While reading a Substack post by Sam Kriss (https://samkriss.substack.com/p/what-is-the-worlds-oldest-hatred), I found this cutesy tale. It's humorously-phrased so I thought I would search more about this Clung fellow, but the only thing that comes up is this guy's essay. There is no historical record for any person with that name. What's the point of making up this fiction? If you want to use these descriptors because you came up with them yourself, just say it plainly! Is hiding behind a supposed historical figure just a good way to throw your snark out there without catching flack for it? This would make all the idiots on Twitter with real names and photos attached to their accounts better than Kriss on that simple fact alone. If it was some experiment in seeding false information to track how it spreads over the internet or to toy with search engine results, well that still strikes me as dishonest (and experiments like that are almost always delineated in white papers or using terminology derived from academic practice even done by a layman). The latter doesn't seem likely when taken in the contect of the rest of Kriss's work which is rather straightforward and not prosaic or rhetorical. A stunt like this immediately calls into question every other word you've read by the author and I haven't bothered to pay this guy any attention since.
Anonymous :
29 days ago :
No.5307
>>5330
>>5307 (OP)
What is this guy's world view, roughly speaking? Have never read him. Seems like he has not yet ascended to his own Wikipedia page.
The DeBoor guy is on my hitlist next.
I too have had the experience of googling a name from a Sam Kriss essay and feeling silly when it returns zero results.
> A stunt like this immediately calls into question every other word you've read by the author
I think that is very much the point. Kriss is obsessed with mythologies, fables, and so on. He is at heart a post-modernist, so much less interested in base truth than in the texture of stories, in narrative strata.
Why not invent an absurdly extremist early-modern preacher and invent some outlandish Elizabethan sayings to put in his mouth? Sayings that, when squinted at, look rather a lot like tweets, look rather a lot like rsp comments, don't you think...? This, too, is a possibility of fiction.
Anyway I hope he sees this he will get a kick out of it.
I can respect that in concept, but by only leaning halfway into it and not going full Thus Spake Zarathustra he is accomplishing neither goal. He mixes in the post-modern street preachery with sincere takes about modern culture that are much more in line with conventional analyses on Substack and elsewhere. It doesn't feel like it will stand the test of time or be anything significantly more than a novelty. I think Kriss is insightful enough to write some serious fire if he could ditch the Substack environment and his own shitposting tendencies.
Standing the test of time is a strange bar to set. Approximately 0.000% of things ever written 'stand the test of time'. It's not a good way of judging if things are any good right now.
That's silly and you know it. I'm sure you've read something written in the past 30 years that has stuck with you or otherwise strongly shaped discourse. Or are you pulling some reddit-tier 'nothing will survive of our civilization a millennia from now' shit
I think writing some 'serious fire' as you imagine it would require Sam turning his back on writing things that delight him, to become a part of the commentariat. At which point he may as well draw his salary from the Spectator instead of Substack.
As long as some people like it, Substack enables Kriss to write exactly the things he wants to write, and for someone of his talents, my intuition is that this is a good thing, a better than than if he were hamstrung by a cynical features editor.
I mean leaving the specific web environment of Substack and publishing independently, guess that was my freetard bias coming through.
Sorry, but if you think 'Laurentius Clung' is a realistic name for a Genevan, that his theological positions are something a Christian could hold and can't tell his supposed quotations are obviously intended to be comedic you might actually be a bit stupid.
I can concede that 'Clung's' theology isn't that far from the bogeyman of 'Calvinism' (the 'Evil Denomination' in the normie mind) so I can understand why someone might think someone with these positions actually existed but come on
Anonymous :
29 days ago :
No.5322
>>5323
>>5322
You're getting so riled up over a throwaway "what if a Reformed theologian was an epic hater" joke that you made an entire thread about it. What would Laurentius Clung say about you?
I did find it a weird name, which is why I searched for more information after I read it. You're repeating back to me what I already described I did then calling me an idiot for not following it, lol.
>>5322
I did find it a weird name, which is why I searched for more information after I read it. You're repeating back to me what I already described I did then calling me an idiot for not following it, lol.
You're getting so riled up over a throwaway "what if a Reformed theologian was an epic hater" joke that you made an entire thread about it. What would Laurentius Clung say about you?
Seems you don't like any of the threads here. Might as well leave, bye bye!
You know what, I think I'll leave instead. Thanks Petrarchan admin for the good memories, ciao everyone.
what a touchy guy!
Anonymous :
29 days ago :
No.5330
>>5331
>>5330
Melodramatic & neurotic Marxist that writes reasonably entertaining short stories.
>>5307 (OP)
What is this guy's world view, roughly speaking? Have never read him. Seems like he has not yet ascended to his own Wikipedia page.
Anonymous :
29 days ago :
No.5331
>>5332
>>5331
> Melodramatic & neurotic Marxist
he doesn't need a wikipedia page because at this point why even bother doing an early life check
>>5330
>>5307 (OP)
What is this guy's world view, roughly speaking? Have never read him. Seems like he has not yet ascended to his own Wikipedia page.
Melodramatic & neurotic Marxist that writes reasonably entertaining short stories.
Mod’s a bitch-ass nigga for deleting that thread bruh I made it and it was pure gold fr fr nigga
Anonymous :
22 days ago :
No.5476
>>5478
>>5476
He writes like an LLM trained on his own writing
>>5584>>5476
Sam Kriss is interesting because he is a leftist writer (and I believe him when he says he is a leftist) but he definitely finds hard-right ideas about race and culture extremely seductive. It wouldn't surprise me if he is a crypto-HBD type or something. This internal tension between his commitment to egalitarianism and his right-coded elitism causes these sorts of stress fractures in his work which I find seductive.
I agree with you about his hysterical nature. But when he reels it in a bit he really does have a gorgeous style. This essay that you're criticising has some phenomenal writing that I have read again and again and can practically quote from memory.
> My Polish friends told me that for the first few decades of the Polish People’s Republic, people in Wrocław ate off dinner plates decorated with the swastika. Strange continuities seep in. The philosophy department at the Uniwersytet Wrocławski is very proud of its distinguished alumnus, the hermeneuticist Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Warsaw, pedestrians cross the road whenever there's a gap in the traffic; in Wrocław they wait patiently until the little green man appears, even if there's absolutely nothing on the road. Just like Germans.
> The expulsion of the Germans after 1945 was maybe the most understandable of the great exterminations that convulsed Europe in the twentieth century, but it was still an extermination. Estimates of the number of people who starved or froze or were worked to death or mobbed or shot vary wildly. Maybe half a million. Maybe two million or more. Their crimes might have been multiple, but the only crime they were actually punished for was simply being German.
A longer passage later on when he moves onto his main theme of the October 7th attacks has actually influenced my personal assessment of that calamity quite a lot.
> I have not, it’s true, lived under siege for eighteen years; maybe my perspective is limited. But I still think it’s possible to drive past some old people waiting at a bus stop and not kill them on sight. I think it’s possible to not execute parents in front of their children. In fact, I know it’s possible, because there were plenty of Hamas fighters who didn’t do it. Some filmed themselves with women or disabled or elderly people in their homes, promising not to harm them. They insisted that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades do not murder children, which is completely untrue, but it’s hopeful. Afterwards, an Israeli woman told the TV news that the Hamas fighters in her home had told her ‘don’t be afraid, we are Muslims,’ and asked permission before eating one of her bananas. How do you explain these people? They lived in the same city under the same siege; they lived through the same Israeli bombings as the ones who happily took their revenge. Could it be that whatever our condition, and whatever evils are visited on us, we are all answerable for the deeds of our hands?
And to settle any doubt on the KQ (Kriss Question), you need only read his short elegiac essay "Bread, figs, phosphorous". Maybe it's just me, but I think it's one of the most moving pieces of writing I've ever read. (I'm glad he's now fixed the typo that used to jar the reader in the paragraph starting 'Gaza was large').
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/bread-figs-phosphorus
Thought about what annoys me about Kriss; I don’t care that he makes up ridiculous characters, his worst sin is that everything he writes, fiction or nonfiction, is written with the same neurotic cadence, like he’s hyperventilating at the keyboard. After reading more than two of his blog posts I always feel subconsciously scared of catching his brainworms.
Also his ethnic and religious resentments seep out of everything he writes. Here he was horrified that Wroclaw looks like every other German city, but there are no migrants or Muslims there, and seemed to imply that the Germans that visit the city as tourists are doing so out of latent Nazism.
>>5476
Thought about what annoys me about Kriss; I don’t care that he makes up ridiculous characters, his worst sin is that everything he writes, fiction or nonfiction, is written with the same neurotic cadence, like he’s hyperventilating at the keyboard. After reading more than two of his blog posts I always feel subconsciously scared of catching his brainworms.
Also his ethnic and religious resentments seep out of everything he writes. Here he was horrified that Wroclaw looks like every other German city, but there are no migrants or Muslims there, and seemed to imply that the Germans that visit the city as tourists are doing so out of latent Nazism.
He writes like an LLM trained on his own writing
>>5476
Thought about what annoys me about Kriss; I don’t care that he makes up ridiculous characters, his worst sin is that everything he writes, fiction or nonfiction, is written with the same neurotic cadence, like he’s hyperventilating at the keyboard. After reading more than two of his blog posts I always feel subconsciously scared of catching his brainworms.
Also his ethnic and religious resentments seep out of everything he writes. Here he was horrified that Wroclaw looks like every other German city, but there are no migrants or Muslims there, and seemed to imply that the Germans that visit the city as tourists are doing so out of latent Nazism.
Sam Kriss is interesting because he is a leftist writer (and I believe him when he says he is a leftist) but he definitely finds hard-right ideas about race and culture extremely seductive. It wouldn't surprise me if he is a crypto-HBD type or something. This internal tension between his commitment to egalitarianism and his right-coded elitism causes these sorts of stress fractures in his work which I find seductive.
I agree with you about his hysterical nature. But when he reels it in a bit he really does have a gorgeous style. This essay that you're criticising has some phenomenal writing that I have read again and again and can practically quote from memory.
> My Polish friends told me that for the first few decades of the Polish People’s Republic, people in Wrocław ate off dinner plates decorated with the swastika. Strange continuities seep in. The philosophy department at the Uniwersytet Wrocławski is very proud of its distinguished alumnus, the hermeneuticist Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Warsaw, pedestrians cross the road whenever there's a gap in the traffic; in Wrocław they wait patiently until the little green man appears, even if there's absolutely nothing on the road. Just like Germans.
> The expulsion of the Germans after 1945 was maybe the most understandable of the great exterminations that convulsed Europe in the twentieth century, but it was still an extermination. Estimates of the number of people who starved or froze or were worked to death or mobbed or shot vary wildly. Maybe half a million. Maybe two million or more. Their crimes might have been multiple, but the only crime they were actually punished for was simply being German.
A longer passage later on when he moves onto his main theme of the October 7th attacks has actually influenced my personal assessment of that calamity quite a lot.
> I have not, it’s true, lived under siege for eighteen years; maybe my perspective is limited. But I still think it’s possible to drive past some old people waiting at a bus stop and not kill them on sight. I think it’s possible to not execute parents in front of their children. In fact, I know it’s possible, because there were plenty of Hamas fighters who didn’t do it. Some filmed themselves with women or disabled or elderly people in their homes, promising not to harm them. They insisted that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades do not murder children, which is completely untrue, but it’s hopeful. Afterwards, an Israeli woman told the TV news that the Hamas fighters in her home had told her ‘don’t be afraid, we are Muslims,’ and asked permission before eating one of her bananas. How do you explain these people? They lived in the same city under the same siege; they lived through the same Israeli bombings as the ones who happily took their revenge. Could it be that whatever our condition, and whatever evils are visited on us, we are all answerable for the deeds of our hands?
And to settle any doubt on the KQ (Kriss Question), you need only read his short elegiac essay "Bread, figs, phosphorous". Maybe it's just me, but I think it's one of the most moving pieces of writing I've ever read. (I'm glad he's now fixed the typo that used to jar the reader in the paragraph starting 'Gaza was large').
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/bread-figs-phosphorus
bah I said seductive twice. skill issue. pretend I said compelling in the second instance.