Some random thoughts
I despise Yuval Harari. From the moment I saw a clip of him talking I instantly recognized him as a charlatan fraud, a bullshit artist carefully crafting a persona for himself as a genius intellectual, but for the centrist liberal crowd instead of conservative right-wingers like Jordan Peterson. The same vibe as a Malcolm Gladwell or Thomas Friedman. It’s all just rehashed Foucault undergrad level philosophy stuff repackaged in the most asinine simplistic ways for suburbanite liberal centrists to put on their bookshelf as decoration, so they can pretend they’re enlightened and smart. Of course this guy is beloved by the media class. Of course he gets invited to Davos and the World Economic Forum. Because he has nothing worthwhile to say while pretending like he does. Whenever you hear someone ask you: “Hey, do you know Yuval Harari?”, you know you’re either dealing with a self-important hack. Here’s a good takedown of his bestseller book by a graduate student.
Whenever I scroll through conservative, right-wing twitter I am filled with a deep loathing of the kind of person who is part of that “movement”, if you can even call it that. It’s more a loose association of the most narcissistic, depraved, scummy, soulless scumbags imaginable, who get joy out of humiliating and destroying other people’s lives, especially if they’re part of a marginalized, minority community. The Ron Desantis followers, the MAGA type accounts, the Q-Anon shit, that weird bizarre deranged cult calling themselves “post-left”—when I see them the thought comes to my mind of how blissful it would be to just outlaw, make illegal, being that type of way. I think to myself: Yeah, sure, the Soviet Union wasn’t perfect, but at least the made it illegal to be that kind of vile piece of shit. They effectively banned the entire conservative, right-wing ideological spectrum from existence. You couldn’t be a Ron Desantis, a Trump, a Mitch McConnell. Hell you couldn’t even be a Bari Weiss or Joe Biden type center-right figure. At least, not explicitly, not outwardly. How amazing that must be.
Of course the problem is that official sanction of this kind doesn’t work. The pathologies that the conservative right represents just became refracted and expressed in other forms. But even so, I do believe that having an official ideology of internationalism and solidarity blunts these pathologies. As evidence I can cite the pre and post-Soviet period in Russia, an argument I have made more extensively here.
One of the strangest things some people say in my twitter replies is what essentially boils down to: “Why aren’t you saying what every mainstream media outlet is saying, and is the norm among the Western media and political class? Why are you instead saying something that is outside the norm, and is pointing out their hypocrisy?” Most recently this has been about the war in Ukraine, but it was said before about other topics as well whenever they were in “the discourse”. These people see literally every politician and mainstream media personality constantly saying that Putin is Hitler and we must arm the Ukrainians and fight to the last Ukrainian, no diplomacy is possible, that’s appeasement, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler…and then they see a squirrel account on twitter pointing out these people’s hypocrisy not just with reference to past beliefs and actions on their part but current ones, in relation to the ongoing active starvation of Afghanistan and Yemen, the economic terror campaigns against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, the active support for the genocidal Israeli apartheid state—and they go insane. They can’t stand it. They need me to also say what they hear constantly by all the major media, political and cultural institutions. It’s a compulsion, a deranged, frantic need to know that you are also on their side, right?
That is what goes through my mind when I see these people making these demands that I denounce Russia, that I say Putin is Hitler, that I regurgitate what everyone already who has any important role in forming opinion in the West already believes and is already saying. And I refuse to go along with that, because it undermines the very reason I first started posting my thoughts, which was to offer a perspective which is rarely if ever heard otherwise.
So whenever something is already being said by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, BBC and the New York Times, you won’t find me saying the same shit, because it’s pointless to me personally, and more importantly it’s pointless objectively. You are not adding anything of value to a particular point of view when that is already the norm, when that is already being constantly screamed out by every major institution in society. The only purpose it serves is for you to signal that you’re on the good side, that you’re brave, that you’re standing up against this or that evil thing. But that’s a bullshit purely self-serving calculation to make. Yeah, go spend your time talking about how evil Hamas and Hezbollah are, how much you oppose them, how much you think they’re terrible. You’re very brave repeating the standard view of the most powerful countries and institutions in the world.
No, I agree with Chomsky’s principle. We only have a very marginal impact on “the discourse”, but the very least you can do with that is to try to effect positive change within the range of the possible. And what does that mean concretely? It means focusing on exactly those things that are never brought up in “the discourse”, because they are not in the interests of the ruling classes, and the political and media class that represents them.
As Chomsky said, “We should give much more attention to one priest we've killed than to a hundred priests they've killed. It's a very simple ethical point: you're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, not for somebody else's actions.”
It is instructive to watch the entire panel discussion that clip is from, as well as this great video by Jeremy Scahill on “whataboutism”.
Do you respond to emails? I have a few questions that I'd love to hear your thoughts on.