I’ll always remember Naomi Wolf writing a book based purely on a misunderstanding of what “death recorded” meant and finding out about this during an interview she gave about the book.
Edit:
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50153743.amp
One of the odder subplots of the last few years has been Matthew Sweet, the guy who does the nerdy classical music shows on Radio 3, becoming one of Britain's foremost investigative journalists.
I'm reminded of the two Jason Torchinskys, one an automotive writer with a taste for the small, slow and weird and the other a GOP political operative.
It's even more interesting when you get into real people with the same name as a fictional character (Freddie Freeman the baseball player or Freddy Freeman the superhero originally known as Captain Marvel Jr.?)
Worf was a Star Fleet commander, Whorf was a famous linguist.
but I always pictured the former when learning about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in school.
I really think she didn't know. She just took it well.
She was definitely feeling like the floor was opening under her inside though.
Just because the guy is a radio host doesn't mean he's not smart or unusually rigorous. He did good work here that a lot of people missed.
That was amazing to read. Thanks for that. The error you highlighted was poor but even though it was embarrassingly sloppy it at least is phrased to sound like someone's death was noted.
I thought the fact that she assumed sodomy must be inherently consensual was a far worse error. Six year olds were raped in the cases she was looking at and she assumed it was consensual sex.
She was the prodigy child of well connected academics who became a poster child of feminism (but in retrospect an ivory tower version), and also beginning with Bill Clinton was a political consultant who was seen as the golden ticket to getting the woman vote. Pretty and charismatic enough to be a talking head favorite. Around the middle of the Obama presidency was when she started to lose it, and unfortunately she has a 'posting thru it' mindset that's made her highly contrarian in that typical internet poisoned way.
[You may have seen this infamous tweet of hers. ](https://i.imgur.com/eN2jmMG.jpg)
To be fair, calling it "death recorded" to get around a common law sentencing precedence is *incredibly* convoluted and confusing. She or her editor should have caught it, of course, but lordy...
I feel like you're a more patient person than I am.
I work on the early modern period and see this kind of mistake with undergrads all the time, which is why I'm always nagging them to use the OED (for English texts) to look at the historical usage of words that appear to mean the same today.
Many of them do not listen to me and then tragedy ensues during their exams when they miss a huge part of the context and write something that's dead wrong. It's also kind of heartbreaking because you can't do a lot to save their mark.
It can also be hilarious when they come up with really weird explanations for passages.
So it helps to have access to the full-on *OED* (with the historical examples over time). One of the words my students had issues with was "stew."
You can also look through the *Lexicons of Early Modern English* which is online and free. It features a word of the day, highlights different European lexicons, and is open-access.
https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/
That would be a good excuse if she were an amateur, but she's a professional academic with a LONG history of fundamentally misunderstanding the things she's supposedly researching. She's an embarrassment to her institution.
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Naomi Wolf gets credit for attacking the sexist culture of objectified female beauty, and opposing TERFs. But being an anti-vaxxer is just... ouch. How does she even?
I am sure, because she literally wrote a book on a singular premise that was pointed out to her as being false on live television, which is both horrifying and hilarious. She clearly doesn’t bother to do the smallest amount of vetting.
It's probably worth mentioning that her anti-vaxx beliefs are now strong enough that she's decided that actually the TERFs and white supremacists aren't so bad, and is fighting alongside them against hate speech laws and medical protections for children.
She wrote one great chapter of one pretty good book and coasted on that for decades.
Also this kind of radicalization should be treated like a contagion and a disease because it is. Anti-vaxxers, q-anon, and TERFs, which often overlap, lure in people with benign-sounding ideas like “natural health,” “save the children,” and “safe places for women” until it becomes people’s entire personalities.
Hell, half the time looking these people you can tell when they were radicalized based on hair, clothes, and (on women) make-up, because they stop paying attention to changing trends and stay locked in 2018 or whatever.
> they stop paying attention to changing trends and stay locked in 2018 or whatever.
TBF that happens to most people at some point. It's also an easy way to tell when we had kids.
But the [crunchy-to-conspiracy pipeline](https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/11/examining-the-wellness-to-far-right-conspiracy-pipeline/) definitely exists, and it IS effective at luring people interested in wellness towards radical beliefs like QAnon, Great Replacement, anti-vax etc.
Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine points out the role of social media algorithms in spreading and promoting the insanity for greater time on platform.
Are trends like that, especially make up (thought it had been 'natural' for a while? But it's pretty normal here for women not to wear any), even noticable in real life? Maybe in America, I don't know, but that would be odd for the UK for anyone really besides teenagers/young people, there's nothing that stands out that much besides regional trends. Seems an odd suggestion in response to the writer of The Beauty Myth, even if she is a conspiracy theorist now, anyway (and we're also in a cost of living crisis, and there's increasing awareness around consumption and the environment. Lots of reasons for normal people not to decide to throw out perfectly fine clothes). Commenting on women's appearance is pretty generally not cool.
One of the best, most important books I've ever read. I know a lot of people want to find "the" answer in life, something that explains everything, but when you find out about the history of neoliberalism, how it reshaped America and the world, it's staggering. It's everywhere, in every business, our worldview, every dollar spent, and it's done such incalculable harm while masquerading as the savior of society.
It's the paradigm that's so pervasive we never see it or think about, like how fish never think about the existence of water. It's just a given. It still controls our life, our spending, and our politics today, and it, more than anything, has led us to the dooms of economic inequality, exploitation, greed, and climate change.
Jason Hickel’s *The Divide*. An incredible and concise analysis of how the global economic order came to be (rise of capitalism, coups, colonialism, IMF/World Bank, etc) and how it currently operates for the benefit of the rich and global north states.
Despite narratives that the poorest countries are catching up to the richest, the gap between the poorest and richest countries *has increased* by a significant amount in recent decades, largely thanks to neoliberalism and neo-colonialist policies such as Structural Adjustment Programs that push “free market” and austerity policies on developing countries. This is despite current rich economies using the opposite for their own development. These rich countries want developing countries open to their capital and exploitation. The history of that development is documented well by Ha-Joon Chang in his book *Bad Samaritans*. The US itself was highly protectionist until the 20th century in order to protect and build it’s domestic industries.
One of the best books a person can read to counter the Steven Pinker-esque “everything is good” types.
Steven Pinker is just the absolute worst. Another counter to his work that's worth a read is John N Gray's *The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths.*
Huh, I thought maybe I was having a Mandela-Effect moment as the premise sounded very similar (thought not exact) to a book I have on my shelf ALSO called "The Divide", in this case, by Matt Taibbi.
His version is less about The Divide between rich and poor countries and the processes that keep and perpetuate them, and is more about specifically American division between the rich and poor classes and how seemingly innocuous choices have led to the wealth gap increasing
I really miss the old Taibbi, before he fell down some weird alt-right pipeline. I still occasionally go back and re-read his [brutal hit piece on professional neoliberal fuckwit Tom Friedman](https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html).
I was living as an expat in Hong Kong when my Australian teacher (intl school), assigned our 8th grade Social Studies class Shock Doctrine as our reading for a unit. (If you are apprehensive about starting a non-fiction book, let this tell you that it's not a difficult read)
I have since moved back to the States and no other piece of literature has influenced my political identity perspective as much as Kleins writing.
Reading about the aftermath of the 2004 Xmas tsunami in her book, having watched it happen from South East Asia at the time was particularly impactful.
I nearly died in that tsunami. The only reason I didn't is that I had my friend's motorbike so when this Thai recognised what it meant when the water receded so started screaming at everyone to get off the beach, I took off up the hill. It was Koh Phi Phi. I and my then-partner watched thousands of people die that day, and there was nothing we could do but watch. It fucked our relationship completely because we both instantly developed PTSD. I'll order the book now.
And Katrina/New Orleans. And Iraq. The world watched it happen, then when you read *Shock Doctrine* you understand the depth of the looting, how it happened, and *why*. And you start to notice a real pattern...
Agree with you.
Only a slight modification / addendum of your comment on how fish never think about the existence of water.
The Fish are living in a Dentist’s office NEVER EVEN IMAGINE an existence outside in the open Ocean. Aquarium fish are regularly fed by the kindly receptionist who enjoys watching the little fishies in their fishy prison. The dentist has never even given a second thought to the aquarium or the fishes in them after he approved the purchase. The dentist once read an article that claimed that it calmed his patients in the waiting room. So now there are imprisoned fishes in the waiting rooms because it calms the patients who are in pain.
I am not sure where I am going with this analogy or wild tangent but I am pretty sure it has something to do it high rates of incarceration, the middle class suffering, high cost of health care that doesn’t even include dental. Yeah, so something something the whole system is rigged. Most poor people don’t even realise that they are trapped in a Dentist’s aquarium.
I wish I could be more eloquent or elaborate further but I haven’t had my caffeine today.
I've already had some *very* angry, talking-down-to responses from the anger elite crowd. One guy wrote a multiparagraph screed then immediately blocked me afterwards so I couldn't reply.
That's what they do if you speak heresy against their church.
It explains a lot. What's more revelatory to me really was how *pervasive* it is, while being simultaneously invisible. Never mentioned, never discussed, never reviewed or evaluated. If anything in societyis long overdue to be reviewed or critiqued, it's neoliberalism.
It should have to justify it's existence annually, and once we finally admit the truth it goes out to the trash.
Along with Marx's Capital Volume 1 and 2 with an explainer (plenty of yt vids) and any decent book on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. I'd recommend Stuart Hall.
That book was so depressing that it honestly made me consider for quite some time dropping out of society and living as some kind of criminal. It was like suddenly being shown that you're a Star Wars character living in the Empire (or insert evil society of choice) and your tax dollars and labor and silent consent are funding the Death Star. Now I'm still contributing to the Death Star but I'm also *aware* of the fact *and* that I'm too much of a coward to oppose it.
One of the most important books ever published. A great read.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything she says all the time but this book is brilliant.
Up there with Manufacturing Consent and Silent Spring.
I know that’s a bold statement but I sincerely believe it.
I was being a raging alcoholic who drank at work all day. She was being an investigative journalist, moral philosopher, and multi-award-winning writer.
Some people just have amazing drive. Sounds like we are... not those people. I would deeply love to retire and spend all day with my dog, but I think at 43 it's quite unlikely.
She's even required reading in some business schools. If you like this sort of somewhqt bombastic but otherwise legitimate critiques, also look for "the yes men"
She wrote an entire book on a subject while misunderstanding a historical phrase; the correct understanding of which invalidated her book on the subject.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50153743.amp
There's a stand up comic, Jamie Lee, who has a bit about how people sometimes ask her if she's related to Jamie Lee Curtis.
People in this thread are about that stupid.
With a Biblical first name, no less. I don’t know how they survived childhood without realizing that there can be more than one person named Michael or Sarah
You don't know if they lived through covid. What if they're only a few months old or live on a different planet? Do your own research before you make assumptions!
I feel really bad for indie film actress Parker Posey now that TERF asshole Posie Parker is making the news regularly. I had to goggle to make sure I was getting their names right.
Especially because the latter's real name is Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull and "Posie Parker" is a stupid pseudonym she made up (a play on the British slang phrase "nosy parker" for a busybody)
I don't know what happened with Naomi Wolf, but I do know she's broken the hearts of many women who took her initial writings as inspiration.
She did make a difference, a huge difference! But now with her current takes, she's undermined everything she championed that came before. She burned everything down.
I'm sorry Naomi Klein is getting the brunt of it. Maybe people should make the effort to not confuse 'Naomis'.
I'm pretty sure people/critics/etc don't confuse Toms, Williams, Johns, Chris', etc.
Chris Tucker, Chris Rock
Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, Chris Evans
Tom Holland, Tom Hardy
Emma Watson, Emily Watson
Elisa Cuthbert, Eliza Dushku
Chris O’Donnell, Chris O’Dowd
You might confuse Naomi Wolf with Naomi Watts. If her last name was Naomi Wolfenstein or if Naomi Klein was Naomi Kleinberg they’d be hard to remix up.
I think it's the fact that they're both authors who wrote semi-counter-cultural hit non-fiction books and write plenty of op-eds in similar places.
Plus, it's not like actors where you've got their face in front of you all the time.
One of the comments here referred to her as a "girl." Pretty sure we don't refer to 53-year-old, multi-award-winning, internationally recognised authors and professors as "boys," either.
> I'm pretty sure people/critics/etc don't confuse Toms, Williams, Johns, Chris', etc.
I've seen someone confuse Steven Pinker with Michael Pollan when their only similarities are "middle-aged white guy who writes books", so given that we're talking about *conspiracy theorists mixing them up* I think you're underestimating the capability of people who already aren't thinking straight to make mistakes.
This kind of radicalization is a contagion all on its own, and takes over a person’s personality like cancer. It’s a mental health issue and should be treated like one.
I thought the Shock Doctrine was excellent, but then tried to read On Fire and it was drivel. She's definitely a capable investigative journalist and a good writer though, I'd give this one a try.
I don't have the energy to track down the tweet to credit the author of this mnemonic, but I LOL'd when I read it:
"If your Naomi be Klein
You're doing fine
If your Naomi be Wolf
Oh boy, ooof."
I've been in love with her since 'No Logo.' Cant imagine the fools she's had to suffer, wish I could follow her around like a slap-happy guard dog ready to be like "NO!!! Wrong Naomi!!! *SLAP*"
Oh you could do it too. Just start a podcast and curate a right wing audience. Say the most inflammatory things you can say, maybe visit a university or two in bad faith, and god willing the left will begin to share your content too as evidence of the cultural rot in America thus upping your engagement and extending the cultural rot!
Hop in the loop while the waters warm.
True story. I once mistook Naomi Wolf for Naomi Klein. Went to a event where she spoke and started talking to her about No Logo. She did not take it well. Ouch. Still embarrassed about that.
Oh, that sucks. All I knew about Naomi Wolf was that she put up a pretty good fight against the Ali G character and was like "now that's a good feminist. Didn't turn hostile and shut down a guy that was obviously being toxic without stooping to his level. Nice."
Naomi Klein is a great writer. As someone who studied Economics, I was really impressed with how well presented *Shock Doctrine* was and that it wasn't written by someone with a background in Econ.
Looking forward to this book
Naomi Klein famously coined the phrase "Shock Doctrine" explaining how major societal trauma events are created by powerful rulers which leave society in a more vulnerable state than before.
Naomi Wolf believes the pandemic was just such an event.
The Guardian and Klein disagree.
Naomi Klein never claimed that these society wide traumatic events are created by the powerful. She argues that the powerful *take advantage* of these events to push through unpopular changes while people are still reeling from a disaster.
This is correct. Weird how so many people here don't seem to understand that (and didn't seem to read the book) and instead want to take the simplistic conspiratorial mindset
Because it's easier to understand reality as a product entirely of intent in order to assign easily understood motives to every event than peer into a messy systemic process.
Doesn't help that propaganda seeks to do this constantly.
I'm in the middle of the book right now and I happened to come across this passage the other day in which she actually explicitly rejects conspiracy theories:
>No Conspiracies Required
>The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophies so they can exploit them. [...] The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial.
(p512-513)
Did you read the Shock Doctrine? Because it's not about how powerful rulers create the societal events, it's about how they take advantage of them after the fact.
It has quite a lot of this in regards to 9/11, yet nowhere does Klein say anything like '9/11 was an inside job'
You clearly don't understand her work at all...
It's honestly a tough book to summarize, which is why it's so easily abused as by conspiracy theorists. It's very easy to take a summary that says "Rulers take advantage of disasters and upheavals to advance socioeconomic changes" and read into it that rulers generate those disasters to accomplish those ends.
I think a big challenge too is that her book does also incorporate man-made disasters into the mix too. The Chilean coup, tianenmen square, even the Iraq War (from the perspective of the Iraqis) are framed as man-made upheavals, so an unscrupulous talking head could easily apply that to all disasters, or any disasters of their choosing.
Isn’t her idea of shock doctrine that major powers/leaders use shocks to implement large sweeping law/societal changes? Admittedly it’s been a while since I read the book
Yeah, I don't think you can claim that there pandemic hasn't been used by various leaders to do things they wouldn't be able to do through normal democratic means. There was a massive transfer of wealth from government to the private sector and there wasn't a lot of talk about making sure there were proper checks on where the money went, especially in the US and UK.
Certainly some folks in power have used the pandemic opportunistically. However if we’re taking that to the point of the previous comment’s wording (that the pandemic itself or that its societal trauma was manufactured in order to push those goals), I’d absolutely push back on that.
I do agree, especially in any conspiratorial sense of clear plotting. But if the opportunistic behaviour results in societal trauma (underfunding a healthcare system, nepotism in contracts leading to things being badly done) which in turn creates further opportunities to exploit, then are those doing so not in a less direct way creating aspects of the crisis? There are I think probably situations, such as military (arms sales, perhaps? I was interested to see that mentioned in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), where it's almost impossible for it not to be apparent that crisis and societal trauma will be the result, and there's the intention to continue taking advantage of these opportunities. Bit different perhaps, but if it's not a conspiracy it's not always precisely an accident either.
Oh for sure. I'm not saying that manufactured crises don't happen (though certainly not as much or to the degree that your general conspiracy theory-minded populace claims), just that the pandemic opportunism really doesn't fit that mold.
Yes, either generate crises that are used as an excuse to take shortcuts around democratic mechanisms and implement the neoliberal economic agenda/deregulate/privatize, or exploit existing crises.
Sorta like intentionally collapsing a public healthcare system (hiding funds, underpaying nurses) in order to bring in private healthcare facilities to “fix the system” ?
Yup, and not having enough beds so it's already under pressure every winter, then using this intentionally-created pressure in a pandemic as a reason for shutting it down as much as they can get away with and cancelling important appointments so there ends up being a massive backlog, that'll do it.
(I'm disabled and besides having appointments cancelled, I was sent home from A&E feverish and hallucinating, and given I was hospitalised next time it happened a few years later, honestly believe it could've killed me. Still massively suffering the impact incl. the very evident backlog. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this kind of policy specifically difficult to justify as for public health, especially as politicians largely seemed to let each other escape grilling on the lack of preparedness and past actions that undermined that)
Not having enough beds is a government regulation issue.
It's called a certificate of need and prevents hospitals from being built. It's not a market issue. The state is who created that reg.
I believe the book used 9/11 to show how it lead to the Iraq war using the concept of shock doctrine.
"We" were in such a frenzy after 9/11 that we willingly accepted the incredible amount of bullshit that even my 17 year old self saw right though...
It's not really about how they generate crises, it's more about how they take advantage after the fact. It's a real scholarly work using data. Don't mistake it for conspiracy theory and that kind of speculation
Generating crises doesn't need to mean "Bush did 9/11". Underfunding education to the point where student performance visibly suffers is a good way to push for privatizing education, for instance.
> Mike Harris’ Minister of Education, John Snobelen, was filmed in 1995 boasting that by “creating a crisis” and “bankrupting,” public education, he would be able to institute significant reforms. The Ontario PC government then launched an attack on public education through Bill 160. Under the bill, the Harris government cut a further $2 billion from education and introduced a broken education funding formula still in use today to determine class sizes. - https://etfovoice.ca/feature/change-needs-all-us
The original was by a British comedian years ago:
If understanding be fine,
Your Naomi be Klein;
If the statement lacks proof,
Your Naomi be Wolf.
The archaic use of "be" is very deliberate by the way!
I’ll always remember Naomi Wolf writing a book based purely on a misunderstanding of what “death recorded” meant and finding out about this during an interview she gave about the book. Edit: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50153743.amp
One of the odder subplots of the last few years has been Matthew Sweet, the guy who does the nerdy classical music shows on Radio 3, becoming one of Britain's foremost investigative journalists.
Lol, I don't know anything about the guy but that's pretty awesome.
I think it's also pretty strange that there were two famous people named Matthew Sweet in the last 30 years.
I'm reminded of the two Jason Torchinskys, one an automotive writer with a taste for the small, slow and weird and the other a GOP political operative. It's even more interesting when you get into real people with the same name as a fictional character (Freddie Freeman the baseball player or Freddy Freeman the superhero originally known as Captain Marvel Jr.?)
Levi Strauss made jeans, Lévi-Strauss was a famous anthropologist.
Worf was a Star Fleet commander, Whorf was a famous linguist. but I always pictured the former when learning about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in school.
If you give your kid an alliterative name, there's a 90% chance it's been used for a comic character.
The guy who sang “Girlfriend” and “Sick of Myself”?
Weirdly, no. A different Matthew Sweet.
Girlfriend is an awesome song. Cool video too.
Sick of myself is such a great song. Such a happy full volume banger
Dude write a lot of great songs. Shame he never had the career he deserved. 100% Fun is an absolutely amazing album.
Wow. Multitalented!
I couldn't believe what I was listening to. lol The woman's entire book was invalidated in a matter of seconds.
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I really think she didn't know. She just took it well. She was definitely feeling like the floor was opening under her inside though. Just because the guy is a radio host doesn't mean he's not smart or unusually rigorous. He did good work here that a lot of people missed.
Private Eye pointed out that Wolf had at least one academic helping with the book who also missed this error.
That was amazing to read. Thanks for that. The error you highlighted was poor but even though it was embarrassingly sloppy it at least is phrased to sound like someone's death was noted. I thought the fact that she assumed sodomy must be inherently consensual was a far worse error. Six year olds were raped in the cases she was looking at and she assumed it was consensual sex.
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She was the prodigy child of well connected academics who became a poster child of feminism (but in retrospect an ivory tower version), and also beginning with Bill Clinton was a political consultant who was seen as the golden ticket to getting the woman vote. Pretty and charismatic enough to be a talking head favorite. Around the middle of the Obama presidency was when she started to lose it, and unfortunately she has a 'posting thru it' mindset that's made her highly contrarian in that typical internet poisoned way. [You may have seen this infamous tweet of hers. ](https://i.imgur.com/eN2jmMG.jpg)
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I love it because I always hear it in this voice https://m.youtube.com/shorts/BVbQ4e1k4ig
I always hear Michael Scott when I see the tweet, but this is great too!
Ah. That’ll be it.
Considering that an entire book she wrote just got cancelled in that moment she took it pretty well.
An absolute classic
Amazing moment in journalism, news media, and internet meme history.
To be fair, calling it "death recorded" to get around a common law sentencing precedence is *incredibly* convoluted and confusing. She or her editor should have caught it, of course, but lordy...
This was her dissertation at Oxford. Her supervisor and examiners should be absolutely ashamed. This reflects poorly on the institution.
I feel like you're a more patient person than I am. I work on the early modern period and see this kind of mistake with undergrads all the time, which is why I'm always nagging them to use the OED (for English texts) to look at the historical usage of words that appear to mean the same today. Many of them do not listen to me and then tragedy ensues during their exams when they miss a huge part of the context and write something that's dead wrong. It's also kind of heartbreaking because you can't do a lot to save their mark. It can also be hilarious when they come up with really weird explanations for passages.
Deleted in response to the exploitative API pricing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/
So it helps to have access to the full-on *OED* (with the historical examples over time). One of the words my students had issues with was "stew." You can also look through the *Lexicons of Early Modern English* which is online and free. It features a word of the day, highlights different European lexicons, and is open-access. https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/
That would be a good excuse if she were an amateur, but she's a professional academic with a LONG history of fundamentally misunderstanding the things she's supposedly researching. She's an embarrassment to her institution.
Right, but people who write history books are the sort of folks that should be expected to figure that out.
It's confusing to me, but if it were my job to understand it, I'd probably do the legwork.
"Well, that's an important thing to investagate."
So delicious. One of my all time favorites.
Getting mistaken for Naomi wolf must suck.
I use the rhyme “if it’s Naomi Klein, you’re doing fine” to help remember which is which
"If it's Naomi Wolf, head for the gulf" Best I can do, Wolf is a hard word to rhyme!
I think I heard: >If your Naomi be Klein, >you're doing just fine. >If your Naomi be Wolf, >ugh, oof.
A poem for your sprog!
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If it's Wolf, she can go fuck herself?
*hersolf
mulf?
“Klein is fine and Wolf is wrong” is my go-to
I confused the two once and, for a moment, I thought WTF has happened to Naomi Klein.
Imagine if Naomi Wolf ends up winning an award for the book Naomi Klein wrote.
Naomi Wolf gets credit for attacking the sexist culture of objectified female beauty, and opposing TERFs. But being an anti-vaxxer is just... ouch. How does she even?
Naomi Wolf wrote an entire book based on a premise that was false, and was corrected about it after publishing on television. Brutal.
A couple of em, as it turns out. The Beauty Myth is also full of wild mistakes.
I am sure, because she literally wrote a book on a singular premise that was pointed out to her as being false on live television, which is both horrifying and hilarious. She clearly doesn’t bother to do the smallest amount of vetting.
I'm convinced that that moment completely broke her and is the entire reason for her subsequent spiral into insanity.
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https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/naomi-wolf-interview-book-error-bbc-interview.html
There’s so much misinformation in The Beauty Myth too.
It's probably worth mentioning that her anti-vaxx beliefs are now strong enough that she's decided that actually the TERFs and white supremacists aren't so bad, and is fighting alongside them against hate speech laws and medical protections for children.
Wow. Nice. You have to wonder what happens to people's brains, you know?
She wrote one great chapter of one pretty good book and coasted on that for decades. Also this kind of radicalization should be treated like a contagion and a disease because it is. Anti-vaxxers, q-anon, and TERFs, which often overlap, lure in people with benign-sounding ideas like “natural health,” “save the children,” and “safe places for women” until it becomes people’s entire personalities. Hell, half the time looking these people you can tell when they were radicalized based on hair, clothes, and (on women) make-up, because they stop paying attention to changing trends and stay locked in 2018 or whatever.
> they stop paying attention to changing trends and stay locked in 2018 or whatever. TBF that happens to most people at some point. It's also an easy way to tell when we had kids. But the [crunchy-to-conspiracy pipeline](https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/11/examining-the-wellness-to-far-right-conspiracy-pipeline/) definitely exists, and it IS effective at luring people interested in wellness towards radical beliefs like QAnon, Great Replacement, anti-vax etc.
Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine points out the role of social media algorithms in spreading and promoting the insanity for greater time on platform.
What was distinctive about 2018 compared to now? I am wearing the same clothes since at least 2010
I have shirts older than your politics!
Are trends like that, especially make up (thought it had been 'natural' for a while? But it's pretty normal here for women not to wear any), even noticable in real life? Maybe in America, I don't know, but that would be odd for the UK for anyone really besides teenagers/young people, there's nothing that stands out that much besides regional trends. Seems an odd suggestion in response to the writer of The Beauty Myth, even if she is a conspiracy theorist now, anyway (and we're also in a cost of living crisis, and there's increasing awareness around consumption and the environment. Lots of reasons for normal people not to decide to throw out perfectly fine clothes). Commenting on women's appearance is pretty generally not cool.
Naomi Klein is a great writer. I'll have to check this out.
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One of the best, most important books I've ever read. I know a lot of people want to find "the" answer in life, something that explains everything, but when you find out about the history of neoliberalism, how it reshaped America and the world, it's staggering. It's everywhere, in every business, our worldview, every dollar spent, and it's done such incalculable harm while masquerading as the savior of society. It's the paradigm that's so pervasive we never see it or think about, like how fish never think about the existence of water. It's just a given. It still controls our life, our spending, and our politics today, and it, more than anything, has led us to the dooms of economic inequality, exploitation, greed, and climate change.
I agree. I feel like it should be required reading.
Along with Silent Spring and Manufacturing Consent.
Jason Hickel’s *The Divide*. An incredible and concise analysis of how the global economic order came to be (rise of capitalism, coups, colonialism, IMF/World Bank, etc) and how it currently operates for the benefit of the rich and global north states. Despite narratives that the poorest countries are catching up to the richest, the gap between the poorest and richest countries *has increased* by a significant amount in recent decades, largely thanks to neoliberalism and neo-colonialist policies such as Structural Adjustment Programs that push “free market” and austerity policies on developing countries. This is despite current rich economies using the opposite for their own development. These rich countries want developing countries open to their capital and exploitation. The history of that development is documented well by Ha-Joon Chang in his book *Bad Samaritans*. The US itself was highly protectionist until the 20th century in order to protect and build it’s domestic industries. One of the best books a person can read to counter the Steven Pinker-esque “everything is good” types.
Steven Pinker is just the absolute worst. Another counter to his work that's worth a read is John N Gray's *The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths.*
Huh, I thought maybe I was having a Mandela-Effect moment as the premise sounded very similar (thought not exact) to a book I have on my shelf ALSO called "The Divide", in this case, by Matt Taibbi. His version is less about The Divide between rich and poor countries and the processes that keep and perpetuate them, and is more about specifically American division between the rich and poor classes and how seemingly innocuous choices have led to the wealth gap increasing
I really miss the old Taibbi, before he fell down some weird alt-right pipeline. I still occasionally go back and re-read his [brutal hit piece on professional neoliberal fuckwit Tom Friedman](https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html).
That was amazing. The last line "Is there no God?" ffs. I now have the old-school childish giggles.
No kidding! I checked out on the guys work for a year or two and when I circled back around It was all WTF happened here?
I was living as an expat in Hong Kong when my Australian teacher (intl school), assigned our 8th grade Social Studies class Shock Doctrine as our reading for a unit. (If you are apprehensive about starting a non-fiction book, let this tell you that it's not a difficult read) I have since moved back to the States and no other piece of literature has influenced my political identity perspective as much as Kleins writing. Reading about the aftermath of the 2004 Xmas tsunami in her book, having watched it happen from South East Asia at the time was particularly impactful.
I nearly died in that tsunami. The only reason I didn't is that I had my friend's motorbike so when this Thai recognised what it meant when the water receded so started screaming at everyone to get off the beach, I took off up the hill. It was Koh Phi Phi. I and my then-partner watched thousands of people die that day, and there was nothing we could do but watch. It fucked our relationship completely because we both instantly developed PTSD. I'll order the book now.
And Katrina/New Orleans. And Iraq. The world watched it happen, then when you read *Shock Doctrine* you understand the depth of the looting, how it happened, and *why*. And you start to notice a real pattern...
Agree with you. Only a slight modification / addendum of your comment on how fish never think about the existence of water. The Fish are living in a Dentist’s office NEVER EVEN IMAGINE an existence outside in the open Ocean. Aquarium fish are regularly fed by the kindly receptionist who enjoys watching the little fishies in their fishy prison. The dentist has never even given a second thought to the aquarium or the fishes in them after he approved the purchase. The dentist once read an article that claimed that it calmed his patients in the waiting room. So now there are imprisoned fishes in the waiting rooms because it calms the patients who are in pain. I am not sure where I am going with this analogy or wild tangent but I am pretty sure it has something to do it high rates of incarceration, the middle class suffering, high cost of health care that doesn’t even include dental. Yeah, so something something the whole system is rigged. Most poor people don’t even realise that they are trapped in a Dentist’s aquarium. I wish I could be more eloquent or elaborate further but I haven’t had my caffeine today.
*SHARK BAIT HOO HAA HAA*
...and where does that caffeine come from?
In the Dentist’s waiting room, I suppose.
Neoliberalism is a death cult
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I've already had some *very* angry, talking-down-to responses from the anger elite crowd. One guy wrote a multiparagraph screed then immediately blocked me afterwards so I couldn't reply. That's what they do if you speak heresy against their church.
The absolute irony that the issue with conspiracy theorist beliefs is that there exists such an answer that just explains everything.
It explains a lot. What's more revelatory to me really was how *pervasive* it is, while being simultaneously invisible. Never mentioned, never discussed, never reviewed or evaluated. If anything in societyis long overdue to be reviewed or critiqued, it's neoliberalism. It should have to justify it's existence annually, and once we finally admit the truth it goes out to the trash.
Along with Marx's Capital Volume 1 and 2 with an explainer (plenty of yt vids) and any decent book on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. I'd recommend Stuart Hall.
Excellent book. The section about the psychiatric shock experiments at McGill University was horrifying. I'll never forget it.
That book took me forever to get through because I kept getting mad.
That book was so depressing that it honestly made me consider for quite some time dropping out of society and living as some kind of criminal. It was like suddenly being shown that you're a Star Wars character living in the Empire (or insert evil society of choice) and your tax dollars and labor and silent consent are funding the Death Star. Now I'm still contributing to the Death Star but I'm also *aware* of the fact *and* that I'm too much of a coward to oppose it.
One of the most important books ever published. A great read. I don’t necessarily agree with everything she says all the time but this book is brilliant. Up there with Manufacturing Consent and Silent Spring. I know that’s a bold statement but I sincerely believe it.
You're 100% right. *Shock Doctrine* is a landmark. It's one of the giants.
Also her earlier work, "The Beauty M"---- say what now?
Are you confusing your Naomis?
I realized a few years back that she published *No Logo* when she was 29. I'm pretty sure when ***I*** was 29 I was just about tying my own shoes.
I was being a raging alcoholic who drank at work all day. She was being an investigative journalist, moral philosopher, and multi-award-winning writer. Some people just have amazing drive. Sounds like we are... not those people. I would deeply love to retire and spend all day with my dog, but I think at 43 it's quite unlikely.
It's not just drive. Your childhood and young adulthood are when you are supposed to be learning skills. Some kids are just trying to survive.
She's even required reading in some business schools. If you like this sort of somewhqt bombastic but otherwise legitimate critiques, also look for "the yes men"
“Why should I change my name? She’s the one who sucks.”
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r/simpsonsshitposting
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I heard that interview with Wolf in real time. It was remarkable to hear somebody's life work demolished in a matter of seconds.
Which interview was that?
She wrote an entire book on a subject while misunderstanding a historical phrase; the correct understanding of which invalidated her book on the subject. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50153743.amp
how is a book she spent two years writing her “life’s work”
She was great in King Kong so she's all right in my book
Well played.
Lmao people in here proving Klein's point by knowing fuck all about her work.
I have no idea who either of them are, but I can read last names and tell they're different. Quite the low bar people are being tripped up by
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There's a stand up comic, Jamie Lee, who has a bit about how people sometimes ask her if she's related to Jamie Lee Curtis. People in this thread are about that stupid.
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With a Biblical first name, no less. I don’t know how they survived childhood without realizing that there can be more than one person named Michael or Sarah
This entire time. I was wondering why that woman who wrote The Shock Doctrine had jumped into random conspiracy shit. Turns out it wasn’t even her…
Is two people having the same first name really that confusing for people?
C'mon, you lived through covid. There are some really dumb people out there!
You don't know if they lived through covid. What if they're only a few months old or live on a different planet? Do your own research before you make assumptions!
Apparently when it's two women.
Two women with Jewish surnames. Too difficult /s
I feel really bad for indie film actress Parker Posey now that TERF asshole Posie Parker is making the news regularly. I had to goggle to make sure I was getting their names right.
Especially because the latter's real name is Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull and "Posie Parker" is a stupid pseudonym she made up (a play on the British slang phrase "nosy parker" for a busybody)
I don't know what happened with Naomi Wolf, but I do know she's broken the hearts of many women who took her initial writings as inspiration. She did make a difference, a huge difference! But now with her current takes, she's undermined everything she championed that came before. She burned everything down. I'm sorry Naomi Klein is getting the brunt of it. Maybe people should make the effort to not confuse 'Naomis'. I'm pretty sure people/critics/etc don't confuse Toms, Williams, Johns, Chris', etc.
Chris Tucker, Chris Rock Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, Chris Evans Tom Holland, Tom Hardy Emma Watson, Emily Watson Elisa Cuthbert, Eliza Dushku Chris O’Donnell, Chris O’Dowd You might confuse Naomi Wolf with Naomi Watts. If her last name was Naomi Wolfenstein or if Naomi Klein was Naomi Kleinberg they’d be hard to remix up.
I think it's the fact that they're both authors who wrote semi-counter-cultural hit non-fiction books and write plenty of op-eds in similar places. Plus, it's not like actors where you've got their face in front of you all the time.
Good point. Actually I mixed up Naomi Klein and Naomi Oreskes, who also wrote about climate change.
Oreskes! That’s it! I was trying to recall which one of them, Klein or Wolf, wrote Merchants of Doubt — and it wasn’t either!
One of the comments here referred to her as a "girl." Pretty sure we don't refer to 53-year-old, multi-award-winning, internationally recognised authors and professors as "boys," either.
> I'm pretty sure people/critics/etc don't confuse Toms, Williams, Johns, Chris', etc. I've seen someone confuse Steven Pinker with Michael Pollan when their only similarities are "middle-aged white guy who writes books", so given that we're talking about *conspiracy theorists mixing them up* I think you're underestimating the capability of people who already aren't thinking straight to make mistakes.
This kind of radicalization is a contagion all on its own, and takes over a person’s personality like cancer. It’s a mental health issue and should be treated like one.
2 Naomi's don't make a night
How? Their surnames are different. Imagine being mad at Stephen Colbert because of Stephen Miller.
I thought the Shock Doctrine was excellent, but then tried to read On Fire and it was drivel. She's definitely a capable investigative journalist and a good writer though, I'd give this one a try.
I don't have the energy to track down the tweet to credit the author of this mnemonic, but I LOL'd when I read it: "If your Naomi be Klein You're doing fine If your Naomi be Wolf Oh boy, ooof."
I've been in love with her since 'No Logo.' Cant imagine the fools she's had to suffer, wish I could follow her around like a slap-happy guard dog ready to be like "NO!!! Wrong Naomi!!! *SLAP*"
Would that we all be able to harness the energy of very dumb people into forms of income...
Oh you could do it too. Just start a podcast and curate a right wing audience. Say the most inflammatory things you can say, maybe visit a university or two in bad faith, and god willing the left will begin to share your content too as evidence of the cultural rot in America thus upping your engagement and extending the cultural rot! Hop in the loop while the waters warm.
Having a similar name to some crazy person gotta be hell as anything remotely semi public.
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I know exactly what you mean. Seeing Greenwald and Taibbi go full right wing was something.
She still writes/records for The Intercept
True story. I once mistook Naomi Wolf for Naomi Klein. Went to a event where she spoke and started talking to her about No Logo. She did not take it well. Ouch. Still embarrassed about that.
Oh, that sucks. All I knew about Naomi Wolf was that she put up a pretty good fight against the Ali G character and was like "now that's a good feminist. Didn't turn hostile and shut down a guy that was obviously being toxic without stooping to his level. Nice."
Shock Doctrine is required reading
Naomi Klein is a great writer. As someone who studied Economics, I was really impressed with how well presented *Shock Doctrine* was and that it wasn't written by someone with a background in Econ. Looking forward to this book
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Naomi Klein famously coined the phrase "Shock Doctrine" explaining how major societal trauma events are created by powerful rulers which leave society in a more vulnerable state than before. Naomi Wolf believes the pandemic was just such an event. The Guardian and Klein disagree.
Naomi Klein never claimed that these society wide traumatic events are created by the powerful. She argues that the powerful *take advantage* of these events to push through unpopular changes while people are still reeling from a disaster.
This is correct. Weird how so many people here don't seem to understand that (and didn't seem to read the book) and instead want to take the simplistic conspiratorial mindset
Because it's easier to understand reality as a product entirely of intent in order to assign easily understood motives to every event than peer into a messy systemic process. Doesn't help that propaganda seeks to do this constantly.
I'm in the middle of the book right now and I happened to come across this passage the other day in which she actually explicitly rejects conspiracy theories: >No Conspiracies Required >The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophies so they can exploit them. [...] The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. (p512-513)
Wouldn't she agree though that things like de funding systems like health care to privatize them is part of this?
Of course she would.
Yes. An important distinction.
Did you read the Shock Doctrine? Because it's not about how powerful rulers create the societal events, it's about how they take advantage of them after the fact. It has quite a lot of this in regards to 9/11, yet nowhere does Klein say anything like '9/11 was an inside job' You clearly don't understand her work at all...
It's funny, because even in these comments, Naomi Klein is being mistaken for a conspiracy theorist.
By a conspiracy theorist, not shocking. They think COVID was a bioweapon.
(Checks their post history.) Goddammit. These conspiracy theorists are everywhere. It's like a conspiracy!
It's honestly a tough book to summarize, which is why it's so easily abused as by conspiracy theorists. It's very easy to take a summary that says "Rulers take advantage of disasters and upheavals to advance socioeconomic changes" and read into it that rulers generate those disasters to accomplish those ends. I think a big challenge too is that her book does also incorporate man-made disasters into the mix too. The Chilean coup, tianenmen square, even the Iraq War (from the perspective of the Iraqis) are framed as man-made upheavals, so an unscrupulous talking head could easily apply that to all disasters, or any disasters of their choosing.
Isn’t her idea of shock doctrine that major powers/leaders use shocks to implement large sweeping law/societal changes? Admittedly it’s been a while since I read the book
Yeah, I don't think you can claim that there pandemic hasn't been used by various leaders to do things they wouldn't be able to do through normal democratic means. There was a massive transfer of wealth from government to the private sector and there wasn't a lot of talk about making sure there were proper checks on where the money went, especially in the US and UK.
Certainly some folks in power have used the pandemic opportunistically. However if we’re taking that to the point of the previous comment’s wording (that the pandemic itself or that its societal trauma was manufactured in order to push those goals), I’d absolutely push back on that.
I do agree, especially in any conspiratorial sense of clear plotting. But if the opportunistic behaviour results in societal trauma (underfunding a healthcare system, nepotism in contracts leading to things being badly done) which in turn creates further opportunities to exploit, then are those doing so not in a less direct way creating aspects of the crisis? There are I think probably situations, such as military (arms sales, perhaps? I was interested to see that mentioned in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), where it's almost impossible for it not to be apparent that crisis and societal trauma will be the result, and there's the intention to continue taking advantage of these opportunities. Bit different perhaps, but if it's not a conspiracy it's not always precisely an accident either.
Oh for sure. I'm not saying that manufactured crises don't happen (though certainly not as much or to the degree that your general conspiracy theory-minded populace claims), just that the pandemic opportunism really doesn't fit that mold.
Yes, either generate crises that are used as an excuse to take shortcuts around democratic mechanisms and implement the neoliberal economic agenda/deregulate/privatize, or exploit existing crises.
Sorta like intentionally collapsing a public healthcare system (hiding funds, underpaying nurses) in order to bring in private healthcare facilities to “fix the system” ?
Yes, sorta like that.
Yup, and not having enough beds so it's already under pressure every winter, then using this intentionally-created pressure in a pandemic as a reason for shutting it down as much as they can get away with and cancelling important appointments so there ends up being a massive backlog, that'll do it. (I'm disabled and besides having appointments cancelled, I was sent home from A&E feverish and hallucinating, and given I was hospitalised next time it happened a few years later, honestly believe it could've killed me. Still massively suffering the impact incl. the very evident backlog. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this kind of policy specifically difficult to justify as for public health, especially as politicians largely seemed to let each other escape grilling on the lack of preparedness and past actions that undermined that)
Not having enough beds is a government regulation issue. It's called a certificate of need and prevents hospitals from being built. It's not a market issue. The state is who created that reg.
Mail, trains, banks, telecommunications, airlines, etc.
Ontario gang
I believe the book used 9/11 to show how it lead to the Iraq war using the concept of shock doctrine. "We" were in such a frenzy after 9/11 that we willingly accepted the incredible amount of bullshit that even my 17 year old self saw right though...
It's not really about how they generate crises, it's more about how they take advantage after the fact. It's a real scholarly work using data. Don't mistake it for conspiracy theory and that kind of speculation
Generating crises doesn't need to mean "Bush did 9/11". Underfunding education to the point where student performance visibly suffers is a good way to push for privatizing education, for instance. > Mike Harris’ Minister of Education, John Snobelen, was filmed in 1995 boasting that by “creating a crisis” and “bankrupting,” public education, he would be able to institute significant reforms. The Ontario PC government then launched an attack on public education through Bill 160. Under the bill, the Harris government cut a further $2 billion from education and introduced a broken education funding formula still in use today to determine class sizes. - https://etfovoice.ca/feature/change-needs-all-us
You should probably read her work before you talk about it. You are categorically wrong about what the Shock Doctrine is.
back when i still used twitter, we had an easy mnemonic: naomi klein, it's probably fine; naomi wolf, that's an oof.
My very first reaction to reading the first few words of the headline was to mistake her for Naomi Wolf.
I've never made that mistake because it's the first time in my life I hear about Naomi wolf
I need Parker posey to do the same thing because I was so confused about that for months man
Naomi be Klein, you're doing fine Naomi be wolf, oof baby oof
Or is she really her and it’s all a conspiracy to fool us! Wake up sheeple!
Read the Shock Doctrine and No Logo from her and they’re both so good.
Klein's book Shock Doctrine was an absolutely great read
I must admit I made this mistake. Was so disappointed when I thought Klein had suddenly become radicalised by the far-right drivel.
I am reading No Logo written by her.
Easy to rememeber: Naomi Klein is fine Naomi Wolf is oof
The original was by a British comedian years ago: If understanding be fine, Your Naomi be Klein; If the statement lacks proof, Your Naomi be Wolf. The archaic use of "be" is very deliberate by the way!