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This is the first time I've seen it and it is a baffling article.
In particular it seems to build a case entirely from an imagined literary genre? He makes this appeal:
But the fact there is that if you do read those texts, they completely undermine his primary case, which is a plea for more retributive violence, even vigilante violence. If you read, say, Le Morte d'Arthur, you will notice regular and conspicuous displays of mercy to defeated enemies, and unnecessary bloodshed is portrayed as a major threat. Arthur and Pellinore become trusted friends and allies, for instance, and the fact that Pellinore killed King Lot, rather than spare him as he ought to, becomes one of the causes of his eventual death. Sir Gareth defeats several knights in a row, all of whom are acting as vicious bandits, and spares them (at a lady's request, no less) and they come to Arthur's court and are forgiven. When characters choose bloodshed, this is usually bad - the tragedy ends with Arthur's determination to kill Mordred, rather than allow him to flee, bringing his own doom upon him.
The trope of defeating someone and then forgiving them and becoming friends is extremely common in pre-modern literature. Half of Robin Hood's merry men are people that Robin defeated, and then extended a hand to in friendship, saying "you are a man after my own heart!"
Heck, this happens biblically: consider David's repeated and conspicuous refusal to harm his enemy Saul, even when Saul is in his power.
What about classical antiquity? Here I'd note something they have in common with the Viking sagas, which is deep concern about the possibility of blood feuds, and the demand that violence ought to be limited and proportional in order to avoid them. Destroying enemies in a temper is bad. The Aeneid ends with the defeated Turnus asking for mercy, or failing that, to have his body returned to his people for burial rites, and Aeneas' furious refusal to do this and act of retribution is presented as a bad thing, or as a moral failing. Likewise the way the Iliad treats Achilles' disrespect of Hector's body. Neither the Aeneid nor the Iliad are pacifist works that believe that violence is always bad, but they are written with an awareness of the dangers of vengeance. The same is true of the sagas.
What's the last one he cites? Elizabethan England? Suffice to say that I do not think the people who wrote this endorsed bloody-minded retribution.
Now, sure, in all of those cases there is a specific local context - David doesn't hurt Saul because he's God's anointed, and so on. All the examples are a bit more complicated. Everything always is.
Likewise there are acts of retribution, and those acts also have context - Odysseus kills all the suitors, not because they're his enemies in some general way, but because they have specifically violated the laws of hospitality, which are sacred, and even then the way Homer describes the slaughter does not seem to be one that we are intended to cheer for. In the Odyssey itself the act is presented as something somewhat transgressive. The slaughter itself is an extended sequence in which the suitors beg for mercy, try to rally a desperate defence, and so on; there is something terrible about it. And then in the poem the families of the suitors demand justice afterwards and Odysseus must reconcile with them, in book 24. Antinous' father gets up and makes a moving speech about his sorrow, and the suitors' families plan to attack. The Odyssey actually ends with Athena intervening and telling Odysseus to stop being violent lest he incur the gods' anger: "men of Ithaca, cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed... Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you."
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
To be fair he almost lost an arm and it was touch and go re: whether he'd ever get full use of his hand again, or even sensation. I've seen the scars (and the arm while it was healing) and they're wild. Took several surgeries. FWIW he also accomplished this injury while doing something badass, but I've said enough.
"Driving around the country" is just Tuesday man -- he reminds me of myself when I was his age in some ways, but if he wants to be badass he needs to do better than "I crashed my bike" (also "Tuesday" for a lot of guys I used to know) in my books.
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Victory in violence always demands the sacrifice of your body. You might hope to get away without injury, but you never expect it. People of violence understand this and accept it, or lose. So I am going to need more than assurances he did something badass if you want to change my mind that that incident didn't cement his status as a risible caricature.
Why would I be interested in changing your mind about this? I have no idea who you are and it's a personal matter. Sticking up for a friend is all.
Welp, I thought you were going to say Dean is spinning it or doesn't have all the facts and maybe find a way to hint at the shape of this badass thing he did, not immediately back down.
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Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
By way of reply, does your willingness to acknowledge whether someone else is a coward or not change any factor of them being a coward?
In his old reddit posts on the trucker protests, Kulak made cowardness conditional on whether one conducted political violence regardless of being caught and identified. This was a demand for a positive action, and failure to meet that action was a categorical proof of personal failure deserving social contempt. He established no exceptions- inaction itself was proof of failure.
Kulak has also made no claim of having conducted political violence at the time he claimed it was necessary to prove one was not a coward. Nor have any of his sympathizers. In fact, sympathizers have provided claims that he did not meet the non-coward criteria for reasons that did not meet his pre-established exceptions. Further, no claim of compensatory action has been claimed- nothing that might provide absolution for the initial failure if her were physically incapable of prioritizing getting into a protest over his personal health. Which itself is a claim no one has made, least of all his defenders.
The principle of positive claims requiring positive evidence to warrant belief does not get reversed for reasons of OPSEC by people who dismissed fear of discovery or arrest as grounds for non-involvement. 'Oh, Kulak can't admit to conducting political violence- he'd be caught!' is not a basis to believe Kulak lived up to his claimed requirements for not being a coward. Kulak would not admit to have conducting political violence if he had not met the standard. The absence of the claim is not proof of a claim.
None of this would seem to have any relation to whether you would admit to any knowledge or lack of knowledge.
Kulak being a moral coward would be morally consistent. It might be morally contemptable, but it would be consistent.
Kulak can be condemned on plenty of grounds. As a historian, a literary analyst, even a rhetorician. However, the condemnation of cowardness can be justified by his own standard presented that he presented as a demand for action lest one be dismissed as a coward.
He did not act. Hence, he can be dismissed as a coward. That he makes no claim to having acted in other cases are additional, but redundant, cases for being a consistent coward.
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action', it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward. That would obviously be crazy. After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
And I find your attempts to play coy in Kulak's defense silly.
There is no schrodenger's anarchist. Either Kulak can be credited with living up to his standard, or he is not credited.
I have multiple reasons to believe he did not, including but not limited to previous admissions of absence and his testy defense of absence on grounds of surgery. He deleted that reddit post soon after, but the surrounding claim of surgery is echoed by others including yourself.
I have, however, claimed that people do not get to claim credit for actions neither they nor anyone else claim they have been a part of.
Bravery often is. However, Kulak's call to action was not to be something other than crazy, but to not be a coward. Note the different goalposts. Being non-crazy is perfectly consistent with being a coward.
You know what would also be crazy, though? Being a substacker who makes calls to violence on associated social media accounts while secretly moonlighting as an actual anarchist engaging in political violence. Clearly Kulak is not above being crazy at least some of the time. We are merely in dispute as to how much and when.
I am moved by your attempt to leave with the last word and a final zing, and your confessed confusion on the position that Kulak is a consistent coward by his own standard.
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TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).
I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.
As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
I wonder if this is the natural course of all Substackers? Fleeing big media for Substack was meant to be a way to seek independence from traditional constraints, but if it just enables a stronger form of audience capture that ever existed before, while encouraging writers to avoid risks and double down on the same crowd-pleasing themes over and over, we may find ourselves missing the old system.
Kulak isn't a journalist, of course, but I do notice something of the process with more 'mainstream' Substackers. It may have taken a few years, but, to pick an example, I feel like Freddie deBoer has ended up just writing the same half dozen articles over and over, as predictable as the tide. I can think of a few others that I read that seem to be sliding down the same incline.
Maybe it's all just bad.
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
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Abolish the police
Give everyone a gun and a wink
???
Justice!
Give war a chance.
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This is basically everything Kulak writes. He makes up a version of what people in the past thought, from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers, that bears no resemblance to anything they actually wrote, but in Kulak's version always boils down to "Violence, violence, and more violence."
I'd say he's historically and culturally illiterate, but accuracy isn't the point. It's all a con to convince other people that violence is the answer (to everything).
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