"Young women are constantly warned of the dangers of the manosphere.... The cult of 'toxic masculinity' is now so overcooked as to be limp..."

"... and meaningless, and, crucially, it entirely misses one key thing: feminine men can be just as 'toxic' as bodybuilders. It is Gen Z’s shallow sexual politics, which privilege 'looking' progressive over deeply felt values, that have landed us here. If the feminisation of culture has succeeded, it is because posing as effete gains men access to the women they want to sleep with. Cultural capital has deserted roided-up meatheads and landed in the lap of the moustachioed, mulletted lothario who professes to be a harmless feminist and who wields just enough knowledge about Judith Butler to talk a blushing sociology major into bed.... When visibly masculine men are maligned as potential abusers, women choose the wolf in vintage clothing. But this is all based on false assumptions: performative matcha is one more way that ill-intentioned loverboys can game our sexual politics’ daft stereotypes, joining tried-and-tested tactics like professing to be left-wing, painting one’s nails and listening to Phoebe Bridgers. You are just as likely to be shagged and bagged by a matcha drinker as a craft beer enthusiast, or indeed, a plain old lager fan...."

Writes Poppy Sowerby, quoted in "Ladies, if you see a man with a matcha latte — run/Male poseurs have abandoned macho and embraced matcha. Is it just another ploy to seduce women?" (London Times).

I haven't used my "performative (the word)" tag in a while. Here's the post where I created it, back in 2022 about a NYT piece titled, "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise." I said:

"The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue."

Said David Axelrod, with a distinctively clever way to state the numerical fact, quoted in "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise. In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans" (NYT). 

Another quote from Axelrod: "Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House. And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative. He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality."

I should make a tag for "performative." It's a buzz word these days, I believe, and I'd like to keep track of it. 

"Surprising words from the country that gave us Derrida and Foucault :)"

Tweets Jordan Peterson, looking at "'Out-of-control woke leftism and cancel culture' from the U.S is a threat to FRANCE because it 'attacks' the nation's heritage and identity, French politicians and intellectuals say" (Daily Mail). 

This is a good nudge to think deeply about how the "woke leftism and cancel culture" has used and distorted the grand French philosophers beyond recognition. The French don't recognize what we've done to the philosophy we appropriated. Our lefties are doing Frenchface... badly.

From the Daily Mail article:

The collection of intellectuals arguing that France is being contaminated by the leftism of America was buoyed on last year after French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to side with them. In a speech in October on the 'Fight against Separatism', Macron warned against leaving 'the intellectual debate to others' as he cautioned of the 'certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States'....

Entirely!  

This month also saw the publication of a book by social scientists Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel in which they claimed that race is a 'bulldozer' that destroys other subjects....  Historian Pierre-André Taguieff argued... that the 'American-style black question' was a 'totally artificial importation' to France. He said that it was all driven by 'hatred of the West, as a white civilization'.... 

James Lindsay — author of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody" — has a response at Peterson's tweet: "They have a complicated relationship with those thinkers, who were wrong, yes, but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least." 

The falsification of falsification.

Scientific American turns to Critical Studies of Science to conclude that we should retire the idea of falsification, upon which the negative half of scientific epistemology rests. The sciences are under serious threat.https://t.co/loEZMiFjdd

— James Lindsay, relevant white dude (@ConceptualJames) September 8, 2020

I don't know if Lindsay's trashing of the article is correct. I simply invite discussion. From the article:

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist’s history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"

Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!

Systemic racism at TikTok?

My TikTok isn't being promoted to the top of people's feeds either. This is outrageous. I mean, I don't even have one, but why am I not getting more attention. It's obviously systemic prejudice against me. https://t.co/zDa9OeKrI8

— James Lindsay, if that's my real name (@ConceptualJames) July 31, 2020

Problems with TikTok may be so yesterday, because today is the day Trump said he was banning TikTok. Interesting to see him getting ahead of The Woke, who were coming for TikTok anyway.

Keep an eye on James Lindsay. He's the author of that excellent essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" that we were talking about yesterday, here. He's got a book coming out, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody," which is going to be a big deal. And look at the high-level attention he's getting:

The Roots Of Wokeness: Insightful review by @sullydish of Pluckrose & Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories,” on the philosophical foundations of “social justice” warfare. https://t.co/dK9LV49eWW

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 1, 2020

"The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate."

From "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" (a very substantial article at New Discourses).

I got that from my son John's Facebook post, here. John extracts this quote:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate....

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation....

Critical Social Justice activists ... tell us constantly about the high emotional labor costs of doing the “work” they do (and never being taken seriously for it). To invite them to a public conversation or debate is to ask them to get exploited in this way for other people’s benefit by getting up on stage in a dominance-approved paradigm with a bad-faith moral monster who just wants his opportunity to reinforce the very dominance that exhausts them...