Pity Parties, Bloodthirsty Monsters, 3525 Days and Counting, and Trolling Fatphobes - Dinner Table Digest № 64
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
There’s a lot going on in the world these days. Today’s Digest contains pieces about both the Israel/Palestine Conflict and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, which is nearing its 10th year, having first started in 2014. Also included is a repartee from philosopher Kate Manne, who takes a condescending fatphobe to task for her many inaccuracies. Oh, and there’s pity parties!
Sections: Pity Parties for Thought Criminals / Human Animals to Bloodthirsty Monsters / 600 Days of War / ‘But Have You Tried Diet and Exercise?’
The Party Is Cancelled - Emma Green - The New Yorker
What happens when a bunch of white, well-to-do Cancelled Thought Criminals get together in a New York bar for drinks? A pity party, of course!
It’s a commonly held belief on the left that concerns about cancel culture are overblown, if cancel culture even exists at all. Paresky considers it a genuine threat. In our conversations, however, her definition of “cancelled” was somewhat elusive; it encompassed people who suffered professional consequences, sure, but she also referred to instances of social-media pushback as “attempted cancellations.” However she defines it, she’s clearly preoccupied with the idea.
This whole article just makes me laugh, from start to finish. You can almost hear the tiny violin in the background. Some of these self-described Thought Criminals were so afraid, they didn’t even show up once they heard at a reporter from The New Yorker would be joining them: “Only a dozen or so people had showed up—fewer than usual, because the group had been told that I would be there reporting on it.”
Green describes an interaction with Kim Jones, who sounds like she has a personal vendetta more than anything, given that her daughter lost in a fair swimming competition to Lia Thomas, who identifies as a transgender woman. What caught my eye was Green’s sentence at the end of the second paragraph here, which I have emphasized in bold:
Jones co-founded an organization called ICONS, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, which advocates for what Jones sees as the rights of female athletes—including the principle that transgender women, whom she calls “male athletes,” should not be eligible to compete in women’s sports. Jones doesn’t consider herself cancelled; she believes that “ninety-nine per cent of people agree with almost everything I say.” Paresky jumped in: “But how many people are willing to be vocal about it?” Jones replied, “This is why I love coming to the Thought Criminals.” Elsewhere, she said, “People who are frightened to read up on something or to dig into a controversy will be, like, ‘Oh, I agree with you, but I just don’t know how to articulate it, or what if I lose my job?’ ”
By the end of the evening, a few stragglers had gathered on one side of the table, where Jones was leading a conversation about differences in sex development—an intense choice of topic for a casual late-night bar hangout. Paresky listened closely as Jones described what she saw as the edge cases for who should be able to compete in women’s sports, going into elaborate detail about congenital medical conditions that affect people’s sex chromosomes or anatomy. I couldn’t help wondering how the conversation might sound to someone who is intersex or transgender—to hear people debating about their bodies and their lives over drinks and appetizers. (Emphasis Added)
From Human Animals to Bloodthirsty Monsters - David Livingstone Smith
One of the world's leading scholars on the subject of dehumanization has some words for Israeli leadership. First, though, he quotes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying,
… that Israeli soldiers “understand the scope of the mission. They are ready to take action at any time in order to defeat the bloodthirsty monsters who have risen against us to destroy us.”
Before the analysis, the important disclaimer:
This is not because I am sympathetic to Hamas. I am not. It is not because I am an anti-Semite. I am not. In fact, notwithstanding my very Christian name, I am Jewish, and I would be happy to see Hamas obliterated.
He continues,
I think that Netanyahu’s choice of words is ominous because, having studied the rhetoric of dehumanization for nearly twenty years, I know all too well what this kind of rhetoric implies.
The worst, the most deadly, form of dehumanization represents the dehumanized other as a monster—an uncanny incarnation of pure evil rather than a human being. But whatever one might say about the hideous atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, it is patently false to claim that these atrocities were not committed by human beings.
Livingstone Smith wrote a fantastic book on the dehumanization inherent in claiming someone as a monster, so good should look there for a more in-depth discussion of his argument, but his primary claim is importantly relevant as atrocities occur all over the world:
… when we dehumanize others as monsters, we essentialize them is a particular way. We think of them as a distinct, racialized kind of being. They—these monstrous others—are deep down all the same. Even if they do not manifest the same properties, they have it in them to do so. Given this pattern of thinking, these racial others, these monsters, must be utterly obliterated—destroyed without quarter.
Characterizing the dehumanized other as “bloodthirsty” adds to the picture. A bloodthirsty entity is a vampire—a being that wants to drink human blood. This is a classic dehumanizing trope, for reasons that I will explain in a future essay. Ironically, it is the basis of the centuries-old “blood libel” that Jews consumed the blood of Christian children.
Lest Livingstone Smith be accused of favouring one side over the other, his next post was an exploration of the history of anti-semitism, with a specific focus on the distinction between anti-semitism (racial discrimination) and anti-Judaism (religious discrimination) in medieval thought. He concludes by saying this:
The founding of Israel and the Nakba that befell so many Palestinians did not create the deadly anti-Semitism exemplified by Hamas any more than the rise of National Socialism created the White supremacist project of destroying the Jewish people. Present-day exterminationist anti-Semitism, and the strange—or perhaps not-so-strange—relationship between neo-Nazis and the radical Islamists is unintelligible unless seen against the background of this deep history.
600 Days of War - Mick Ryan
Mick Ryan is one of the more reputable commentators on the Russian extermination project in Ukraine, which, as he helpfully notes, has been going on a lot longer than 600 days. According to Christopher Miller, it’s actually been 3525 days since Russia first attacked Ukraine, their first offensive actions coming in 2014 when they took over Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine with military staff dressed up as insurgents. Remember the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine, anyone?
But the important part of Ryan’s piece isn’t necessarily the counting of the days, but what the passing of time means to the defense of the Ukrainian nation. I want to highlight one of his reflections after 600 days of active hostilities, regarding the Ukrainian way of fighting war:
… Ukraine appears to have developed its own unique way of war. This Ukrainian Way of War is a conglomeration of Soviet, Western and Ukrainian cultures, concepts, organisations, and technologies. There is a fascinating interplay of older Soviet and newer NATO doctrines for training, leadership, and operations.
… During my most recent visit to Ukraine, I examined this subject through the lens of how Ukraine is applying all elements of its national power to develop a strategic approach to raising, training, employing and adapting its military. … it is reasonable to hypothesize that Ukraine, at the 600-day mark of the war, is now implementing a distinctive way of war that has been developed to deal with the specific context of this war.
As we turn our attention to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, let us not forget our Ukrainian friends, who have been under some sort of attack by Russia for nearly 10 years now.
‘But Have You Tried Diet and Exercise?’ - Kate Manne
Philosopher Kate Manne was sent a variation of the “Diet and Exercise” missive that fat people are so used to hearing that their eyes glaze over every time. This time she claps back. And it's simply delicious! 😋 Here's one excerpt:
But back to Deana. She calls me “obviously a brilliant woman” and then proceeds to talk down to me for the remainder of her email.
I found that so striking. And so typical. And depressing. As fat people, we’re standardly assumed to be incompetent, ignorant, oblivious, even stupid. One of the biggest reasons I struggled with fatphobia so long, I think, was that my fat body was at odds not only with dominant beauty ideals—which I’ve cared about only intermittently—but because it was also at odds with the image of an intellectual in contemporary Anglo-American culture. The sense that a fat person—still less a fat woman—who is smart and authoritative and an expert in her field is a walking contradiction. After all, if our minds are sharp, how could we have let our bodies get this way?
There’s so much to unpack here: the false, pernicious sense that book smarts and the ability to contribute to intellectual culture are the only forms of intelligence that matter. (Trust me, a society full of people with minds like mine, prone to abstraction over complex embodied knowledge, would be a complete disaster.) The false, ableist sense that creates intellectual hierarchies whatsoever, rather than looking to different people for different kinds of contributions. …
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