Mega Informal Review

Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise.

Primetime (2026) by Lance Oppenheim

Was okay. Robert Pattinson is fun. I keep confusing Skyler Gisondo with Nicholas Braun. It frustrates me that people keep interpreting it as being solely about how Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator faltered by making a spectacle out of (attempted) sexual violence; like that is one thematic axis, but the other equally or more significant axis is about powerful people deflecting from their abuses by pointing at others’ over whom they wield control. Not only is Chris Hansen using his pursuit of justice to deflect from his own extramarital affair, but Bill Conradt (the local Texas politician who committed suicide as he was about to be raided on the show) is depicted as weaponizing anti-pervert politics the same way. Some months ago, I bought shorts from the Bummer Shop, and accidentally received the wrong pair saying “Dead pedophiles don’t reoffend” (I’d ordered the Matthew 18:9 one). Did you know that the recent movement to execute sex offenders is being driven mostly in southern states and, besides it coinciding with the movement to mark trans people etc. as sex offenders, it is decried by actual survivors because it makes it harder for them to come forward with accusations? This is what Primetime is engaging with, in my reading, and it feels timely when our political system is headed by actual literal pedophilic rapists who still manage to point the finger.

Paul’s Enslavement (2025) by Mark R. Fairchild

Fairchild argues that Saul of Tarsus, later and better known as the Apostle Paul, was likely a freedman whose (politically involved) parents had been captured and enslaved during a zealot revolt in Judea, and that this traumatic experience informed his rhetorical fixation on slavery and freedom when writing his letters. It’s very well-argued, going off of church hearsay as well as the implications of some of Paul’s sayings (again, the constant slavery metaphors, as well as the reference to “pleasing men” which was a euphemism for acting in the capacity of a slave, and to his “stigmata” which to any contemporary reader would have signaled not piercing wounds but slave branding). Fairchild argues by extension that Paul argues implicitly for the freedom of individual slaves as well as the end of slavery as an institution but that he can’t say so outright because of the risk of political persecution (in Philemon, Paul says basically “I could command you to do what I would want you to do except I want you to do it on your own accord and I can’t tell you what exactly I mean but I trust you know what I mean”). This brings to mind Paul’s wishiwashiness in other regards like with marriage and the status of women where he affirms the role-based subservience of wives but argues that husbands should in turn serve wives in a subservient manner as Jesus did his Church (since the Church is One Big Wife), and maybe when he contradicts Roman sexual ethics by saying that male-homosexual tops are as guilty of sin as bottoms are (which, since he had been raised a slave, is interesting since he is very extremely likely to have been diddled during that time). This rhetorical strategy is so characteristic of Paul and it makes it hard to narrow down what he actually meant by any of it, since clearly we can’t stop arguing about it. It’s almost like a meta-merism, where Paul encodes a range of possible positions in a single argument (rather than just encoding a range of things within a binary phrase). So if the reading for maximum anti-slavery sentiment seems to hold true, does that extend to maximalist readings of Paul’s other arguments? Who knows.

Half His Age (2026) by Jennette McCurdy

I don’t post a lot about fiction here, but oh my God, this book is fucking crazy. I had seen an interview with McCurdy where she talked about writing sex in a kind of repulsive way which stood out to me because I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about it that way. Oh God. Absolute gaggiest book I’ve read this year, in both senses. When the teacher divorces his wife and moves into a hotel room where he puts all of his guy movie posters up. I wanted to throw up lowkey, but in a literary excellence way. I would like to make others throw up. This is unfortunately the third entry in this post about getting diddled. Sorry. Something in the zeitgeist lately, I guess.

Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) by Domenico Losurdo

Argues that liberalism developed hand-in-hand with the transatlantic slave trade, not as its historical counter-tendency but as (to borrow Debord) its condottiere which ends up waging the war for itself. Really good book. I bought it without looking at the author and my friend Ènziramire was surprised because Losurdo is the intellectual daddy of Rockhill, who is the intellectual daddy of the fascist American Communist Party, where the thread is that Western Marxism (a broad enough category to encompass Foucault, Trotsky, and the Frankfurt School) is a CIA psy-op to tarnish the legacy of Stalin and his conservative outlooks on the family, private property, and the state (I’m surprised that those are why they want to go to bat for Stalin? I mean I know why but like, wow, are we including that in the seven parts good?). But it was a good book. Agreeable.

You Can See Everything (2026) by Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim

Damn, same guy twice. Neither are important here, though. I was jokingly frustrated at how much discussion on this documentary before it released centered on Nathan Fielder and his history of hijinks. The real star of the show is my scheming sister Elizabeth Holmes whom I’ve always jokingly maintained would not have been arrested had she been a man (which is probably untrue). I was expecting a freak-off between two master manipulators, in which regard Holmes has lowkey been a comfort character for me (especially depicted by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout). What I got instead was a character study about a socially inept woman who has been groomed to accept manipulation from the worst men you’ve ever met in your life. The key question to Holmes’ case is obviously to what extent is she manipulated or manipulator, and it’s easy to say that to view her as the former is what she wants and what she has successfully manipulated others to see. The problem is that the two worlds have functionally the same outcome, and I think the latter where she is a narcissist and pathological liar requires far more intentionality (and frankly internality) than she and people like her seem to have. Not that she is innocent, but what’s really the simpler explanation? Isn’t the old foundational myth of patriarchy that the gods created woman, the dog-minded artifice, so man would unwittingly embrace his own destruction? Do we still buy that? I think man is happy to do it to himself.