Idea Tapas #2
A second helping of thoughts for the discerning palate. CW: transphobia, fascism
Have you dined with us before? Let me explain how we work. Last week, I put together a bunch of shorter-form thoughts into a wee sharing platter. But it was starting to get a bit long, so I split it in half, and this is your second serving!
I'm writing this in the past, so to the question of how I'm doing? Hopefully better! Let's assume better.
Thermoregulation in movement
It's too hot right now, and if you move, like, at all, you are going to feel it. The big risks are fluid disturbance and thermal strain, and your cooling strategy needs to take into account whether the heat is dry or humid because evaporation strategies won't work in a tropical atmosphere.
An interesting idea is pre-cooling your body before beginning movement, and the two most effective strategies for this are ingesting an ice slurry (or cold water) and cold water immersion.
When moving, face wind/water spray is the most effective, and this can be complemented with menthol "cooling" (it's an affective assistant) and ice or phase-change vests. For practical reasons, neck cooling is often preferred, depending on the type of movement.
After moving, cold-water immersion or cryotherapy are the best, though ice vests and ice packs also help.
Stay safe out there, overheating can be quite dangerous.
The Law and the Good
Our relationship to the law bears reflection, because once one has accepted that there’s an irreconcilable difference between what is at any moment legal and policed, and what is moral and ethical, then one has tipped into a different symbolic world that only happens to appear the same.
At any moment, out in the world, there’s a small but non-zero chance that you will be forced by your sense of right and wrong into crossing over into operating outside the law. You need to be emotionally ready for that. Not in a macho hypervigilance sense, not even in a radical outlaw sense. You simply have to have done a little thinking about it in advance.
You need to, for instance, internalise the importance that you don’t talk to cops. Your interests and the police’s interests, even if you are cis male pakeha, are no longer the same. You can perform friendliness and cooperation but this carefulness needs to be right there in your mind with every interaction.
You have to develop your own sense of right and wrong, and have it ready. If you see someone shoplifting from a supermarket, is this different from stealing from a small shop? Do you need to know their sob story before acting or do you trust their demonstrated need?
Few of us know ahead of time how brave we are under unknown circumstances. But just as emergency services reduce turn heroism into simple duty through practiced conditioning, that’s how we need to be with doing good in public; it should feel like straightforward necessity. And that only comes from mental preparation, thought, and conversation.
Category Errors
The concept of “category error” is one I’ve found useful in analysis. “Comparing apples to oranges” is the basic idea, but its power comes in recognising when we are applying an unhelpful lens to a phenomena.
For instance, a “conversation” where the parties aren’t acting in good faith is not a conversation. In a good faith conversation you are ethically obliged to act with respect and honesty, to try your best to communicate as clearly as you can. Applying those precepts when dealing with someone who is lying and acting in bad faith would be a grave mistake. At least, you waste your time. But you also may dignify their argument in front of others.
Even if we don’t have the specific words to distinguish one category from another, it is enough to recognise when things are not alike. A lot of modern politics makes more sense when you understand this conflation of unlike things. We mustn’t treat arsonists like firefighters.
Now there’s an inherent challenge here, namely, how one chooses to categorise things is not an essential property of the world, it is an order that we impose upon it. It is possible to choose unhelpful categorical structure. Apples may be comparable to oranges as commodities. This is the limit of analysis, and why we mustn't hold any one analysis too tightly, and must sense-check its conclusions.
Nonetheless, and similar to “framing”, we need to be aware of false conflations and the implication that we should treat, for instance, property damage the same as harm to humans in activism, or all radical positions as alike (see horseshoe theory).
The aesthetics of fascism
There are a lot of good reasons for rejecting fascism. My radical proposal is that we should reject fascism because it’s aesthetically crap.
Modern fascism arrives with a flood of generative AI images, hopelessly bad suits, the stalest memes and jokes, and a dedication to disgusting food. Nothing creative, beautiful, or cool emerges from these contemptuous death cults.
This alone is sufficient to condemn them. In their indifference to beauty and meaning we can see their ideas for the inhuman slop they are. Don’t mistake me, they fetishise “classical art” and photorealistic objectified women, but it’s a put on. Their appreciation for art ends at its libidinal expression. The limit of their taste can be circumscribed by what would excite a teenage boy.
But what about historical fascists? The uniforms by Hugo Boss, Piacentini’s architecture, the futurists, the fashy poets and philosophers? Much of it can be summed up by the fact that amphetamines are a helluva drug. Less glibly, I admit that I'm not above a snazzy uniform or a formidable building. But would I want a world consisting only of that? No hint of irony, or camp? Death would be kinder.
The psychology of TERFS
Paul's question - why are TERFs so fucking psycho? - got me to write up an explanation of how I interpret their behaviour.
For many TERFs, I believe they have turned Womanhood into a fetish object. Women suffer awfully under patriarchy, in too many ways to list, and so when someone comes along and says "you have not suffered without reason. You belong to a special class of person, persecuted and precious for your membership in this class", well, that's an attractive message. It's the kind of idea one could build an identity around. It occults the fear that the violence experienced, the medical neglect, the endless marginalisation, was arbitrary and unnecessary.
Note the way that trans women and trans men are treated - trans women as transgressors pushing their way into a sacred space, trans men as traitors who rejected a sacred gift.
I believe that this kernel of identity is so important that they defensively foreclose the inevitable gap between the symbolic model that supports this and messy reality. They psychotically assert an essential "truth".
I think this is why we see long-term “left-wing” and “feminist” folk first break on this issue and then spiral towards the far right. The psychotic foreclosure maybe happened years before but is now exposed by a changing world, and all other values are subsumed by this effort to protect the symbolic order.
This is why they experience the existence and visibility of trans and intersex people as traumatic. For them, this messy reality is a symbolically existential threat. They react with fear and psychotic anger.
Then, once they get involved in TERF communities like Mumsnet or FB groups, they also join a kind of perverse obsessional community: people who enjoy obsessively thinking about trans and intersex folk, like the pleasure one gets from scratching an itch till it bleeds. Hardly unique but deeply nasty.
The “womanhood as fetish” explanation may not be the only reason for the psychotic foreclosure, but I think it’s a top contender. Male transphobes also fetishise women but for different reasons, including the perceived threat to their sexual identity. The mechanism of psychotic foreclosure remains but it hides different things.
Dumpty Doo
There we go. A series of tasty dishes for your brain. Till next time.