doing drafts and preliminary scaffolding for their sincere work is orders of magnitude more socially beneficial than for making corporate PowerPoint sloptent even more repellent & sloppier.

Indeed. Even my dumb little meme only seems useful to me as an instrument for a small purposeful comment.

The more substantive uses of “AI” I find interesting are artists using these tools as one among many instruments in composing something with intention and meaning, whether it is James Curico weaving “AI” elements into complex mixed-media artworks or Damien Walter using “AI” illustrations just to liven up a videoessay so it’s not just him being a talking head. Curico says:

I’ve had very good results in this direction, personally. Though it’s kind of a lose-lose talking about the process since on the one hand it’s “doesn’t matter if you spent 90 hours on it you still deserve the electric chair” and “what's the point if can’t do it with one prompt?”

Reconstructed movies

I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans.

Ones I have seen

Raiders

Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11/12/13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and stripped out all of the sound, even the dialogue, using instead a loop of Trent Reznor’s score for The Social Network.

Why?

I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.

Fun for me too.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Soderbergh’s experiment is weird film-nerd joy but it isn’t anywhere near as fun or as gutsy as this variation on the theme.

Back when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was new, a circle of tween-aged kids had a crazy idea: how about taking a parent’s home video camera and making their own version of the movie? They resolved to reproduce every shot from the original film as well as they could, which is bonkers considering that home video releases of films were not yet a thing, giving them no way to examine every scene closely. They went to a movie theater and furiously took notes, recorded the audio on a tape recorder, pored over stills they found in places like magazines and trading cards.

They spent their whole summer vacation working on it, but they didn’t get as far as they imagined. Filmmaking is hard. So during the school year they kept at it on weekends when they could. Then they devoted the following summer to it again. Then the next summer. They were in too deep to stop. They had almost the whole movie done when high school graduation forced an end to the project.

Decades later the kids, now grown, dusted off their VHS tapes and did a few showings at theaters willing to spare a screen for a couple of hours for this oddity … despite being unable to charge money lest a plague of studio lawyers descend upon them.

I was lucky enough to go to one of those early screenings, with a raucously enthusiastic crowd. Watching the film is uncanny and delicious. Actors transform back and forth between kids and teenagers from scene to scene, or even within a scene. Because it’s a film you know, you cannot resist thinking ahead. “I know what comes next. How the heck will a bunch of kids reproduce that in a backyard?” Every time, their solution turns out to be more clever and impressive than one would dare hope.

Word eventually found its way to Steven Spielberg, who decided he had to meet these creators. He must have twisted some lawyers’ arms, because now you can just buy a home video copy.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho

So. What if it’s not a gang of kids attempting a zero-budget shot-for-shot remake of a Hollywood film? What if, instead, a talented real-deal director had the resources to do it right?

Would it produce the same movie? Would it turn out as a different movie? This should just be a film school hypothetical, impossible to test, but Gus Van Sant cashed in on the moment of his greatest industry pull to actually do it.

What did the experiement reveal?

I find it impossible to describe. Yeah, it’s the same film as Hitchcock’s … sort of. But also sort of not. The only way to get it is to see the film. Van Sant says:

The results were that it wasn’t as frightening as Hitchcock’s film, and I attribute it to the director, me, my DNA, and the different totally immersive style of Hitchcock. Without that, it seemed it couldn’t be reproduced.

I cannot recommend it unless you are a film nerd. But if you are, there’s nothing else like it.

Touch Of Evil — 1998 Walter Murch restoration

I’m glad that I somehow never saw the original theatrical version of Orson Welles’ noir classic despite having meant to catch up with it. It had a reputation for being great despite confused storytelling which resulted from the studio trimming the film down from Welles’ original cut.

Almost 20 years after the film was released, a print close to Welles’ last version was found, but that had been an unfinished film, with postproduction work still to be done when the studio took it away from him. Then another 20 years later, after Welles had long since died, sound designer Walter Murch discovered an angry memo Welles wrote to the studio criticizing what they had done to his film. There were 58 single-spaced typewritten pages detailing everything he would have done differently. Murch restored the film, using the memo as the blueprint, revealing the real movie at last.

Metropolis — The Complete Metropolis

One might guess that Touch Of Evil is the only director’s cut delivered from beyond the grave, but Metropolis may be an even greater miracle.

Metropolis was made in 1927 and it still looks wildly ambitious to eyes accustomed to mega-blockbusters. The cost of the elaborate sets and effects nearly bankrupted the entire German film industry. But epic result was packed with imagery so powerful and influential that I refer to it as a film everyone has seen even if they have never seen it, because its moves (and even snippets of the film itself) show up in so many later films that when one sees it for the first time, it feels familiar.

Few people ever saw the full film. It was trimmed down from its original 2½ hour runtime for distribution in Germany, then trimmed down further for international distribution. Then decades passed, with prints circulating through film schools and rep houses, getting scratched and burned and broken and spliced back together, so each extant print was at least a little different. In the ’80s a producer struck newly restored prints … with a different (rock ’n’ roll!) soundtrack, goofy colorization, and trimmed down more than an hour shorter than its original runtime.

Then at the end of the century, a German film foundation asked to borrow every print in the world. They scanned them all and combined the data — one print could correct the loss from a scratch on another print, a lost frame on one print could be covered by it surviving on three others. They pored over archived notes from the original production. This produced the fullest version any living person had ever seen, a little over two hours long. The computer synthesis of information from multiple prints made almost all of it look as fresh as if it had been shot yesterday; the film was even more beautiful than we knew. Title cards describing what surviving records revealed about the missing scenes got them as close to rescuing the entire film as anyone believed possible.

Then one more print turned up in a museum archive, a negative struck from the original full version. It was in bad shape, but it had 25 minutes of footage which no one had seen since 1927. There were a few bits damaged beyond repair, but it meant that we got all but five minutes of the original cut back.

Have I mentioned that the film is amazing? The film is amazing.

Brazil — The Director’s Cut

Terry Gilliam had such a hard time getting the film released at all that The Battle Of Brazil is a book entirely about Gilliam fighting against the studio’s attempt to bury it, which then spawned a documentary film. Gilliam showed the movie at film schools and art houses on the sly in his campaign to bring attention to it.

Finally the studio relented, but in a final tragedy they held Gilliam to his contractual obligation to deliver a film within a certain runtime. To keep the studio from hacking the film entirely to bits, Gilliam cut out ten minutes of footage from the finished film he had been showing around.

That theatrical edit was still hailed as a great film and became a staple of rep houses, where I fell in love with it as a young film nerd. But a decade later Criterion, the prestiguous home video publisher of classic and arthouse films, made Gilliam’s original edit available.

Gilliam was right to be frustrated by the theatrical version. The full version includes a scene unnecessary to the plot but underlining the film’s theme, the terrifying secret police revealed as working joes griping about their day, oblivious to the horrors they commit. It’s good to have the real thing back.

Blade Runner — The Final Cut

Possibly the most famous director’s cut to find its way to a broad audience, and one of the few to eventually displace the original theatrical version almost entirely.

Warner Bros had wanted a sci-fi action blockbuster, but director Ridley Scott delivered a textured, alienating science fiction art film. To make the movie more accessible, the studio insisted on adding a introductory title card, a happy ending, and voiceover narration throughout. Harrison Ford recorded a deliberately stilted voiceover track in an attempt to help Scott talk the studio out of using it, but the trick didn’t work.

The resulting film was not the hit they hoped for, but despite the voiceover and other flaws, Blade Runner became a favorite of film buffs, including me. I saw it in its original release and was a little too young for it. I rediscovered it as a budding film nerd in college, re-watching it obsessively. I no longer rank it among my top-tier favorites but it remains the film I have watched more times than any other.

Because cinephile love made it a rep house perennial, prints of an early assembly cut from before the studio’s changes found its way to screens, misrepresented as a “director’s cut”. Scott felt frustrated by that version’s lack of polish, but the interest people showed in it led to the studio coöperating with Scott to create a proper Director’s Cut. The resulting film was subtly different and better. Then Ridley Scott’s ongoing success in his career made it possible for him to get one more bite at the apple, making a host of fine adjustments and even shooting a bit of new footage more than two decades after principal photography had originally wrapped.

Despite having seen the original theatrical cut dozens of times, the Final Cut is so right that it has almost completely displaced that version from my memory.

Dark City — Director’s Cut

I had long thought that this edition just removed the opening narration forced into the theatrical release which undercut its surreal-mysterious tone, but seeing it recently revealed that it adds 11 minutes of footage to expand several scenes a bit, and to significantly alter the closing psychic-battle setpiece.

Fixing the opening is definitely an improvement, as I aleady knew from skipping it when watching with friends who were new to the film. I’m not so sure the other changes are worthwhile. That psychic battle landed as a little goofy even when it was new; having more of the effects which have not aged well belabors the inherent problems with the ending. Though is sure does land as anticipating The Matrix, which arrived the following year.

Maybe I need to make my own fan edit which never shows us the city from the outside?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition

Nerdy, obscure, and amazing.

I grew up a Star Trek kid. I was the right age to be entranced by the goofy Filmation animated series when it was originally broadcast, grew into nerdlove for the original series in syndication, and was still young enough when the first feature film was released that I was uncritically delighted to see new Trek on the big screen at all.

But by the time ST: The Motion Picture was released for home video, my tastes had matured enough that revisiting it revealed that how the film was a clumsy slog. I had heard rumours about how The Motion Picture had suffered from Studio Meddling. Since the special effects shots were expensive some suit had insisted on including every bit of them, whether they served the story or not, filling the second act with a stultifying series of shots of the crew of the Enterprise looking at clouds through the viewscreen. To spare time for that nonsense, a bunch of character stuff and ideas landed on the cutting room floor.

It did not stand up in contrast with The Wrath Of Khan and the run of pretty good original cast Trek films which were still coming out. Then there was Next Generation. Then other Treks. I thought I would never look back at Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.

This wasn’t a beloved classic the studio could cash in on investing in like Blade Runner; even the famously enthusiastic Trek fandom admitted that it was a dud. There wasn’t a better cut just sitting on the shelf like there was with Brazil.

But the studio still had the footage that didn’t make it in to the theatrical release, director Robert Wise just couldn’t let go of the thought of the better film he had wanted to make, and a lot of film professionals have a soft spot for Trek. Wise doesn’t call what he and a host of enthusiasts did a restoration of his cut, he says they got to finish an unfinished film. They didn’t just trim out the clouds and weave the story beats back in, they worked on everything. They improved the sound design. They cleaned up the effects shots they wanted to keep. They made new effects shots to replace things they originally hadn’t had time, or money, or capacity to do back in the 1970s, careful to match the distinctive look of the original effects.

The resulting labor of love is not just a marvel of craft or just a good Trek film. It’s a great Trek film. It may not have quite the appeal to non-fans of The Wrath Of Khan or The Voyage Home (the one with the whales!) but anyone who likes Trek at all will enjoy it, and for anyone who ever loved the original series it is a true gift.

Alien³ — The Legacy Cut

The theatrical version of this film was so bad that it nearly killed the franchise. I saw it on its original release, which was an unnerving experience. The first few scenes were so gripping that I thought the universally negative reviews were lunacy. The next few scenes didn’t quite work. Then the next few scenes were weaker still, and it continued to decline through an incoherent second act, and then further still to an excruciatingly hokey ending. Strong turns by Sigorney Weaver and Charles Dance couldn’t save it. It’s a pile of crap.

It was well known to have come out of a horrendous production process. There had been a succession of scripts and directors — including a script by William Neuromancer Gibson which one can now find adapted to comics and as an audio drama — and was already wildly over-budget when young David Fincher took the reins to direct his first feature. The filmmaking and wrestling with the studio was such a mess that Fincher is said to have come close to refusing to have his name on it. He hasn’t just refused to attempt a new cut of the film, he is so bitter that he has refused to ever talk about the movie at all.

The studio tried to lure fans into paying for a home video release of this unloved mess by creating a box set of Alien films with a bunch of special features, including what they called the Alien³ Assembly Cut, a Frankenstein’s Monster made without Fincher’s involvement incorporating a bunch of unused footage and reference images for special effects that were never made. I gather that the result is a hash that makes one wonder what might have been. That non-film inspired a crew of nerds to create this fan edit, tinkering with the arrangement of scenes and fleshing out missing effects.

The result is better than anyone who has seen the theatrical version would believe possible. It’s not as good as the original Alien or James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, but that is praising it with faint damnation; I think it’s better than the sequels Ridley Scott has given us. If you have a taste for the series it’s worth a couple of hours.

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition

While I’m nerding out, I have to point to these James Cameron re-edits of two of his films.

The theatrical release of The Abyss was good but sloppy, and the ending was completely broken. We are lucky to have the Extended Edition even though it remains more than a little shaggy.

I understand why some people prefer the theatrical version of Aliens — it’s so tight that you could bounce a quarter off of it — but I concur with Cameron’s judgement in creating the Special Edition, if only to have the sentry guns pile on even more suspense.

Ones I want to see

The Dark Side Of Oz

Probably the most-seen fan edit ever made, in part because anyone can re-make it DIY: it’s just The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off, playing Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon as a soundtrack. There was a craze for it back in the 1990s, when video rental through Blockbuster was at its peak; reputedly there’s a lucky alchemy in the way the tracks of the album align with events in the film.

Despite listening to the album a billion times when I was young somehow I never got around to trying this. One of these days.

Silent Hill — Restless Dreams

I have not played the vidya game, but an enthusiast for it introduced me to the film adaptation. It doesn’t quite work, but it is so atmospheric that I found it seductive anyway.

Fan edit enthusiasts rank this one of the best examples of the form; rumor has it that even the movie’s director likes it.

Raising Cain — Director’s Cut

There are a lot of director’s cuts broadly recognized as better than the original theatrical version. There are a lot of fan edits which many fans call better than the original theatrical version. There are even a few fan edits which directors have praised. But I think this film is unique in being such a good a fan edit the original film’s director annointed it “The Director’s Cut”.

Admirable humility by Brian De Palma.

Bateman Begins: An American Psycho

This is a weird one. Christian Bale played both Patrick Bateman, the titular main character in American Psycho, and also Batman in the three Christopher Nolan films, so an enterprising fan has stitched the two films together to suggest that they are the same guy.

It’s so crazy, it just might work. I have to find out.

Blood Simple — Director’s Cut

An oddity both in that it tightens the the movie to be a few minutes shorter and that many fans fault it as inferior to the theatrical version.

The Blackened Mantle

Akira Kurosawa’s lost original cut of his story of Annakin Skywalker’s fall from grace against the backdrop of the rise of the Galactic Empire.

Well, obviously not. But that is what it is meant to feel like.

Star Wars has enough enthusiastic fans that there are countless fan-made re-shufflings of the films. They follow in the footsteps of The Phantom Edit, a pioneering fan effort from before just anyone with a laptop and a lot of patience could re-cut a film; it re-arranged scenes from the first prequel The Phantom Menace and cleverly transformed Jar-Jar Binks into a wise sage by snipping out his slapstick moments and replacing his dialogue with an invented alien language and wholly new lines delivered in subtitles.

Mantle takes that trick much further.

Star Wars is a pastiche informed by a host of sources. George Lucas had originally wanted do a Flash Gordon film but could not get the rights, so Star Wars stirred that together with Westerns, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, flying ace movies about both World Wars, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and … the films of Akira Kurosawa set in Japan’s feudal era, most directly The Hidden Fortress.

So informed by Kurosawa’s influence, The Blackened Mantle refines Revenge Of The Sith by presenting it in the style of Kurosawa’s works. It’s in black-and-white, with bits of the other prequels woven in as sepia-toned flashbacks. All of the actors’ performances have been dubbed in Japanese so that subtitles can tweak the dialogue to reshape the storytelling.

A friend recommending this got me going down this whole alternate-edit rabbithole in the first place. I have seen a couple of scenes and they are delicious, so I am keen to sit down with the whole thing.

End Of Skywalker

Nosing around the internet, I find a lot of people calling this the best of the sequel trilogy re-edits, mining footage from all three films and using the subtitles trick to assemble a single feature telling a significantly different story. That’s not as seductive as the Kurosawa conceit, but I’m curious.

As with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy is frustrating. The Force Awakens demonstrates impressive craft but not quite the resonance someone who grew up with Star Wars hopes for, The Last Jedi is divisive (I adore the way it brings Luke Skywalker full circle), and The Rise Of Skywalker wraps it up with … a total trainwreck. That last is particularly bitter given the gorgeous production design, actors’ strong performances, and nifty action setpieces it wasted. Good ingredients for stone soup.

The Empire Strikes Back — Revisited

It’s easy to pitch me on the fan edits above attempting to improve on Star Wars at its worst, but why mess with The Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best Star Wars feature film?

Well, I found fans insisting that this edit is actually better than the original film. I didn’t think I needed to see Empire again at all, but my curiousity is piqued.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

The Superman II we got was a remake of an unfinished film the world never saw. The original plan for the 1970s Superman movie was to leverage the cost of the ambitious production by doing two films worth of principal photography, in the hope that profits from the first film could fund post-production on the second film. It almost worked. After a long, difficult production, director Richard Donner delivered Superman: The Movie and it was a hit. But budget and production challenges meant that the shooting Donner had done for the sequel was not quite enough to bring the sequel home, and in a complicated behind-the-scenes soap opera, Donner was replaced by Richard Lester.

In order to resolve the legal ambiguity that created in assigning a director’s credit, Lester wound up re-shooting a lot of what Donner had already done. While Lester deserves credit for how rightly beloved Superman II was and remains — “kneel before Zod”! — some of its odder elements are Lester’s additions.

As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a sentimental director and enthusiastic nerds decided to finish the film that might have been. I gather that the result doesn’t have anything like the astonishing polish that the Trek team got to deliver, but I also hear that it qualifies as an interesting real movie.

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

The title is a misnomer. Director Sergio Leone’s true original cut was about 700 minutes long (almost six hours!). This recently released edit was created without him, since he has been dead for 25 years, and it runs “just” just 250 minutes.

The cut Leone preferred is lost to time. There are no records of what it contained, precious few people ever saw it, and he is not alive to tell anyone about it. Legend describes it as a glorious, fascinating misfire. Since the elaborate production had Leone starting from a ten-hour rough cut, there is no figuring out what Leone wanted to do from first principles.

It was cut down for a showing at Cannes, then cut again for limited release, then at the point when it finally got a full a full US theatrical release it had been whittled down to a broken 139 minutes. But then in the years since Leone’s death there has been a trickle of different releases adding more and more things back in. It seems that the latest edit is the most complete version we will ever get.

I have not seen any version. Someday I want to tackle it, and binging the longest available version seems like the way to go.

Dark

Dark was filmed in 2013 and released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. The film was taken from me after the first director’s cut, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input.

I offered to revisit the film, cut and mix a new version at my own expense but was denied permission by the producers.

This cut was created using work print DVDs. I had no access to the original hi-res footage and unmixed sound. I used those limitations to my advantage when creating this new film.

I was working toward a more aggressive editing style when Dying of the Light was taken away from me. Dark represents the direction I was hoping to go.

Dark was not created for exhibition or personal gain.

It is for historical record.

— Paul Schrader

Found by a friend who says it “largely takes place within Nicolas Cage’s CIA agent’s brain as it is being eaten by a tumor, as he pursues vengeance against a terrorist. I haven’t yet seen the official release, but the re-cut is just wild.

More fan edits

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

The Escape from the Shining Alien Thing from Beyond the Stars

Reputedly a weird, inventive mashup of several films, starting from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Cosmogony

A weird mashup of several films, said to be more “contemplative” than a narrative.

Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux

A fan attempt to recover the novel’s spirit and Lynch’s intent. I have soft spot for some of the weird stuff in the very long “Alan Smithee” cut, so I can imagine how that might be possible. And it gets surprisingly positive commentary.

Wes Craven’s Dark Nightmare

A fan edit of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare which reputedly makes it more psychological than fantastical to good effect. I revisited New Nightmare recently and I found it short of the fresh surprise which impressed me when it was new, so I imagine that there is room to improve the film by re-framing it.

Phantom Of The Paradise — Uncensored Cut Restoration

An elaborate fan project to rescue the lost version of a cult classic.

Paradise

A fan edit weaving together the Ridley Scott Alien sequels into a single film, in an attempt to produce something that makes sense. an attempt to make them make sense.

Hellblazer

A fan edit of Constantine drawing on deleted scenes. It seems there is a lot of opportunity there, given what a mixed bag the theatrical cut was, and the choice of title suggests that the creator shares my love for the ’90s comics. But hard to get.

The Matrix Revolutions Decoded

All the sequels woven into a single feature, much loved for clarifying the source’s themes. One can get a little taste.

More official releases

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

Doctor Sleep — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release does amazingly well at sweating down the doorstop of a novel and reconciling King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film The Shining along the way. But there is a lot more to say, so I wonder how it does that.

Little Shop Of Horrors — Director’s Cut

Lots of little changes, plus a big change to the ending, reputedly making it even more Faustian.

Das Boot — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release was already a great film … and it turns out there is a much longer version available.

Highlander 2: The Renegade Version

The director’s attempt to recover as much of the movie they had actually wanted to make as he could. Sort of. But do I care?

That Thing You Do! — Extended Cut

Reputedly better all-around, including that it corrects queer erasure in the theatrical release.

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

The only major change is in the last few minutes … but that is reputedly a profound change.

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

A fair bit longer than the original theatrical version, which evidently makes it land as completely different on a thematic level. During the Iraq war era I had no appetite for a film about the Crusades, but I’m curious.

Blackhat — Director’s Cut

A weak film that came out of a very messy production, and this cut is supposedly very different. But in this case is different actually better?

Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

Capturing a Bluesky thread from Matthew Sheffield.

‪Kai Ryssdal‬ asks:

Fight and help win a world war.

Establish a global order that cements your national power for 80 years.

Blow it all up.

What am I missing?

This is literally what I've been writing and podcasting about for years. I was planning to do an essay on this, but here's a [Bluesky thread].

The main reason is psychology. Due to personal, family, and cultural histories, some people are inherently scared of the world. The fear of the world usually manifests as fear and hatred of new things. They rarely admit to this fear (especially the men), but they show it in their actions of carrying a gun everywhere or thinking that if they don't cheat others first, they will be cheated.

This fear actually proceeds from an even deeper impulse, the belief that quick judgment thinking (what I call memetic epistemology) is superior to extrinsic thinking. They trust their instincts more than anyone else, regardless of their expertise. Conservatives and their reactionary cousins believe that their views are true because they believe them. They don’t need hard proof or to be able to argue for them. They’re “common sense.” This viewpoint is the fundamental unifier of everyone on the right, from atheist ancaps to Christofascists.

Memetic epistemology isn’t inherently bad. It is in fact how we experience love, art, music, faith, and maintain coherence in adversity. But the self-focused, somatic nature of memetic thinking means that it can be dangerous when applied to the world at large.

Society has become so large and so complex that one person can no longer have total mastery of even two fields of knowledge. The paradox of modernity is that each advance in knowledge also creates ignorance, in two major ways. The first is that knowing more things also increases the number of known unknowns. Our models of reality are not reality itself. Scientific laws are descriptions of physical obligation, rather than the obligations themselves. When we describe one thing one way, it unlocks other ways to describe it. This extrinsic epistemic approach has made modern humans able to advance through science in ways that would appear godlike to any ancient human.

But this new way of thinking is knowing through negation. And it’s not how humans did things for the entire history of our species. It’s “unnatural.” For more on the fear of the “unnatural,” please see this recent podcast episode I did with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: Robert Kennedy’s bizarre obsession with ‘natural’ isn’t going to make Americans healthier: historian of fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on why an obese president has a health secretary who moralizes about wellness (audio).

Cumulative advances in knowledge are threatening to people who only want to use somatic reasoning and who respond to all new things memetically. They want to imitate authorities rather than have humility and accept extrinsic realities through abstraction. This is the conservative epistemology.

Besides piling up all kinds of newfangled things, expansions in knowledge also can liberate minds from social prejudices. For centuries, women and other ethnic groups were not fully human, same-sex attraction wasn’t real, and trans people didn’t exist. As Virginia Heffernan and I recently discussed, this is the problem of other minds. Because cognition is done through hidden states and language is an only a very partial extrusion of thought, we can’t know for sure that other minds are as real as ours: Renee Good and the problem of other minds (audio).

But the problem of other minds also extends to institutions made by other minds. During the Great Depression and after World War II, the United States and many other countries built governmental and international institutions to alleviate poverty and resolve disputes. These institutions and the global order they created were very far from perfect, but they were much better than what existed before. Unfortunately, their creators didn’t realize that they needed to continue to advocate for institutions and to continue to reform them.

People are sometimes surprised that Trump and other reactionary politicians don't have consistent policies. They shouldn’t be. Reactionaries hate abstract systems and coherence. They don’t understand NATO, USAID, public broadcasting, literature, or science. So these things must be destroyed. Government as the ultimate mutual aid, cooperation, consent, and sexual autonomy are concepts that don’t make sense in a worldview where only the strong survive.

There's so much to do to educate the bystanders and the malcontents about what the right wing is doing. Please share if you could!

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I forgot to add that it’s no coincidence at all that the emergence of science and liberal democracy happened at the same time. Science and democracy need each other, and it's also no coincidence that reactionaries hate both, as Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discussed with me: Science is under attack because it left the public behind: NIH scientists Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discuss the deep connection between democratic principles and scientific progress (audio).

Science, democracy, and art all go together. And so does sexual freedom. They’re all ways of knowing ourselves, as Savannah Sly and I discussed here: The right-wing wars on science and sex are linked: New Moon Network founder Savannah Sly on the radical right’s attack on self-knowledge and autonomy (audio).

Not exactly my analysis, but related enough to add to my Understanding American Politics index.

Campism

A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie.

What’s campism, you ask?

In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what.

It’s the ideological/geopolitical version of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which manifests itself as the idea that any leader and/or regime positioned in opposition to the United States needs to be supported in the name of anti-imperialism.

For those who adopt this mindset, the fact that some world leaders who are seen as “enemies” of the United States are also brutal, murderous dictators who oppress, disappear and slaughter their own people is an afterthought, if even that.

More often than not, campists will insist that such beliefs are actually nothing more than Western imperialist propaganda. That in fact, folks such as Assad, Putin, Maduro, and now Khameini are really not so bad after all, and need to be supported because to not support them is to continue to prop up American empire.

[⋯]

Campism is to leftism what a fear of insects is to our personal well-being: an instinct that had a legitimate function in previous stages of our evolution but which nowadays does much more harm than good.

Let me elaborate on the former.

The origins of campism are rooted in the geopolitical shifts that resulted from the emergence of the “Great Powers” in the early 20^th century, which solidified in the years after the Russian Revolution and then cemented itself in the divisions that unfolded due to the Cold War.

The Cold War created three general geopolitical groupings: countries aligned with Western capitalism, countries aligned with Soviet socialism, and the “non-aligned” countries. These three groups are where the concepts of the First, Second, and Third World come from. Three camps, if you will.

But even during the Cold War, when geopolitical lines were much more clearly drawn, adherence to campism could function as a trap. Consider the origin of the idea of tankies, a term which was birthed as a way to distinguish and call out leftists who defended the use of tanks by the Soviets in order to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Those who did so were so blinded by their allegiance to Communism that they either failed to or refused to consider that the reasons why Hungarians were revolting was legitimate and that such a show of force on the part of the Soviets was brutal and unjustified. Those who defended the Soviets in that instance, as well as during the ’68 uprisings in Prague, were engaging in campism and absolutely deserved the pejorative label that they received.

After the fall of the USSR, in the absence of the previously-stated categories, campism reinvented itself into what we see today. In place of a (theoretically) tidy capitalist / communist split, campism ended up taking on the trappings of what’s best referred to as Third Worldism. The divisions redefined themselves as follows: the Global South versus the Global North and / or the underdeveloped world versus the developed world and/or the colonized world versus the colonizer world.

Which is a set of alignments that from a leftist perspective should absolutely act as a guide, a compass, a framework that anchors where we take off from. But after the take off, nuance and critical thinking are paramount, and campism has no use for either. It’s black and white. Good guys, bad guys. And from that, the idea that any leader that the bad guys don’t like must be a good guy.

Which is how you end up with folks like Caitlin Johnstone, who has stanned pretty much every modern-day dictator that’s come up against American empire without fail. For her and other campists, the ends justify the means. The suffering and fate of millions of people is ignored in the service of taking an ideologically pure position against empire.

And such a position is abhorrent.

Virus-cautious socializing

Looking at covid, flu, et cetera, my sweetheart & I are trying to live a virus-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing.

Indoors

Just as one doesn’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, we are wary of folks who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days.

Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we pack a Metrix test kit for use before sharing indoor air … though the awkward bit is that it takes 30 minutes to run the test. Ideally we would build a small circle of folks testing.

We are also looking at more aggressive HEPA filters and far-UV lights improving the odds.

Outdoors

We have both gas & electric heaters set up for our covered patio. They aren’t strong enough to overcome the coldest times of winter, but they take the edge off enough to be cozy on a chilly day if one also dresses warmly.

We are also trying to cultivate a list of venues with covered & heated outdoor seating.

• Victoria Bar
  our favorite, with good nosh — NE Albina
• The Rambler Bar
  N Mississippi
• ¿Por Qué No?
  taqueria — SE Hawthorne
• Bar Maven, Bar Carlo, Shami Cafe, 5 & Dime Bar
  surprisingly good food (except 5&D) but none of these have heat outside — SE Foster

We are also up for an adventure to try places like …

• Mirisata Restaurant
  Sri Lankan food — SE Belmont
• Laurelhurst Market
  a world of beef — E Burnside
• Tiny Bubble Room
  taproom & grill — N Lombard
• Interurban Saloon
  N Mississippi
• The Knock Back Bar
  NE Alberta

Divination and “AI”

I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously as a thinking process, neither more nor less different from electrical engineering than film theory differs from medical diagnosis.

Contrary to what some esotericists and most civilians imagine, when doing divination using tarot cards (or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts, or whatever) one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through a spooky process which controls which of these tokens come up.

Each token in a divinatory system (a card or rune or whatever) has a complex, multivalent meaning. Famously, the Death card in tarot does not necessarily mean actual death — readers take it more often as signifying sharp changes and transitions, carving away the unimportant to attend to the important, and so forth. I personally like tarot because of how this manifests in the complexity of the imagery on the cards, but even a spare, simple rune has this quality; isa (ᛁ) signifies ice, stillness, reflection, observation, facing fear, endurance, the antithesis to primordial fire, and more. Learning a divinatory system involves developing a rich, complex sense of what each token can signify.

During divination, drawing several random tokens offers the reader a big bouquet of symbolism rich in meaning. The reader’s mind surveys that, picks out elements, and synthesizes those into a description of what they see the tokens “saying”. This is not a reasoned process, it is an “intuitive” process. Reading tarot, I find that different elements of a card stand out for me in different readings; I may focus on the fallen king under Death’s horse in one reading, then in the next reading find myself thinking about the odd sunrise (or is it a sunset?) between two towers in the background.

What are the mechanics of that “intuition”? One can conceive of it as receiving information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of it as an entirely psychological-materialist process. Practitioners commonly describe how everything feeds a divinatory reading — not just the tokens but the querant’s question, what the reader notices about the querent, what the reader knows about life, et cetera. This is the kind of subtle mental process Freud was trying to address by talking about conscious thought being the tip of an iceberg which included “das Unbewusste”, the unconscious. Does das Unbewusste draw on information from spirits or other cosmic forces? Jung thought so, and many readers find it useful to think so. Jung would also say that the Cosmos arranges synchronicities — meaningful coïncidences — so that the hand of the Cosmos chooses the right tokens to appear. But one may also presume that contemplating a novel mix of arbitrary symbols just brings forward analysis das Unbewusste does on information it has received through mundane channels, that perceiving meaning in the spread of tokens is just a useful illusion.

Esotericists generally counsel resisting the temptation to overthink those mechanics. I embrace a radical agnosticism on where the insight “really” comes from … though in doing divination I find it very helpful to pretend as hard as I can that the particular tokens which come up contain a carefully-composed message from the Cosmos.

The relationship between a querent and a reader parallels the relationship between a reader and a spread of tokens. What a querent absorbs from a reading is the querent’s own process of “intuitive” interpretation drawing on the set of ideas the reader presents to them. I submit that this double cascade of interpretation further demonstrates how divination is a structured thinking process; doing divination solo, a querent drawing their own tokens without a reader, is notoriously difficult.

Software systems attempting to deliver divination have been around for decades, but they are unsatisfying. Having a computer program spit out a fixed meaning for a tarot card or astrological correspondence — “beep trine between the Sun and Saturn signifies a need for caution in financial & business concerns beep” — does none of the subtle analysis I describe above. This is the same difficulty as doing divination solo.

But I wonder about LLMs, the technology animating recent discussion of “AI”. I have a hunch that they might enable better divination robots than the proceedural software systems of the past. The way I describe the mental process in divination above seems to rhyme with the way people (sometimes dangerously) project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. Maybe a querent can exercise the Eliza Effect with an LLM as a substitute for a human reader? Or cultivate that as a skill easier to develop than ordinary solo reading?

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenges this suggestion:

This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.

As both an esotericist and as a nerd skeptical of “AI” boosters’ breathless enthusiasm for supposed applications of LLMs, I share that impulse, but I am also trying to resist becoming a reflexive LLM hater.

I think they were partly responding my original thread’s implication that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which I do not want to suggest.

Rather, considering the potential usefulness of a divination robot depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw tokens to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something useful to that purpose? Does divination require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity?

I don’t know. Surely someone is trying the experiment?

The tale of RMS Carpathia

I’m overdue to keep a link to this great telling of one of my favorite stories: the RMS Carpathia rescuing surivors of the wreck of the Titanic.

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

Have a hanky handy. I’ve read this dozens of times and it makes me weepy every time.

Also: in case you didn’t already know, this story will show you that the Starship Enterprise is a steamship.

Clarifying common social justice praxis

Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify what is happening in other commentaries.

• The left
• Liberal vs identity politics
• Hard vs soft identity politics
• Identity politics concepts

Criticisms

• Faux liberalism
• Anti-liberalism
• Language policing
• Absolutism
• Cancel culture

Fundamentals

Social justice

The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.

Praxis is a word much-used by leftists to name to the manifestation of ideas through practices.

Social justice means addressing injustices pervasively experienced by social groups: the sexism women encounter, the racism people of color encounter, et cetera.

Social justice advocacy more specifically refers to the practice of attempting to correct social injustices. There are a range of different approaches, grounded in different analyses of how social injustices work. This post is mostly an attempt at clarifying how some major approaches work.

Social justice advocacy culture is an expression I use to distinguish advocates’ driving ideologies from the social norms & practices people exercise. This can be useful, for instance, in naming that one embraces the feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves feminists tend to make … or vice versa.

Opponents of social justice include people acting from a few different principles. Some assert that American society is fundamentally just, with social justice advocates misrepresenting how the world works. Some accept that the conditions social justice advocates point to are at least partly real, but reject addressing them as impractical, or entirely impossible. Some recognize those conditions but assert either implicitly or explicitly that those conditions are right & good. I find it useful to talk about these types together while recognizing that they are not simply all the same.

The left

We should not just conflate social justice advocacy with “the left”.

We need to start with clarity about the term “left”, which can mean a few different things. (I have a long post on the subject.) To name to the range from Democratic Party moderates to Maoist revolutionaries and countless points in between, I like to refer to “the broad left”.

Leftism — or The Left — is the portion of the broad left which calls for profound institutional change replacing capitalism with some form of socialism (not just social insurance like single-payer health care, but public control of factories et cetera). Within both groups one can find many different relationships with social justice — frameworks for understanding, policy approaches, and degrees of attention.

Social justice advocacy is not just the same thing as either the broad left or leftism. Social justice advocacy on the broad right is rare, but does exist. Some people on the broad left have a weak enough concern with social justice that they do not qualify as advocates. Many social justice advocates conceive themselves as leftists; many others do not. Some leftists consider social justice advocacy a distraction from economic class as the important locus of political action.

Two big social justice ideologies

Among social justice advocates in the US one finds two broad ideological schools with profound differences. The failure of social justice advocacy culture to articulate these schools clearly produces a lot of confusion. Alas, as when talking about the left, the most precise terms of art invite confusion, but we have no better alternative.

The liberal school school is more familiar to people who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture. Not “liberal” in the sense of the policy objectives of the Democratic Party (which leftists call “lib”) but a deeper sense: the approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in democratic institutions and universal egalitarian rights. (To specify that sense, I often abbreviate liberal democracy as “libdem”.) One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

• calling for equal rights for all
• vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
• exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination

The identity politics school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture in recent decades. Unhappily, this name for it is most often used as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice, but we need to be able to distinguish this framework from the liberal school, and no other term will do. “Identity politics” first appeared in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, and one can learn a lot about this approach to social justice by reading that early document. I summarize the identity politics school as:

• considering the universalism of the liberal school inadequate for achieving social justice; as Anatole France famously snarked, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”
• examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
• actively countering the unequal relationships between those groups in every context (cultural, social, institutional, et cetera)

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This distinction is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where people stand.

Soft identity politics embraces both the liberal and identity politics approaches. It sees them as complimentary, acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

Hard identity politics rejects any other approach to social justice as illegitimate. It sees the liberal school as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

One cannot draw an entirely bright line between these tendencies. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity politics frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework. But looking for social justice advocates’ attitudes in these terms can be very clarifying.

Identity politics concepts

To understand what the identity politics school is — and to make a lot of social justice praxis legible — I find it clarifying to reïntroduce some key vocabulary & concepts from the identity politics school’s analytical toolkit which advocates don’t always describe crisply.

The term equity directs attention to bottom-line outcomes, in contrast with liberal ideas of rights & process equality. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics registers that different axes of identity (race, gender, et cetera) operate in similar ways. In particular, it refers to relative advantage as privileged positions (white people, men, etc) and refers to relative disadvantage as oppressed or marginalized positions (people of color, women, etc). “Privilege” in this context neither contrasts with rights nor denotes the particular advantages of high social class; the term stuck despite those misleading resonances because a famous 1991 commentary used it well in speaking to college-educated white feminist women.

Identity politics articulates several ways that different privileged positions operate similarly, just as different marginalizatized positions do. For example, culture tends to frame privileged positions as “normal”, while taking marginalized positions as deviation from that norm, so a privileged identity often goes unmarked while a marginalize identity is marked even when it was irrelevant — one will hear references to a “Black doctor” or a “female doctor” much more often than to a “white doctor” or “male doctor”.

Identity politics also examines the unique characteristics of each axis, and intersectionality names its body of ideas for addressing how people’s positions on mutliple axes interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or marginalized. A gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender while experiencing marginalization on the axes of sexuality and race. Each identity complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

The identity politics school has a vocabulary for talking about different mechanisms which produce inequities — personal, interpersonal, institutional, structural, and more. This expands the scope of social justice advocacy beyond impacts of overt bigotry & discrimination, trying to overcome systemic inertia from ignorance, misunderstandings, inequities in financial & social capital, et cetera. Thus it uses “racism” to refer to everything which creates & sustains racial inequities, rather than to refer just to racial bigotry; likewise for sexism, homophobia, etc. This makes it easy to get confused about which processes we are talking about in a particular instance; I try to never deploy terms like “racism” alone, instead specifying “racist bigtory”, “systemic racism”, et cetera.

Because of this attention to systems beyond bigotry, identity politics underlines that one can participate in injustices without exercising bigotry at all — that indeed one inevitably will unless one makes deliberate efforts toward antiracist / antisexist / etc action, especially along the axes where one occupies a privileged position. The aphorism “impact, not intent” reminds us how focusing on the particulars of bigotry can become a distraction from understanding & correcting how one implicitly enables unjust processes. One practical application of that is that nouning is considered harmful — one should avoid asking whether we should indict a person as a racist or sexist et cetera, instead registering without disqualifying their whole moral character the ways they should look to better support justice. I sometimes express that by saying things like, “I don’t think you are a racist, but when you X you are doing racism, so you should change that”.

Grappling with criticisms

Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how best to understand & correct social injustices. Vigorous contention among social justice advocates about how to understand and address injustices is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary.

Personally, I find the identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem unmistakably necessary … and I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them, so I stand with soft identity politics. I find wisdom and allies from folks in both both the liberal and the hard identity politics camps; one must respect people committed to the project whom one considers mistaken.

There are real problems in social justice advocacy culture. Frankly, there are even a few social justice advocates who we must keep far from the levers of power. There will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle.

But one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are in any movement. The worst ideas and actors in social justice advocacy hold no significant power, and will not any time soon. There are obstacles to a healthy culture of social justice advocacy from within the movement, but they are dwarfed by the problems rooted in adaptations to facing constant attacks motivated by stubborn misunderstanding or deliberate bad faith. Even the movement’s greatest failings are not nearly so bad as opponents of suggest.

That defense made, I see a need to talk about criticisms at length, for several reasons.

It is important on the merits. I have posted before about concerns because we can and should do better.

It serves the primary misson of this post, delivering clarity to people sympathetic to the project of social justice who find encounters with social justice advocacy disorienting and frustrating. Advocacy culture is not self-aware about legitimate anxieties about our practices which tend to drive people away. Clarifying things people react to and putting them in perspective helps people find good ways to engage, even when they remain skeptical. This is why, for instance, this post names a distinction between social justice versus social justice advocacy culture; I want to defuse any tendency to reject the project of social justice because of stinging encounters with movement culture.

It refuses to cede the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice. I don’t want to those opponents to look more credible than they are by being able to claim “we are the only ones talking about XYZ”.

It supports improvements in praxis. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. (I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including not just “identity politics” but also “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, “woke”, and others.)

So below I try to name some common troubles in social justice praxis, focusing on things which I find that people unfamiliar with advocacy tend to mis- or over-read.

Faux liberalism

A lot of criticism of social justice advocacy which exercises libdem language is either deceit or wank rationalizing inaction which leaves inequities in place. One can see this fundamental problem in one of critics’ classic moves: demanding that we demonstrate to their satisfaction that an inequity emerges directly from bigotry severe enough that acting to correct it is possible and morally necessary.

Social justice advocates often reject that move from bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I consider it useful also challenge an assumption lurking within that demand. The burden of proof should fall on their suggestion that an inequity may be fair, not on social justice advocates’ assertions that inequities are unjust.

Consider people framing their objections to antiracist policies as standing for “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. How do they account for every metric one can find revealing white people better off than Black people? It is trivial to see how in 1950 this reflected inequality of opportunity. Today’s inequities pointing in the same direction as past differences in opportunity is a very suspicious coïncidence. If American society changed to provide equal opportunity, when exactly did that happen? 1975? 2008? What evidence supports that claim? If Black people get lesser outcomes from equal opportunity, is that not a claim that Black people are somehow inferior? If one is not a bigot, isn’t it more parimonious to attribute inequity to lingering unfairness in the system? If that unfairness does not emerge from direct discrimination, why would that make it OK? Even if bigotry were entirely erased from American society — which we know it has not been — we would expect it to leave a lingering systemic legacy, like a traffic jam persisting after cars wrecked in an accident have been cleared. Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can to correct those echoes from past wrongs?

Reflexive anti-liberalism

I respect how the kind of people I describe above inspire impatience with liberal arguments skeptical of the analysis and remedies offered by the identity politics school. The culture of identity politics advocacy sometimes presumes that all support for the liberal school of social justice must therefore reflect nothing other than disingenuous opposition to social justice. In my personal experience people offering skepticism framed in shallow liberal terms sometimes turn out to be more goodhearted than they appear, having embraced a misreading of liberal principle because they have given these questions very little thought. I would never demand that any social justice advocate spend the time and energy it takes to walk people out of that thinking, but they should not oppose other people making the attempt.

Some hard identity politics folks extend that reading yet further. One rarely sees social justice advocates draw the distinction I do between the liberal and identity politics schools because a lot of people committed to identity politics resist recognizing it as a social justice ideology, because they think of it as the only real form of social justice advocacy. This denial of the legitimacy of the the liberal framework often extends to implying that no real liberal tradition in social justice advocacy has ever existed, which would come as a surprise to the people who put the word “rights” in the middle of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Language policing

Most social justice advocates consider cultural change as important as institutional change. I have sympathy for this feeling like nitpicking sometimes … though the shock of encountering casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bad cultural politics in media just a few decades old makes a strong case that the nitpicking efforts which changed our norms were well worth it. Taking care with language is a big way social justice advocates do this cultural work. But the practice can have messy unintended consequences.

Sometimes preferred language is just an arbitrary signal that one pays attention to social justice. One cannot deduce from antiracist principle that one should say “person of color” rather than “colored person”, one has to just know. It does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is a good thing to do! We should be forthright about that. In that particular example, objecting to someone saying “colored person” is fair because the rule is well-known. But in other cases, social justice advocates take offense based on language norms which they presume are better-known than they are. Esoteric language can drive away people with their hearts in the right place who don’t know where to start in getting more engaged with social justice advocacy culture, and can reïnforce social class gatekeeping by presenting a greater challenge to people who have not been exposed to that langauge through a college education or other professional-class spaces.

Social justice advocacy culture responding to people who don’t use the word “racism” the way it does presents a particularly fraught example. Advocates often tell people that they are “wrong” to think that “racism” means racial bigotry because the “real” definition of “racism” understands it as a system. Trying to assert the “correct” meaning of “racism” is like trying to identify the “correct” meaning of “God” — the ideas the word represents are too contested. Most dictionaries offer racial bigotry as their first definition of “racism”; and many do not reference racism as a system at all. Countering people talking about racism in terms of bigotry with an assertion about the definition of the word turns the discussion away from the substance of language to the semantics.

At its worst, this becomes a lazy attempt to force people to accept a whole way of thinking about social justice without bothering with the argument for it. I find it both more honest and more effective to say, “Because looking only at bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. Since different people use the words ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ differently, I try never to use them by themselves. I say ‘racist bigotry’ or ‘institutional racism’ or whatever, in order to be precise.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage of the word is accurate, and talk about the substance of what I am trying to say, without spiralling into unanswerable questions about what the word “really” means.

It further undermines attempts to assert an “accurate” definition of “racism” when social justice advocates are not actually precise with their usage of the word. Advocates commonly slip between using “racism” to mean The Big System Of Injustice and using it to mean bigotry. That sloppy language makes advocacy look like sloppy thinking. In those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which falls into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism setting by insisting on proof of bigtory.

Social justice advocacy culture needs to do better at delivering the care with language in practice which it calls for in principle.

Absolutism

Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.

Understanding from lived experience

For example, standpoint theory registers that one’s identity positions have an inescapably profound impact on one’s encounter of the world, which makes it good praxis to value lived experience: people in a marginalized position have a generally more sophisticated read of the inequities along that axis, and the mechanics of how those inequities work, than people in a privileged position do. Women understand sexism better than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man may happen to have an insight into sexism which a woman does not.

But this sometimes does stiffen into an abolute form. I have been told that a particular fact I have offered about the history of feminism which a woman did not happen to know could not possibly be correct, because men must never tell women how sexism works. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, which may make us dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory. This can produce maddening paradoxes, calling on people in privileged positions to speak out against injustices but then scolding them when they do.

This is tricky to navigate! My fact about feminist history was not all that important; on balance, relying too much on queer cultural memory may still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works than being too credulous with straight historians. People in privileged positions tend to over-read the marginalized as making bad moves, which is one reason why the privileged need to cultivate skepticism about their own reactions. So correcting such errors at the margins is not always worth the effort. And in decisions where stakes are higher for the oppressed than for the marginalized, the marginalized have a compelling moral claim that they should be the ones to make a call about what to do.

Campism

The privilege–marginalization framework inherits a lot from the anticolonial work of Franz Fanon, who underlined the importance of always checking one’s politics against whether or not it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression at the bottom line, summarized in the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies any brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people fall into the trap he warns about, claim a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness, in a creepy parallel with Carl Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”. That kind of vulgar Fanon-ism should give us the cold spooky.

Oppression Olympics

If the only ground for understanding is the experience of the marginalized … how do we discern who resolve whose marginalization is legitimate and relevant in context? Some “feminists” claim that trans women are really men, and accepting their account of transphobia illegitimately favors privileged men over marginalized women; trans women call this a demand that we favor privileged cis people over marginalized trans people. I know where I stand — transphobes are liars — but “defer to the marginalized” in itself does not give us the ability to resolve that question. People can fall into an oppression Olympics of arguing over who is most marginalized … and intersectionality names the importance of not doing that, because the dynamics are always complex and entangled.

Cancel culture

I have another post directly addressing this. There is no better example of a real challenge which opponents of social justice grossly exaggerate. Two key points:

the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Manifestos for a new America

We have no choice but to think big.

The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an economic system. A full new social vision with its own ethos.

I’m starting to see manifestos, so I’m going to index them here.

Working On Our Ism

Timothy Burke has not so much a manifesto as a manifesto-for-a-manifesto.

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism?

[⋯]

What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.

[⋯]

But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

Liberal Currents | Reforging America

A word from Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents, where people are thinking about the muscular, radical liberalism I yearn for.

The mainspring of governance

1. Congress must be revitalized internally
2. Congress must reassert itself vis-a-vis the other branches
3. Most importantly, the link between the Congress and the people must be reforged

A world of abundance

1. We must clear out regulations that serve only to create artificial scarcity
2. We must run a hotter economy than the neoliberals allowed
3. We should invest in basic public goods
4. We should re-found the world trade system

America for all

1. We must invest in public and higher education
2. We must finally arrive at a new settlement on immigration
3. We must prosecute all the criminals of Trump II.
4. We must rebuild our public sphere

The UnPopulist | The Reconstruction Agenda

The Reconstruction Agenda, a new project of The UnPopulist, will take this problem seriously, building on its Fireproofing the Presidency series. Its Executive Watch project is diligently documenting the copious abuses of the office emanating from this White House. The Reconstruction Agenda will propose fixes and mechanisms to avoid such a scenario from transpiring ever again. Through written analysis from myself and outside experts, along with regular in-depth interviews on The Reconstruction podcast, it will examine how American democracy became so brittle and how it might be rebuilt. The goal is to value genuine expertise and make it accessible to any thoughtful reader. You’re smart people and you deserve smart answers, not clickbait and ill-informed punditry, nor nihilistic doomerism. The task before us is restoring the capacity for freedom and self-government, not simply lamenting its decline.