
Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) is a weird “absurdist” science-fiction in which a multiverse-hopping Michelle Yeoh attempts to deal with her family issues while saving the universe from destruction. It was released in 2022, gained plaudits at some random US film festival, and has been making a killing in its public release. It has received generally very good reviews: it got 95% at rotten tomatoes and 81% at metacritic, as well as winning a bunch of awards. It seems to have stirred a lot of passion, with most critics seeing its science fiction as clever and original, its acting as great, and the emotional component of its story as deep and genuine. Of 339 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, only 18 rated it as rotten and many said it was “profound and moving” or “made you think and cry” (see below).

To me it was ordinary SF and trash pro-family propaganda. My review has a few light spoilers, but here instead of dwelling on its failed science fiction I want to talk a little about how much I hate pro-family propaganda in art, and how socially destructive it is.
The premise and the ordinary science fiction
The movie is about an Asian-American family, headed by migrants Evelyn Wang and Waymond Wang, who run a failing laundromat and have a college-age daughter, Joy, who is a lesbian. They have also recently had to bring Evelyn’s father over from their home country (it’s not clear if it’s Malaysia, or one of the provinces of China, but since Evelyn and Waymond speak a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin it is probably either Guangdong/HK or Malaysia). Granddad is old and sick, and Evelyn is an incredibly stressed, hyper-active, and extremely unpleasant mother, who refuses to engage properly with either her daughter or her husband and is basically an abusive bully. She refuses to respect her daughter’s relationship, calls her girlfriend “he” and then blames this lapse on her bad English (Chinese speakers of English often mix up genders because in Chinese it’s all ta), refuses to tell her father the truth about Joy’s relationship, refuses to listen to any of either her daughter’s or her husband’s concerns, opinions or emotions, and when she appears to be about to be kind to her simply tells her “You’re fat”. She also reacts very badly to any attempts to change or improve the working of the shop, has an incredibly poor management style (for e.g. receipts) and gets angry whenever anyone tries to improve it, but is always stressed about it. She’s a classic manipulative and abusive parent.
When the show starts she is being audited by the tax office, and trying to organize a party for her father. We learn later that she was basically kicked out of home by her father for choosing to marry Waymond, and he has come back to her because his wife (her mother) died and she needs to look after him. Most reviews don’t mention that Waymond is spending the first half of the movie trying to get Evelyn to agree to divorce, but she is so dismissive of her husband that she refuses to make time to talk to him or look at the papers, and only finds out by accident. What a nice mother and wife!
So anyway it turns out that there are infinite multi-verses, and someone who looks exactly like Evelyn’s husband is racing through all of them, at the behest of a parallel-universe version of her father, looking for the specific Evelyn who is best able to fight off an evil being that is attempting to destroy all the multi-verses. This evil being, of course, is a parallel universe version of her daughter, Joy, who is building a singularity thing that will destroy all the universes. Joy’s reason for doing this is that nothing matters, a nihilistic destructive urge that ultimately looks a lot like suicidality, when we get to find out what makes her tick. Eventually the parallel-universe team realize that the Evelyn in our universe is the correct Evelyn to take on Joy, because she’s so hopelessly shit that she must be perfect for the task (this is logic). Because this is “absurdist” SF these alternative universes are full of dumb things like people with sausages for fingers (through which they have sex), a universe where Evelyn is a rock, a universe where she can fight with a pizza sign, etc. By imagining such a universe and pressing a button a special magic headset, Evelyn can go to that universe, grab the skills of the person in that universe, and then use them in this universe. Sometimes this leads to personality swapping and sometimes it doesn’t, because the movie has no rules, and the only useful person Evelyn gets is an alternative universe Evelyn who is basically actual Michelle Yeoh. So she can do some martial arts. Also to jump between universes you need to do something improbable or weird in this one, so chewing discarded gum, sticking a butt-plug up your arse, telling your enemy you love them (and meaning it).
It’s not absurdist, it’s shit. For about 30 minutes it’s funny and then it’s just boring and dumb, with escalating levels of weird as the directors try to milk this for all it’s worth (and it’s a very long movie!) Finally there’s a big, overly long showdown between Evelyn and Joy, during which we somehow learn that useless Waymond (who was trying to divorce his wife) is the hero of the movie, and if we all just be “kind” we can save the world, so Evelyn (who is a horrible person) starts trying to be kind like Waymond, who she now suddenly looks up to and admires, and fighting enemies with (martial arts based) kindness. Then there are long and supposedly moving interchanges between Evelyn and Joy about how Evelyn is a bad mother but Joy should just accept it, because Joy is Evelyn’s daughter. At this point reviewers will tell you that the movie is about how family are the people we really love, and they may not be perfect but we should stick by them and respect them because they’re there when everyone else isn’t, and this is very moving and the way Evelyn tries to draw Joy back is very deep and powerful. Actually Joy is suicidal, and this is because she was raised in a loveless and cruel family, and her belief that everything is pointless and empty is their fault, but the movie wants us to think she should accept them and forgive them anyway.
There is a brief period where Joy returns to her family and they live happily, with Joy and her girlfriend’s relationship being accepted, but Evelyn still telling Joy she is fat and lazy. Which is meant to validate all the battles or something. And Joy and her girl are overjoyed that her mother has accepted them, because this is all the validation they wanted all along.
Fuck that. This is pro-family propaganda, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, and we should be ditching it from our culture. We can start by not over-hyping shoddy, ordinary SF movies that fail at a multiverse story in order to get us to believe that forgiving and going back to your family is the right thing to do, because it’s not, and anyone who tells you it is is a liar who means you ill.
The dangerous illusion of the “Asian Family” stereotype
Before we go on to discuss pro-family propaganda, let’s just briefly digress to discuss the stereotype of the unforgiving Asian family, the mother and father who never have any flattery or kindness for their kids but only unrelenting demands. American Born Chinese (ABC) commentators and comedians are full of stories about this idea, and would like you to believe that this is some unique trait of Asian families. But here’s the thing: it’s not. My father never had any flattery or kindness for his kids, but he also didn’t ever encourage or demand anything from us. Homer Simpson is based on a real type of Western father, who can’t stand his own kids, doesn’t care to understand them, and always encourages them not to bother being special or seeking to make themselves better. Isn’t that worse? I think some ABC wear the meanness of their family like a badge of honour (look how I suffered) and have turned normal abusive family dynamics into some kind of cultural iconography. It’s not! And to try and make it so at this time is a dangerous tactic. As anti-Asian hate has grown, a lot of ABC journalists and comedians have tried to use these narratives to get onside with white society, to try and weather the backlash. Don’t do it! And don’t laud the depiction of Evelyn in this movie as somehow an especially perfect depiction of a Chinese immigrant family or intergenerational trauma. Her behavior is just bog-standard Arsehole Parent.
For example, the story of Evelyn’s father not being able to accept his granddaughter’s lesbianism is presented by some reviewers and, I think, by Evelyn herself within the movie, as being reflective of his conservative Chinese upbringing. This serves a nice role for the audience, mostly white, to imagine that their own community hasn’t produced this kind of bullshit, but it’s misleading propaganda intended to allay white concerns about white problems. Western men the same age as the grandfather in this movie are just as fucked, don’t pretend it’s because this old dude is Chinese. This is like the classic “if you think it’s racist here, you should see how Japanese treat foreigners!” Actually, I live here, I know how they do, and the west is far worse. White people love telling themselves these little comfortable lies to enable them to pretend their own society isn’t a cesspit. Don’t do it! If there is anything in this world that is Everywhere All at Once, it’s the universal form of arseholery on display in Evelyn and her dad’s personality in this show.
What is pro-family propaganda and why is it bad?
Western movies play many propaganda roles, but two of their deepest and most powerful roles, which are related to each other, are:
- To show that sub-standard white men can be heroes and winners, that what goes wrong is never their fault, and that even if you are an ugly, boring, useless whining loser who is propped up by the women and foreigners around you, you are still the hero of your story. Jackson Oz in Zoo, Brandon Stark and John Snow in Game of Thrones, pretty much every male character in a Disney cartoon, and to a certain extent James Holden in The Expanse all play this role.
- to remind you that you have an obligation to uphold family loyalty and ties even when your family are cruel, negligent, neglectful and/or openly abusive. The absolute classic canonical example of this is Rick & Morty, in which there is an obvious, openly abusive relationship between the grandfather and the grandchild, the parents don’t care or interfere in the abuse, and the viewer is sucked in as an accomplice to an incredibly abusive relationship. Incidentally a lot of people compare R&M to EEAO, which should tell you all you need to know…
One day I will devote an entire blog post to 1), the “It’s not your fault white man” genre of social reinforcement for boring losers, but a more common theme and a much more destructive one is 2), the idea that you need to stick by your family and get their approval no matter what. Some movies cover both themes (e.g the first Guardian of the Galaxy movie with its obssessive focus on helping a callow dude find his lost mummy) and in American movies the pro-family propaganda saturates almost every production in the form of their ubiquitous daddy issues, but it’s more widespread than just this.
And let’s make no bones about it, this story is destructive. I’ve written before about how we have an obligation to hold our family to account for their misdeeds, but I’ll summarize it again here: The only reason that parents feel that they can treat their children like shit for years is that they know, without any doubt, that their children will stick around and won’t abandon them when they become adults. Most shit parents even have a pretty strong inkling that they can keep treating their adult children like shit, and their adult children will keep coming back and licking that shit up. In contrast, the reason we don’t get away with the same levels of abuse towards our friends (in general) is that we know our friends will cut us loose if we keep that shit up. Similarly, for a lot of us, with partners: people are much more likely to divorce than to cut off their parents.
And how do parents know this? Because they read books, read magazines, and watch TV shows and movies that constantly, over and over, tell us that sticking with our parents is an absolutely essential role for us as adults, that we should tolerate their crap, that it’s the kids who need to bend and adapt not the adults, and that we need to be understanding of our parents’ “shortcomings” (which are actually, generally, just abuse) and accept that they won’t change or adapt for us. Movies about kids shaking off their parents and fucking them off are much, much rarer than movies about the kids struggling to find common ground with their parents and eventually learning to deal with, tolerate, or adapt to their parents’ bullshit. Often in these movies the parents throw out a fig-leaf to the kid – accepting their choice of partner or job or moving to Paris or whatever – but they never, ever admit they were wrong and they don’t usually do anything to change the other suite of awful behaviors they have inflicted for decades on their kids.
This movie is just another example of that propaganda. Joy just has to accept, forgive, and stand by her stupid mother, she gives a wild speech about how her mother has ruined her life and then just … gives up. Evelyn changes nothing about herself and just wins.
If these movies weren’t made, or if they were properly balanced with stories about kids getting their vengeance, kids refusing to seek approval, or even – imagine this – parents seeking out and earning their children’s forgiveness through real changes and growth, then we might see people who become parents understanding that their children’s love for them is conditional on their behavior, rather than unconditional acceptance of their faults, cruelty and violence. Then they might modify their behavior accordingly. But they don’t see any reason to do this because all of society keeps telling them they don’t have to, and keeps telling their children that it’s their responsibility to do all the giving in the relationship.
This movie is just another cog in that machine, and not a very interesting one.
Conclusion
As someone who actually made the decision to cut off my parents and abandon them to wallow in their own bullshit, I get angry when I am forced to watch a movie about 親孝行, about having to respect your parents no matter what. This movie started off looking like an interesting insight into a difficult family, with Michelle Yeoh playing a very convincing unpleasant mother figure who I was waiting to be forced to adapt to her family and the outside world by the SF circumstances. Instead I was betrayed – again – by a movie that recited all the same old pro-family propaganda and gave me the same old nonsense about how parents are good no matter what, and we’ll never find anyone like them.
This propaganda is nonsense, and it’s dangerous. People need to stop making it, and reviewers need to stop pretending it’s “deep” or “profound” or “thoughtful”, and start recognizing it as valorization of abuse, cruelty and arrogance. Please stop making these movies! And if this thing bothers you, don’t waste your time on this movie.
I swear every movie should come with a sticker that tells you if it has daddy issues, pro-family propaganda, copaganda, or military-industrial complex war-porn. Fuck Tipper-stickers, I don’t care about “adult themes” and swearing, I want movies that don’t tell me cops are cool, the US is a force for good, and you should stick by your parents no matter what. We can’t build a better world if everyone believes that their wife-beating ex-marine dad is just a misunderstood guy who is traumatized by murdering foreign babies, and will get better if we just stand by him no matter what he did or what he does.
Don’t stand by that man, and don’t stand by this movie!
January 9, 2023 at 8:08 am
I have not seen the film, and therefore I have no opinions about it, positive or negative. However, I saw another blogger mention it as one of the best films of the year and I found the divergence in opinion so striking that I posted a comment with a link to this post. A few commenters responded, some agreeing strongly with your review and some disagreeing. I have no idea whether the agreement will be of interest to you; I have no idea whether the disagreement will be of interest to you; I’m just letting you know.
January 9, 2023 at 8:10 am
I am interested! Please put a link!
January 10, 2023 at 2:53 pm
I tried to post a link, twice, but it seems not to have taken. I’m posting this comment to see whether I can still post comments without links.
January 10, 2023 at 4:27 pm
https://tinyurl.com/yd3w6s35
January 11, 2023 at 8:41 am
The TinyURL above is a link to the post I mentioned, just in case that’s not clear.
January 11, 2023 at 9:59 am
Thanks J-D, you got dumped in Spam for some reason. Thanks for posting the link at LGM, the responses were as interestingly divided as reaction to the movie – some people saying “I completely agree” and others saying “he completely misunderstood that movie”! Weird! I see the same thing with Rick & Morty actually – people completely fail to see the pattern of abuse that’s so obviously visible in plain sight, and others grossed out by it. Also disappointing to see people dismiss my cogent and very powerful critique of the propaganda of the family as “trauma”, maybe that word needs to be retired along with “gaslighting” and “privilege” as a flyblown cliche with no meaning.
I’m not surprised Nussbaum loved this movie – it’s exactly the kind of pale liberal social critique that appeals to her. I got in trouble with her on Twitter for disagreeing that the Expanse is just a 9/11 story, apparently telling Americans not everything is about them is uncool, and pointing out the similarities between belters and Palestinians was on the nose. Also I think she doesn’t really understand SF, kind of like a Margaret Atwood vision of SF.
In truth I’ve stopped reading LGM because I consider their brand of uncritical left-wing American exceptionalism to be a curse on global leftism, and the way people their (and at Balloon Juice) suck up the anti-China and pro-Ukraine viewpoints being promoted by the same people who promoted the Iraq War is just, well, it’s depressing. Seeing left-wing blogs broadcasting the viewpoints of actual Nazis is really sad. Many of my complaints against CT apply to LGM now, where once I thought LGM was a more intelligent and politically astute blog than CT. Disappointment abounds in the COVID era!
January 11, 2023 at 12:48 pm
Given what did did not get dumped in Spam, I think the reason was ‘URL exceeding line length’, although why that should be considered Spam I don’t know. TinyURL is my friend! But I’ll also remain alert to see if anything else fails to appear.
I agree that it’s interesting (that’s why I thought it might be worth drawing to your attention) but I don’t think it’s weird. A wide divergence in reactions (to films, books, whatever) is probably more common than the reverse.
I might come back and respond to the rest of your comment later (if this comment doesn’t get trapped in Spam!).
January 12, 2023 at 9:25 am
I don’t understand what you mean by this, but I think I might like to.
I may not have read as much at Lawyers, Guns & Money as you have, but in what I have read I don’t recall any citations of actual Nazis, and if they do occur I think I would probably like to be aware of them.
January 12, 2023 at 12:18 pm
Your reference to Crooked Timber, and the associated portion of your comment, brought back to me our previous exchange on the subject of Crooked Timber, and is the reason why I went back and added something to it.
January 12, 2023 at 9:37 pm
J-D, in their reports on Ukraine the LGM crew (mostly Rofer and Drexner) routinely cite Ilya Ponomarenko of the Kiev Independent, who is a confirmed neo-Nazi who proudly boasted about his “honourable membership” of the Azov Battalion last summer. The Azov Battalion are straight-up neo-Nazis, and all that “does Mariupol stand” stuff LGM and Balloon Juice were jerking off about last summer was direct support for neo-Nazi murderers. They also occasionally report the opinion of other neo-Nazis, like the presidential chief of staff Yermak who is a protege of Yatsenyuk, who helped the rise of Azov and Right Sector. This is the kind of thing these people do, and this is the kind of people LGM is giving its voice to. Just remember: When those people are done burning down buildings, murdering anarchists and taping Roma people to lamp posts over there, they’ll come and do it over here – as they already inspired the Christchurch shooter to do in New Zealand. Good thing we’re giving them rockets!
It’s worth noting that LGM through people like Rofer and Drexner have also been big, happy proponents of the Xinjiang genocide hoax, boosting the voice of its lead advocate Adrian Zenz (a born-again christian who fantasizes about the destruction of New York because it is full of gays and “Bankers”) and Foreign Policy’s James Palmer, a sexpat who doesn’t pay his contributors and once wrote a serious article taking seriously a “leaked list” of Chinese communists that included Kevin Rudd (!?) and whose PhD thesis has been dismissed as fantasy by actual experts on Russian history. They happily broadcast the same fantasists who brought us the Iraq war, because in this vision the US wins and that’s all they care about. Meanwhile I note this week CT is hosting a debate on “are Russians human?” (Spoiler: many people think not!), which is the kind of thing one would have expected of American mainstream academics in world war 2 and just shows that no, nothing has changed. Yes, sometimes they give nice snarky attacks on Republicans, but when the chips are down they’re always, always going to be murderous war-mongers, and the US left are not our allies.
January 13, 2023 at 9:03 am
‘Look at this article I read in the news’ (I say).
‘It’s a pity you’re citing known neo-Nazis’ (you say).
‘What?!’ (I say) ‘I’m citing The Guardian.’
‘Yes,’ (you say) ‘but that article in The Guardian is by known neo-Nazi Illia Ponomarenko.’
‘I didn’t even look at the by-line’ (I say) ‘and if I had the name Illia Ponomarenko would have meant nothing to me.’
If, hypothetically, we divided people into two categories, with Category 1 consisting of all the people who do extensive research** into the background of all news reporters whose stories they read and Category 2 consisting of everybody else, then most of the people in Category 2 would be just ordinary people, not Nazis or pro-Nazi or Nazi-sympathetic or near-Nazi. People in Category 1, on the other hand, could reasonably be suspected of being at least a little bit weird.
Of course, if you already happened to know that somebody was a neo-Nazi, that would be a good reason not to rely on a report if you were conscious of their being the source, but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re suggesting has happened in this case.
** Before reading your comment, I had never heard of Illia Ponomarenko. When I read the name, I did a Web search. It’s that Web search which suggested a different spelling from yours, and also revealed one article in The Guardian. (It also revealed that he’s more closely associated with The Kyiv Independent, but–although I’m not a regular Guardian reader–I’m still much less familiar with The Kyiv Independent, and I suspect this is true of bloggers at LGM as well.) But the top hits gave no hint of any association with neo-Nazism. I would think it an unreasonably high standard to suggest that political bloggers are under an obligation to do even a simple Web search for the names in by-lines of reports they cite, let alone even more extensive background research.
These people? Which people?
I wasn’t aware of this specific story until you drew it to my attention (and I still don’t know how reliable your source is), but I’ve read enough human history to know that incidents like this, sometimes even more horrific (if possible), are a recurrent feature of it, perpetrated by many different kinds of people, some of them Nazis, others not, and that people capable of acts of this kind can be found in most if not all countries, so even before reading this story I would have predicted, on general grounds, that there would almost certainly be people in Ukraine capable of such acts. I’ve also read enough to know that Nazis can be found in most if not all European countries as well as multiple other countries, and I would have predicted on general grounds that there would be Nazis in Ukraine without evidence identifying any specifically (I would make the same prediction about Russia, about Australia, about Japan … at the moment I can’t think of any country about which I would confidently predict that it has no Nazis).
So I’m not sure what additional relevant conclusion can be drawn from this story.
Of course there are people who have not read as much human history as I have, people for whom it would still come as news what horrors people are capable of, and it could be salutary for them to be made aware, and I suppose you might not have been able to tell that this was not true of me.
Those people? Which people?
It is not sense to fear a Ukrainian mob, intent on violence, travelling to Australia, or to Japan, or wherever else you mean by ‘here’. I would have more reason to fear the violence of a mob of Australian Nazis; but I would have had as much reason to fear that for, effectively, all of my life, long before recent events in Ukraine.
If I mentioned to somebody that I had participated in the comments on that post, and my interlocutor quoted your description to me, I would respond ‘That’s a gross distortion’. If somebody asked me for a concise summary of what the main point of Chris Bertram’s post is, I would say ‘That it’s important to recognise that blaming Russians in general for the war is a bad idea’. I think it’s a good idea to post something like that.
January 13, 2023 at 1:50 pm
J-D, the LGM people don’t “cite the guardian”, they cite Ponomarenko’s Twitter feed (most of the reporting that they and BJ do about Ukraine seems to be a series of embedded tweets from various “experts”). It is on his Twitter feed that you can find him proudly bragging about his Azov “honourable membership”. He’s a nazi, and they should know this. Now maybe you shouldn’t know this, but *you* aren’t running a monetized blog under your real name in which you trade on your qualifications as a security expert to give info about the events in Ukraine (or China, or wherever US interests happen to find it meddling). *You* aren’t expected to know these things, but if *you* were running a monetized blog with reach in which you repeatedly dismissed the Nazi problem in Ukraine as a Russian fiction on the basis of your superior knowledge of foreign affairs while broadcasting Tweets by a Ukrainian Nazi I think that would be a problem. Don’t you? Especially if your own Twitter feed was full of people pointing out to you all the ways in which the very journals and magazines you cite in your blog spent 5 years talking about how Ukraine’s Nazi problem was a huge deal? Make no mistake – everyone of the people on these big blogs talking about Slava Ukraine know exactly what kind of forces they’re dealing with, they just happen to think it’s of secondary concern to impoverishing Europe and making the USA the world’s largest LNG exporter. Similarly if you were broadcasting the Xinjiang genocide hoax on the back of your “expert” knowledge while knowing full well that your primary sources were a born again christian rapture-fantasist and a Beijing sexpat with a bad knowledge of history who seriously believed that Kevin Rudd was a member of the Communist Party of China. Do you think people who know these things and continue to act like pure defenders of freedom and liberty are really, genuinely being honest with you?
I don’t think you should give these people as much benefit of the doubt as you do. These people know what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is propping up American exceptionalism.
It may not be sense to fear a Ukrainian mob coming to Australia, but the Christchurch shooter had traveled to Eastern Europe and had “Azov” painted on his gun; there is some suggestion he trained with them. Much of our supposed liberal and left-wing media and blogs have spent the last year supporting arming the Azov battalion. There are foreigners – including New Zealanders and Australians – training alongside these Nazis. Do you think that is a good idea? What will they do with their training when they come back?
I know that the post on CT was not meant to ask “are Russians human” just as posts there in 2015 were not meant to ask “is Hilary Clinton a child-molesting evil bitch who will destroy the world while Donald Trump genuinely wants to protect everyone’s pensions” but that is what it has turned into, just as in the past JQ’s posts have turned into a stomping ground for right-wing misinformation. I know that’s not Bertram’s fault but the moderating is CT’s business, and I have pointed this out to them multiple times (including in email) and nothing has changed. I understand it’s difficult to manage these things etc. (I certainly don’t have this problem, since I have a readership of 1) but it’s still important to point out what is happening, and that, I’m afraid, is what is happening.
January 16, 2023 at 10:14 am
You get comments from more than one person, but I suppose it’s possible that you don’t on posts like this one. If it’s important to you to post this here where I may possibly be the only person who reads it, is it important to you to get my responses? I could give you my further responses at this point, but I am not confident that it is important for me to do so. You have included some direct questions for me in what you’ve written, but I’m sure you’d be able to manage without my answers. Your call.
January 16, 2023 at 10:17 am
I’m happy to hear your answers J-D, hold forth as much as you like!
January 16, 2023 at 1:54 pm
Well, I’m still not sure that it’s important for me to give you my responses, but I’ll start with just one and see how things go.
When I see somebody use the rhetorical device of introducing some remark or assertion ‘Make no mistake’, it immediately makes me suspicious. It doesn’t make it any more likely that whatever follows is true. What it makes me feel is that there’s a point being hammered precisely because the hammerer lacks confidence that it will be accepted.
January 18, 2023 at 9:34 am
J-D does it shock you that I might make rhetorical points on my own blog? It’s the internet! In this case the point is clearly rhetorical – I don’t *know* that Rofer, Nexon et al are aware of the true nature of the people they’re signal-boosting. I mean yes, they profess to be experts in international relations, yes they are well read, yes the western media talked extensively about Ukrainian fascism until 2021, yes Nexon is a professor of government, and yes they have written extensively about fascism in the USA and – until 2020 – they were aware of corruption in Ukraine. But it’s possible they just don’t know these things! Maybe they have never googled anyone they quote on their blog, or when they did they saw party names like “Right Sector” and didn’t think anything of it. Maybe, being Americans, they aren’t aware of the names of European nazi heroes like Stepan Bandera, who has a national day of commemoration in Ukraine, and they just overlook his picture hanging on the wall of local officials whose videos they post. Maybe they’re just incredibly ignorant about every aspect of nazi history in Europe (they are American, after all). But do you believe that? Maybe they never once read anything about the far right violence at the Euromaidan, the murder of leftists in Ukraine after 2014, maybe they just don’t bother investigating anything properly if Russia is involved?
My rhetorical device makes clear I don’t believe that, and I think they know. I don’t lack confidence in this conclusion. Do you?
January 19, 2023 at 11:44 am
What I wrote was not that I was shocked but that this particular** rhetorical device makes me suspicious. Would it surprise you*** to learn that it has this effect on me whether it’s on the Internet or anywhere else?
** It’s not the only one. There are other rhetorical devices that also make me suspicious.
*** It doesn’t surprise me that people use suspect rhetorical devices. It does puzzle me a little, though, in the sense that I wonder ‘What was that person thinking when they chose those particular words?’
January 19, 2023 at 3:27 pm
I’m not sure how the statement would be less rhetorical if I didn’t use that phrase – it’s clearly not a statement of fact but a judgment about the motives and knowledge of the people I’m discussing. You should be happy I’ve identified it as such! But this is all a distraction, surely?
January 22, 2023 at 3:59 pm
A distraction from what? What (would you say) is the key point that most deserves to be focussed on? If there were one question you most wanted me to answer, or one statement you most wanted me to respond to, what would it be?
January 22, 2023 at 8:02 pm
Well I’d prefer you to make the points you wanted to, rather than getting distracted by debate about whether “Make No Mistake” is a rhetorical qualifier. Make No Mistake, I’m interested in hearing your opinion!
January 23, 2023 at 4:23 pm
But I’m not being distracted from making the kind of points I’d prefer to make; I am making the kind of points I’d prefer to make! All the points I’d like to make are points about what you have chosen to write. Including the phrase ‘Make no mistake’ was a choice on your part; you could have chosen to omit it. To me it would be interesting to know why, given those options, you chose the one you did.
Here’s another point: you chose to include this sentence in your earlier comment:
If you wrote this thinking that I would understand the references you were making, what made you think that? If you wrote it thinking that I would not understand the references you were making, what was the point? If you didn’t think about it, why not?
January 24, 2023 at 10:48 am
The point of that comment is to show how these commentators don’t bother to check the credibility of their sources, even though they’re supposed to be experts in these topics (or want us to believe they are). I don’t expect you to know these things, but I would think that (assuming you believe I am telling the truth) you would be led to question the credibility of these commentators if you discovered this was the quality of source they were broadcasting; just as I assume you would question the political motivations of supposedly left-wing people who repeatedly signal boost nazis, who they probably know are nazis. Perhaps you don’t think this way – perhaps you think that it’s possible for genuinely left-wing people who are genuinely motivated by concern for freedom and human rights globally (and not by an interest in extending American power) to work with, trust and collaborate with nazis, born-again christian rapture fantasists, and anti-China propagandists. But I don’t think you believe that, do you?
January 24, 2023 at 12:13 pm
Your comment makes it seem that your answer to my question–
–is that you assumed that even if I didn’t understand your references I would accept your account as an accurate one. If that’s what you were assuming, why?
January 24, 2023 at 1:59 pm
I do hope you have some faith in me, J-D!
January 24, 2023 at 4:09 pm
In a way, that’s a kind of expression of your faith in me, and there could be something flattering about that, but still, what leads you to suppose that I have faith in you? What faith do you have reasonable justification to expect from me?
I should add that for my purposes, again, this is not a distraction! The kind of confidence (if any) that we can have in each other is fundamental to the way dialogue between us can work (to the extent that it can).
January 25, 2023 at 9:09 am
J-D, I assume you read my opinions on these things because you think I have something basically worthwhile to say, and that I am doing so in some degree of good faith. Hence I think you might have some basic trust in the accuracy of my statements. Just by way of back up of this: I bought and read the book Worthy to Escape by LGM’s favourite Uyghur genocide hoaxer Adrian Zenz, which is why I know he’s a rapture fantasist (I read the chapter where he decides that NY is going to be destroyed because it has the biggest population of “bankers” (ie. Jews) and gays). This means I have done more due diligence on his work than LGM ever did. Same for James Palmer, their go-to expert on China, who is a bizarre fantasist: I took the trouble of finding Kuzmin’s review of his historical treatise The Blood White Baron and confirmed that he isn’t capable of honest analysis. I also investigated him through his work in Foreign Policy and on Twitter, where I discovered he doesn’t pay contributors, and is no longer welcome in China. He hasn’t been in China for years now but not being in any way connected to China never stopped white men from masquerading as China experts. I’ve already shown that I investigated Ilya Ponomarenko, and I also went to the trouble of finding out the political background of a few of Zelenskiy’s advisers that sometimes get quoted on LGM – people like Geraschenko (Herahshenko sometimes) who is another neo-nazi with a very shady history.
I hope that you have the good sense to put greater weight on the information provided to you by someone who has actually bothered to investigate the background and behavior of these sources, than people who broadcast these sources either not knowing or not caring that they’re nazis, fantasists and liars. You do, right?
January 25, 2023 at 1:12 pm
1. Good faith is not in itself a guarantee of accuracy. I have myself repeated in good faith things I have been told, or have heard, or have read, and have subsequently discovered that they were inaccurate. I assume that other people (sometimes) do the same.
2. If you give me information about the investigation you have done, that gives me something to judge by that I don’t have if you don’t give me that information (although knowing the investigation you’ve done is also not by itself a guarantee of accuracy).
3. Obviously you know about the investigation you have done, but you can’t have the same kind of knowledge of investigation that may have been done by bloggers at Lawyers, Guns & Money (or bloggers at Crooked Timber).
January 25, 2023 at 3:51 pm
J-D, this is all very distracting, I’m not sure what the point is. I’ve made a claim, you have a choice: 1) do your own research, 2) believe me, 3) don’t believe me. I assume you come here and read what I write because on some level you’re capable of doing 2), and I guess also you don’t want to do 1), so I guess all that remains is for you to make a decision about the credibility of my complaints and then decide what to do with it.
It’s disappointing I know but LGM and CT have lost their way, there’s a big problem in the UK and US left, and there’s not much we can do about it.
January 26, 2023 at 4:36 pm
If the point of your complaints is ‘LGM and CT have lost their way’, I don’t know what to make of it, because that statement doesn’t tell me what the way is that you’re saying that they’ve lost. If the point of your complaints is ‘there’s a big problem in the UK and US left’, then I still don’t know what to make of it, because that statement doesn’t tell me what you’re saying about the nature of that problem. If the point of your complaints is ‘LGM and CT are now effectively running a Nazi agenda’, and still more if the point of your complaints is ‘the UK and US left are now effectively running a Nazi agenda’, then I can’t find those complaints credible without some explanation of why they would be doing that.
January 26, 2023 at 7:03 pm
J-D, I don’t think they’re running a nazi agenda deliberately, they’re just running a typical liberal blog. But sometimes liberalism enables fascism, and sometimes it looks the other way when fascists do bad things. Sometimes also it doesn’t realize when the liberal order itself is being racist or doing violent appropriation. This is the entire history of The Economist and The Guardian, basically. It explains why the entire Guardian commentariat were able to get sucked into the Corbyn anti-semitism hoax, why so many of the early “liberal” bloggers (Yglesias, Cowen etc) supported the Iraq invasion, pretty much all of Blairism, etc. They’re easily fooled into supporting fascism because their class interests mostly are not served by a truly left wing program, and because fascism often hides itself in its early stages, or appears (to those whose class interests blind them to the facts) as harmless and a bit dumb. Liberals are also often fooled by big-sounding but ultimately empty words like “authoritarian” and “tyranny” because they don’t have any underlying political framework, and are not able to analyze what’s really happening in the world. Leaven that with a bit of good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, some red-baiting, and the fact that Russia probably did meddle in the 2016 election, and it stands to reason that a liberal blog will lose its way.
Doesn’t mean we have to, though!
January 27, 2023 at 8:21 am
It’s important to establish whether these things are true, and if they are true then it’s important to figure out how it happens that sometimes liberalism enables fascism, and what makes the difference between those instances when it does and those instances when it doesn’t. It’s also important to establish what kind of underlying political framework does help to analyse what’s really happening in the world and how it does so. To me it seems that your complaints about Crooked Timber and Lawyers, Guns & Money shed little or no light on these questions: for example, if you are analysing what’s really happening on the world on the basis of an underlying political framework, I’m not getting an inkling of what it is. I might say that your complaints distract from those important questions, but then I might say that blogging about RPGs distracts from those important questions, whereas what I think is that you blog about what you want to blog about, and I make the comments that I want to make (for as long as you are kind enough to continue to allow me to do so on your blog). That’s fair enough, as far as I’m concerned; the reason I’m giving this response here is because you seemed to be interested and because perhaps it will prompt some interesting further remarks from you, but if it doesn’t that’s also fair enough.
January 27, 2023 at 9:23 pm
Well J-D, I’m just speculating about why they’re boosting nazis. You might have your own theories, feel free to speculate. But either they’re nazis or they’re idiots, it’s up to you!
January 28, 2023 at 1:32 pm
If the only two possibilities you have to suggest are that they’re Nazis and that they’re idiots, then I can only respond that on the face of it both of those seem highly unlikely to me, and that in turn that makes me think that more likely than not you’re mistaken about how much they’re boosting Nazis.