Primmlife Weekly Reading Roundup
I read a lot during the week. Not just books but many, many articles, and as a new feature going forward on Fridays, I’ll put a few articles that affected me throughout the week. Reading broadly is important to me, and I’d like to promote the work that I admire and found fascinating. This is hopefully another way to do that. I will include a little of my own analysis, reasons why the article spoke to me so, and quotes that I found interesting. My guess is that the topics will fall into a few main areas: Politics, Philosophy, Science, and Writing. Enjoy!
Can Jim Mattis Hold the Line in Trump’s ‘War Cabinet’?
Mattis is a fascinating man. He represents an ideal that is missing in the rest of the administration, and I try to read whatever I can find about the man. This article from the New York Times is a balanced look filled with excellent writing.
It is a measure of Washington’s profoundly anxious condition that Mattis, dismissed as a warmonger during the Obama administration, has been held up in liberal circles as a potential savior.
The above line hooked me into the story because it’s true. During the Obama administration, I didn’t research the man enough, but I respected his service. Mattis’s famous quotes indicate a warmonger, but in his role in the Trump administration, he’s shown the rest of us what his troops already knew about him. Now, I’ve revised my opinion, and this article goes a long way towards that. Mattis is someone we want in this administration. This is a great profile and well worth the read.
In other words, men like Mattis are, in many ways, as different from Trump as it is possible to be. Think of the gaudy ubiquity of Trump’s golden logo and consider this: When the Marine Corps was publishing its official history of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mattis insisted on removing every instance of his own name and replacing it with “Commander, First Marine Division.”
Who Does She Think She Is?
By Laurie Penny
Laurie Penny is a British feminist writer that tackles difficult subjects, and this article is no different. Here she talks about what is involved with being a successful, opinionated woman on the internet. While a long, long read, it’s worth it to see how pervasive harassment for women online is.
There’s one more thing that the Left, the Right, and every spoke on the broken compass of directionless human politics has in common. Apart from disliking women who are too successful, too happy, too much, the other thing they have in common is how much they seem to enjoy taking them down.
Ms. Penny gives readers a good insight into what she went through as she became more successful in her career. It’s an excellent look at how petty humans can be. She includes some devastating lines in her work. I’ve already recommended this to friends who enjoyed it as well.
The internet is an inverse Hydra with a hundred assholes: Put down one and two more pop up in his place to tell you your dead dad would be ashamed of you.
Jordan Peterson, Historian: aide-mémoire
By Tisias
Jordan Peterson is an interesting case. When I first saw him on the Joe Rogan Experience, Mr. Peterson surprised me. I didn’t quite agree with him, but I thought he had a chance of raising the profile of intellectuals on the Right. Since then, with everything I’ve read by him or heard him say, my opinion has dropped. But I still find him interesting even as he makes debate more difficult with his simple, spurious philosophy. On medium, this article explains why Mr. Peterson’s understanding of Marxism, post-modernism, Foucault, and Derrida is shallow at best and an out right lie at worst.
When it comes to the immensely important question of what to read in life, of what to enshrine within a curriculum, ideologues are those who recommend, defend, and attacks books they haven’t read based on mere reputation and perceived politics.
The above quote describes how I perceive Peterson’s understanding of those topics. I understand that he has issue with what is going on in institutions of higher learning, and while his criticism is good, his root cause analysis is not. It’s interesting that he criticizes the institutional career path that he chose. Who better than someone who rose through the ranks in that system? If only he stuck to the field in which he is an expert because his reading of the philosophers seems lacking.
Rather than asking anyone to change political beliefs, I am asking for something infinitely more reasonable from Peterson and his friends, followers, and foes: express a commitment to the basic scholarly practice of the humanities without any whataboutism.
Peterson typically consumes his thinkers whole to prevent these sorts of situations that require nuanced thinking. “Philosophizing with a hammer”: this is Peterson’s favourite Nietzschean expression. “Historcizing with a bulldozer”: this is Peterson’s actual method.
What Putin Really Wants
By Julia Ioffe
L’Affaire Russe as the Lawfare blog calls it fascinates the hell out of me. Evidence shows that Russia definitely interfered in the 2016 election. The biggest result is that it shows how fragile and how vulnerable the US’s democracy really is. Another interesting byproduct is the reaction. When I was grouping, Russia was THE evil in the world according to conservatives and the Republican party. That party claimed that the Left in the US admired the Soviet Union. Now, it’s flipped. The political Right, obediently following their leader President Trump, are in love with Putin and his Russia while the Left is engaged in smokey room, Charlie Day style conspiracy theorizing. Meanwhile, Ms. Ioffe paints a portrait of Putin as an actual human being. It’s a nuanced look at a man many consider the devil.
This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes Putin effective, what makes him dangerous, is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment, to disrupt, and to take big risks.
His ability to adapt plays into the conspiracy theories. He is not a master organizer, simply good at recognizing opportunity. Despite what Trump thinks, the former KGB operative, though, is not a man to be admired. He rigs his own election, jails his political opponents, and poisons his enemies abroad. While the Left needs to see him as a human and not supreme puppeteer, the Right needs to recognize that he is our enemy.
…it is classically Putin, and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness, to avenge deep resentments, and, at all costs, to survive.
Russia would show the U.S. that there was more than one regime-change racket in town.