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Here's a Thought... A (no longer) new section, with chunks of ideas that might grow into a bigger essay, but will likely stay as these small islands in this vast cyber-sea.
Here’s a Thought –
January 2025 Edition
RIP David Lynch, the Nicest Weirdo
If only for Eraserhead, which took nearly five years to make.
Because when Bukowski finally watched cable tv this was one of the first
things he saw, and couldn’t believe what he had been missing all these
years not watching television, only to realize how much of an outlier it
was quite quickly.
Because Kubrick played it on the set of The Shining to get in the mood.
Because Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks) saw it and thought the director
would be perfect to helm a movie about a famous man with a mutated face.
Because Lynch never told anyone how he made that fetus.
Because of the cheeks.
Because of the sound of the radiator.
Because pencil factories.
Because 20th century absurdist horror shouldn’t impeccably encapsulate
daily life in the 21st century yet Eraserhead does.
But then there was Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks and
You can take the man out of the
Sometimes the dialogue in a Lynch film is straight out of the Andy
Griffith show, until Dennis Hopper shows up, until Naomi Watts wakes up,
or until people in
The sound and the fury in all their heads is also in David Lynch’s, at
least until Jan.15.2025, when he went into the Lodge of his own making.
Notes
(https://www.polygon.com/entertainment/510587/david-lynch-death-tribute-actors-directors)
(Especially the ceramic cow art submission bit)
The Problem With Patents, the Copyright
Catastrophe: To Own, To Owe, To Property, Too Proprietary
When a struggling artist becomes a succeeding one, it is something to
celebrate, all the more so at a time when success can mean many people
knowing of their creations, while not actually having to properly
financially compensate the artist for it.
‘Properly’ is of course debatable, but it has reached the point where
financial support comes from watching an ad, or paying for a catch-all
service of entertainment where that one particular artist might make an
infinitesimally small percentage of that typically monthly subscription.
So if you want to support a musical artist, an extra step is required by
purchasing a downloadable file of superior quality, a vinyl record (if
available), a concert ticket (if they are touring), or simply making a
donation (if they accept them).
There is the matter of deciding not to pay an artist once they get ‘big’,
the assumption being that they are making enough money already (or appear
to earn, as millions of streams or tickets sold still might be a sliver in
the artist’s pocket).
The rationalizing ‘they have enough money’ goes beyond the actual creator
of art, as sharing Netflix or Spotify passwords is considered a sign of
friendship, not fraud. After all, you don’t own anything you stream. You
just rent.
Stealing music in the sense of a vinyl record or compact disc (remember
them?) requires the physical act of taking them out of the store without
paying. It was theft in a sense that all of human civilization for
thousands of years could agree on, since you now owned a physical thing
you did not pay for.
Once people could steal digital ones and zeroes with little consequence,
they did, and the few times the Recording Industry Association of America
randomly choose over two hundred people to sue in federal court, there was
eye-rolling outrage at this pathetic attempt at making examples of people,
where the PR made the wealthy record company owners (and any artist who
supported the CEOs) completely out of touch.
(https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later)
There’s nothing wrong with biting the hand that feeds you when you
consider the size of the fucking hand.
People have no problem ripping off a system they believe is ripping them
off (when enforcement becomes impossible, it’s not even considered fraud
when you use someone else’s credentials to watch a movie on your phone),
and any sort of honour system agreement with a faceless corporation
regarding password sharing will be broken without a single pang of guilt.
And it’s even easier to do with private equity firms eating up music
artist catalogues (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/opinion/private-equity-music-spotify.html).
Now that these companies own some much of the music people listen to, AI
will be able to prevent individuals from uploading copyrighted material to
YouTube or other sites quicker than before.
So what will happen
when Spotify declines to pay up when royalty rates skyrocket for the next
contract? Will music streaming services become more exclusive, more
expensive?
Meanwhile the more important issue is why this sort of company should own
a song they didn’t write in the first place.
Whether Mickey Mouse* or Monsanto's seeds, how long should someone own
something?
*- The Disney
Corporation is famous for pushing the length of copyrights for their
characters (Mickey Mouse, most notably) further and further, which is
possible if you er, ah,
‘fundraise’
and
‘lobby’
politicians on
a fairly consistent basis to change the respective copyright laws.
While many people worked on a major film, the ownership of it is accepted
to be that of the film studio that bankrolled it.
For art that is more singularly created - whether an independently
financed film, song, or
painting - the question quickly becomes much more personal.
How long should ownership last? Since Lou Reed’s dead, should anyone be
allowed to make money off his songs?
Even if an artist leaves their songs to be overseen by a foundation that
will donate all royalties to charity, there’s no telling how long it will
be after the artist dies - or the initial employees at the foundation
leave/retire - that the songs are purchased by a hedge fund or venture
capitalist firm. And they will likely be very reticent when it comes to
people ‘borrowing’ their products and services without proper
authorization.
But at least with entertainment it’s just that: entertainment, and not
absolutely essential to human survival.
When it comes to truly basic necessities - food, shelter, medication -
that profit can be made on the items people need the most is particularly
odious.
Novo Nordisk, the Danish drug company, is so successful it ‘is’ the
country’s economy:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/business/denmark-ozempic-wegovy.html)
It’s always most egregious in medicine, because
access to basic health should be a human right, and even if it’s written
into UN statutes or national laws, the practice is oh so far from perfect.
(https://prospect.org/health/2023-06-06-how-big-pharma-rigged-patent-system/)
Can you believe this shit?
The answer is of course you can, because the world
pinches out this story every day.
Monsanto’s stomping through the agricultural
industry and putting farmers in a catch-22 of always buying their
particular products or have fallow fields is well-documented, and
well-litigated, to the point where its ultimate parent company had to pay
$66 billion to settle lawsuits.
(https://usrtk.org/monsanto-papers/)
When everything on earth can be invested in and
owned, from dirt to the melodies pouring out of people’s heads, the idea
that everyone has their own equal share is utter crap.
Everyone forgets that Frank L Baum’s Wizard of
Oz novel is a criticism of capitalism in the time of the Industrial
Revolution. The scarecrow represented the agriculture sector (no brains),
the tin man was steel (no heart), and the cowardly lion was government
regulation.
You take the yellow brick road (gold) to what you
desire, only to have a very difficult time getting inside. The large,
imposing Wizard is all talk, and it would have stayed that way for Dorothy
if it wasn’t for her dog Toto to turn their attention to the nebbish man
behind the curtain.
The guards outside the Wizards castle sound like
they’re chanting melodic gibberish in the film, but in the book it is
clear:
“All we own, we owe.”
Are We Living in a
Are we being nudged by higher-dimensional beings (or god(s), if that sort
of word is your thing) to join their club?
2001: A Space Odyssey
had a mysterious monolith guiding humanity from their primate period to
their travel across the solar system and then ‘beyond the infinite’…for
reasons that are never explained. Although its ambiguous ending suggested
that the first person who made the trip - astronaut Dave Bowman - was
elevated to another state of consciousness and re-born as a superpowerful
embryo in order to oversee whatever happens on earth for the foreseeable
future.
*cough*
On our little hunk of rock - that had quite a long development period of
fire, rain, ice and asteroid impacts - we think we are in the boonies of
the universe, with neighbouring stars too far to easily travel to, and a
cloud (named Oort) surrounding our solar system that might make it
difficult to send out and receive any sort of message.
But maybe realizing that things are too far away will finally force us to
either build something that will shrink distances in a much more creative
fashion or that will show just what the nature of our reality truly is.
The latter notion quickly takes us tumbling far away from science and into
philosophy and sci-fi (emphasis on fi), even if we attempt to use so bits
and piece of actual scientific facts to make our completely loopy
arguments.
If we are in a simulation, perhaps sudden medical afflictions (stroke,
aneurysm, very rare diseases, perhaps even cancer itself) are examples of
the beings in a higher dimension glitching us (or part of us) for their
amusement and education, or because that’s a result of how the simulation
is run. Like how some characters ‘glitch out’ in video games (and can be
blamed on faulty/inexact programming, or doing something that cannot be
properly interacted with because the code is not prepared for it).
If we can’t tell if everything we experience is real or not…then the
entire argument is moot. Any simulation theory has to remain and unproven
theory until we start scraping together evidence, and if everything in the
universe is part of this simulation, we won’t be finding any smoking guns
any time soon.
But consider some very fortunate developments that would make sense if
you’re intentionally ‘terrarium-ing’ a universe, focusing on one
particular rock to see what would happen:
-the fortunateness of amino acids pooling together to form the first forms
of single-cellular life
-the fortunateness of nothing interrupting the very, very, slow
development of multi-cellular, much, much more complex forms of life
-the fortunateness of ‘only’ losing 99% percent of living creatures on
earth during some extinction-level events involving giant rocks slamming
into the planet (because why not 100%?)
-the speed of light ‘easily’ observed by the distance of the earth to the
moon, which takes a (relatively (heh)) reasonable amount of time to
understand: 1.3 seconds
-high availability of silicon in the earth’s crust, so building computer
technology is ‘comparatively’ easy to make more and more scientific
discoveries to the point where we can consider that the universe itself is
computer technology
Fact Slicing for (In)Convenience
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/business/media/fact-checkers-misinformation.html)
Truth will get more
personal…unfortunately.
If we are in a post-truth society, then the challenge is to control
constructs/narratives that are believed/adhered to as much as possible.
The construction of narratives - literally, storytelling - is not new
obviously. In fact, beyond actually stories, how we write/read biographies
says as much about the society they are written in as the subject itself.
The story of an artist’s career, their successes and failures,
triumphs and tragedies, are told in a familiar, easily identifiable forms,
with rises, falls, and (if the individual is fortunate) a comeback,
compressed to a few paragraphs or a five minute video.
But to have the information presented in this form means omitting a
great many details. If you want to learn about David Bowie, you can read
the entire Wikipedia page, or even the first few paragraphs of the
Wikipedia page. If you want to learn a detailed account of his life, you
can read one of many extensive biographies published. But those are behind
the paywall of actually purchasing the book, whereas the encyclopedic
equivalent online is free (and in a very familiar and easily digestible
format).
Because so much information is so easily accessible these days, the
true unknown aspects of society appear to be that much important, that
much more secretive (even if ultimately they are not). This is not only in
a geopolitical sense - where questions of ‘who really runs the world’ can
create bizarre and ludicrous perspectives - but in personal and cultural
ones.
Today it’s easier than ever to ignore or dispute the facts when it
gets in the way of your goal, whether it is an argument over what a friend
did or did not say a few days past, or what a politician said years ago
about a particular issue that is suddenly controversial and important
right now. The simple act of looking for evidence that seems to be sitting
right there is not so simple, because of the desire to dispute the
evidence if it’s not what you want it to be.
And while this seems to be the product of a broken system, the system
is only broken in the sense that it doesn’t help most of the people in the
nation/world. The system works in the sense that the people who control
the system stay in power to keep controlling it…and make a ton of money. Which is, of course, a fact that can be
disputed.
A Change in the Change
The move to digital currency is still in its infancy. The Scandinavian
countries (chiefly
Obviously when there are power failures and prolonged blackouts, suddenly
everyone is penniless unless they have coins or bills, but that’s
problematically balanced out by having most stores and services reliant on
electricity and wireless signals to power devices and registers that would
be able to process purchases in cash as well.
While it might be slightly easier on the pockets by not carrying coins and
on the brain of not having to count out the amount in your hand, a more
unforeseen side effect is that people are caring around less bills and
coins, meaning they are handing less of it over to the impoverished, who
are clearly and unsurprisingly not as engaged with digital currency as
other segments of the population.
A couple of quarters or even a five dollar bill occasionally handed over
is done because you can spare it at the moment, and even the term ‘spare’
suggests you think little of it after you hand it over, but for the person
you give it to this money is incredibly important for accessing the basic
necessities many of us take for granted.
Yes, cynics and generally cold-hearted people will always claim that the
change is going right to an addiction, but studies have shown this is not
true. Most money the homeless acquire are spent on obvious, common sense
things like food, clothing and lodging.
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/27/canada-study-homelessness-money)
But with less physical money circulating, less of it is being given to the
poor, and any sort of digital donation equivalent is done on a much
smaller scale and takes longer to actually reach the people in need.
Oh Baby
(https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children)
Low birth rates are a problem because of the dominant economic system
of the world, which is based on the future always having ‘more’ than the
present.
Old people cost a lot to take care of, and with more of them and
fewer young to middle aged adults, the circle of work-tax-spend-on-seniors
is broken.
‘Capitalism’/‘Consumerism’ depends on people buying more to put more
into the system, to keep the proverbial wheels spinning.
No country wants to pump the brakes and see what happens.
But just because countries and corporations want people to have more
babies, doesn’t mean they will.
In part because they can’t afford it.
Tax breaks and free day care are nice incentives, but they don’t
change the average salaries of prospective parents or the grocery store
bills or the ever-increasing tuition costs twenty odd years down the road.
There is also the simple matter of space.
The rise in suburban living through the second half of the twentieth
century (with its single family two storey, four bedroom homes with front
and backyards) has proven untenable in the first half of the twenty first.
Space costs money, and it’s only gone up in price in the last couple
decades as more and more people leave small towns for big cities.
Adults in their twenties and thirties are living in small single
person apartments, with roommates or going into debt to own a condominium
or house. All of these options do not allow for the consideration of how
much a child costs (and requires), no matter how many rebates or benefits
are dangled in front of prospective parents.
No financial space means no physical space, while a more economically
comfortable present means a more sustainably populated future.
The Burning of Learning
Maybe it doesn’t matter that the people who don’t give a shit about
reading the Great Gatsby don’t read The Great Gatsby in school anymore.
Yes, of course there needs to be base level of reading, writing and
mathematics, but when a skill is not needed for years after it is learned,
it is forgotten.
Yes, schooling is essential and integral, but its current methods are so
antiquated compared to how children and teenagers and ultimately adults
engage with the modern world.
What has to change is the approach, which has to become slightly different
for each student. For some, a teacher talking in front of a
chalk/whiteboard/overhead projector screen is still the best way to learn,
but for others, it absolutely is not.
How do you make teenagers - or anyone - want to learn about calculus? Or
dramatic irony?
The argument that you learn the curriculum to get better grades to get
into college to get a degree to get a good-paying job has been dashed to
pieces in recent years, with skyrocketing tuition costs essentially
guaranteeing long term debt and a volatile job market that virtually
ensures no long-term careers.
The amount of money spent on education in developed nations is at once a
staggeringly huge amount, and at the same time not nearly enough when one
considers how essential it is that the children of today become educated
adults in the future. The role of the teacher will change more in the next
ten years than in, say, the last several thousand.
One of the more recent ways to combat this technological upheaval was just
to double down on the fundamentals. Lots of homework overseen in small
classrooms taught by very devoted teachers who were incentivized
financially to make sure their kids got high marks on standardized tests.
This form of learning was called ‘charter schooling’, and at first it
worked…until it became a system where the curriculum was preparing for
those tests and little else.
Charter Schools are further proof that the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. It works great if the group running them are wholly dedicated
to improving education, and while that seems obvious, when it was clear
that plenty of money was being given by the government to run these
schools, fraud arose.
Once the oversight deteriorated (or was never there in the first place),
it allowed profit-driven types to come in and give shoddy education where
they can pocket the difference.
That the education system can be sucked up by crooks and scammers is
appalling on several levels. They are not only stealing taxpayer dollars,
but are leaving children without an education when their school closes in
the middle of the year for 'lack of funds' (whether or not the school was
horribly managed or a scam outright). And we need educated people in the
near future more than ever, to make sure that these sorts of schools go
the way of the dinosaur.
The Fragility of Our Internet
When the internet goes down, most of
the time it’s our own modem, router or device that’s the problem, and the
interruption is typically temporary. At worst we have to go a near by tech
store or wait for a repairman to come by and replace something. Even
during that brief period, there are typically options for you to at least
check your email and messages by turning your phone into a hotspot, going
to a nearby coffee shop or friend’s place.
But then there are the massive
outages where entire cities, states/provinces or countries can be
affected.
Attempting to turn off the internet
is a go-to weapon in modern warfare, including against your own citizens
if they are getting too rebellious in a controversially autonomous region.
But on the flip side of malevolence
there is incompetence, and one of the major Canadian internet service
providers went down for a day because a software engineer accidentally
inputted a slightly incorrect code.
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-outage-no-plan-b-1.6515664)
It doesn’t even have to be a huge
well-known ISP or tech giant, as no one had really heard of CrowdStrike
until it screwed up royally:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/business/microsoft-outage-cause-azure-crowdstrike.html)
People who knew about the problem
thought one of them was taking care of it, and the person who oversaw them
didn’t even know the problem existed.
It is a communication breakdown on a
micro scale that creates a communication breakdown on a major scale.
Technology can make it easier to make
sure everyone is on the same page. Operative word being ‘can’. Because if
you wholly rely on said technology, and then said technology breaks, you
are up shit creek, and in a lot of cases, we’re not dealing with creeks,
but oceans.
For how much our internet is
dependent on thousands of satellites zipping around in low and mid earth
orbit (always functioning properly and not crashing into each other, mind
you), it is easy to forget that undersea cables crisscross the entire
Atlantic and Pacific to carry fibre optic data from one continent to
another, and this takes a ton of work to set up and maintain.
(https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships)
And if it is understaffed and
underfunded, make it part of a nation’s defense/military (and its core of
engineers), since it is absolutely involving (inter)national security.
I Remember Nothing
It’s not disposable, but it
can be, if you aren’t giving it your full attention.
What is it? Doesn’t matter.
New music can easily exist
in a state of perpetual forgetfulness. Today one might just remember band
names, and then recognize album covers on a Spotify page. Album titles are
possible, but song titles? Forget it, those details being lodged in the
brain of today’s average listener are rare now because why waste space on
it?
With the rise of popularity
in instrumental music, where familiar choruses are by definition absent,
titles are even harder to remember
Ambient music is an
aesthetic expression almost designed to be appreciated while doing
something else.
It is music that is not
designed to be remembered the same way a song with a catchy lyrical
refrain or melodic hook is. Eno called it ‘furniture music’, suggesting
it’s not much different that a table or chair, something that can be given
only a modicum of attention to appreciate it fully.
And now we are adding the
visual to audio format.
Background television and
film, and not just because you’ve seen it before and can safely tune in
and out without concern of being confused.
So much of the entertainment
we consume today follows very familiar patterns and styles. Reality
television, sitcoms, news programs, sports. It doesn’t have to be
constantly arresting or full of plot twists to prevent you from looking
away. It is the rise of…mid tv:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/arts/television/mid-tv.html)
And it’s hard to avoid
because it is always there. All of it. And if you forget it you can
quickly cue up whatever moment you need to have your memory jogged, so why
learn this particular piece of information when you don’t have to? Why
retain knowledge if it is not assisting you at the very moment? Why have
historical events or scientific formulas in your head when you can
speedily access it through the device that’s usually right in your hand?
The information is becoming
less important as the access (and especially ease of access).
Culture conflates over time,
and time has gone for a real spin in the last few years.
The entire relationship with
an artist and their music (or any form of culture) changes when instead of
being a fan for years and waiting for each successive album release as you
age, you hear one song on a playlist or on a tv show and binge the
artist’s whole catalogue in an afternoon while reading their Wikipedia bio
and become a superfan
(and becoming cynical
the next afternoon, opining that they jumped the shark with A, but B is
criminally underrated).
Putting 'the twist' and 'I'm
waiting for the man' on the same Spotify playlist is a bit like putting
Mary Poppins and Persona on the same movie bill. And since all
these references are from the sixties, it is entirely possible that
contemporary audiences will know less than half of these references.
Without historical context
it is easy to see these pieces of culture in an unmoored, unknown state,
not certain what inspired it and what it may have inspired.
And now that so much of it
is free, it’s more likely to be forgettable. Not because the content
itself is cheaper, but because there was never any real financial value
attributed to it in the first place. There was no ‘well, I spent $8 on a
movie ticket so even if it’s a lousy film I’ll sit through it to get my
money’s worth’ because there wasn’t an alternative (and back when it was
$8 to see a movie).
Now you can of course watch
films for (nearly) free and turn it off at any time, so when you fork over
some cash to go to a movie theatre, you are much more aware that you
decided to pay for it and are taking that money into account and
comparison against what you could have watched for free instead.
Streaming is not free, but sharing passwords between
friends is damn easy and so is finding grey market websites where you can
stream or download anything for a fraction of the actual price of Netflix,
Disney+, Apple TV, what have you.
There is so much content out there, and so many ways to put
what you love in bookmarks and playlists that when asked some of your
favourite movies, books, albums, whatever, the chances that you go blank
at the moment, not remembering what you like.
Now you’ll just have someone check your socials to see what
you’ve organically liked and commented on over the years whenever you’ve
come across a particular song, movie or video game.
You don’t even have to remember what you like. Technology
will handle that, too.
The
Misleading ‘M’
The
‘M’ rating on video games does the them little to no service.
With
digital sales becoming predominant, the idea that age-ratings will prevent
a teenager from buying Mortal Kombat 1, Dead Island 2 or Elden
Ring DLC is becoming all the more laughable. And those are some games
that are just obviously M because of the intentional over the top gore,
not because they would be hard to comprehend by a ten year old.
Even
some of the most lauded games because of their story, presentations and
mechanics can have ridiculously violent animations (Last of Us, God of
War), whether in cut scenes or part of gameplay.
Instead, the ‘M’ rating harms the perception that gamers and non-gamers
have regarding this still expanding culture and industry
In
theory, it makes sense that there would be ratings similar to that of
movies, to denote which games have graphic/realistic violence, sexual
content, profanity, or otherwise mature situations (a nebulous term, but
since some games can absolutely have direct and indirect story or cut
scenes talking about shocking or controversial topics can feel much more
intense and affecting than in a film that you ‘just’ watch).
A
game series with realistic war scenarios like Call of Duty or
Battlefield, or a series like Grand Theft Auto where you can
run over pedestrians, visit strip clubs and beat up gang members and
police officers alike are obviously full of mature content.
But
how you do these things in game is ridiculously easy, you tilt the
joystick for motion in the general direction you want to go (walking or
driving) and press a button to shoot or punch (or throw dollar bills in
the air). It is so easy a ten year old can do it…which is why they do, and
so does everyone else.
Now
this is not meant to throw possibly naive and absentee parents under the
bus, but to show that games with mature content can be extremely easy to
play.
Meanwhile, the assumption that a title with an E-rating (for Everyone, by
the way) means the title is a ‘baby game’, or can’t tell a compelling
story or offer a unique gameplay experience is absolutely unfair, and many
gamers who think that way are losing out on incredible video games.
Nintendo has historically prided itself on having mainline titles suitable
for all ages in terms of storytelling and visual presentation (with the
exception of Bayonetta).
The Mario, Pokémon and
Animal Crossing games are obviously meant to be ‘all ages’.
Zelda and Metroid are more difficult and have more varied game mechanics
(sometimes there are puzzles to solve or bosses to beat with precise
attacks), with a touch more dark themes and atmosphere, but there’s no
sexual situations, no swearing, and maybe only the barest hint of blood in
a cut scene.
But
this focus on more bright and friendly atmospheres and art designs are
literally surface, as it does not mean the game in any way will be easy or
simple.
And
yes, at first many Nintendo game seem to be exactly those two things, but
they can be quite deceptive. ‘Easy to learn, difficult to master’ is the
mantra for many Nintendo titles, because the basic gameplay is fun, then
the challenge of becoming an expert at it will have that same attraction
Pressing a total of four buttons to quickly jump on a koopa and then
carrying its shell over to a platform to throw it into a question mark
block to pop out a power-up item might take the same amount of button
pressing and finesse as quickly killing someone in an online Call of
Duty deathmatch.
The
Pikmin series looks just as cutesy as other Nintendo titles, yet it
requires more problem solving, time management, and resource planning than
any other first party franchise by the big N. And your cutesy little
Pikmin friends dying via fire, drowning or being eaten by a wealth of
different monsters is a lot more harrowing each time you watch/let it
happen than all the times you suffer a gory fatality in any M-rated fight
game.
Even
non-Nintendo E-rated cozy games like Stardew Valley where ‘dying’ in the
caves just means waking up later on because another villager rescued you
have deep life simulation/RPG mechanics that demand attention in ways that
M-rated story-based titles like Uncharted 4 or Red Dead
Redemption 2 do not.
In
the latter game, you press a button to automatically set up a campsite. In
Nintendo’s landmark open world game from the Zelda series, Breath of
the Wild, you have to find wood, flint and strike the two of them with
a sword to create a fire. Being creative is not M-rated.
One in a Million
This Vsauce video
acknowledges that extremely unlikely, one-in-a-million things happen
everyday, if only because the amount of ‘things’ that happen everyday:
(https://youtu.be/sHCHEykUxP4?si=3w_iOVG9ZqwUtkmE)
Maybe it's not weird. Maybe
nothing is weird. Maybe not one single thing that's ever happened in
existence is weird. Maybe existence itself is weird, and therefore
everything that happens under its umbrella is just...normal.
How we all fit into the
unrehearsed play that is the universe is part of its mystery, and why when
something good or bad happens to you, it can be chalked up to whatever you
want. A higher power directing everything, or random chance. Which seems
to take you out of the equation altogether, which is not the right
attitude to take.
What you do affects all the
particles in the universe just...so.
Your presence matters. Your absence matters. Your thoughts -
electrical signals that are just charged elementary particles like
everything else - matter. The impact each individual person makes on the world moving forward is so small. But the impact is not zero. It can't be. Because adding up all these small impacts adds up to 100% of everything that happens.
HERE’S A THOUGHT JULY 2024
All Hail the Algorithm
One of the top comments (by SID-ym3ge) in this video (polite bear waving
hello):
Is asking why the comments in this video (awesome catch by the bear):
Are deactivated.
(Although at the time of the publication of this ‘Here’s a Thought’,
comments were now possible on both)
And that’s mildly amusing, but also a very good example of how we adapt to
the arbitrary rules of the internet.
The way individual citizens engage with the world are limited in the sense
that we are all human beings and as a general rule we act in predictable
ways when put in similar situations. The notion of ‘human nature’ and what
those actions entail changes over time, but the funnelling of familiarity
remains eternal.
If we all use cell phones, we will all adapt to the information delivery
system it provides and while initially cellphones operated strictly as the
portable versions of the landline phones we had in our homes, when the
technology changed in the early 2000s to incorporate what computers were
able to do (including access the internet), it changed everything.
For how much Apple’s resurgence was defined by the iMac in the late
nineties and the iPod the early 2000s, it was the iPhone from 2007 that
became the changing technology that would define the 21st century up to
this point.
YouTube debuted two years earlier, and while message boards were from the
earliest iterations of the World Wide Web, the comment section below the
video became it’s own miniature, temporary communities of support and
shitposting, sometimes within the same thread.
The popularity of technological portability and audiovisual possibility
coming together meant we learned not only the content of streaming sites,
but the form of it as well. And talking to each other in bursts of short
sentences (otherwise risking tl:dr) where days might go before responses
have become the norm. And what you find is based on what you have already
found. More of the same is an eternal feedback loop, in nature and its
digital counterpart.
The Fifth Solvay Conference (1927)
It is almost certainly the greatest meeting of scientific minds in human
history.
These week-long (or so) conferences held
infrequently in
The first was in 1911, and in 1927, the fifth took place at the end of
October, when the stars (and schedules) aligned.
Comparisons for smart people hanging out together would have to go back
hundreds, even thousands of years. The Socrates-Plato-Aristotle hangs outs
don’t hold up historically, and Issac Newton was extremely anti-social, so
there wasn’t much overlap with any other luminaries of his day (although
him arguing with Leibniz via letter writing over who ‘created’ algebra is
amusing to think about).
In the nineteenth century it became easier
(easier, not exactly ‘easy’) to communicate regularly across the European
continent thanks to transportation advances like the steamboats and the
locomotive. Not only sending and sharing letters and documents both
private and public very quickly, but making it much easier to see each
other face to face.
By the 1920s, air travel was in its infancy, but after taking the ships
and trains, cars could quickly get you the rest of the way to a particular
destination.
Which brings us to the Fifth Solvay Conference (1927):
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference)
The
main photo is a who’s-who of the first fifty years of 20th century physics
(it’s not really a Solvay conference without Einstein, Bohr, Plank,
Schrödinger, Curie, or Heisenberg), which built an astonishing
intellectual foundation upon which our society exists today.
For how abstract quantum physics can certainly appear to be at first,
second and several other glances after, the technological discoveries that
have come out its principles has given us important advances in
semiconductors, telecommunications, MRIs, cryptography and - on the
horizon - the aptly titled quantum computing.
This was not a quick process, either. Decades passed between theories
published in scientific journals in the early years of the 20th century
(‘1905’ was Einstein’s all-star year) and their eventual practical
applications to everyday life
Can anything later discovered be credibly sourced back to a conversation
or lecture that occurred at the conference?
Not exactly, but getting together on a personal level in between any
planned activities made it easier to share ideas on a professional level
both there and the years after.
Friendships are not always highlighted when looking back in history, as
they might just become a footnote between two important figures, but
working together on any important endeavour is essential.
With modern technology it is of course easier than ever to immediately
share studies and experiments publicly across the globe, as well as having
personal correspondence via email, text and phone. Even the Nobel Prize
Awards ceremony makes a point of having some of the winners sit around a
table and have a conversation about various topics overseen by a mediator
that tries to tie loose disciplinary threads together.
In the 1920s, it was still published journals delivered by mail that would
inform scientists of the what the rest of them were working on.
Even a picture back then was a big deal, something that was still largely
in the hands of professionals, where getting twenty people together was
something that took time to schedule and set up.
Seeing who had the idea is not nearly as important as the idea itself, but
remembering that there has to be a who for every theory shows the literal
humanity that comes with the sciences.
The Collapse of the Family Unit and the Rise of the Friend Blob
‘Family’ is the collection of individuals
whose connection is based on blood (or to be more scientifically accurate,
DNA), and it was easy to understand, so we’ve stuck with it for as long as
we can remember. And this ‘we’ goes beyond humans, as animals congregate
in similar family units as well.
Even though there are many examples of
families of being absolute disasters as small groups of people, with
individuals able to make life absolute hell for other family members,
sometimes there is little recourse because, ‘hey, they’re family’. You
might live with - or at least support - someone who is an addict, an
abuser, a criminal, or just a lazy asshole who sucks all the joy out of
the room.
Today, the family unit is still dominant
but not as much as before. People are living separate from family members,
which sounds unremarkable, but it was completely normal for millennia that
the family lived in the same house for generations. Or if you did move,
all family members did. For most people, you lived together because you
didn’t have a choice in the matter, socially and economically.
And you left because people died or the
house was destroyed, not because you ‘wanted to have a go at it in a new
state’, since that was akin to abandoning your parents, children, cousins,
aunts, uncles, etc.
Today, friendship is the replacement
social group, with people choosing to socialize with like-minded people,
not with people they happen to share DNA with.
It is easier to make and break these
social bonds, which is beneficial when it comes to relationships that
initially only need to be superficial (share a living space) and short
term (sometimes for a few months or a couple years).
This is an accurate reflection of how
adaptive we have become as the ‘speed of society’ has accelerated. Family
is slow, friends are fast.
All the World’s a Stage…Scalped Tickets Available
(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/opinion/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-antitrust.html)
Ticketmaster is a monopoly, and why do monopolies end up offering
terrible, crooked service?
Because they can.
Whether the politicians/regulators naively believed a few years ago that
the new Ticketmaster/LiveNation corporate blob would actually improve
service/performance in the long run, or didn’t really care in the first
place, the result was the same.
Shitty service and an organization that is (supposedly) too big to fail.
Certainly Ticketmaster/LiveNation will make any forced gov’t break-up be
as painful as possible for the consumer, a final corporate fuck you to the
people that had to depend on them because the corporation bribed
politicians into supporting a merger that clearly wasn’t going to be a
benefit for the public, but the shareholders.
Why spend money on having a site that will always work properly when
you’re the only game in town?
Such behaviour practically guarantees scalping, a practice that is much,
much older than these ticket/venue-controlling behemoths offering sub-par
service with above-par service fees.
But corporations hated the idea that individuals were gaming the system by
selling tickets at inflated prices, and wanted in. But in true corporate
fashion, they wanted it all, completely squeezing out any competition, big
and small.
First was getting rid of paper tickets, since that’s what can be shopped
around the easiest. Now that it’s all digital (and no screen-shots
permitted), Ticketmaster can better track where the ticket is going and
how it’s being used.
Then they decided to beat the scalpers at their own game…by charging
ridiculously high prices for shows right from the start!
The recent cancelling/re-scheduling of tours by the Black Keys, Jennifer
Lopez (and ‘seats still available’ for recent tours by Charli XCX (it’s
still a Brat summer, though) and Porter Robinson) is blamed lately on tix
being too damn expensive.
(https://www.stereogum.com/2267170/arena-tour-ticket-sales-black-keys-jlo/columns/sounding-board/)
Management might have told these artists that if this is how much scalped
tickets were going for on your last tour, we may as well charge a similar
amount for this upcoming one so you’ll make that money instead of the
scalpers.
Which sounds great in theory, but it also complete overlooks the fact that
most people bought tickets on the previous tour did so at pre-scalped
numbers, and that only a fraction of fans were willing to by the scalped
ones.
That greed is at the centre of all of this by all parties involved should
surprise no one.
We are all Lost (literally) without the
internet
Think of the last time you looked at map of
your city or province/state when you weren’t about to go anywhere, when
you just end wanted to get a good idea of the area. Chances are you only
look at maps on your phone when you need directions from where you are
right now to a very specific location. How often would you zoom out from
that image and see the larger region as a whole, to see where the major
expressways and streets intersect to create a mental image in your mind
that you can retain?
Now you never have to know the names of the
streets in a distant neighbourhood (or even your own), only the streets
you need to take at that exact moment.
We’re never lost because we are always shown
the exact way to get to our exact location even taking into consideration
realtime traffic and construction.
This is not a lament for paper maps or the
lost ‘art’ of looking at a map and deciding your own route to your aunt’s
house or a mall or a distant town you’ve never been to before. Physical
maps have obvious drawbacks, like falling apart or tearing, getting lost
under a seat or sofa, becoming woefully out of date extremely quickly, and
not giving now expected information like traffic and construction delays.
It’s a lament that if the internet ever goes
down and society collapses, no one will even know where the hills are to
head for.
Imperial and Metric
One of the reasons it’s been so difficult to have America (and the few
other places) to switch to the much, much more efficient and simpler
metric system of measurement is because people are lazy (and not
specifically Americans, but people in general).
And not just in the sense of people not wanting to do the mental work that
comes with switching 1 inch to 2.5 centimetres (that’s a big one), but the
actual words used to say out loud.
Slang and pronunciation shaving are examples of people trying to get to
their point with the fewest and shortest words as possible.
With friends and co-workers you might be describing ideas and situations
with common references between everyone, using initials and short hand,
all to skip the energy of saying more than you have to.
When it comes to switching from imperial to metric, saying ‘one foot’ now
has to be ‘thirty centimetres’. That’s four additional syllables to
describe the same length.
Inch, foot, yard, mile, they are all one syllable words. When it comes to
speaking and expressing distance, nothing beats them. Even the shortest
metric length - metre - is double the syllables.
At least grams can compete…until there’s milligrams and kilograms…
We choose easiness in terms rather than easiness in what the terms
represent, especially when it is a word/idea that we were used to growing
up with (childhood is described as an ‘impressionable age’ for a reason).
Now people who have never been that familiar with imperial would never
consider the economical pronunciation benefits that come with shorter
words because they’re so used to speaking in metric, but those that are
familiar with imperial (America) would find using excess time and brain
wasting syllables a nuisance at best and an evil plot to destroy the
United States at worse.
The
Glorious 9th
If we had to prove to aliens our worth as an intelligent,
worthwhile species, we’d play them Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It is one of
the highest forms of human achievement, condensed to about an hour. It a
form of math (in the musical arrangement sense) that sits in stark
contrast to, say, quantum physics.
One can put forth the concept of how math (and the science
it explains) will be the universal language between extraterrestrial life,
but we should offer something else that shows our other mad skills.
The 9th Symphony is one of the legendary composer’s last
workers, written as he was going deaf (it’s always nice when there are
some quirky trivia facts regarding one’s masterpiece).
‘Classical’ is the unfairly narrow genre label that applied
to way too much to the music made for centuries, but if you had to use one
piece of music to represent that, the 9th is the ideal for that, too.
The opening movement (Allegro) is dark, harrowing metal, and
the closing movement (Ode to Joy) is the most soaring, beautiful
counterpoint to it.
It is the perfect piece for right now (early 21st century),
because just as the time feels chaotic and overwhelming, so too does much
of the music here. When the tempo and scales rise you feel like its
practically attacking you, but then it eases up and are ensconced the
warmest strings your ears could ever beg for.
The 9th is largely instrumental, except the closing ‘Ode to
Joy’ segment, which is pretty standard in message (why can’t we all just
get along on this lovely planet) but sung in German. You don’t need to
understand a single word to get caught up in the emotions of the singers,
but aliens might want to meet this amazing person they’re singing about,
and then it might lead to a strange discussion regarding theology.
So instead one can focus on how its lyrical sentiment
compliments the music, like waves crashing down and then receding to
reveal a beautiful, pristine beach. An impossible, idealistic conception
of harmony in nature.
Is it good because we keep saying it’s good?
And we are, by the way:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/arts/music/ode-to-joy-beethoven.html)
That it still needs a full orchestra to be performed live is
a reminder of the physicality of art, which sounds obvious but is actually
easily forgotten when absolutely any sort of media is digitally accessible
and practically available for free.
The 9th’s value is valueless, and its sounds are good enough
for the deaf.
The Fish Everyone Wants to Catch
(https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/358022/global-mental-health-happiness-measure-gdp)
The above link is an article that focuses on a global
survey that used an unexpected series of questions to determine people’s
mental health and happiness in various countries (how have people treated
you, your outlook on the future).
How people treat each other is a metric that goes beyond
concrete numbers like salary and cost of living, and instead requires
individuals giving wholly subjective ratings between 1 and 5 (since one
person’s 5 experience might be another person’s 3).
But setting finances aside
completely is a fool’s errand, because so much of what informs a person’s
happiness is their status and
opportunities in their community.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy life saving and
life improving medicines. It can buy shelter, which is a basic human need,
but that can range from a makeshift tent to a shack to an apartment to a
house to a mansion (and that’s not even considering how much more money it
takes to own any sort shelter instead of rent it).
In societies where there is more equality, there is more
likely communication and sociability between more people. Which is why
this survey is dominated by Scandinavian countries (long known for
progressive taxation and a strong social safety net) and Latin countries
where economic stability and security are slowly (re)building after many
years of uncertainty.
Happiness seems to quite absent in G7 nations, a
concerning indicator in countries that are expected to remain stable and
to lead many global concepts and initiatives. And those things are harder
to do when most people aren’t happy.
We’re all nerds now
All the stereotypes attributed to nerds in the past (say
around the seventies and eighties, since that was the general period where
that term entered the cultural lexicon) are now attributed to mass/popular
society in general.
A heavy interest in sci-fi/fantasy pop (and sub) culture,
an interest in owning the latest technology, and a rise in diagnoses of
social awkwardness/anxiety/attention-deficit-disorder, all of which is
perfectly (and horridly) serviced by the technology in our pockets, where
we never have to be more than few taps and swipes from our fellow nerds
who like and loathe the same things as much as we do, absorbing info in
the thought-sized portions that the internet allows.
Oh, and glasses. Wearing glasses went from not cool to cool
to blandly being accepted.
That’s us.
But entertainment companies are not catering to this crowd
out of the goodness of their hearts, but the needs of their bank account.
Because nerds had money, and they had no issue with
spending that disposable income on their interests, where the movies or tv
show or video game was just the beginning. The swag surrounding the
Intellectual Property (IP) was just as important for personal collecting
and public flaunting. Why watch a superhero movie when you can collect all
the figurines, and why collect all the figurines when you can dress up
like superhero at a convention?
Hence, making fun of nerd culture was also done by the
nerds themselves.
Mad Magazine was a huge source of satirical, meme-worthy
entertainment from mid sixties into the mid nineties because it was just
before the internet swooped in (although its highest circulation numbers
were in the 1970s). While they typically published eight new issues per
year in the nineties, the other months would yield ‘super special’
editions, which was essentially the greatest hits (or in mad-speak, the
‘least-yeechiest’) of the sixties, seventies and eighties. You would get a
conflation of political and pop culture references from decades past,
wrapped in a winking, sarcastic tone that meant fans of Star Wars of all
ages loved it when ‘the usual gang of idiots’ made fun of Stars Wars.
It’s hard to imagine now that there was a time when a lack
of Star Wars movies and film was the norm, not the exception. Even comic
book films went through feast and famine periods before the the early 21st
century, which all changed when the Marvel Cinematic Universe watered down
its nerdiness for the masses, constantly trying to satisfy newbies and
diehards at the same time.
Kicking Oil
The dreams of doing this overnight (and obviously not literally) was
always just that: a dream.
Even if cold fusion suddenly yielded exponentially more powerful results,
a more effective solar panel is developed, advanced AI offers up new
maglev tech, or higher-dimensional beings telepathically beam better
designs for super-batteries into our heads, it will be decades before the
last oil well is shut down.
Because oil’s not just for powering our vehicles (and while it’s nice that
our cars are going electric, our planes, trains and ships are
currently…not), but for making oh so much plastic. You know, the stuff
that takes thousands of years to break down fully, and in the meantime is
becoming a substance known as micro plastic, which is rapidly entering the
digestive system of pretty much every ocean creature.
Consequently it gets sick and dies before it can breed (leading to
more animal endangerment) or it gets caught and turned into food so we can
have the plastic transferred into our own bodies when we chow down. And
these micro plastics don’t pass when we head to the toilet, hanging out
inside us and helping cause that pesky thing we call cancer (colorectal
cancer is on the rise for all age groups).
And yet, immediately stopping the usage of plastic across the globe is
only possible with a lot of time and money and change to how we do so many
things, from the furniture we sit on to how we package food to parts for
vehicles that haul plastic around the world. Everything will become a lot
more expensive or a lot less available.
When it comes to changing something that works well because it has some
unwanted side effects, society is a lot like an individual when it comes
to junk food. Even when it’s pointed out how it’s the right thing to do,
it’s so hard to stop and the person can rationalize quite quickly why they
shouldn’t have to do what they really, really should.
Hell, there are still a ton of buildings old and new that have asbestos in
the walls because it’s too much work to switch to a non-killing form of
insulation.
Why?
Money. The boring, obvious answer is always money.
It gets so complicated so quickly because writing off the owners and
investors of these massive industries as greedy capitalists who should pay
their far share of taxes (as individuals and as a company) is the easy
part. Dismantling that structure is another heaping mess for another day,
but what is quickly ignored in initial conversations regarding the
replacement/regeneration of the industry is that there are so many jobs
tied to the secondary and tertiary industries around petroleum that its
much needed dismantling will include some very unwanted unemployment jumps
in regions across the globe that are very much dependent on this source of
energy being used in perpetuity.
Now a responsible and ethical corporation would at least attempt to
cushion the blow for these now jobless workers, just as they would have
been taking care of them with proper safety equipment, sensible working
hours and health care coverage all these years beforehand.
But boy is that naive, idealistic thinking.
The documentary The Corporation characterizes standard company
operating procedures as sociopathic, doing anything it can to grow,
including denial, anger, claims of victimization,
and bankrolling PR firms to talk about anything else except the
massive problems it is causing.
Gaslighting (heh) is not just for personal relationships gone bad, but a
smart marketing move if you know you’re selling something terrible.
Oil became so easy to suck it out of the ground that we didn’t have to do
it efficiently at first.
And while we have made great strides in making safer to extract,
transport, refine, and transport again the oil we need, that we need so
much of it means there’s still many examples of how terrible we are at
doing so:
(https://earther.gizmodo.com/one-of-the-nation-s-largest-pipelines-caused-the-bigges-1846406684)
On the stupid other hand, maybe for how reliant we still are on petroleum
we should be thrilled that there aren’t more spills, breakages and other
disasters (that we know of).
No, this is the much more worrying part:
(https://gizmodo.com/blackouts-usa-power-outages-climate-change-weather-1850404167)
Even if we kick oil, we’ve been addicted to it for so long that those
effects will be felt even though we might be living ‘green’.
Which is so hard to even get started. Airlines are trying to use ‘green
fuel’, but how long it will take to transition is not easily gauged. The
promotional material is willing, but the profits are weak (which is why
their moving at a non airliners’ pace).
The Pandemic Never Ended
That so much of American institutional infrastructure has been sold off to
the private market means it was ill-equipped to handle a situation like
the Coronavirus. While government bureaucracy obviously has its own
drawbacks and problems, that something as important as health care can
largely be left in the hands of those that first and foremost 'need' to
make a profit is wholly irresponsible and dangerous. Especially during a
health crisis.
That the owners of Wal-Mart and Target were giving speeches alongside
President Trump in the spring of 2020 says a lot about where the American
sources of power resides.
There was plenty of wasteful and misallocated spending with the Covid
relief funds, and as much as the blame can be placed on the Trump
administration not giving much of a shit whether it went to a suddenly
unemployed citizen or a massive company already reaping in huge profits,
it is also true that the government doesn’t have the proper infrastructure
to oversees a responsible distribution of this amount of money. And first
building a well-run department that could do so would take so much time
that it would defeat the purpose of trying to get this money out to people
as quickly as possible.
(https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-14/where-did-6-trillion-in-covid-funding-go)
History has shown that supply and demand has no problem with price
gouging. And prices that went up for both essential and non-essential
goods because they were suddenly harder to come by in 2021 or 2021 never
came down. And if that wasn’t bad enough, enter shrink-flation in the
years after that.
Making money is hideously easy in chaotic times (when government-corporate
hybrids are ‘printing’ money in hopes that it will stabilize society). You
just have to lack a conscience and have a complete indifference to the
suffering of your fellow human beings.
Some of the Best ‘Fights’ in Film
Sometimes it’s the actual physical exertion between the two parties, and
sometimes it’s just the narrative stakes surrounding it. Ideally it’s
both. But when two people decide to settle important matters with their
fists or impossible laser swords, it can be some of the best moments in
cinema history.
Jason Bourne vs Desh Bouksani, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Skip the catchphrases and instead attack with a book. Matt Damon and Joey
Ansah put on a masterclass mix of martial arts and brawling in a small
apartment in Tangiers.
The intentionally shaky cinematography adds a level of intensity and
realism that most others films tend to ignore, which makes this one all
the more (literally) breathtaking.
Kusangani vs Spider Tank, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
With animation, it is irresponsibly easy to dismiss any sort of fight
because it’s not actual fighting, it’s just a bunch of animators drawing a
fight, and one that doesn’t have to be even remotely realistic.
But that makes it all the more challenging and impressive when they pull
the scene off, and director Mamoru Oshii and melts your brain as you
witness a futuristic tank with four legs instead of treads trying to
destroy a naked android with cropped black hair whose own weapons hardly
make a dent.
Riggs vs Joshua, Lethal Weapon (1987)
It’s nice to get two famous actors (Mel Gibson, Gary Busey) going up
against each other…on a third famous actor’s lawn (Danny Glover), no less.
With a bunch of cops arriving on the scene and watching it all play out
instead of intervene.
Well it makes sense since so much of Lethal Weapon is ridiculously intense
and over the top. It’s an action flick about stopping drugs dealers even
though it seems everyone making it was also on (non-psychedelic) drugs.
How do you make it rain in
To prepare for this final fight scene, Gibson and Busey trained for weeks
in three different fighting styles (capoeira, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and
jailhouse rock, which is apparently more than a song and movie).
It paid off, because the brawl has great sequences that are certainly a
cut above the 80s fights that had come before that starred A-Listers.
Oh Dae-Su vs lots of guys in a hallway, Old Boy (2003)
One angry man looking for answers, one continuous shot, and one hammer.
It took three days to film, and the tension and exhaustion is real.
Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader, Empire Strikes Back (1980)
While the lacklustre (in hindsight) lightsaber fight between Vader and
Kenobi in A New Hope can be explained away onscreen as Obi-Wan being an
old man and offscreen as a scene they didn’t have any more time or money
to make better, the bigger budget balanced with bigger expectations in the
sequel.
So while the actual swordplay is better, the art design and cinematography
are a step up, and that’s not even getting into how the good guys loses
(!) and is then subject to the biggest plot twist in movie-dom (and on a
similar note, The Return of the Jedi rematch also deserves mention).
Making your villain seem invincible comes with a risk, but it pays off
handsomely here.
The fights in future Star Wars films would rely heavier on CG set pieces,
and while seeing fights that included Yoda or took place on the side of an
exploding volcano, this one work because it was so much more believable
that Luke was getting the shit kicked out of him.
Agent Liu vs The Twins, Kiss of the Dragon (2001)
Two against one isn’t fair, but when the one is Jet Li, it makes it fun.
The Twins (Cyril Raffaelli and Didier Azoulay) aren’t identical
(although share a similar taste in hair colouring).
Destroying the cubicles in a police station means plenty of broken glass,
plenty of chairs as weapons, and plenty of desks as jumping off points
(and weapons). Liu’s subtle glance around him when he’s on his back is
great foreshadowing to revealing that in certain tighter spaces the lil’
twin can’t kick as easily.
Yes, victory for our hero is all but assured, but watching him take the
pain and then give it out is exhilarating.
Disposable Income vs Disposable Employment
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/business/economy/summer-travel-economy.html)
The gap between rich and poor is no more apparent than
when it comes to travelling, because the former can do it, the latter
cannot, and the shrinking economic demographic in between has had to make
decisions between spending and saving. This middle class used to have some
disposable income, but now they save more because of the fear that their
job is disposable.
The contrast is shown within the above article via the
person who works full time at the airport as a cleaner but does not earn
enough to go the airport as a passenger ready to go on vacation.
And even for those who can afford vacations, a gap is
widening between those that can travel luxuriously and those that have to
tighten their belts even if a vacation is a time where you’re more likely
to let it all hang out.
Catering exclusively to the wealthy is not a sensible long
term economic strategy for any company because of how few wealthy there
are. The growth is so limited, especially for a demographic that can be
selective as they want, favouring one location (for travelling) or brand
that is popular for a season or two, and is then discarded for another.
It is a minor bubble economy. While brands like Louis
Vuitton and Gucci are luxury symbols and promoted as catering exclusively
to the rich, they are still coveted and purchased by the masses. For some,
that purse or jewelry purchase counts for a vacation.
And that’s fair in the sense that you can decide what you
want to do with your money, but the less you have, the less options (and
the less freedom) you have.
The future for the type of employment mentioned in the
above article is dim.
When is cleaning homes, offices and airplanes going to go
from a staff of ten, to a stay of two who oversee cleaning robots in
addition to cleaning the few places the robots can’t get to?
Where there is no job security, there is no economic
security, and that makes people feel disposable.
It’s easy to not look out for others when you’re just
looking at your own bank account. But not realizing how important it is
that everyone has the ability to take a vacation - or equivalent, in terms
of disposable income - is dangerous for the future of communities large
and small.
We cannot succeed alone.
It takes a village.
But those four words lack
the urgency and emphasis that the idea behind the phrase demands. The
phrase should really be:
It takes a fucking
village.
Here’s a Thought February 2024
Burn Baby Burn
In dystopic fiction and film from the middle of the twentieth century,
poor quality air was certainly a factor in depicting how terrible we’ve
treated the planet. And it was usually because of factories and vehicle
exhaust pipes continually belching chemical poison into the air (sometimes
falling as acid rain), even if we all knew better.
And yes, that is absolutely happening and it is a massive threat that
needs to be addressed:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/world/asia/new-delhi-india-pollution.html)
Telling poor
farmers to stop burning excess crops is also a sign of how terrible we are
with wasting food at every level of production and consumption. While it’s
well known how much food grocery stores and restaurants throw out every
day, it’s even worse that the agriculture industry burns crops it doesn’t
need or are paid to pour milk down the drain. This is directly linked to
the monetary value we apply to food, even when there are still millions of
the world who still do not have enough to eat.
Trying to do the right thing by reducing air pollution can cause
catastrophic effects. Limiting the amount of aerosol in the air is
great…but when ships stop emitting it, the less smoke exhaust in the air
means there is more sunlight hitting the ocean surface and warming it up.
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/marine-clouds-climate-change-1.7016498)
And a warming planet is one with changing weather patterns, which means
more extended periods of dry weather, and that’s ingredient number 2 for
forest fires.
Rarely was forest fire smoke used as a reason for why people needed to
wear a mask if you had to go outside in fiction - let alone in real life -
yet here we are.
The amount of forest burned in Northern Canada over the summer of 2023 can
fit several countries (https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/wildfire-season-2023-wrap-1.6999005),
some of which were eventually affected by the disaster, because, the smoke
from this region crossed the Atlantic to lower the air quality in the UK
and Europe. And the smoke that caused so much trouble for
While this summer was clearly the shockingly worst and most widespread,
the frequency of forest fires are increasing as is the amount of area
damaged.
These types of fires are supposed to be ‘once in a century’ sort of
things, but because weather patterns are being upended, if it’s hotter for
a longer period of time or drier for a longer period of time, the chance
for these fires to start and continue to burn just increase.
This will undoubtedly change how people decide where they are going to
live, beyond the idea of affordability. Even if you lucked out this year
and your town, neighbourhood or house was not the one that got lit up, why
stick around with the risk of the fire coming back next summer?
It’s climate migration that is going to put stress (at least initially) on
whatever town or city the fleeing people are going to settle in. And while
certain countries can handle such movements of thousands of people, many
areas around the globe where extreme drought and flood conditions persist
or are increasing cannot, resulting in multifaceted humanitarian crises
that ultimately affect people far from the location of the event.
Unpacking 'I Get It'
It
is a short phrase meant to indicate understanding, using three extremely
short words that are meant to save time and leave little room for
misunderstanding. Can be as exuberant or dismissive as need be.
The
literal declaration might seem to indicate receiving something, but it is
almost always a concept, not a physical item as saying ‘I get it’ when
being handed a key or phone or balloon might give it away that you are an
alien posing as a human.
The
way the phrase is delivered can also change its meaning, because it can be
a reassuring comment or one that it said sarcastically for something that
is supposed to be common sense.
It's a good connector phrase in the middle of an argument to bring in a
similar position, or even a contrary position (placed in the proper
context).
Obama: The Last Inspiring Politician
Today it is about having a leader who can just batten down
the hatches and try to make sure things don’t get any worse.
It could be said that this is what Barack Obama’s
presidency became - and perhaps what many leaders in democratic nations
become - but at its beginning there was absolutely the hope that things
would get better not only in America, but the world over (which once again
shows how influential - for good and ill - the United States is when it
comes to promoting the concept of democracy). A candidate that embraced
largely progressive policies and represented proof of how far the civil
rights movements of the sixties had come, ‘hope’ (the term that his face
was placed beside on posters) gave way to an immediate expectation that he
would solve the 2008 financial crisis that befell the planet just before
his election victory.
While some of the larger concerns were alleviated over the
next few years through a mixture of liberal and conservative financial
policies (both of which could easily disappointed groups who wanted all of
one sort and none of the other), it took ‘too long’ in the eyes of many
citizens, some of whom did not feel the effects of the recovery. Trying to
pitch ‘the economic crisis could have been worse’ is a tough sell for any
politician, but it is especially hard for one who was so closely related
with ‘hope and change’.
Consequently, in the 2010 midterm elections, the democrats
lost control of the House of Representatives, which would remain in
Republican hands for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. This would
result in Conservatives blocking and watering down almost every sort of
bill supported by the president, as doing so apparently made for good
political strategy, even at the expense of the good of the nation.
It is a good thing that power is defused among the many
(or at least, not in the hands of one person) in a democracy, and that a
politician can only wield they power they are given. But in situations
like this, cynicism for the entire system can easily set in, when it
becomes clear to the general public that the leader chosen and expected to
fix this sort of bureaucratic morass is similarly stuck in it.
Obama sensibly maintained that for all the rhetoric (by
him, the public, and the media) surrounding his road to the White House,
it would be up to the citizens to work alongside him to create a more
perfect union. He always knew that there would not be any quick fix for
the problems with
In the nearly eight years since the end of Obama’s
presidency, geopolitical tensions between and within countries have risen,
with living standards flailing and polarization widening. While speeches
given by candidates still contain the same rhetoric, they are falling on
ears much more suspicious or dismissive.
Hope is a tool so powerful that it must be wildly
carefully, because nothing blunts it quicker than political expediency.
A Good Pair of Genes
There is not enough appreciation given
to how much your parents’ genetic code determines who you are. Not just in
terms of blatant physical attributes like height, weight, or hair colour,
but also how well the respiratory, nervous, and digestive systems fare
over the decades, and how susceptible you will be to certain diseases
(from cancers to immunodeficiencies).
Even with the level of nature vs
nurture always up for debate (since it can be wildly different on a case
by case basis), what you started with DNA-wise before you even popped out
from between your mother’s legs is going to largely define who you would
be and what you would be able to accomplish in your life.
Fair?
Oh, the nurturers will inevitably tell
their nurturees in some way that ‘life’s not fair’, but then it’s never
been that simple because via science we don’t let life push us around like
that. Combining the qualities of two things was popular
for breeding animals and plants for millennia, no science degree required,
although it was plenty of trial and error over months, years and decades
to show results. And the farmers weren’t doing this for tenure or research
purchases, but because it means more healthier and bountiful crops to eat.
Now knowing the genetic nuts and bolts
means we are on the cusp of being able to alter our DNA not just to weed
out terrible diseases and afflictions (from hemophilia to blindness), but
making the Olympic credo of ‘longer, stronger, faster’ something to pick
off a menu. Which sounds great until it’s not, and we can leave it to AI
to take us over the finish line…and the cliff. Genetically superior people
is bad enough, but AI manufactured super people?
It sounds like a dystopic sci-fi movie
a lazy studio executive would ask an AI writing program to spit out in
seconds:
Genetic modification becomes extremely
popular extremely quickly because it can start off with the most
immediately practical intentions. It is decided that it is the best way to
combat the effects of climate change (more air pollution, hotter
temperatures, crop damage, fires/floods) instead of actually doing
something about climate change. Modifications include better lung
capacity, more efficient sweat glands, skin that prevents the sun’s rays
from having skin-cancer causing effects. But it is unlikely that these
changes are given out equally (whether on financial, national, cultural or
social grounds), and there quickly becomes a have/have-not society that
becomes a genetic ‘race’ discrimination/war, where the outcome ranges from
all of humanity being wiped out, or just this new version of humanity (if
you can call it) wiping out the old. Roll credits?
Potential and Kinetic Money
How useful is sitting on billions of
dollars, or billions of dollars in stocks?
There is a psychological comfort of just
sitting on it, not doing anything at all, but that always has the risk of
the amount’s worth going up or down due to typical market occurrences and
pressures.
The real problem is that if it’s not
being used for purchasing or investing, it’s not even money, it just has
the potential to be money, to at one point being kinetically exchanged and
transferred constantly through the economy.
Of course even when you ‘buy’ things,
they can be just as abstract. The stock market allows you to buy
hypothetical events. ‘Shorting’ means you buy/make an agreement that
states if a company's stock goes up or down a certain amount at or within
a certain time, you get paid out (or owe) X amount.
The only people who would buy such a
thing are those who have insider knowledge about the prospects of said
company, or are relatively certain their bets will be covered by the
government if the failing of these companies (and bets upon them) might
crater the whole economy (hey, it happened once).
It’s like having rocket filled with fuel
that’s just sitting on the launchpad. Until you actually use it to send a
ship/capsule sitting on top of it into orbit, it’s just taking up space,
doing nothing, wasting everyone else’s time and resources.
If money is power, and power can be
wielded as a weapon (or be a varying characteristic of a weapon), then
money is a weapon, and must be treated as such.
Effects of Streaming on Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal on Music:
The money dictates the music more than ever now. Artists
get paid per song play, if it plays for at least 30 seconds. The result?
Artists are writing/releasing shorter songs, because 5 two minutes songs
will yield more revenue than 2 five minute songs. While brevity can lead
to creativity, putting yourself in this position for primarily financial
reasons is absolutely detrimental to the possibility expressing your
musical ideas in longer pieces. Not that it has to be a fifteen minute
song suite, but even a five minute tune seems to be ‘long’ these days
(sometimes a way around this is an artist will uploaded entire albums on
YouTube with ads (yay) placed in between tracks).
Unfortunately this dovetails perfectly with our current
attention spans, where we have so many choices in front of us that giving
only a few seconds to a song, movie, video game or piece of art is the
norm, because there is the possibility that the next thing you check will
be so much better than what you are currently ‘wasting’ your time on.
Music has an additional hurdle, however, as listening on
your phone means as the album or playlist you might not always be looking
at the screen and see what it is actually playing. You can be doing a host
of other activities, reducing music to background, even more so than in
the past. Plus there is less of a chance that people have purchased a
physical release with the artwork and track listing in their hands,
resulting in people not necessarily knowing the artists or names of the
songs they are listening to (instead becoming fans of a particular
playlist). This information has inadvertently been detached from the sound
itself.
“Denies/Cleared
of
any
Wrongdoing”
The
dangers
of
this
method
of
avoiding
legal
responsibility
by
corporations
is
subtle
and
insidious.
It
is
a
perspective
and
attitude
that
filters
down
to
the
corporate
blob
to
the
individual
executives
and
employees
alike.
‘It’s
not
my
fault’
comes
to
explain/justify
many
of
the
problems
that
surrounded
these
industries.
Handing
off
the
blame
to
others
has
gone
beyond
being
seen
as
any
sort
of
moral
failing.
Now
it’s
a
good
business
decision,
and
you
might
be
faulted
for
having
a
plan
that
does
not
include
such
an
option
if
things go
belly-up.
Corporations
have
created
shell
corporation
temp
agencies
that
hire
part
time,
non-permanent
employees
that
do
not
have
the
same
rights
and
privileges
as
those
of
the
parent
corporation.
Nor
are
they
paid
the
same
or
given
any
sort
of
benefits,
even
if
they
do
very
similar
work
to
full
time
and
permanent
employees.
Best
of
all
(from
management’s
point
of
view),
they
can
be
blamed
for
any
problems
and
quickly
removed
without
much
legal
challenges
(from
the
now
ex-workers).
These
social
divisions
within
a
massive
project
of
different
companies
or
a
corporation
that
relies
heavily
on
its
shells
have
far
reaching
consequences.
Not
only
is
there
physical
and
psychological
alienation
from
the
product
and
service
being
created
and/or
used,
but
it
makes
it
possible
to
see
employees
just
as
replaceable
as
equipment
or
software,
because
human
beings
in
general
aren’t
supposed
to
exist/act
like
this.
These
basic
tenets
of
modern
capitalism
is
what
will
keep
humanity
from
reaching
its
true
potential.
Cultural
theorist
Marshall
McLuhan
said
that,
'art
is
anything
you
can
get
away
with',
but
it
certainly
applies
to
business
as
well.
Whatever
potential
liability
you
can
heap
onto
any
other
individual
or
entity,
the
better
for
your
business,
regardless
of
what
the
greater
cost
might
be
to
the
community.
Amazon
and
many
other
massive
corporations
write
contracts
with
third
party
companies
in
a
way
that
exempt
them
from
responsibility
if
something
goes
wrong.
Smaller delivery companies are on the hook, not the big one pulling the
strings.
Part
of
the
agreements
the
big
banks
signed
when
paying
steep
penalties
for
getting
caught
breaking
the
law
is
that
they
do
not
have
to
admit
any
wrongdoing
in
the
legal
sense.
When
huge
companies
or
very
wealthy
individuals
are
question
about
how
much
more
power
and
influence
they
obviously
have
modern
society,
they
deny and
deflect,
they
point
out
stats
that
there
are
many
other
wealthy
people,
and
minimize
their
own
role
in
this
transference
and
squatting
upon
of
wealth.
All
the
power,
none
of
the
responsibility.
Ben
Parker
would
be
aghast.
In
terms
of
legality
as
opposed
to
morality,
Bezos
and
The
Corporate
World’s
apparent
rationalization
is
that
if
they
can
pay
lobbyists
and
lawyers
to
fundraise/bribe
politicians
into
supporting
corporate
agendas
(low
taxes,
deregulation,
ignore
rights
that
would
benefit
that
average
worker)
without
any
real
consequence,
then
the
public
must
be
okay
with
it.
Which
is
stupid
at
best
and
sociopathic
at
worst.
When
your
greatest
asset
is
a
legal
loophole,
maybe
it’s
not
a
plan
for
all
humanity
going
forward.
But
if
you
subscribe
to
the
capitalist-minded
view
that
in
a
nation
it's
either
sink
or
swim,
that
you
have
the
tools
to
succeed
and
you
use
them
or
you
don't,
you
start
to
believe
society
that
is
made
up
of
a
few
winners
and
many
losers.
This
stark
dichotomy
is
terrible
in
many
ways,
because
you
seem
to
accept
an
overly
simplistic
view
on
how
success
occurs
in
a
post-industrial,
(hyper)digital
era.
There
is
the
erroneous
viewpoint:
"I
succeeded,
therefore
the
system
must
be
working
well."
If
you
see
a
working
society
being
full
of
a
few
winners
and
a
lot
of
losers,
then...you
live
in
a
society
full
of
losers,
and
you
are
foolish
if
you
think
that
situation
can
hold
(or
are
you
cynically
prescient?
Figuring
that
That
companies
can
have
such
an
outsized
influence
on
global
affairs
is
bad
enough,
but
if
a
single
corporation
has
to
have
a
department
which
tackle
worldwide
misinformation
that
can
affect
billions
of
people
because
it
is
occurring
within
a
service
they
provide,
then
it's
too
big
of
a
corporation
to
exist.
(https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-war-room-is-definitely-managing-at-least-one-1829837729)
This
should
be
the
responsibility
of
governments,
not
just
in
preventing
misinformation,
but
making
sure
a
single
non-government
entity
can’t
become
powerful
enough
that
they
might
affect
election
outcomes
across
the
planet.
While
it’s
sad
enough
to
see
union
busting
efforts
in
Western
democratic
nations,
in
countries
where
human
rights
are
much
harder
to
come
by,
forced
labour
is
a
common
occurrence,
even
for
corporations
that
are
headquartered
in
America,
like
Nike
and
Coca-Cola.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/business/economy/nike-coca-cola-xinjiang-forced-labor-bill.html)
That
is
horrifying
mistake/tragedy/clusterfuck
of
capitalism,
where
those
who
run
these
companies
aren’t
supposed
to
see
people
as
people
(beyond
marketing
purposes)
because
that
just
gets
in
the
way
of
the
goal.
But
chances
are
that
if
the
executives
are
ever
questioned
about
this,
they
will
feign
ignorance
and
deny
any
responsibility.
Fred Astaire, Jerry Seinfeld, and
Jay-Z walk into a club…
Fred Astaire was an old school
triple threat (actor, singer, dancer) from nearly a century ago, and he
made dancing look so effortless and easy he accidentally inspired millions
of young men to go out to a dance hall or club and embarrass themselves at
best or break their ankles at worst.
Jerry Seinfeld does the same with
stand up comedy, because while he makes it seem like anyone can get a
laugh talking about breakfast or furniture, if you go and try without hard
work and natural skill, you’ll bomb hard.
Jay-Z’s work on the mic is at once
laid back and in your face, a flow that is both natural and seemingly
planned from top to bottom. But finding out that he rarely writes anything
down before heading into the studio makes you think it really is as easy
as thinking up some basic rhyming words in front of a microphone.
It’s not, and omitting Jay-Z from a
Top 5 MC list is almost like you’re trying to be different at the expense
of good judgment. Jay Z’s one blemish is that there is just too much
fucking material. He’s diluted his impact by being so prolific.
It means that even Reasonable Doubt
- an impressive debut as one could find, regardless of the genre - still
has some weak tracks (Black Album is his strongest top to bottom). But
Can’t Knock the Hustle has everything you need for a big hit (memorable
title, great verses, an iconic Blige performance)…with the hook being the
way Jay confidentially declares the title.
Which is also the perfect phrase to
those resentful failures who tried to be Astaire, Seinfeld or Hova.
Structuralism (and post-structuralism) isn’t dead, that’s
just its dead name.
Globalized society has accepted (sometimes passively,
sometimes actively, sometimes cynically) accept the notion that human and
societal behaviour is shaped by many different ideas and forces, some very
practical (resources, climate, geography) some more abstract (money,
religion, patriarchy). Whether elites, the oil industry, Pokemon, the LGBT
community, Filipino diaspora, Greenpeace, The US Intelligence Agencies,
online gambling, tax-deductible charity organizations, secret lizard
people, these concepts (real or not) and peoples’ relationship to them
shape the world we live in.
Some of them have very irrational qualities, making it
hard to predict how exactly they will shape our world, which is why
critics of structuralism point out that while it might explain how society
works, it concedes how impossible it is to change it any specific way.
Structuralism allows for many different forces/narratives
to overlap each other, making it difficult to pry them apart or explain
how they work interdependently.
It’s not about the content of political discourse, but the
form. Commentators/critics might acknowledge how often a politician lies,
but they will also analyze how successful telling these lies are,
essentially acknowledging that it doesn’t matter if they lie or not, but
just if the end goal of winning support works.
Positions, causes, movements, issues, conflicts, these are
individual identifiers which are becoming so numerous and multifaceted
that they are becoming more and more meaningless in the sense that they
continually have less and less (relevant) power when viewed separately.
Once again, political and economic power is out of reach for most, and the
more people grasp for cultural power, the more diffused it becomes.
At least Post-Structuralism is not as weak a leg to stand
on as post-modernism, but that’s because post-modernism’s leg might
actually be a crutch, an arm, several bananas, or one’s own relationship
with societal pseudo-cliches.
Do Not Block the Planetary Fire Exit
Things are looking bad for the earth in the coming decades, and because
hope is can be just as essential as it is misguided, one of the underlying
ideas humanity will cling to is that at least some of us can rocket off
the planet before it’s too late.
Yes, we’re already having to assume a dystopic time on earth for that to
happen, but it will be even more unfortunate that such a craft will have a
hell of a time just getting out of orbit because of the possibility that
it will be too much of a garbage dump to blast through in the near future.
Space debris is proliferating as we put more satellites and craft up in
low earth orbit. While the area is absolutely massive, the smallest bits
used to build this equipment can come loose (like a bolt or paint chip)
and suddenly become a tiny bullet that is zipping around the planet at a
dangerously high speed.
Space debris damaging or destroying a satellite that briefly knocks out
your internet is one thing, but that satellite’s debris becoming a danger
to many other satellites can create a domino effect that turns low earth
orbit into a deadly zone of constant crossfire that no ship can ever hope
to get through in one piece.
What is particularly maddening is the paradoxical notion that when it is
said that there is too much space debris above us, we can’t help but
imagine it would be like walking/floating through a very clutter garbage
dump, when in reality there is still a lot of…space…between every screw or
bit of fuselage as it floats around. At first it would seem like there
would be no problem at all, that there is still plenty of room for a
rocket to blast through Low Earth Orbit unimpeded.
But rockets and the tiny ships that sit atop them during the trip up are
expensive and in short supply, and would you risk it (let alone the people
on board) when there’s a chance that one tiny screw shoots through it like
a bullet, depressurizing and exploding it in a second?
The solution would to build a device that would suck up the debris, a sort
of space net or vacuum cleaner, but once again, the area it would have to
operate in is absolutely massive, and on top of that, it would have to be
able to somehow avoid getting hit or withstand the damage by the very
debris it is trying to remove.
Of course, having to clean up the mess we’ve made above our heads, says a
lot about humanity in general. Space debris shows how we can be quite lazy
about pollution until it absolutely inconveniences us. It is an example of
how our ambition outpaces our responsibility for exploring, and how even
when trying to solve problems, we prefer fast and cheap possible solutions
over slow and expensive definite ones.
Cop a Fix
Defunding the police will never work with current
socioeconomic conditions. Because crime can occur for overlapping reasons
like poverty, mental health issues and addiction means that there does
need to be some sort of professionally trained service to make sure the
laws are followed.
Now it is easy to acknowledge the sadly human element that
comes with this task, as individuals can easily make terrible decisions
based on their own personal biases and personality type. As tragic
examples of shootings and abuse have shown us, some people who become
police officers should never become police officers.
At the same time community based violence/crime
de-escalation efforts as an alternative to the police do not work nearly
as well as activists would hope:
(https://www.vox.com/22622363/police-violence-interrupters-cure-violence-research-study)
This is because de-escalation in specific situations is not
enough, you need to give individuals (and the community) an alternative to
crime and the potential violence associated with crime. It is an
alternative that provides living wages and basic health services to all,
and just writing that shows just how big of a solution is required if the
goal is to not require police officers.
Currently the police are typically reactive and rarely
proactive, which is why changing the sort of role police officers play in
a society means changing society first.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
While Bruce Springsteen largely sings of lives spiralling
out of control and/or enjoying one last moment of glory before death or
another working day, the music itself is too neat and tidy. Whether he’s
doing the fist-in-the-air arena rock stuff of Born to Run and Born in the
Except for 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.
It is one of the best American albums of all time, and that
is not supposed to be an unusual qualifier. You want to understand what
the
It is an amazing ten song line up from start to finish, even
the two ‘singles’ - Badlands and Promised Land - are better than anything
on Born to Run, his previous and breakthrough album, full of more energy
and desperation in perfect balance.
Streets of Fire swaggers when it starts and burns when the
bombast hits.
Factory is the perfect length for a perfect lament for what
the daily assemble line life could give and take.
Candy’s Room is freaky and weird.
Racing in the Streets is a true heartbreaker, a love story
for both cars and women.
The title track is one of the most fitting ending songs to
an album of all time.
By trying to not-exactly-follow-up ‘Born to Run’ with
another hit album, he slipped between slightly too much and obviously too
little, and landed in perfection.
The
Other Type of Long Covid
This
article -
(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html)
-
explains how pandemic has affected mental health situations big and small,
but also stresses how institutions can affect the discourse to make
large-scale problems seem less of the fault of their own decisions and
more ‘the natural ways of society’ (essentially gaslighting the populace).
That other aspects of modern society have been increasing stress levels
for decades (creating financial challenges, lack of job security,
technological upheaval, growing geopolitical tensions) means adding a
pandemic-forced lockdown is gasoline on an already burning fire.
The
article stresses the difference between mental stress and mental illness
(as well as one can cause the other), and that there is “the well
documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence
and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop a
given diagnosis, from depression to schizophrenia.”
What
can worry you today and can destabilize you tomorrow, especially when
tomorrow never knows (and not in the good Beatles way). And with more and
more people feeling this every day, of course there are attempts to find
solutions, and in our capitalist society, money talks (even if lack of
money is one of the problems).
That
there is an incentive for quick-fix solutions for everything in and out of
government in modern society, it means that treating mental health is
sadly no different. When there needs to be ways to addresses people’s
needs individually, the cheaper and corporate friendly way is to give
everyone a bunch of pills to calm us down:
“Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to
address the underlying cause of population-level increase in mental and
emotional distress. It does, however, work really well if you’re trying to
come up with a solution that everybody in power can agree in on, so that
the people in power can show they’re doing something about the problem.
Unfortunately, the solution that everyone can agree on is not going to
work.”
There
may be no better example of the road to hell being paved with good
intentions. It’s not even a Placebo effect if the placebo doesn’t work.
Businesses that haven’t yet embraced
AI/robotics are doing so because they can’t, not because they don’t want
to. They would love to replace a human because of how expensive one of us
is, but the technology or price for an AI/robot replacement is not yet
ready/still too expensive.
That several large retail stores are
removing the automated check-out lanes is only proof that the technology
is not yet perfected, not that the store owners love their flesh and blood
employees.
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/some-retailers-scaling-back-self-checkouts-1.7034047)
And one of the chief problems is theft,
reinforcing the idea that it is our relationship with technology that
defines it, not the technology itself.
Easy
file sharing is great, and when it was easy to share/steal music, we did
it en masse. When we can steal from supermarkets without punishment, a lot
of us did.
But ultimately tech will make it hard to
steal from stores, maybe through airport-like body scanners that you have
to walk through when you exit, and the machine will know exactly what you
have in your bags or coat and charge your mandatory ID/credit card
immediately.
And these advancements that result in
layoffs will not occur all at once, but over many years, making its
devastating effects not seem like the huge issue it actually is, since the
current party line is that for all the jobs AI/robotics take from people,
it will somehow create new ones for us (which are…?).
For now, banks and other services are
stressing in commercials that they still use humans for customer support,
that you won’t be speaking to an AI program with limited options.
But how long until it’s flipped, and
that you’re promised that you won’t have to speak to a person, just a
fully capable AI?
Workers/unions are aware of this, that
there is going to be a change over the next several years because big
companies are looking at what current AI can do right now and are
extrapolating to a future time when AI can do even more, specifically
exactly what that company would like it to do.
Which is why there are a litany of
strikes and threats of strikes right now, because this is the time for
unions of all sorts - from writers and actors on the arts side, to auto
workers on the manufacturing side - to get any sort of contract that might
lessen/buffer the catastrophic effects (namely layoffs) that are indeed
coming.
AI tech that won’t be ready for five
years is upending our lives right now.
July 2023 Here’s
a Thought
Scrumptious Sprout Strategy
There are fewer experiences in video games as rewarding as a good day in
Pikmin.
Everyone should play the games from the
Pikmin series because they are
brain-bendingly unique and full of heart pounding excitement even as they
look all cartoony and fun (and the latest,
Pikmin 4, just dropped a week
ago).
The real-time-strategy genre is definitely not very popular compared to
your First-Person-Shooters or Hack-and-Slash because of the amount of
brainpower and instant reflexes required. Thinking fast is essential, and
even online multiplayer games where pause is unavailable is not quite the
same, as MOBAs slowly narrowed the types of decisions that could be made
to achieve your goal, which was typically killing an enemy before they
kill you.
So Pikmin stands alone as the
game where you control scores of tiny troops that can have a variety of
traits and abilities that make certain ones more adept in certain
environments and fights. You will be scouring the alien (yet familiar)
planet in search of damaged ship parts, resources, and potential valuables
in order to achieve various missions before you are able to leave the
planet and return home. And you can only do these activities during the
day, which is thirteen minutes in real time, so the pressure and
nervousness is immense, especially if you make a foolish move and see
dozens of your troops get killed or drown.
The difference between describing how the game plays and what it looks
like is one of the biggest dissonances in gaming. Its middling success -
compared to other Nintendo franchises - can be credited to its excessively
cute graphics and art style that scares away hardcore gamers, and its
quickly complicated and difficult strategy requirements that scares away
the kids and casual gamers who initially bought the game because it looked
cute.
This difficulty is felt most strongly in Pikmin 1 and 2 (which are both
about 20 years old), because while they still hold up overall, they are
extremely challenging since most games from decades ago typically were
harder than today’s fare, which means if you want the real hard stuff,
there it is.
Meanwhile 3 and the brand new 4 are absolutely awesome and should be
must-plays for noobs and hardcore gamers who are thirsting for more
unusual and wild interactive experiences. Your brain will thank you.
Eventually.
Picket Signs of Things to Come
Because it involves celebrities, striking actors get more
attention than striking writers. Now most of them are not making
celebrity-level money and even fewer writers make celebrity-level money,
but both are assumed to be in cushier positions than many workers both in
and out of the entertainment industry.
The dismissive put-downs of the social media peanut
gallery should not be surprising, as you can find that for any issue at
all, but the current SAG-ACTRA strike can be seen as a shot across the bow
for future labour relations in general.
Firstly, the negotiations involves revenue sharing from
streaming, that thing you do that costs either around $10 per month or
nothing at all if you’re password sharing. How such an entertainment
service would make money when some of the movies and tv series made
exclusively for it cost hundreds of millions of dollars (plus all the
content Netflix ‘rents’, like Seinfeld or older blockbusters like
Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or anything Scorsese) is a head scratcher,
and perhaps that’s why the last year had been a series of declining
profits and layoffs at many streaming service companies.
In 2021, Scarlett Johansson sued Disney for tens of
millions of dollars when Black Widow (which she starred in as the titular
character) went to right streaming in 2020, claiming that by doing so the
company would be making millions from the bump in subscribers who signed
up just to see it, and that nothing in her contract has a proviso for
making a percentage of those profits for such an occurrence (and she would
have gotten a percentage if it went into theatres as originally planned).
Yes, it’s millionaire versus billionaire, but it’s
illustrative of how management will look too screw over the worker any way
they can, even if it’s a worker that never really has to ever work again.
The other issue is - of course - AI, first of which can
come up with scripts in five minutes (sorry, writers) and second can
create digitized versions of real people or composites of them and then
have them act with lines that could have been written with the AI-written
script.
Sorry, humans.
It’s odd that while it was assumed that AI would replace
more mundane blue and white collar jobs that the types that are suddenly
most at risk involve the arts, professions that we all expected to be so
much more…human…than assembly lines and spreadsheets.
Which is why how this strike is resolved will be very
indicative of how other industries will handle their own workers going
forward with new technology (spoiler alert: probably harshly).
Selling Perfection
We have high expectations of our institutions and corporate entities, and
that's partially due to the human condition of expecting things that
worked well in the past to continue working just as well at present and
into the future. It does not take us long to get accustomed to
uninterrupted electricity, a perfect television signal, and Wi-Fi that
doesn’t have connection issues.
We all have this high expectation because information (particularly
advertising and marketing) drills it into our heads that it is acceptable
to constantly have this level of expectation. We are told that we are
great, that we deserve the best, that the best life we could ever live is
only one decision or purchase away. And while believing so in relation to
owning a car, shirt, or all-inclusive vacation might only harm your own
financial situation, believing so in regards to macro issues of society
can become very problematic.
Even if the truth is that complex organizations - whether a health care
system or telecommunications provider - will not operate perfectly most of
the time, and will frustrate or disappoint us, it can be tragic in the
former example (not having access to certain medicines or treatments) and
extremely annoying in the latter (bad internet service, terrible customer
hotline).
It's easy to accuse corporations of focusing on profits over everything
else (because it's true), and it's easy to accuse governments of offering
stilted and subpar service for any program that they oversee (because of a
bureaucratic mess that relies on corporate contracts).
But these two do not cancel each other out in terms of overall social
value.
Corporations focus on profit ultimately means that they'll ultimately
offer subpar service as well, because cost-cutting is the easiest way to
bolster profit, even though it comes at huge cost.
The profit elements ultimately harms not only the functioning of the
organization or institution, but the fabric of society as well, because
profits are rarely shared equally, and most of it goes to a small segment
of the populace, who just accrue more and more power.
And to make matters worse is that we expect perfection quite quickly, and
that we are dismissive of everything when we don't get it that fast, the
‘If I can’t have a complete solution in two weeks I don’t want it at all’.
Amazon Prime’s next day delivery schedule has given us false expectations
for how everything else in society can be run.
Weathering the Weather
So it’s too dry in some places (resulting in wildfires),
too dry in other places (resulting in floods), and too hot in pretty much
every place.
There’s no ‘told you so’ by scientists anymore, just
‘strap in, it’s going to be more of the same and worse’.
Warnings of a warming planet are many decades old, and
because trying to fix the problem would result in a total restructuring of
how humanity lives on earth (not to mention a real kick in the profits for
the titans of industry), all proposals to do something about it was coolly
received.
It doesn’t matter how common sense it sounds, if it gets
in the way of money, there will be enthusiastic deniers. It took the
literal rising of oceans sweeping away beachside towns before some
conservative politicians in the southeastern United States admitted that
yes, the planet is getting hotter.
And now Phoenix, Arizona is going three weeks straight for
days above 110F (43C), it’s so hot in southern Europe that wildfires are
the terrifying normal, and record breaking heat in Beijing means a
record-breaking use of electricity (which in turns makes everything even
hotter).
The more extreme it gets - and
one must remember that a massive ‘side’ effect of all this will be on
agriculture, where unpredictable weather can result in fewer crops,
meaning less food that means more expensive food
- the more extreme the solutions offered
will likely be.
Cloud seeding, ‘liquid nitrogen-ing the ocean’ (to stop
massive hurricanes), and mirrors in space are all going to be in the
running because we just can’t stop…air conditioning, 4x4 off-roading,
crypto-mining, and jetting off to somewhere even a bit cooler because it’s
sweltering everywhere else.
Raising a glass to Cheers, 40 Years Later
“Who are three people that have never been in my kitchen?”
- Cliff Clavin’s answer on Final Jeopardy
Eleven years on the air and leaving at the top of the ratings in 1993,
Cheers became the ultimate
workplace comedy that was superseded into the popular consciousness by a
show that at one point came on right after it:
Seinfeld.
That show is seen as the rule-breaker, the show that threw all the sitcom
conventions out the window. While this might be true in terms of narrative
pacing (sacrificing sensible plot developments to have a lengthy
conversation about life’s annoyances), the cast of the show is practically
sitcom 101: An affable leading man, a put-upon, hard-luck best friend, a
wacky neighbour, a sassy ex-girlfriend.
Such tropes had long dominated sitcoms, as they were meant to be appealing
to the broadest possible audience.
By the early eighties, the workplace comedy was commonplace (Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, WKRP, Barney Miller) with one of the sets
involving a public place to socialize.
Cheers was pitched with that public place in
mind, with the regulars would be the employees and the literal ‘bar
regulars’, having their lives upended however briefly by any character who
could walk in with a new plot for twenty two minutes.
Considering the setting was a place where beer, wine and alcohol would be
served, there was comparably little drunkenness for all the implied
drinking. Despite always having a pint in front of them and the show
revolving around the idea of ordering another and not going back home, the
regulars are constantly lucid and full of quips.
Making the effects of alcoholism come off as funny is not easy, especially
on a scripted program where you don’t want to depict the main characters
of the show as enablers of someone’s drinking problem.
Laughing at a drunk and the mistakes or stumbles they make can seem
mean-spirited so very quickly, so it took an animated spoof of
Cheers on The Simpsons in
the early nineties to show the possible dark side (but, uh, still funny)
of Norm’s alcoholism (and it should be noted that the cast of
Cheers were fine with it, as they all voiced themselves).
Leading
man and bar owner Sam Malone was meant to be a football player, but Ted
Danson didn’t look burly enough, so it was changed to baseball. Rhea Perlman played Carla, and
was the first person cast.
John
Ratzenberger auditioned for the Norm Peterson role, but told producers
that every bar needs a know-it-all, and a character was developed for him
in that vein.
Juxtaposition is at the heart of the broadest forms of comedy, but
certainly it can be mined for deeper and more rewarding laughs if handled
properly.
To contrast the blue collar regulars, Shelley Long played the Boston
University graduate who was ‘abandoned’ by her fiancée in the pilot,
meaning she would start working there as a counterweight to everyone and a
potential love interest for Sam.
And as Diane Chambers became less the upper class foil to those at the bar
and more just a part of the team, Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane stepped
into take that role (even more so when Shelley Long left the show).
And similarly, as he became just another regular, Bebe Neuwirth’s Lilith
Sternin arrives just in time to once again be comically horrified at the
shenanigans in the basement bar (by which time the sweet but stupid Coach
was replaced by the sweet but stupid Woody, played by a guy actually named
Woody).
Ratings-wise Cheers sunk like a
stone in its first season, and there’s no doubt that if it had been
broadcast in the last three decades, it wouldn’t have even made it that
far. But NBC executives saw something in the show (or saw that they didn’t
have anything worthwhile to replace it), and gave it another season. And
then it took off like a jet airliner, becoming
a hit and earning 95 Emmy nominations, winning 20.
Eleven years means a lot of twenty two minute A and B stories (275
episodes to be exact), and recurring characters might only show up twice a
season (Harry the Hat, John Allen Hill as the fussy restaurateur in the
unit above, the rival bar owner Gary, Carla’s family), but being on for
more than a decade meant it was still several hours of these miniature
arcs.
Before Seinfeld’s story arc of
developing a Seinfeld-like
sitcom took up an entire season, Cheers gave its audience a lengthy
romance and corporate-espionage intrigue between Rebecca and her wealthy,
dodgy, English crush Robin Colcord for over a dozen episodes in season 8.
Another foil for Sam, Roger Rees played the man magnificently, someone you
were supposed to hate but was also quite funny.
There is definitely something both amusing and antiquated went going back
to watching an episode of Cheers
today, and it’s not simply because of the fashion or laugh-track, but
because of bizarre the idea is today of going to place where ‘everybody
knows your name’.
The Universe and Knots
The secret to relativity and quantum physics might
be right at your feet.
Think how often you tie your laces without a care
in the world, how often it works absolutely perfectly.
It’s only that odd time when it doesn’t work that
the knot becomes absolutely everything, even for a moment.
It slows you down, it creates stress, it forces
attention, it exerts energy when you bend or sit down to take time to fix
it.
To extrapolate this to everything beyond you being
annoyed for a few moments, a smooth and uniform expansion of the universe
from the moment of the Big Bang can be rudely interrupted early on by
Inflation, a very brief period that was essential for our existence,
because certain elementary particles might not have exploded/cooled into
being without it. Inflation was a bump, and a bump is nothing more than a
knot.
Additionally, the Higgs Boson was nicknamed ‘the
god particle’ even though it was nothing without the Higgs Field, the
‘location’ where the boson can go from mass-less to mass…full.
Slowing something down that doesn’t have mass?
Well nothing slows you down quicker than a knot.
The idea being that affecting the spin of one
particle can immediately affect the other, regardless of the distance
between them. ‘Immediately’ is not underselling it, either, as the
information telling the second particle to change its spin moves faster
than the speed of life.
Perhaps a multi-dimension knot in the fabric of
space-time allows for this seemingly impossible link.
Certainly a theory involving the word string can
also include a concept involving the idea of a ‘knot’: String theory
reduces the tiniest of tiny sub-atomic particles to…strings. Which are
connected at each end so they’re more circles than anything else.
Because the unknown properties are the knots of
particle behaviour, and once you learn how they work together and can
untangle them, then you'll understand the rules of the universe.
The Process of Addressing Wealth Inequality
-support local candidates in your
district that strongly support high taxation on the wealthy and heavily
regulation of corporations and industries, making it clear that these
people and institutions are beholden to the success to the
country/community as a whole, not just profit for investors. Support truly
does mean engaging with people who might not agree with or be aware of
this candidate because they might not be part of a well-known political
party
-running as an independent or creating
one’s own political party is extremely difficult if you are not already a
well known fighter in your community
-which is why an early obstacle is
other, well-known and well-connected political parties, who will try to
stress that this candidate is not suitable because of these views. But if
these views are truly popular with the community, then the political
parties might criticize/attack this candidate for other reasons, or try to
convince that these views on taxes and regulation are extreme or wrong
-if the candidate remains popular
despite this, then the political parties might try to offer an option to
join them if they compromise on some of their views in exchange for
financial support or stepping aside and supporting a/the mainstream
candidate, but sometimes the political parties might renege once their
preferred candidate is ultimately elected, making it look like they
betrayed their voters, or are simply incompetent/ineffective
-the mainstream media will openly
criticize the candidate’s views or discuss them in a way that would
suggest they will not easily win the election(s), or that some of these
ideas are radical or unfeasible
-typical negative campaigning and
pseudo-scandals will be slathered upon the candidate, who has to address
these accusations deftly and without seeming too aggressive and too weak
at the same time
And if everything just happens to work
out precisely as planned, and enough voters keep focused on this/these
issue(s), then congratulations! Hopefully more than a few politicians are
now repping these ideas in the halls of power!
But compared to getting wealth
tax/corporate regulation policy actually passed in the halls of power, all
of the above was the easy part.
Die, All Right! - Scandinavia and the Moving Picture
It’s not just cold during the winters in
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark (to a lesser extent), but
dark as well.
Sure, the flip side is that summer solstice
means you can get the midnight sun if you go far enough north, but these
extremes obviously seep into your routines and perspectives of daily life.
Sometimes it feels like the horrible
blackness will never end, that death is sweet silence from the chattering
nuisance of consciousness (a reminder here that Hamlet himself is Danish,
which might explain the theme of his soliloquies).
Soren Kierkegaard was the Danish
proto-existentialist philosopher who was very polite and matter-of-fact
regarding how we must not completely ignore or forget the haunting spectre
of death that could take us off this mortal coil at any second. So
ideally we infuse every moment with
personal meaning, that we would act as god might, although ‘he’ could
obviously do this effortlessly being omnipotent and all.
But as the twentieth century lumbered on,
and the horrors of war and genocide and the possibility of nuclear
annihilation loomed overhead, any meaning - individual or collective -
ultimately felt meaningless.
Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal (1957) is the
archetypal Scandinavian film, the sort that would be celebrated and
lovingly mocked for decades to come.
Despite the contemporary period being a
fertile ground for misery, Bergman goes back six hundred years to the
Black Plague, slotting in the Crusades to really stress the futility and
destruction of the hazily labelled ‘medieval period’.
While wandering through the land and seeing
people’s hardships, a noble knight is playing chess with the grim reaper
for his life, but since death never loses, it’s only a matter of delay,
delay, delay.
But at least
there is a simple and understandable plot, because compared to Bergman’s
other masterpiece - Persona, a psychological drama of an actress and nurse having
breakdowns in a cabin - The Seventh
Seal is Fast and Furious 6.
Decades later,
Lars Von Trier started in television, before creating a series of
filmmaking rules (Dogme 65) he rarely adhered to. With explorations into
how society breaks down individuals in
Europa, Breaking the Waves and
Dogville, it’s like John
Cassavetes 70s work, but even more depressing.
Even when the
Scandinavians tried to get funny, it wasn’t with airy quips or a comedy of
errors. Songs From the Second Floor is a bonkers series of tableaus in
various locations that is suffering from the bizarre and mysterious
effects of the apocalypse (like stockbrokers whipping themselves in
tandem).
Confront the inner mundane absurdity of
existence with complimenting scenes of outer fantastical absurdity.
History is long, as is the winter night, but neither is as long as death.
When these
perspectives are diluted by outside cultural concepts, you get
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
(infused with Hollywood pulp), while
Midsommar is a mix of American and British influences in both theme
and style (the film follows a group of young Americans visiting a pagan
Scandinavian folk fest, meaning it’s an easy city-meets-pastoral set up,
and it’s a lot like the British horror classic,
The Wicker Man).
Life is a Series of Pills
We take pills to get up, to fall asleep, to calm down, to get amped, to
get hungry, to get hard, to get healthy, to get sick and even to die.
Tiny capsules that almost always are taking orally (with suppositories
coming up the rear…ba-dum-tsch) means it’s easy for the chemicals within
them to get within you.
Too easy, in fact.
After the long fight against the dangers of cigarettes finally seemed to
be won (or at least, acknowledged and understood by the general population
so that fewer people do it), in comes prescription painkillers, which make
people feel really good and want to take more of them, which, from a
capitalist point of view, is the perfect product.
But when it quickly became apparent that people got addicted to them, the
pharmaceutical manufacturers took the same approach as cigarette
manufacturers decades prior: deny the problems, fudge the science, bribe
the politicians and regulators, and undertake a massive
promotional/charity campaign to make it seem like you’re not acting like a
drug cartel.
So now it’s pills only in moderation, of course.
There are so many pills it’s easy to take too many of them. There are
warnings on bottles about what the safe dosage, but heeding those are
obviously optional.
Dependency on pills that have physically addictive chemical properties,
one that that goes beyond the natural world and instead lands not just
upon our intellect, but our working together as a community…to make sure
that factories can churn out pressed powders that can be easily swallowed
by anyone who has the need or want, but also the cash. Even pills that
don’t get you hooked on them can become less effective if you still take
them regularly as your body builds up a tolerance.
Because of the massive imbalance between use and abuse of drugs and how
society treats the former (buy more!) and the latter (throw those
criminals in jail!), it is essentially that we Decriminalize All Drugs.
One huge advantage of this is the simple fact that a person who is
apprehended/confronted due in part to their addiction is that they have a
better chance at getting rid of or managing their habit and lead a more
productive life if they go to a treatment centre, instead of prison.
Prison leads to a much high rate of recidivism not only for taking the
drug, but the criminal behaviour that the person commits to support their
addiction.
On top of that, the drugs that
are illegal are much more likely to be abused by the lower classes which
leads to harsh drug sentences even for possession of small amounts,
meanwhile prescription medicine that apes so many of the effects of the
illegal drugs are abused primarily by the upper and middle classes. And
prescription drug abuse is much more lenient and weakly enforced crime
compared to illicit drug use.
Finally, the effects of the ‘war on drugs’ in Central and South America
has had devastating consequences for the millions of citizens living there
who have nothing to do with the illicit drug trade. Cartels and gangs
kill/bribe anyone who stand in their way, and entire governments are
caught being beholden to how money is spent by local drug kingpins and the
money that comes primarily from the United States to fight them.
While it is loathe to imagine that suddenly Pfizer or Merck industries is
in charge of producing a cocaine or heroin equivalent (although uppers and
opioids are uncomfortably good starts), having it corporatized in this way
is certainly preferable to a literal drug war in distant nations.
Sad Bonus: Over-diagnosis of ADHD...for hideous profit!
(https://www.vox.com/2018/12/17/17263874/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-symptoms-diagnosis)
Who
Watches
the
Digitized
Watchers?
The amount of information available on ‘the internet’ is incredible, but
what needs to be looked at is our relationship with the information.
What do we bring to it? We stare at it, listen, read its words, but what
does it take from us? At first it seems like nothing (unless we make a
comment), but this is not true.
Thanks to ‘cookies’ for webpages and all the things you agree to let your
apps do on/to your phone or tablet, internet companies big and small
record the amount of time we spend on it, whether watching a video,
listening to a podcast, or scrolling through an article. It knows what we
do next, making connections of how absorbing the information has affected
our behaviour.
You are always a target demographic, and it will recommend make-up,
Minecraft, animal fails, or Andrew Tate videos accordingly.
While these are certainly disparate topics, it is nothing but data as far
as computers are concerned, and more and more often it is computers (more
specifically, AI) that are making these sorts of decisions.
One of the complicated problems with banning hate speech is that there is
a strong possibility that it will be used against groups that most people
would not consider hate groups:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/opinion/if-we-silence-hate-speech-will-we-silence-resistance.html)
This problem is exacerbated greatly with the fact that it is corporations
that find themselves the owners and overseers of new digital public
squares, and are not as beholden to the public good as the government is.
A failure to protect free speech or banning what is defined as hate speech
is not a legal or Supreme/High Court issue for them, but part of workflow,
that will assessed as something that could be worked on in the next
financial quarter.
We have too effectively monetized central tenets of human behaviour like
discourse and attention, and a too small group of Silicon Valley owners
and investors get a bit of the money every time these behaviours happen
(and they happened millions of time over, every second of every day).
If Twitter, Facebook and social media in general are the new ‘town
squares’ where people get together and talk, compare it to people going to
an actual square or city park. A place where they are chatting with each
other privately or listening to someone else speak for a planned meeting
or get together, but then someone starts screaming and yelling and
accusing them of being liars, paid actors, or simply ‘piece of shit’. How
is this dealt with in real life? Ignoring or walking away from this angry
person, hoping that a security guard comes up to them and asks them to
leave?
Heckling is comparatively rare when someone speaks in a town square if the
topic is not extremely controversial. Even if it’s a talk about music, if
someone in the crowd disagrees with the speaker, it’s more likely they
will just murmur a comment to their friend beside them, or will raise
their hand to offer their opinion to the main speaker without (ideally)
calling them a ‘fucking idiot’.
But on the internet, every comment can be quickly heard/read by the person
who made the initial post, so they can suddenly be confronted with the
agreements and disagreements of the many people listening/reading.
Formal, real life debates have moderators, and virtual chat rooms have
them as well, meant to enforce a series of rules in the room regarding
decorum, meaning a ‘mod’ might say to you that can’t talk about that
subject here, that your comments have been flagged, and that if you try
anything like that again you will immediately be banned.
By not being face-to-face in real life, you can become uncomfortably close
in the digital realm.
Ironically, as this world of ones and zeroes becomes more developed and
avatars become more common place, being threatened or insulted by another
might suddenly become less threatening than a straightforward text or
comment that does the same, because you can more easily do the physically
familiar act of walking away from that person (even if in the digital
realm it involves pressing a button, tapping a screen, or making a simple
gestures that indicates movement for your avatar).
Most people are aware that our electronic devices with microphones can
record us without our knowing, with governments claiming they do it for
our safety and corporations claiming they do it to improve your online
experience. While both can legitimately say otherwise, lost in the terms
and agreements of simply owning a cellphone and subscribing to a
telecommunications service are the hazy exceptions that can practically be
permanent if deemed valuable.
Companies certainly say that they value your privacy, even when
information you deem private can be quite profitable for them, which is
why it is important to keeping pressing the issue - or at least be aware
of it - that the way we conduct ourselves online is markedly different
than offline.
What Kind of God…
Nobody knows what happens after you die. No
one. So yes, it’s possible that there’s a heaven just like a lot of people
believe. But the idea of ‘after your life, you have another life, in some
other dimension or reality where you get everything you want for ever and
ever’…sounds great, ridiculous, and the very definition of ‘too good too
be true’. If you saw that on sale in a store, you’d assume that it was a
complete scam, covered in asbestos, or is somehow going to steal all your
online passwords.
It the sort of thing a parent would promise
to their eight year old they’ll stop throwing a tantrum in a grocery
store.
The whole idea of ‘there’s a powerful man in
a white beard who knows everything you do and whether you were good or bad
and will reward or punish based on that’? It’s Santa Claus. It’s not even
‘the grown up version of Santa Claus’, it’s the exact same thing, it’s a
scale of 1 to 1, and instead of the North Pole it is in a place where you
can never be called out for it being total crap.
On the reverse, Satan is even more comical, a
bogeymen that you can blame your own behaviour on. The idea of entering a
bargain with him is good story fodder and nothing else, since your soul is
a concept of self, and you can never sell that or give it away.
Because isn't it
convenient that what you want/like is the will of god, and what you don't
like is the will of satan/evil/not of god?
The personal relationship between an
individual and a spiritual/theological conception of reality can be of
great benefit to them and their community. It can be a tool for personal
growth and a way to create an ethos for being kind and loving people.
But organized religion typically turns that
tool into a weapon.
Being organized is meant to be a compliment,
but with the term ‘religion’ tacked on, it suggests strict hierarchy,
inflexible beliefs, and plenty of power relations and all the abuse that
can come with that.
We seem to be the most human when we are
trying to understand the divine.
Not that divinity is needed for this sort of
activity.
Noted French philosopher and atheist
Jean-Paul Sartre started as an existentialist (see up above, the
Scandinavian film bit), but the experience of the Second World War changed
him, saying that,
“to be free is not to do what one wants, but
want to do what one can”, which is adding a level of morality to an amoral
world and a slight bit of inspiration to contrast the natural bleakness
that can come with embracing existentialist philosophy.
Here’s a Thought Jan 2023
The Maiming of the Author
Rumours of their death are greatly
exaggerated, but that’s to be expected in the fancy-ish business of
word-working.
The relationship between writer and
reader has of course gotten more complicated as it’s now so easy to
communicate with one another, and if the writer isn’t interested in doing
this, well, even that action shrieks volumes.
The audience can be more upset than ever
- either as a collective or a very passionate individual - that the story
or the symbolism of the story does not match their expectations.
They may disagree with a review or
assessment by a critic, but they also might disagree with the creator of
the work itself.
If the author’s opinion or personal
information is absent, its lack will become part of the analysis of the
work.
Their role is not exactly removed or
reduced, but melted and bent into the shape that the reader/critic/scholar
wants it to take.
Future History: Learning the Wrong Lessons
What will be the big problem with the early twenty first
century according to people looking at it (hopefully there will be people
to look at it) from the early twenty second century Rampant free market
capitalism and its inevitable associated practice of consumerism that
inevitably leads to wealth and power disparities when there is a lack of
regulation? Not addressing climate change in any meaningful way for oh so
many years when it became more and more obvious it was a huge problem?
Standard fights over resources that led to small and large military
conflicts? Inability for humanity to adopt to rapidly changing technology
that fragments them into individuals and cliques making it harder to work
together and solve big issues like the ones mentioned in the first three
questions?
As part of the last question, there is the unfortunate
possibility that in the future any form of ‘individualism’ that stresses
the importance of the individual over the community will be seen as the
problem (especially if civilization really does hit the skids), and as
such future governments (whether democratic or authoritarian) might
attempt to limit how people can speak or act in order to ‘protect
society’.
The concern with this conclusion is that Individualism is
not at all the problem, but that it cannot simply occur in any society in
a vacuum. It must exist within a reasonably successful environment for a
majority of citizens to live unencumbered with their basic needs being
consistently met.
Which is the right lesson to always remember.
What is the Press Now?
Is Julian Assange a journalist?
It’s an easy question to forget years later, even as he is still
languishing in a UK prison, awaiting possible extradition to the US for
running Wikileaks when it leaked oodles of classified material. And maybe
saying ‘leaked’ is already showing a bit of bias. What if the word was
‘reported’? Would that make it seem like Assange worked for The Guardian
or the Washington Post?
To paraphrase, ‘he may be a bastard, but he’s not the New York Times’
bastard’.
Corporate consolidation for airlines, soda companies, and video games are
bad enough, but when it comes to essential services like financial
institutions, health insurance providers, and the news media, the results
are inevitably so, so much worse.
Information is the bedrock for a free society that makes decisions as a
collective, and we have to quickly add the word ‘accurate’ in front of
‘information’ because without that combo, you’ve got worse than nothing,
you have a society making decisions that will go wrong right from the
start. On top of that, there is also the necessity for relevant
information, as it is too easy to find the for-profit news media providing
stories and coverage based on what people want to hear (the tail wagging
the dog), rather than what needs to be heard. Case in point: It's
depressing that the Panama/Paradise paper leak barely made a splash for
more than a three day news cycle.
The Internet isn't built for such an in depth and reflective analysis of a
448 page report.
The daily drips and tweets of the most juicy details, yes, but providing
an overarching narrative to show the wealthy hide their billions through
yawn inducing shell corporations and tax loopholes, not in the least.
McLuhan was right: The medium is the message. And the Internet offers
immediacy and constant novelty, and nothing more.
This is what the news has become.
This is not excusing the actions and viewpoints of the public for their
indifference. Many factors including the format at which these receive
information are to blame. Decades of cynicism toward the political process
is understandable.
However, the public can never fully escape culpability. Democracy and
freedom requires constant vigilance, regardless off the supposed morass of
the current situation. To throw your hands up in disgust and turn away
just hastens democracy's demise.
This isn’t that new, of course, as Chris Hedges noted back in 2015 on Bill
C-51:
http://rabble.ca/news/2015/03/chris-hedges-on-c-51-they-have-won-and-it-to-us
The Idea of a Nation
While the symbols of a country will likely tell you very
little about the nation itself (bald eagle! Apple pie!), the qualities
given to the people of the nation can be just as meaningless. In fact,
because they focus on almost exclusively positive qualities, they read a
bit like horoscopes. Countries are filled with proud, hardworking polite
people, because who’s going to say their country is filled with miserable,
lazy, rude people? Especially because you’re going to find people of both
kinds in every country.
And ‘proud’ is positive spin on what (and who) could be
considered a ‘major asshole’.
The laws and policies of a country (both proclaimed and
actual) say so much more about the country than the food, clothing, or
celebratory animals that happen to live within its borders.
What’s in a Name?
A rose by any other name blah, blah, blah. But just for the record, it
would be really confusing if we all disagreed on what ‘rose’ meant.
Agreeing on definitions is something built so deeply into species
sociability that of course we take it for granted. Part of the early
difficulty of creating a language (and it’s certainly not something groups
of people in the Stone Age sat around and agreed to do via grunting) is
deciding that this series of noises matched this symbol etched on a cave
wall.
Today the names of objects, events and ideas can change more rapidly than
ever (yeah, yeah, thank you internet), and while most of it unsurprisingly
involves slang and colloquialisms in certain subcultures that can
occasionally burst into the mainstream, there are some bizarre behemoths
that involve political movements and ideologies.
Conservatives support neoliberalism, regulatory bodies that chiefly
de-regulate, a debt ceiling that always gets raised so it’s not much of a
ceiling, and socialism is so nebulously defined by the mainstream
political discourse that the term is rarely mentioned by left leaning
politicians who support socialist policies and is akin to communism or
fascism by the right wing.
Even the more basic terms are on shaky foundations, as apparently ‘The
Swedish Democrats’ are a far-right hate group.
Sussing this out is beyond simple annoyance. An overabundance of misnomers
(and therefore misinformation) leads to miscommunication which increases
the chances of society’s ability to function adequately. It is perfectly
Orwellian, as in 1984 the
Ministry of Peace deals with all things war.
Will technology save us? What is to be lost (and gained) by having less
ambiguous terms for complex ideas might become moot when translator
programs become as dependable and effortless as texting autocorrect.
And while we can mock some of the mistakes that show up with said
autocorrect, we forget how on point it almost always is.
Tom Brady is not flashy. His play-style
is mid, except for the tendency to throw fast. His efficiency and
longevity are his hallmarks in a sport where neither are commonplace
outside the position of kicker.
Credit certainly goes to his ability to
analyze the field in real time to get the ball out of his hands quickly,
which reduces the likelihood of being sacked or the need to scramble to
extend the play. By avoiding those two occurrences, Brady avoided serious
injury for most of his career, which is why he is/was able to play for so
long.
And of course all this was possible in
conjunction with Bill Belichick’s coaching brilliance on the defensive
side of the ball (meaning Brady rarely had to mount comebacks, and if he
did they would likely only be down by one score, not several), and his
managerial brilliance of finding compatible receivers for Brady’s play
style and trusting offensive coordinators to maximize said play style.
The History of the word ‘Warp’
Etymology is the study of words, and the Oxford English Dictionary
(sometimes shortened to OED) is not so much a dictionary that tells you a
word’s definition, but a historical account of the first time it was ever
used and what information it conveyed, along with the various ways it has
been used ever since (a quick, simple example: ‘Access’ was something you
did, now it’s also something you can have).
The word ‘warp’ was originally a term in sewing when using looms,
describing an arrangement of parallel lengths of yarn with a crossing
string. While intentional, this crossing string looking askew (or going
against the norm) in comparison to the other ordered strings is how ‘warp’
would be used going forward.
Soon it took to mean objects bending in completely unexpected and
sometimes unwanted ways, going from a description of a mundane event to a
description for something typically negative.
Now it was bad to be ‘warped’…which meant that for those who were eager to
stand in contrast to mainstream cultural definitions, being warped was at
the same time a rebellious badge of honour. It was bending or changing
something that was straight and familiar.
Science is legendary for coming up with lousy names for extremely unusual
phenomena. The Big Bang is a great example, especially when you consider
that it was named sarcastically by a theoretical physicist who thought
that the evidence presented at the time for a near-instantaneous event
that started everything in the known universe was shoddy. Upon further
research, it was decided by the community at large that The Big Bang was
correct, but no one bothered to change the term (although Calvin suggested
that it be renamed to the ‘horrendous space kablooie’).
The names of the six types of quarks are like the seven dwarves, but with
even less personality or indication of what they do: Up, Down, Charm,
Strange, Top and Bottom. It’s barely better than naming them the first six
letters of the alphabet (or last six).
Going back to warp, discoveries in 20th century physics showed that the
fabric of the universe - spacetime - could truly stretch and bend along
with the light that travels through it, so using the word ‘warp’ to
describe the possibility of travelling at ridiculously fast speed wasn’t
half bad.
Pop culture did the rest.
Now ‘warp’ is primarily known as a measurement in Star Trek lore. And hey,
you didn’t have to be an astrophysicist to know that warp 7 was faster
than warp 4. But even in fake magical science, it’s not easy.
See, Warp 1 was in fact the speed of light, which is just under 300,000
kilometres per second. Which is dang fast, but since there was a vague
attempt at scientific accuracy and consistency within the Star Trek
universe (even though, y’know, Klingons and tribbles and such), and
considering that galaxies are
so damn big, higher levels of warp were exponentially faster than the one
before it. This gets to the point where Warp 9.9 has been quoted as being
‘4 billion miles per second’ (nearly 6.5 billion km).
Which is gibberish-level fast.
That’s going from the sun to Pluto in less than a second. It makes the
size of our solar system a quick cough.
Are People Getting Stupider?
The accusation of a community/region/country/world getting dumber and
dumber is popular, and has been for a long time.
Whatever period we look back at and think is the ‘smarter one’ is usually
a time when the people then were looking further back in time and thinking
the same way.
Which time in history would it be? When the most amount of people can
read, write and reach a vaguely agreed-upon idea of a particular education
level?
Because that would be right now.
Despite complaints about the quality of education kids today are receiving
and how well they are (or aren’t) doing on standardized test scores,
there’s more educated people on the planet now than ever before, and
that’s because of huge numbers of youth in developed countries receiving
an education who would not have gotten one in years prior.
Universal education is an extremely fresh concept when compared to how
long human civilization has been around, yet the quality of this education
is a whole other kettle of textbooks, and can differ for both complicated
and simple reasons.
But is going to school the same thing as not being stupid?
How are we measuring smart (and therefore stupid)?
By IQ tests? By standardized tests in school for children and youth at
certain ages?
What if the questions being asked are less applicable to most of the
people taking them?
What if the questions were designed for people who weren’t raised with the
entire content of the world in their back pocket? Why even bother
memorizing tons of bullet points of vary subjects when you’ll always have
access to it via phone, tablet or computer? How much does rote
memorization have to do with being/becoming smart?
So not only does technology play a huge role in trying to answer this
question, but consider that differing social financial situations throw
the entire testing system off kilter.
Older generations especially would love to embrace the notion that they
were the smart ones and that this new batch of young adults and kids are
navel-gazing lazy-bones who spend too much time with the latest
technology.
And if you want to believe that, well, you can cherry pick all the
evidence you want, although beware of the dangerous Power of Anecdotal
Evidence. It feels so good, it’s plain as day, it’s pulling the emotional
heartstrings, has been a way of deciding things for millennia… and always
has the potential to be completely wrong. Which might prove people aren’t
getting any smarter than years prior, but that they’re not getting any
dumber, either.
The Horrific Thing About Hitler is the
‘Gap’ of Horror
We view Hitler as a monster to distance
himself from us, because while he was a human being we - as other human
beings - don’t like having any sort of connection to him. We don’t want to
think of anyone being capable of doing the same thing, so we call him a
‘monster’, just as we do to serial killers.
But outside of his time as a soldier in
World War I, Hitler never killed anyone himself. Instead he helped create
and oversaw a massive war machine and a genocidal plan to rid
Germany/Europe/the world of people he and his supporters found
undesirable.
‘The banality of evil’ was the description
given to surviving Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials after World War
II.
It is the uncomfortable idea that these men
came to power by legitimate means, twisted the law to their own advantage
and in twelve short years had soldiers and citizens commit some of the
most heinous acts in world history.
Hitler railed against the Jewish people
with his bigoted words, but was never seen mocking rabbis on the street or
pointing a gun at the head of a concentration camp prisoner.
There is a gap of action but not of
responsibility. It is the idea that convincing other people - in some
cases, many other people - to carry out the horrific idea you have is
worse that doing it yourself.
That a person has the power to convince
other people to do evil is terrifying because it is admitting the
possibility that maybe you might one day be subject to such convincing.
If Hitler tried to kill as many Jewish
people as he could all by himself with a machine gun in Munich synagogue
on a random day in the early 1920s before he ever entered politics, it
would still be a horrific event (which would likely end in his immediate
death or arrest, trial and sentencing to death), but unlikely to be in any
history textbooks beyond perhaps a sentence.
But because Hitler strived to and succeeded
at becoming the leader of a country, he was able to expand his desire to
exterminate the Jewish people (and communists, and anyone who opposed him)
on a massive scale, with enough ardent supporters to carry out these
heinous acts.
Exponentially growing evil, with one man at
its root. The matter of giving orders versus carrying out orders.
There is despicable agency and intent, but
also distance.
Meanwhile, heinous serial killers might
brutally tortured their victims, and it was because of their own agency
and their own hands doing them.
Similar to Hitler although on a much
smaller scale, Charles Manson was able to convince people to do foul,
violent acts on his behalf.
The horror of Hitler is our own fear that
we could be convinced/manipulated into doing great evil based on another’s
ideas, suggestions or demands. And the sad proof that we as a species are
susceptible to this is that despite humanity’s efforts to make sure any
form of genocide would never happen again…they certainly have, with
depressing regularity across the globe, from Cambodia to Rwanda to the
Rohingya.
Age-ism-ism
Denigrating or ignoring someone (or some people) simply
based on how old they are is certainly ageism.
On and individual level it says more about the parties
involved and their own biases (‘kids these days’, ‘ok boomer’) than
anything else, but looking down upon an entire generation because of how
many collective institutional mistakes they made during their ‘watch’ is,
quite simply, how history is written.
That one ‘becomes’ an adult at eighteen in the sense that
they are wholly responsible for their own actions in a legal sense and can
participate in elections is based on a loose, community agreement that
this is a good average age for such activities, when puberty has finally
ended and the hormones aren’t so much in flux. At the same time, of course
there are responsible, level-headed fourteen year olds who can be much
more reliable for all sorts of activities than some people decades older
than them. But such cases are the exception, not the rule.
At the other end of the scale, associating age with wisdom
is something older people stress just so people will still listen to their
outdated ideas that have little bearing on what’s actually happening in
the world around them. Just because you managed to live to eighty doesn’t
necessarily mean what you say is helpful. Plenty of life experience does
not equal useful information for others.
Chasing the Algorithm
Creators and streamers are paid based on their popularity, in the basic
sense that with more eyeballs on your page or channel the more that you
will receive in ad revenue and sponsorships and get a small cut of sales,
and the more likely that people will buy merch or donate to support you.
And while this sounds like a matter of raw numbers, it's not exactly, as
getting seen on the most popular sites (so let’s just say YouTube,
Instagram, TikTok and Twitch), involves a lot of random chance.
All
these sites and apps benefit financially when you spend more time on them,
so the owners are incentivized to give you more of the same based on what
you are choosing to watch. If you just watched a video of a cat slipping
on ice, maybe you’ll want to then watch a video of a dog jumping in a pool
and knocking some kid off an inner tube (or sports highlights or cover
songs of a particular artist). The computer code that decides what to
recommend to you next is loosely nicknamed ‘The Algorithm’, and creators
are acutely aware that their livelihood can depend on someone clicking on
a video it recommends.
The
sites themselves don’t care much what you do or watch, so long as you’re
there. But the channels on them are desperate to make sure you spend time
on their channel, which is why you’re asked to subscribe for updates, like
the video, and make comments on them, as all those actions slightly alter
the algorithm to favour that video slightly more often as a recommended
one. This system is not at all perfect, as sometimes alerts don't work,
sometimes you don't appear in recommended lists that you would have been
previously, and the changing winds of what’s popular at this hour might
pass a creator/streamer right by.
Some
ads are for other content creators, spending money to get around the
Algorithm if they feel they’ve fallen out of favour with it, which is
attributing a very human quality to a bunch of ones and zeroes, and is
something we might be doing more and more of in the future.
Art-less
"Please don't put your life in the hands, of a
rock and roll band, we'll throw it all away."
- Oasis
With public figures, institutions and the political process letting us
down more and more in this unfortunate century, we have turned to the
creators of art and culture as our guides through the darkest timelines,
as the sensible ones in a world full of nonsense. This is foolish and will
almost certainly disappoint. Inflatable and impossible expectation can
ruin many a relationship with a book, film, or album, let alone the person
who made it. Not only are the creators as fallible as yourself, but the
process of creating these works are just as fallible, and full of steps
where it's akin to making a sausage, as you probably don't want to know
how. Not necessarily because it's horrifying, but because it can be kind
of bland and reductionist. The artist will forget how they came up with
your favourite song, they may have left a mystery in a story because they
were to lazy to explain it, etc.
Feeling that a work of art speaks to you is wonderful, but don’t mistake
it think that it is the artist speaking to you. Becoming too attached to
anything - whether a person or whatever they create - can lead to problems
down the road.
Considering how much cultural material involves sex, violence, revenge,
and going through absolute hell to finally persevere (and not always with
that happy ending), one could say that if an artist's work was actually
indicative of their behaviour or attitudes, then most artists would be in
jail. Thinking an artist definitely 'means' a story/song/joke/performance
literally is like thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger is not an
Austrian-American actor but rather a killer cyborg from the future
Political Compromises...
Do you hold out and wait for enough political and
social support for a big left-leaning cause/bill/agenda in one single
vote, or do you compromise by making incremental centre-left-leaning
policies that over time (likely years) might equal the same amount of
change as the initial 'do it all in go' agenda?
What scenario is more likely to succeed?
And we've barely broached the issue of the amount
of hostility towards these ideas from corporations and the right.
The sad complexity of how and why politicians vote
for certain bills - as well as the amount of money dumped upon the issue
via lobbyists - means there will as most certainly be a ton of imperfect
(and demanding allies) to get something like an infrastructure or climate
change bill passed.
So is this an advocacy for compromise? Is this an
admission that having enough political votes and/or will to pass something
even mildly contentious like 'the green new deal' is probably impossible
in the foreseeable future?
How will those committed to this plan feel when a
more watered-down version of the bill passes?
Betrayed? Disappointed? Cynical at the entire political process
going forward?
These considerations become all the more pressing
when one acknowledges how important it is to do something about climate
change, inequality, and 'money out of politics' right now. These three
issues right there are already hopelessly interconnected and affect each
other's outcomes.
People were disappointed with the limits of
Obamacare, and he had to point out that it was just an initial step, that
over time, it would be improved upon. Unfortunately, this meant Obamacare
supporters would have to hold onto the presidency and congress past
2016...which didn't happen.
Which is a terrifying reminder of how fragile so
many policies can be.
Political divisions meant a
conservative-controlled congress meant Obama had to pass executive orders
to help bolster climate change and inequality policies. Some of which
could simply be reversed (and were) when his predecessor arrived in
January 2017.
There are so many considerations when one thinks
about supporting candidates that completely reflect their own opinions,
and supporting candidates that reflect the opinion that would most likely
garner the most votes in a national election. That's a frustrating
compromise.
Especially because issues like economic inequality
and climate change can't wait for the 'next election cycle'. Things are
getting terrible right now, we can't cross our fingers and hope that a
more open-minded and progressive electorate is four or eight or whatever
years away.
It's hoping for the absolute best result versus
acknowledging the possibility of the worst possible outcome. Youthful
idealism versus middled-aged pragmatism.
It's not a new line in the sand by any means, this
has been a challenge for democracies since the get go.
So what do you do?
You talk to as many people as possible and find
out what the voters think and convince them that you’re the best person to
deliver on these issues. And if there’s a lot of different opinions on
them…looks like you’ll have to compromise right away!
Knowing About WW2
History inevitably has
a long reach, especially big, beefy events like a war that spanned the
globe and even had countries that weren’t battlefields completely changing
how they lived during it.
Like
The Empire Strikes Back, WW2 was much more complex and nuanced than
its predecessor (and by extrapolation, WW3 will spend the first third of
it settling one outstanding issue from WW2, before becoming a re-hash of
WW1 with some familial complications behind the scenes…
like Return of the Jedi).
World War 2 can be as
complicated in the details as the experts want it to be, and as simplistic
as tik-tok video summarizing everything, and both can be both shocking and
fascinating at the same.
It was also a time of
technological advancement in terms of documentation of the conflict
itself. Footage of battles and their aftermath meant that people were
aware of the goings on beyond the newspaper articles. You could go to the
cinema and watch newsreels of soldiers actually fighting, of tanks and
planes firing on enemy targets (as military censors probably would edit
out something like their own side getting blown up).
Of course, technology
in its infancy meant some mistakes and accidents, like how all the footage
of American soldiers landing on Juno beach on D-day was damaged beyond
repair.
That the war took
place in many different locations and conditions meant that entire
sub-disciplines could focus on the battles in North Africa, or the South
Pacific, or the top secret Allied missions to disrupt the Germans’ own
attempt to develop nuclear weapons. Films and TV series have delved deep
into these experiences, and some were even made while the war was going
on. While Casablanca might be
Bogart’s best known film set during the war, he also starred in
Sahara, where he played a tank
commander holding off a German battalion all by themselves.
As the war went on,
new countries joined (
That the Cold War
began as soon as WW2 just reinforces the idea that its effect had an
extremely long reach, since that conflict didn’t end until the collapse of
Soviet Union in 1991, which meant that history itself ended.
Heh.
Who watches the watchmen?
The police as a powerful institution being so often free from
accountability inevitably leads to brazen abuse. While it is essential
that unions are a big part of a functioning democracy because workers
definitely need that tool when it comes to dealing with management, strong
unions can certainly protect terrible employees. While working in a
unionized manufacturing job you'll find that bad employees can be inept,
lazy or frustrating to deal with, bad teachers and especially bad police
officers can have much more terrible impact upon
society in general.
Police unions in the US have made it hard for bad cops to ever be fired,
let alone charged with a crime, and change is still coming slow. Internal
Affairs - the law enforcement within law enforcement - may be well
meaning, but it is hard to shake the notion that any officer that
cooperates with this department will be seen as a snitch or a rat.
Since the police have so, so much more power than a constantly
marginalized minority, they are the ones who must be responsible for
wielding it properly. If an individual officer can't accept that, they
should quit. There is a long list of cops who gun down black people
because they think their life is in danger, but it turns out (thanks in
part to bystander camera footage or body cameras) that the person they
shot wasn't even armed. Once again, it seems to be that public must play
the role of judge and jury, as law enforcement can’t seem to do it
themselves.
Here’s a Thought
- July 2022 Edition
Context is Almost Everything
(and
even that requires Context)
Who’s advocating that policy? Who’s making
that joke?
You even have to consider who’s saying
every word you hear, writing each sentence you read (this one - as is
everything on this site - is written by a straight, white male), because
that context will properly inform you as how to properly read all the
intents and accidents of the literal and symbolic that can be packed into
the content of the material.
If it’s wrong, the creator was
misinformed. If it was offensive, it was just a joke. It if was an
offensive joke, they’re sorry to anyone who is offended and will learn
more about the person/people/culture you mocked.
Sometimes it’s the bad luck of the context
of the compliant, where people are looking for what an attempted statement
of support was inadvertently lacking. To understand as much of an online
argument as possible you have to not only read the entire thread, but
delve into the perspectives of the two or more voices of users.
Or you don’t.
If you want authorial context, there it
is. If you want to ignore it, you can do that, too.
The internet has made anonymity easier (at
least for a certain level of popularity, because once something goes
viral, discovering identities becomes an industry in itself).
You can take all sorts of guesses as to
the identity of a writer or creator who wishes to remain anonymous, and
sometimes your personal biases might seep into these conclusions.
If you like what they’ve created, you
might hope they are somewhat like yourself. If you hate it, maybe you’re
hoping they’re all the way different.
Or maybe you don’t care, that the work itself is so good that it
effortlessly stands on its own, letting the experiencer give the work
meaning, absent of the creator’s viewpoint or intent.
And maybe then the creator can complain
about context.
For rock at its most celebratory transgressive, it’s
Brown Sugar through and through. Famously described by Christgau as
‘so compelling it discourages exegesis’, it has recently come under
criticism for its lyrics regarding sadism, slavery, substances and
sideshow queens.
If it were a somber ballad it might be seen a thought-provoking commentary
on these issues, but it is a party rock song par-excellence.
(This is not the only time the Stones ‘got away’ with this,
Start Me Up has such an easy, feel good groove the whole way through
that radio stations still play the ‘you make a dead man cum’ lyric in the
outro)
Even with Sugar’s riff-tastic
opening sounding archetypal Keith Richards, Mick Jagger wrote the song
practically in its entirety.
It was recorded in late 1969 just before the disastrous Altamont Festival
gig. In fact, they played it there, and it already sounds great.
The staccato start gets your head turning, and the band comes in with full
force a few seconds later, so by the time Jagger is singing with full
throttle everyone’s enjoying
themselves when they shouldn’t. The slaver is doin’ all right as he abuses
his property, the tent show queen has underage lovers, and the protagonist
just wants to know why brown sugar tastes so good (here’s where we’ll
mention this initial title was Black
Pussy).
Right after Bobby Keys’ solo (although he bests himself a few songs later
on the Sticky Fingers album with
Can’t You Hear Me Knocking),
Mick can’t wait getting back to it, giving a beautiful, ridiculous,
‘aaahhhhh’ on the way into the third verse.
The energy is absolutely overpowering. There is a joy in pushing the
boundaries and going wild, asking this rhetorical questions just to show
you how he really fucking feels.
By the time the ‘yeahs’ and ‘woos’ you’re so in a thrall that you don’t
care what the barely-considered words are, it may as well be Dylan’s best
couplets, the way you’re sucked into the overall excitement and
groove-tastic rhythms.
The band has stated that they will not be performing the song these days
because times have changed, and that’s exactly why Brown Sugar still
represents the dichotomy that rock has in its bones. Outlaw aesthetics for
the mass market. Shocking words on the dance floor. Made for the youth,
still played by senior citizens. Almost excessive saxophones.
Whoo!
Why Do Things Exist?
We don’t know, which is great, because then we get to
choose.
We know that our bodies (and everything in the
universe) are made of atoms, which are made up of tinier particles that
are mostly empty space and electrical charges. We don’t get to choose that
answer.
Well technically you can choose not to believe it, but
it flies in the face of scientific progress that has yielded a bounty of
practical inventions that have defined contemporary civilization, so
accepting the fact that your smart phone is constantly in communication
with satellites that are flying above the earth means accepting the
scientific theories that helped develop these inventions.
How do the subatomic particles on transistors work?
There are plenty of textbooks and five minute ‘for dummies’ videos to
answer that.
Why do they work?
Shrug emoji.
We can choose between options already popular or
completely unique and personal when it comes to why things exist.
There can be one or more gods, one or more alien
species, one or more flying spaghetti monsters, and the ‘why’ for our own
creation comes down to these creatures’ own, unknowable whims. We always
look to the stars, to the beyond, when asking questions that are beyond
us.
A continually tweak-able
standard model is what we hold up as how
our universe works the way it does, but we might have to send a probe (or
a spaceship?) through a black hole to answer
why.
When you
have a system that can barely bend, it won’t take much to break.
Among the
myriad of challenges Covid continues to present is that while its effects
on an individual is most likely a brief, more-series-than-average-flu (for
both vaxxed and un-vaxxed, but the latter’s risk of ‘even more serious’ is
obviously higher), the effect on our functioning,
just-in-time-and-just-enough, supply chain dependent, capitalist society
is catastrophic.
We run
businesses where it is expected x amount of employees are always working
on the supply chain to keep shelves and orders filled (from the mines to
the factories to the warehouses to the stores, with trucks, ships and
planes moving the product from place to place). We have this many doctors
and nurses to provide this amount of medical services for a community on
average. And covid threw this out of whack completely.
There were
already problems with these systems function being able to properly, and
covid made it so much worse.
Even trying
to be responsible in these times can blow up in the system’s face.
The airline
industry thought it would take five years for tourism to bounce back, and
in the early days of the pandemic it sold planes and equipment, furloughed
employees and pushed company veterans into early retirement, all to save
money so they could weather the half-decade of expected economic loss.
Instead,
people are angling to travel again just two years in, and there aren’t
enough planes, pilots, flight attendants and grounds crew to make it
happen. But did the airline’s sensibly only schedule as many flights as
their employees could handle? Nope, they went overboard, which meant
random ones would be cancelled or delayed.
Everyone has everyone’s children
This isn’t hippie shit. This is the sobering realization
that no matter how digital we get, we are all in this together, and how
the responsibility of raising all the children properly (and ‘properly’ is
certainly a very subjective viewpoint) is necessary for the future
survival of the species.
The pervasive thought towards child rearing of the last
half century is pouring as much positive attention and resources and
carefully-given advice into your child’s own development as possible,
typically at the expense of the state of the wider society in general.
If you were going to try to lower your carbon footprint,
campaign for political candidates that support a strong social safety net
and green energy, or any sort of ‘responsible citizen thinking about the
future’ activity, you will have to put it aside because that energy is now
focused on a raising your own offspring.
And while it makes sense that you would focus on your
children because that is something you can affect more directly and
positively that much more than the wider world (with its massive
complexity), the wider world is where these kids are going to have to
live, and keeping your eyes off that prize can be devastating for
everyone.
You can’t just try to give your child the best chance to
thrive in the world, you have to try and give that chance to thrive to as
many children as possible.
The Incomprehension of the Now
The passage from child to adult is a
common trope in literature (symbolizing the move from ignorance to
knowledge, weakness to strength), but it can also be applied to earlier
stages of life.
The helplessness of infant requires being
waited on hand and foot. It wants everything, even if it doesn’t
understand what it wants or what it needs.
This is the indomitable will of a six
month old infant crying, not really able to grasp why its hungry, why it
shits its pants, why there’s all these noises and colour around it that
barely seem to have any pattern, and why it suddenly feels tired. It just
wants.
Over weeks and months the concept of self
grows, the ability to communicate becomes essential, and the limitations
of all sorts come flooding in, a lack of understanding how one’s own body
works, a lack of mobility in the most basic sense before learning how to
walk and even then the true limits of that when the world itself is
sensibly sectioned off by caregivers.
Children learn that they cannot have
everything they want immediately. They learn that they are not the centre
of the world, that things are denied to them for their own good, and their
initial response to this is the (attempted) destruction period known as
the terrible twos.
There will always be a tendency to compare what is happening now with what
happened in the past. We do this with similar events (wars, lead up to
wars, economic booms and busts, pandemics, extreme weather, artistic
movements, etc.). We are especially prone to doing this when we know more
and more about the past, and thanks to many technological innovations, we
know so much more about the last one hundred years of human civilizations
than the centuries and millennia before (it is also, obviously, much more
recent than the further past, with firsthand experience still available
and affecting those who lived through these events).
It is easy to compare how we handle crises in the past with how we handle
them today, and there are certainly lessons to be learned, but the
technology that allows us to remember so easily and vividly (with video
and audio recordings, as well as a wealth of written material) also
affects:
How (and How Long) Will We Remember the
Nineteen Sixties?
The baby boomers (born between 1946 and
1964) now range from fifty eight to seventy six. Despite plenty of
advances in medical technology over the last several decades, death will
reach out its not-so-groovy hand towards this generation. The ones that
were born into a strong social safety net that began to come undone in the
nineteen eighties, just as they fully came into positions of economic and
political power.
Middle class wealth had them from the
cradle. This does not mean they were all rich, but even those that found
‘only’ middle class success meant they could buy houses, receive good
health insurance coverage, and even save money for the future.
At the same time, the years that they
reached adulthood was filled with social change, much of it led by those
of the era of what is called the greatest generation (because they were in
power in the fifties and sixties).
Most of the baby boomers didn’t hit their
twenties until the seventies, and that was the ‘Me Decade’, as it didn’t
take long after Woodstock that this hippie stuff really wasn’t going to
work out once you came down from the acid.
While it still makes sense to market
products to the 18-35 demographic, the concentrated wealth among the baby
boomers from the nineteen-seventies, eighties and right up to today meant
the cultural industry kept trying to appeal to them and their wallets.
Why did it seem like they never shut up
about The Beatles? (Other than the fact The Beatles wrote a shit-ton of
amazing songs)
Because they kept buying Beatles albums
and merch. When CD arrived in the eighties, you re-bought Abbey Road, when
mp3s arrived in the 2000s, you bought its digital download, and then vinyl
became popular again you can buy it a fourth or fifth time.
Regarding the sixties itself, the social
movements of the decade meant the cultural material being created had
changed in leaps and bound when looking at both content and style.
This means that looking back today at the
music and movies and art of that time seems much less archaic than what
came from the nineteen fifties and before.
Technological advancements in the sixties
meant it was easy to record everything and anything, and it only got
easier as the twentieth century went on.
Easy-to-use cameras were finally
affordable and prevalent.
Photos weren’t few and far between and absolutely cherished possessions
but now things you can fill up album after album with (and hey, if some of
the were blurry or had the spook-filled ‘red eye’, you could get rid of
them and just take more).
As the middle class grew, so did
disposable income, and so did the opportunity to collect and accumulate
things that you could say interested or defined ‘you’.
The youth of the sixties were the first
demographic where goods and services were specifically advertised to them
via television, and its never stopped, nostalgia never ending as products
and events celebrated their twenty fifth, fortieth and fiftieth
anniversaries so you can buy a lava lamp again.
How are we remembering the sixties? With
product placement regularity.
Today, the 18-35 demographic can stream
their life to the entire world (or show off an entirely virtual one
online) which can be saved in hard drives as long as the electricity holds
out, which begs the question…
Did people used to remember more events
in their lives?
That because we live at a time where
there is a sensory overload thanks to the internet offering always new
information - coupled with the comparatively easy access to travel - that
we don’t spend time thinking about our past (childhood, early adulthood,
or whatever period depending on how old you are). We are always ‘onto
something new’, leaving our past in the proverbial dust. And when we want
to remember, there’s less (or less detail) in our memory banks and more in
hard drives.
On the other hand, while it makes sense
that the older you get, the earlier memories begin to fade, but some of
those can be recollected/jogged with the proper photo or cultural
artifact. Maybe because we’ve documented our present so often (thanks
again to modern technology) we can quickly remember easier than before.
But do we do this? How often do people look back at photos they’ve taken
years ago? You can take so many with your phone and store them
effortlessly, but it’s this simplicity that makes it less a valuable act.
People used to have to dig for photo albums and flip through pages and
pages of slightly blurred pictures to remember their high school years.
There was effort to reminisce. Now it’s
just another easy choice to shrug away.
James Brown
Since the Beatles are, at the end of the day, four individuals, it can be
said that James Brown is the most important singular person in the history
of 20th century music. No one figure wrote and performed music at his
level, while also having a massive influence on at least five genres of
music: R&B, soul, pop, funk and hip-hop.
Certainly Bob Dylan bringing a level of literary prowess to protest and
pop music casts a long shadow, but how many splits was he able to do
onstage?
Brown’s live shows are stuff of legend, and while it’s a treasure trove of
excellent footage from sixties, it’s amazing to think he would perform
regularly for forty more years, playing his last concerts only months
before his sudden death in 2006.
His sixties hits were paradoxically tightly arranged and performed while
more explosive and out there than anything else in the Top 40. It was
harder than R&B, heavier than soul, and more dance-able than rock.
He was a genre of one, so of course funk and hip-hop took that ur-rhythms
and ran with it.
James Brown was the only one actually partying inside your radio, proving
there’s nothing wrong with being 95% style and 87% substance if you’re
giving 110% in both (James Brown defies math).
"Kids these days" is a very boring phrase.
Kids
are overprotected, overstressed, have fewer respectable job prospects than
previous generations, and escape this depressing reality and bleak future
through any available digital screen.
And
anyone middle-aged and above can’t wait to say disappointed they are in
them, that there is the fear by the elders that the society they preside
over is going to be inherited by a generation of youth who are becoming
soft, over reliant, asexuals who can't cook or change a tire.
To
reassure this older generation:
Don't worry, your decisions regarding economic, environmental and resource
management will have much, much more catastrophic effects on humanity than
people texting too much and being pronoun sensitive.
So,
thanks for nothing baby-boomers and gen-x-ers. You took your lucky break
and broke it in two (ta, Sir Paul, who is pre-boomer).
In
the sixties the middle-aged and above clucked their tongues at the music,
the drugs, the premarital sex, and even just men having hair longer than a
buzz cut.
All
of this continued unabated through the seventies and eighties, with ‘just
say no’, ‘this is your brain on drugs’, and…
It
worked?
Today, youth are having less unsafe sex and taking fewer drugs than
generations past, so old people have to really reach and find something
else to complain about it.
And
they can’t put it all on ‘kids and their phones’, because today they’re on
it nearly as much.
So
what have they come up with?
LGTBQ issues apparently, especially the ‘T’, with the transgendered
community having to defend itself yet again from bigoted policies both
subtle and overt. But it looks like them having to fight for basic rights
both in the eyes of the law and general society is a good way for the
boomers to deflect just how much they’ve screwed up the environment,
rigged the economy, neutered democracy, etc.
Nietzsche is just Schopenhauer for chumps
The further back in
history you go, the more gossip and petty squabbles of human interaction
are lost to the sands of time.
In the history of
philosophy this is particularly true, as it makes sense that the thoughts
and writings of these people are almost wholly the focus as opposed to the
lives they lived.
That Immanuel Kant was so
punctual that his neighbours could set their watches and clocks by when he
left his house in the morning is probably a matter of not letting truth
get in the way of a good anecdote, especially one that can actually shed
light on what the man might be like as a person. Wow! Punctual!
As far as other German
philosophers go, the hyper organized and structural Hegel taught classes
at University of Berlin, and Schopenhauer (who looked and thought like a
maniac) purposely scheduled his own classes at the same time, because he
hated Hegel and wanted to try and steal his thunder. This wasn’t
a friendly rivalry, either, with Schopenhauer using words like
‘loathsome’,
‘repulsive’
and
‘ignorant
charlatan’ to describe his
co-worker.
Despite this, Hegel’s
classes were much more popular, as he was the better known academic at the
time.
Schopenhauer would get
the last laugh, because by keeping his doctrine (relatively) simple, he
arguably inspired more philosophers and thinkers in many other fields of
discipline since then.
To him, the indomitable
and irrational will is what drives humanity, including our attempts to
create a rational, structured world. We force our will upon chaos, and
then later we will force our will on order. Morals aren’t some higher
ideal, they are ways to dominate one another, so that each individual can
attain their goals.
And what is our goal?
More.
Just more.
Power, money, dessert.
It doesn’t actually
matter, because it can be different for everyone.
And Schopenhauer said it
first, but no one wanted to listen.
Not until Nietzsche stole
his hair and ideas.
David Bowie's Seventies Run
Between 1970 and 1979, David Bowie released ten albums, and all of them
were at least good with seven of them absolutely amazing. The closest
comparison of longstanding commercial and critical success is the sixties
run of The Beatles, and there were two and a half great songwriters there.
Bowie's output at the time ran the entire gamut of the popular music
spectrum during this time, meaning he was both influenced by the sounds
around him, as well as influencing them as well.
[You could say it started even earlier, with Bowie's novelty folk rock hit
of 1969 - 'Space Oddity' - being the culmination of that genre, born out
of electrifying Dylan's sound]
The hard-rock push of 1970's The Man
Who Sold the World has shades of an introspective Cream, a dreamy
Zeppelin, or a sunny Sabbath.
Hunky Dory is a Velvet-Underground mesh of art rock and baroque pop
that give nods to the Kinks and permission to Queen.
His commercial breakthrough – The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust - takes everything that works from
Dory and turns it into pop
concept album masterpiece, probably the best one since
Sgt Pepper.
Aladdin Insane is the quick follow-up with a Stardust character
(immortalized with the album cover), and some of the individual songs on
there (title track, Time, Jean Genie) are better than what was on the
previous record.
Diamond Dogs is a grimy, flip-side of Ziggy that was a hell of
a lot weirder and inpisred by Orwell’s
1984. Even his weakest 70s
record still has one of his best songs (Rebel, Rebel).
Young Americans is a soul-funk celebration filtered through a
toothpick-thin Englishman with a heavenly voice.
Station to Station
is a chilly coke freak-out, still danceable for plenty of it, but you can
feel
And he embraced the continent completely between 1977 and 1979 with the
rightfully acclaimed and influential trio of albums (Low,
Heroes, Lodger) now called, The Berlin Trilogy, because it’s a better
name than 'Outside of Paris then mostly in Berlin Trilogy' (although the
'Bowie-Eno trilogy' may suffice, because the latter is all over them).
These three albums involved sonic explorations that had a huge influence
on New Wave and therefore the sound of the eighties in general.
As
a bonus, there are two live albums spaced out far enough from each other (David
Live from 1974 and Stage
from 1978) that there is little song overlap and involve completely
different aesthetics and sounds. You can appreciate the fact that Bowie
didn’t just want to be a studio artist, and made sure he had a tight band
when bringing his music to the masses onstage.
“Seek and Ye Shall Find?”
When looking for an explanation for physical phenomena, the common sense
approach is to experiment and observe repeatedly and make conclusions
based on common and uncommon occurrences.
But at the same time, when exploring and ruminating in fields becoming
more and more familiar, some ideas and theories might come out of a
scientist’s brain before they set up an experiment. Now they might be
looking for a particular conclusion that would confirm what they
hypothesized.
Consider the following two quotes:
“One
can interpret Planck’s
1900 paper to mean only that the quantum hypothesis is used as a
mathematical convenience introduced in order to calculate a statistical
distribution, not as a new physical assumption, write science historians Gerald Holton and Steven
Brush.
Einstein, on the other hand, consider the light quantum to be a feature of
reality: a perplexing, pesky, mysterious and sometimes maddening quirk of
the cosmos.”
(Isaacson, pg.99)
Issacson, Walter.
Einstein: His Life and Universe. Toronto: Simon &
Schuster, 2007.
“After all, if the wave function of an electron can be
split and the result is two half-electrons, then it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the wave function is the electron. It isn’t a mere mathematical convenience, as physicists have
believed for nearly eighty years. It is the ultimate reality that lies
beneath the surface of the world.” (Chown, pg.43)
Chown, Marcus. The Universe Next Door.
2001.
What was supposed to exist only in theoretical comes out to exist in the
real.
While the familiar saying involves a hammer and prospective nail, one can
also observe that when you have math, everything looks like a number.
Einstein always made a point of saying how he tried to visualize the
problem, or to find allusions and comparisons to the natural world (he
uses dropping items out of train windows over bridges to describe
relativity).
Imagining a star bigger than the sun is easy because this star would still
have similar properties to the example we are familiar with, and even
someone with a passing knowledge of the solar system thanks to illustrated
comparisons in elementary school has internalized the idea that the sun is
very, very big but doesn’t look it because it is also very, very far away.
But on the sub-atomic size scale, how particles interact with each other
are wholly alien to our understanding and experience (even if we are made
up of billions upon billions of these particles).
The speed that these particles move and change energy states are
nonsensical by our standards, even when we use them for familiar
measurement because of their exactness. The scientific definition of one
second is the duration of 9 192 6310 770 (so 9 billion) periods of
transition between the hyperfine levels of the ground of state of a
Caesium-133 atom.
(cough)
To help us (both scientists and non-scientists alike), we have developed
computers to make all of this easier, and we can now use computer
modelling to create alternate conditions for the beginning of the universe
inside a hard drive, just to give us the results we want.
Never Promote Your Documentary
It
is a losing proposition, because while you want a lot of people to know
this piece of art exists, a sizeable, well-written article can negate the
entire point of watching it.
Chuck Klosterman noted that there was such a
media blitz around Metallica’s 2004 doc,
Some Kind of Monster (which
followed the band during the hardship of recording their 2003 album,
St Anger), that many people -
including Metallica fans - saw little reason to watch it, since interviews
and articles quickly went through the highlights.
If
you - either the subject or the director - are talking about the
documentary, it kind of explains how the movie ‘ends’, which is usually
about the experience of making the movie itself.
In
fictional films, an article or review wouldn’t give away too much plot or
a twist or ending (unless it has the words ‘spoiler alert’ plastered
around it), but describing what actually happened from beginning to end in
a documentary - y’know, real life - is almost expected in a piece about
it.
While it’s true that the all movie trailers these days spill too many
beans regarding the plots of fictional and non-fictional films, if someone
can get even a decent chunk of understanding concerning the ninety minute
documentary feature by watching said trailer or reading a ten minute
article on it, there’s a good chance they might not follow up and watch
the whole movie. But maybe they’ll watch a reaction video of someone else
watching it for the first time so they can see what this person thinks!
Here’s a Thought - January 2022
The
Matrix and Such
Using
pop culture references to further one’s political argument is easy, so
everyone does like it.
The
Matrix is a great touchstone because it was super-successful cool movie
with plenty of philosophical/political overtones. Think Orwell’s 1984 with
bullet-time action sequences.
‘Taking
the Red Pill’ is the not-very-shorthand for ‘wake up, sheeple’, and can be
applied to whatever fake, lie-filled system you think the world is being
manipulated by.
(https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/12/21/22847157/the-matrix-red-pill-legacy)
It may
start with the underdog going up against the big bully that controls
everything (whether rogue AI or Silicon Valley), but as the ideas get more
popular, everyone starts using these memes.
Suddenly the people you think would be setting up the Matrix itself are
the ones imploring you to take the red pill.
Those
that support a techno-fascist future (but are smart enough not to call it
that) do so because they see rampant individualism/liberalism as the
problem:
“I support a restriction on the exchange of free
ideas and opinions…except my own. Mine should be spread around and
adapted.”
It
should come as little coincidence that people who push for such policies
are the ones that are going to (or hope to) benefit from their adaptation.
Responsibility and freedom can sometimes smash into each other in
tough-to-resolve ways.
The
rights and freedoms we have under democratic laws need to be protected
with the utmost importance. It grants us the ability to make autonomous
decisions based on our own ideas and experiences.
Even
decisions that might inevitably unravel and walk back these democratic
laws.
Responsibility means behaving in a way that if everyone did the same
thing, it would be a net positive for the community (Kant’s categorical
imperative, in other words).
There
are ways to inadvertently harm society that are not against the law, and
considering that includes free speech, it’s important that they remain
that way.
But
that means a social responsibility comes into play.
You
have to decide to do the right thing.
And you
have every right to decide that everyone else is wrong regarding what you
should do. But you have to accept the responsibility that comes with this,
especially when things start to go bad.
Because
there is no natural system of check and balances, it has to be assiduously
and carefully maintained. Even the way we view nature is subjective to our
human limitations, both as individuals and a collective (how humans
experience/define nature is wholly different from how every other organism
experiences nature).
We have
to choose a system and do our best to uphold the best components of it.
As the
Wachowskis’ later said/clarified in the Matrix: Reloaded:
‘The
Problem is Choice.’
Weather or Not
One of the earliest attempts to understand and explain nature was using
deities and their whims in regards to weather patterns, particularly
devastating storms or sudden natural disasters, but also the lack of rain
when dependable agricultural success was a matter of life and death.
Shamans
and priests were tasked with bringing or taking away the water that fell
from the sky, because it must be a gift or curse from the gods. While
dances and music-focused rituals seem amusing now, finding social
scapegoats that could be ostracized or killed seem less so. In even in
more mundane ways, sailors’ rhyming couplets regarding ‘red skies
at night’ show an early attempt at weather forecasting.
Looking to the sky desperate for rain (or desperate for rain to end) is
just the start, as how we see the stars have always been reflective of the
culture of the time.
It was called 'the heavens' because it was the place of gods. We saw
spirits, symbols, myths. Rudimentary forms of astronomy had a sliver of
science and big heap of entertainment pulled out of the then-expert’s ass
(also known as astrology).
As technology advanced, we looked at it through a more scientific lens.
When it comes to things in the sky, aliens - alternative civilizations on
habitual planets similar to earth - replaced angels as the entities that
we could possibly meet if we went even further and further past the
clouds.
But as far as we have to come to know for certain about high and low
pressure weather systems, how they are going to act hour by hour over a
relatively small area of the globe is not so exact.
Much like how the rules that dictate how matter, energy and space-time act
- which scientists know in great detail - break down when they get to a
very small and particular scale. Certainties become probabilities.
Chances of rain are exactly that. Chances. And when the estimates are
eighty or ninety percent, many people naturally boot that number to one
hundred percent in their heads, and are then annoyed when that ten or
twenty percent difference comes through.
All the psychological biases come tumbling out, and you forget the times
the meteorologist was right, and only remember when they were wrong.
How Soon Is Panama? - Comparing The Smiths and Van Halen
-hugely influential bands of the eighties in terms of
musical style and overall presentation
-charismatic frontmen who wanted to do more poppy songs and
left to starts solo careers that started hot but soon led to diminishing
returns
-unique, iconoclastic guitar players whose sound inspired an
entire genre after them
-always trying to fire part of the rhythm section -a production style and musical sound that is
credited to both the band and a celebrated producer
-in terms of the actual ‘mood’ of the music, however, they
are exact opposites, as Van Halen can’t wait to party, and The Smiths
can’t wait to brood at home because parties just remind them that you’ll
ultimately end up alone
Can You
Knock the Hustle?
It’s
tough make money these days, and plenty of people have taken plenty of
jobs that might do more damage to society (in subtle and overt ways) than
help it.
Obviously illegal activities are the easiest ones to point out, but you
turn to theft or drug dealing because there might not be other jobs
available to you, your situation or your skill-set.
Now
there have been many jobs in the last century (particularly in the gas and
chemical industries) were it wasn’t exactly clear if (and how much) the
work was affecting the health of people and/or the planet, but now we know
how terrible they are.
And many of variations of
these jobs still exist…because we still need plastic and heat/electricity.
In this we are all guilty of looking the other way for the sake
convenience and comfort.
Then
there are many jobs that are in the grey area, such as many online jobs
that create data for the sake of data (in order to maybe sell a product
someone might eventually by), or create purposely misleading content that
will still garner clicks.
Speaking of promotion, while we might be used to seeing celebrities shill
cars, watches or perfume, having them promoting products and services that
might have slow developing but devastating effects to society at large
(like gambling, crypto or credit cards) is simply disappointing. In part
because these stars are already quite wealthy.
The
hustle itself revolves around our concept of money and how important it
for us to have. We can’t really deny that it is tied to a form of freedom
that we are constantly told is the most important in modern society:
Economic freedom, debt free, ‘fuck you money’, do whatever it takes to
make that bread.
Civilization’s
Tombstone:
We
Couldn’t
Keep
Up
“Building
such
a
complicated
socioeconomic
system
that
was
expected
to
be
manageable
and
malleable
in
the
face
of
rapid
technological
change
is
not
easy.”
-
a
hypothetical
textbook
from
one
thousand
years
in
the
future
about
the
Industrial
and
Digital
Revolutions
In the last two centuries technology
moved
faster
than
we
ever
could.
It
complicated
many
socioeconomic
policies
and
community beliefs and therefore quickly
alienated
or
made
powerless
great
swaths
of
people
in
both
democratic
and
non-democratic
states.
It
radically
altered
forms
of
communication
that
had
either
stayed
roughly
the
same
for
centuries
or
changed
at
a
much
slower,
comfortably
adaptable
pace.
It
made
the
exchange
of
information
and
capital
much
quicker,
which
meant
that
the
already
wealthy
could
easily
accumulate
more
with
any
sort
of
government
regulation
lagging
sorely
behind.
That
it
coincides
with
a
period
where
the
climate/atmospheric
effects
of
fossil
fuel
burning
are
being
felt
to
great
detriment
(and
no
quick
way
to
stop
or
reverse
said
effects),
is
perhaps
little
surprise.
Rapid
technological
development is
an
extremely
complex
process
with
glorious
pluses
and
devastating
minuses.
We
have
a
hard
time
arranging
and
assessing
an
overload
of
information
that
might
contain
a
kernel
or
truth
ensconced
in
layer
of
misinformation
and
corporate-political
spin.
Handing
certain
jobs
over
to
AI
may
solve
some
problems,
but
also
create
many
unforeseen ones until it is too late.
The
solution
for
a
scenario
spiralling
out
of
control
is
probably
not
handing it all over to an ‘inhuman problem solving device’
we
even
know
less
about.
Paul Thomas Anderson and the
Atmosphere Flick
You can start with Malick and
Cassavetes’ seventies work. A stylistic depiction of adventure and expanse
from the first, and a much more nuanced and intimate look at human
interaction from the second.
But in both cases the story felt
secondary, and that was absolutely fine. No need to breathing hard in
anticipation as to how our heroes (or anti-heroes) were going to resolve
the situation. Just being around them and seeing their foibles was
entertaining enough. Even happy endings were not necessary. Just have a
satisfying one.
But if you’re going to make
depressing art, at least make it weird and interesting depressing art.
1993’s Sonatine brought mood and
ennui to a group of Yakuza that are lying low in a small beach town and
getting into some (occasionally deadly) misadventures, and is an excellent
preview for the next three decades of the atmosphere flick.
PT Anderson certainly became the
best example of this, as Boogie Nights was ‘about’ the people in adult
film industry in the seventies and eighties. No one particular character
had a compelling story arc involving any sort of complicated development.
Certainly there were highs and lows, but the main antagonist was the
passage of time. The enjoyment came from relating and becoming invested in
the characters, and Anderson, the cast, the and crew combine to do an
excellent job of feeling like you’re involved in the adult film industry
in the late seventies.
While Magnolia had oodles of
interconnecting-mini-narratives, Anderson perfected the non-story story
with There Will Be Blood and The Phantom Thread. The first was about an
asshole oil businessman and the second was about a slightly lesser asshole
fashion designer.
Taking cues from Kubrick (who
doesn’t?) and letting the camera and conversation linger upon the
characters into possible awkwardness for the audience, Anderson furnishes
the rest of the world (whether the American west in the early 1900s or
post WWII England) so perfectly that you are captivated by being…there.
The critical success and
influence of Anderson’s work can be seen right up to today, from Cuaron’s
Roma to Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Both are filmed beautifully
and have incredible performances by the entire cast, but it is the
atmosphere that makes the difference.
24 Hours of News?
Fox News and MSNBC is pretty explicit about their agendas
(appealing to the stark opposites of the political coin), whereas CNN is
like a chicken with its head cut off scrambling for ratings/views. What do
people want to see and hear? Additionally, how do they want to see and
hear it? In thirty second sound-bites on their phone?
Comparing the coverage of news and sports has become much
more de-rigueur in recent years, so it should come as little surprise that
both are looking a lot like the other. There is no longer an off-season,
and ‘breaking news’ can occur any time if you follow a professional sport
assiduously. Meanwhile news is bulking up on polls and stats that might
not mean anything forty-eight hours later.
It says a lot about our society and where its power truly
lies when our political candidates are forced to act like salesmen and TV
talking heads and sports coaches are taking tough questions in post-game
press conferences.
And the fact that the much of public largely sees through
this and tries to find a political figure that sounds different (in hopes
that they would act different) speaks volumes as to how people view their
government institutions. Even though this difference is likely to also be
a familiar TV/movie archetype: The brash straight-shooter, the scrappy
underdog, the scheming rich villain.
Sometimes there is not enough news to fill the day, and you
have to start cribbing from the rest of popular culture.
How Deadly Is Misinformation and
Disinformation?
How can you measure the way these
activities not only put people’s lives in peril, but also the health of a
functioning and free democracy?
(https://www.vox.com/22774745/death-threats-election-workers-public-health-school)
Trust is something that is too
easily taken for granted.
How many people have to think
that every government official is involved in a giant conspiracy before
the government doesn’t work anymore?
A smaller number than we would
hope.
Suspicion and disenchantment with
long-standing institutions can happen relatively quickly, especially
compared to how long it might have taken to build up trust with these
systems.
If a profit can be made from
telling lies without recourse, it should come as no surprise that this has
really taken off in the digital age.
A sea of ever expanding data that
you can get lost in very quickly and not even think you’re lost because
you are being catered to by algorithmic search results that give you
exactly what you want.
It gets to the point where doing
nothing is actually helping. Not spreading misinformation is something
wear like a badge of honour, because it makes the job of getting accurate
information out there much easier.
But would you cheat and lie to
keep your democracy in tact, or would you be upright and honest and watch
it slip into fascism?
Is it inevitable that if you lie
and cheat that you will inevitably start to use such means for your own
benefit? That lying and cheating is already negative actions associated
more with fascism than democracy in the first place does not bode well to
the argument that you can constantly use such tools so that your
questionable tactics will actually benefit of the most amount of people in
your nation.
Getting Decent Marx
The
Marxist concept of alienation was borne out of the industrial revolution
and was focused on the conveyor belt-like creation of goods in massive
factories and warehouses. People become so far removed from the creation
of the products they use that they don't see the workers a fellow
citizens, but just cogs in a greater machine.
Obviously this process accelerated throughout the twentieth century as it
became cheaper to make good in low-wage developing countries and ship them
across the world than to make them close to where people will ultimately
by the product. The manufacturing industry was an important pillar for
middle class employment in the western world, and it cracked and fell over
in the last few decades of the last century.
With
the digital revolution, this is now happening in the service industry. You
interact with retailers less and less for several reasons. Tech advances
make it easier to automate more aspects of buying products and services.
So much so that employees are becoming more and more the most expensive
part of running a retail store or restaurant, so the less of them there
are, the more money the owner can make.
Delivery persons - whether long and short haul truck drivers with many
packages or a bag of chicken wings on the back of someone’s e-bike - is
the backbone of the gig economy, and don’t need to interact with people
when they reach their destination.
You
don’t have to think about any of the work that was involved in getting
your pad-thai onto your kitchen table because you never saw a single face
related to it.
And
more vehicular automaton might mean even delivery persons are next on the
chopping block.
What
are we to do with this ever growing pool of unemployed/underemployed?
The
world needs a New Deal, Roosevelt style. One country enacting policies
(even one as big as China or America) won't cut it. Countries are so
interdependent with complex but essential trade and exchange rules that
you can't effectively make reforms by going one nation at a time.
The
New Deal was essentially the largest and most successful redistribution of
power from the few and very wealthy to the many and little wealth. Not
surprisingly, the rich people back then really hated it, and called
Roosevelt a communist, a socialist, etc. So it's no surprise that the same
arguments are being levied against similar economic reforms that are
deemed essential for the continuation of the middle class, and a truly
representative democracy. Make no mistake, the changes that must be made
now are the same that were made in the 1930s: Taking power away from the
rich and giving it to the poor.
Norm
(There aren’t many famous people named Norm, so it’s easy to
know who you’re talking about with these four letters. The only other
person with that name recognition in the last few decades is the fictional
character played by George Wendt on the show Cheers. In fact, this is how
Dennis Miller once introduced Norm on his talk show…’George Wendt’)
No one played the dumb guy as clever as Norm Macdonald did.
He came off as your slightly slow, slightly oddball friend who came up
with the wildest comedy ideas. He could get away with the most offensive
comments and material because he made it seem to come from a place of
naive innocence, not snide superiority. Pointing out the obvious was
hilarious when Norm did it because he made it seem like he was realizing
the thought just as he was saying it.
It really felt like he didn’t know he was making jokes (it
was as if he was just reading the teleprompter on Weekend Update, having
no idea what word might come next)…except when he was absolutely overtly
making jokes (his later appearances on Conan when he retells the old
classics, even doing the hack routine of making show sidekick (and
Swedish-German) Andy Richter the ‘star’ of them).
Norm was simultaneously the butt of the joke and in on the
joke, so even if it backfired…that was funny for some people, including
(and most importantly) Norm himself.
It was not exactly the anti-humour of Neil Hamburger, but it
was close.
Sometimes it’s hard to watch Norm’s standup for more than
five minutes because of its intentional stiltedness. In fact, some of the
best Norm moments came when interacting with other people, funny or non.
His recent ‘shows’ (focusing more on interviews and less on
monologue-like jokes, and sensibly titled ‘The Norm MacDonald Show’ and
‘Norm MacDonald has a Show’) were the best vehicles to flex his comedy
chops, showing a very quick mind behind an intentionally slow delivery.
Dismissing Right Wing Extremists Doesn't Make Them Go Away
When progressives celebrate any sort of achievement, and then hear that
the right is not going to be happy about it, the response is something
along the lines of 'screw 'em'.
But that doesn't stop the right from reacting. And this reaction might
just be complaining ad infinitum on right wing talk shows, but it also
might spur an active voting block and political movement to reverse said
achievement, or it might inspire a militia to try to kidnap a democratic
governor, or might make a guy snap so they shoot up a predominantly black
church.
All of this is why 'screw 'em' is a useless rejoinder when discussing how
to deal with political opponents, especially at a time when politics is
getting more polarized.
The key is to lessen to extreme reactions, and doing that is much, much
harder.
RWE’s didn’t appear overnight, and they won’t disappear that quickly,
either.
It is a good time as ever to acknowledge that everyone can quickly fall
into a very comfortable opinion-bubble/echo chamber, but if your tv and
radio ‘newspinion’ stations are telling you how shitty the government is
as you think about how shops and factories are closing in your town,
you’ll link those two ideas together.
Only when reality doesn’t match the message will extremism lessen, and
that means there needs to be a regeneration of towns and small cities.
Which means more money needs to be pumped into them, which means more
progressive spending policies, which means voting for left-leaning,
progressive politicians-
Nuts.
The Lessons of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’
They are universal and timeless.
Unfortunately.
Arthur Miller was already big time when The Crucible was
first performed in 1953, thanks to Death of a Salesman, which arrived four
years earlier.
Miller transposed the Red Scare of the early fifties to
17th century Salem, Massachusetts, explicitly comparing the grilling of
citizens by the government as to whether they were part of the communist
party to the infamous Witch Trials centuries earlier.
In an example of life imitating art, three years after the
play’s debut, the playwright was forced to appear in front of the House of
Un-American Activities to explain his political viewpoints and actions, as
well as name names of fellow artists who accompanied him. When he refused,
he was blacklisted and held in contempt of congress.
If Death of a Salesman can now be seen as the current state
of Western Democracy (past its prime but still trying to find its way
despite the inability to accept the harsh reality of the situation), then
The Crucible can be seen as our collective identity’s reaction to such a
state. It is full of anger, paranoia, baseless accusations,
quick-to-judge, hypocrisy, and the wealthy taking advantage of it all.
The Crucible takes place in a community that has not yet
become familiar with its new surroundings, since it’s an environment (cold
winters in the
‘New
World’
in the 1600s) they
doesn’t know how to control. Not much different than the virtual/digital
world we are tumbling headfirst into as the twenty-first century lurches
forward.
The Slow Sadness of Today’s Death
Hobbes suggested that for most people in 17th
century life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (more so than the notions of
the social contract he espouses in his opus, Leviathan, he is known for
those four words).
For more and more people in this overwhelming
21st century, this is no longer the case. Living longer and longer has
seemingly become a given for each generation (covid being the first time
it’s waffled), and no longer just in the Western
world.
Access to basic health care has greatly
improved, not only at life’s beginnings (since for a lot of human history,
childbirth and infancy was a risky period for mother and child alike), but
at its end as well.
Which comes with unforeseen quandaries.
Dying is no longer a relative quick process
for many, but can take weeks, months or even years with plenty of complex
medical care required.
It is a wonder of science that people can
live with ailments, but it allows for the uncomfortable question of ‘what
kind of quality of life?’
The body might break down slower, but it
inevitably does, and so too does the mind (and having the latter go before
the former can be a tragedy all by itself, with exhaustion, confusion, and
despondency being just as cruel as cancer).
Keeping people alive who can no longer
adequately care for themselves is now asking too much of family members.
Death is guided and funnelled into certain
rooms and building away from the bustling modern world.
In the West, with many of the baby boomers
reaching their autumn years, nursing homes are having difficulty offering
the necessary services, especially at a cost most families can afford.
Respect and quality of life are
near-impossible to put a price tag on…but the more money you have the
better options and comfort will be available to you.
Until you die just like everyone else, just
lying in a bed weak and uncertain for a few more years.
It’s a damn shame that so much of humanity
(and human history) has to hold up death as the next step of understanding
to how the world/universe/human existence works. The answer to the big
questions like ‘why are we here?’ has to be ‘I don’t know, but maybe…’,
and so is overlapped with the question ‘what happens after we die?’, since
it has similar answers. It is explained that after we die…there will be an
explanation. That there is more. More of something. More life, more
consciousness, more awareness, just more. Because we are afraid of
conceiving of anything…less.
Ta, Schopenhauer.
Where do you see poor people on television?
First disregard scripted fiction shows, as whoever depicts an impoverished
individual are well-paid actors, and their barely realistic takes on what
it's like to experience poverty within the traditional storytelling
formats (sometimes with ads) cannot be taken that seriously.
Poor people are talked about on news programs, but are rarely featured.
Even on shows that are about regular people trying to win money (whether
game or reality-focused), whatever economic situation the contestants
might actually be in are quickly glossed over because hey, everyone wants
to make money, right?
The poor have always been shunted aside because a lot of the culture we
want to imbibe involves quickly conquering that ‘inconvenience’ (even if
it’s a damning part of many people’s lives).
If we turn away
from the poverty-stricken on the street, it’s no surprise we do the same
on our entertainment screens,
even if the
images of employment are wrapped (and warped) around the ideal.
When we think of a career involving working with your hands, it’s always
fixing up old motorcycles or making ornate arts and crafts, it’s not
stocking shelves in a dollar store.
In movies and tv series ,edical professionals are helping people who look
comfortable and are very appreciative, so you don’t see nurses turning
helpless, disoriented elderly people on their sides so they can clean
bedsores and wipe their ass.
Office meetings are bright and smiling and full of enthusiastic
suggestions instead of bored people trying to stay awake or desperate to
get back to their desk (unless played for laughs or drama).
Popular culture shows a very skewered mirror to reality, based a lot more
on what we want as individuals and as a society than what we have.
HERE'S A THOUGHT - SUMMER 2021
Talkin' 'Bout Religious Speech
Forcing the religion out of you in going to have the same sort of problems
as forcing the religion into you:
(https://www.vox.com/21523506/france-teacher-attack-terrorism-free-speech-muslims)
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-quebec-court-ruling-1.5993431)
Dogmatic secularism and dogmatic sectarianism are both extreme reactions.
Free speech has always been a brain melter, especially when religion gets
involved. While France literally holds up cartoon depiction of the prophet
Muhammad as an example of free speech, there are also rules in the country
about discussing holocaust denial (seen as anti-Semitic). The difference
between anti-religious speech and any sort of controversial art might be
made by the state, but that doesn’t mean citizens are going to agree with
said difference.
And
bringing both of those topics in one sentence can't help but be an alarm
bell, dog whistle, what have you, with people looking for agendas and
angles of what is being said loudly or quietly (Is the position
pro-Muslim? Anti-Israel? Infused with bonkers conspiracy theories?).
How
do you get everyone to...relax? Admittedly that is a very naive and
reductionist way of putting it, but right now there is a fierce
nationalism/nativism streak running through western nations, and it is
easy to divide people based on what god they worship and how they worship
it.
Divisions based on how people live their lives is bad enough, but ones
based on what happens after life ends can be much more catastrophic.
History is full of terrible, unlearned lessons about that, but pointing
out just how damaging religion has been (especially when it has plenty of
political/economic/militaristic power) is bound to upset somebody.
Spolitics
When politics is covered, analyzed and discussed like a sport, and
vice-versa, we have un-defined success.
The
reaction to the planned European Super League (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/european-super-league-football-inside-story-65033gpsj)
by almost every football fan in Europe was inspiring, and, even more
surprising, successful.
It
mirrors a corporation trying to do something greedy, with
workers/customers making such a PR stink on social media (and maybe even
protesting) that the corporation has to back down.
It
is viewed as a win for the little people, the working stiffs, the salt of
the earth. They’re setting aside their differences to achieve a common
goal. That the already super wealthy association football teams of Europe
backed down and decided to not pursue an extra elite tournament shows that
yes, sometimes the masses do have a bit of power to stand up for what they
collectively believe in.
Too
bad it happened just for fun and games.
Meanwhile this doesn't happen nearly as much in politics because it seems
like once a proposal is put it out, no matter how odious or harmful it
might be most citizens (and only benefit the very few), there is rarely
enough of a public outcry (and unity) to derail the proposal.
It's like many people have given up on political change, and are focused
more on protesting sports and culture, because at least in these areas it
seems like change is possible (even though it is much less impactful on
everyone’s lives) than politics. In fact, that's why change is 'allowed'
(by the powerful) here to some degree, because it doesn't make as much of
a difference as in politics and consequently the wealthy people’s bottom
line.
MAR$?
While great technological and exploratory strides have been made when it
comes to the red planet, we aren't going have a colony on Mars until we
have a radical re-think of society and money on earth.
It has been decided that space exploration costs so much because we can't
get it out of the global socioeconomic system. It is built out of
materials and resources that are part of the common market, and for all
the potential that vertical integration can have on saving money, there is
still the manpower and time that is required for the amount of precision
and exactness to make sure there isn’t a rapid and unscheduled disassembly
(aka, boom).
Since the Apollo missions, NASA hasn’t got a lot of (safe) bangs for their
bucks, as the Space Shuttle Program and space telescopes like Hubble and
James Webb were/are money pits that went wildly over budget.
But it was government funds, and was less beholden to making money off the
project when it was successfully completed. The idea that private
companies can do everything better than public ones comes with a massive
caveat: it is expected to turn a profit, and there is no profit in going
to Mars for a long, long time. It's nice that billionaires see this as a
bit of side project, but that's not going to get us there.
Space has barely made any money. Yes the satellites that orbit earth are
immensely important profitable, but right above earth isn't really
'space'. In fact, it's called 'low earth orbit', and you’re not even out
the planet’s gravity pull.
The only time
The relationship between SpaceX and NASA is intrinsically linked, although
in actuality the former works for the latter via contracts. Of course
SpaceX is branching out and making money ‘on the side’ via creating their
own internet service provider (Starlink) and even creating the concept of
space billboards.
Virgin Galactic is already offering seats on their ‘sure why not let’s
call it low earth orbit’ voyages, and Bezos isn’t far behind.
It obviously naive to say something like ‘space should be free’, but we’re
only going to go so far if early trip access to the cosmos remains
expensive.
To put it in perspective, space-for-profit will work as well as
health-care-for-profit.
Star Trek's Lore
(Not to be confused with the character 'Lore'. Thanks, Star Trek!)
Because it was initially conceived as a tv series on a budget that kept
getting cut, Star Trek's visual style and presentation rarely reached its
loftier story-telling aspirations.
Even after transitioning to commercially successful films in the late
seventies and early eighties (thanks, other Star-something!), The Next
Generation still had to come up with creative ways to make the future look
impressive. With a whopping twenty six episodes per season (using Q and
the Borg sparingly was a key to those characters' longevity), 'monster of
the week' shows were inevitable, and many of them were wholly forgettable.
Not to mention being chained to 'seven minutes then a commercial break'
storytelling format.
TNG was so successful it spawned it's own string of feature films, and for
much of the nineties there was usually two Star Trek shows on at the same
time (plus older series’ re-runs).
So why are recent series just...good?
Obviously nostalgia is very fucking fickle, and Picard is/was all about
bringing the old gang back again, but any big story about humanity's
future is always an attractive notion for show producers and fans.
If you take away that one thing which almost everyone thinks of when they
think Star Trek (one ship travelling through space), you'll find that the
bigger story of humanity's exploration of the Galaxy is just as
interesting.
In fact, what happens in the 21st century according to Star Trek Lore
feels like an example of life imitating art imitating life.
Guess what, in the Star Trek Universe most of the first half of this
current century is crap, with technology run amok, increased environmental
devastation and disaster, and greater instability between nations.
It culminates in a devastating world war in the 2050s, but since war is
typically a time of technological innovation (even if it's to just destroy
the enemy more effectively), it is out of this period that warp drive
travel is discovered. And a test flight its inventor undertakes is noticed
by aliens who happened to be passing by (in this case, Vulcans, who are
thankfully peaceful) . The rest is, as they say, a very profitable sci-fi
universe.
The TNG movie First Contact does a good job at depicting all this, even as
it once again has to lean heavy on time travel to get the 23rd century
gang back to the big moment two hundred years earlier. The post WWIII
civilization is in tatters, but because Star Trek is an American media
franchise, that's where it conveniently takes place.
When one of the people from the 21st century find themselves on the
Enterprise, in addition to being overwhelmed, they ask how much it could
possibly cost to build, and Picard explains that they don't have 'money'
anymore, that all of humanity has set aside competing for personal gain or
interest, and instead work together for common, aspirational goals of
spreading across the galaxy.
What a ridiculous, silly sci-fi show!
If this is what people are stealing...
(https://www.npr.org/2021/05/08/994656425/theres-big-money-in-stolen-catalytic-converters)
(Going underneath cars to unplug and remove a small device and then flip
it on the back/grey market)
...then society is truly getting to a breaking point.
It is a regression, an acknowledgement of the limitations of the
supposedly limitless virtual world being built every second of the day.
There is a physicality to our lives that is not being addressed as it once
was.
The
barely acknowledged concern is that because of continued economic
hardship, petty crime and robbery/assault rates might rise (after being
quite low for a long time, because online fraud becoming more frequent and
having replaced it). Which might result is calls for making stronger
sentencing laws, which will expand the prison population (or people living
under house arrest/perpetual probation), which will make economic hardship
that much worse for already hard-hit, low-income communities. These are areas
that have been completely ignored by the corporations and institutions
that see the virtual/digital realm as the future. And they ignore it at
everyone’s peril.
South Park
Like
The Simpsons, South Park started to make a swerve in its third and fourth
seasons that offered something much deeper, interesting and funnier than
'just' the gross-out comedy that sparked its initial fad in 1997-1999,
which led to a movie that surprised everyone in terms of critical and
commercial success. Most film critics were not expecting ‘Bigger, Longer
and Uncut’ to be a well-written musical with heavy political overtures
where the song are actually amazing. But that's what Matt Parker and Trey
Stone were doing before South Park: musicals. Obscene, ridiculous
musicals.
It
was such an innocent time, twenty years ago, when 'giant douche versus a
turd sandwich' was meant to characterize Bush versus Gore, and summarized
how disenchanted the public was with modern politics (oh, how things have
changed). 'South Park Republican' was a thing for awhile, and the creators
showed their apolitical by nature by stating that they hated liberals, but
really hated conservatives.
Not
all episodes had to deal with such topical events. 'Scott Tenorman Must
Die' is a revenge story with hints of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (and
pubic hair). ‘Fish Sticks’ puts a humourous spin on the terrifying way
sociopaths can view the world in a much different way than everyone else
(courtesy of Cartman ‘remembering’ how a joke was created). ‘Simpsons
Already Did It’ makes light of the challenge of coming up with new story
ideas over time, because...see the episode title.
It’s
cardboard cutout style of animations (even though they are made with CG
that can do amazing stuff) gives it a chance to be as offensive and
bizarre as it likes, because unrealistic art more easily permits
unrealistic and uncouth scenarios (like seeing the same eight year old
child die horribly over and over in many, many episodes).
A
year and a half after South Park's arrival, Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy
debuted, and it has also become a veritable institution, having run for a
total of nineteen seasons so far.
But
it never pivoted out of the shadow of being a Simpsons clone. While the
joke ratio might be the same as The Simpsons, Family Guy leaned so heavily
into that instead of character development that it’s fair to view it more
like a skit show with recurring characters than a sitcom. In fact, the
show tripled down on this formula, with McFarlane also co-creating and
overseeing American Dad and The Cleveland Show, which lift its visually
storytelling and joke style from Family Guy.
South Park’s commitment to ‘less is more’ (both in terms of visual style
and 13 episodes per season) has allowed it to make the wildest comic ideas
(Wal-Mart as the blob, earth as an alien tv series, everyone chipping in
to build a ladder to heaven) become biting satire that says more about
modern society than any newspaper or magazine article. Oh, and it’s just
hilarious on top of it all.
It's the roaring (nineteen) twenties all over
again:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/technology/crypto-art-NFTs-trading-cards-investment-manias.html)
When experts start describing the market as 'stupid', it's time to ask
just what is 'the market'?
AI and computer model predictors are having a larger and larger hand in
the shaping of the market, but they are still serving the interests of
banks that developed them. What if they worked for the public good
instead?
Speculation has been a business investment option for far too long. In
every other definition of the word, speculation is fraught with danger and
is not advised, there is in an inherent risk to it. And while it is true
there is a financial risk when investing in anything, it is not the same
sort of risk that affects societies and communities when basic resources
and necessities for survival (from water to petroleum to wheat) are priced
thousands of miles away inside a computer modelling program.
The term 'lemming-like behaviour' always seems to minimize the fact that
it usually leads to a bunch of them going off a cliff and dying. If the
point of this behaviour is to get out at the right time with the money
while everyone else loses, it means you are living in a world where there
is suddenly a lot more losers. And that has huge effects for individuals
and governments, two concepts that you might not care as much about
anymore now that you’ve struck it rich by ‘earning’ a ton of money from
them.
For every GameStop-like example of the masses taking back Wall Street or
disrupting it, there is the acknowledgement that it is business as usual
for a very small group of investors making risky financial decisions that
have massive reverberations far beyond their portfolio or quarterly profit
earnings.
When this unspeakably shaky economy craters, and the 'experts' ask what
went wrong, what possible explanation can there be except that the very
rich people didn't want to share?
There could be a system where the wealthy is more evenly distributed in a
society (not absolutely evenly distributed, just more evenly than the
massive inequality there is now), but the people who have an inordinate
amount of power seem to have no interest creating that.
The problems that come out of this sort of society are already becoming
apparent.
The ever widening pool of poor will suffer. The wealthy will just be
inconvenienced.
We're at a politicization point where being contrary is more effective for
retaining power than being useful
So goddamn stupid:
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-delegates-reject-climate-change-is-real-1.5957739)
Because in modern politics you can't risk supporting a popular policy that
your opposition is better known for (otherwise there's less of a
difference between you, and then the voters will just stick with your
opposition), the Canadian Conservative Party has decided to deny climate
change. Apparently it's better to be stupid and different than smart and
the same.
Conservatives worldwide are over a barrel because their basic economic
policy has been the dominant one for several decades, which has made a
small group of people very rich and made most of their citizens poorer.
They can't run on fixing it, because they don't think it should be fixed,
even though it's destroying the middle class, the backbone of democracy
itself.
What remains is boogeyman social and cultural issues and appealing to the
far right fringe of the party who see conspiracies in everything. These
are straw-man, semantic ‘whattabout’ moments, because there seems to be
the solipsistic notion that winning an argument is equal to making the
world a better place. Boy is it not.
Conservatives have to hold idiotic policy positions, because if they hold
the same blandly centre-left policies as the liberal parties (which will
at least start to address the huge economic and social inequality), then
there would be no reason to vote conservative.
From the perspective of maintaining one's own political identity, it makes
sense clinging to bonehead ideas. From the perspective of trying to
address society's ills, it's stupid, embarrassing and dangerous.
Meta-riffic: Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water
A song with such a blatantly prehistoric cave-man guitar riff, where it's
nickname is 'Duhn-Duhn-Dun', and even the band considered it a filler
track that was kicking around when they were making their sixth album.
It's a ballad in the traditional sense, where the lyrics tell a story. In
this case...it's the story of
writing Smoke on the Water. While the chorus is 'smoke on water, fire in
the sky', the verses are about the band Deep Purple going to record an
album in Switzerland. While there, they go to a Frank Zappa concert, where
the venue - on the shores of Lake Geneva - catches fire and burns down.
The band are worried that they will run out of time to finish recording
their album, but no worries, they did (thanks to the Rolling Stones mobile
recording studio truck, which is oddly described in the verses as ‘the
rolling truck stones thing just outside’).
Lyrically, it is both dense and ridiculously simple at the same time.
Self-aware and the equivalent of an eighth-grader giving a report on what
they did for their summer vacation.
The Chauvin Sentencing Is Just a Start
That how low the low bar is for what to celebrate in terms of improving
race relations is in America. Wanting the police to stop killing unarmed
black men is too much to ask for apparently, so finally just holding one
accountable in the court of law is held up as a
win.
There is certainly
some measure of relief for George Floyd's family as well as the African
American community as a whole with this result, but my god, it is the
thinnest silver lining when it comes to addressing the many systemic and
sadly still blatant examples of racism that minorities must face.
The marginalization and ostracization of minorities in America never ended
after the civil rights act. It just morphed from outright racism to
systemic, which meant re-routing social assistance funds from
predominantly black urban communities (by claiming there was plenty of
fraud) to white suburban/rural ones. It meant that for decades the
'viewpoint' in conservative circles was that Black people were lazy and
liars first (not true, as welfare abuse was bullshit) and violent
criminals second (citing rising crime in these impoverished communities as
proof).
This was done primarily for votes and power (that the politicians pushing
this narrative having racist views was practically incidental), and it
worked so well that many rural and suburban whites became both resentful
towards and scared of black people.
It was a horrible system that worked...until politicians and corporations
got too greedy (shock, horror) and started sucking the money out of white
communities as well, plunging them into poverty. And what happened there?
Rising crime rates and drug addiction.
What needs to be done is blandly clear: A transfer of power (meaning
wealth) from the small group of people who have an abundance of it to the
massive amount of people who have so much less power.
A holiday commemorating Juneteenth is a
wonderful symbolic gesture, and there is certainly value in highlighting
the horrors of the past and still very present challenges of today
(both in classrooms and general discourse), but it is mere window dressing
to the one thing that will make the true difference, the way to really
rehabilitate a community:
Money.
Whether this means reparations (and calling them such) for individual
citizens, or large investments in infrastructure and jobs programs in
minority communities, money is what will make the difference in the years
to come.
For marginalized groups that have higher rates of poverty thrust upon them
thanks to systemic racism, giving them power is what needs to be done, or
further tragedies like George Floyd’s death will sadly continue.
Why Didn't the Segway Catch On?
If laziness is the mother of invention, if humanity (and the laws of
physics) seem to always take the path of least resistance, why have we not
embraced the device that saves you from walking?
IT allows you to either stand completely still, or (if that's too onerous
for you) lean/grab onto a handle a waist height and move around with only
slight gestures and movements with your body.
Is walking still too easy when you factor in storage, security and
maintenance?
Is it the price?
There have been knockoff versions that are sort of like a kid's
Skateboard-ish version of the device. Even a slightly augmented electric
scooter has been better received.
One big factor: You just can't look cool on a Segway.
It didn’t help that its big early customer was the US Postal Service,
which never had the reputation as the hippest and pioneering company.
'Arrested Development' gave one to Will Arnett's character, with the
knowledge that it would perfectly with his blowhard, hapless personality,
further cementing the product as something nobody cool would bother with
(plus the footage of president bush falling off it, and even Usain Bolt
had a mishap).
When no one could tell if the Segway was for business or pleasure, you
realize that some products are beyond the help of PR.
Legal/Illegal Drugs
-there is obviously a wealth gap (with the racial and cultural divides
that come with that as well) when it comes to drugs. Stimulants and
opioids are regularly pushed by giant massive pharmaceutical companies,
but illicit drugs that fall into similar categories and have the exact
same effects are highly illegal and carry massive punishments for people
caught with it.
-only after pills completely destroyed communities outside larger cities
(and led to a huge rise is heroin addiction because pill poppers wanted
another fix) was a link truly acknowledged by gov't/pharma.
-And what was the response? Barely a fine to the companies in comparison
to how much they made off this drug dealing (because that’s what it was),
and stiff punishments for people who were in possession of these pills
when what they truly needed was proper treatment
-another example of solving a problem from the wrong end, because this
'right' end shields the already powerful from any serious prosecution
-if it is agreed that pharmaceutical companies acted like drug cartels in
pushing this product and bribing the law/regulators to look the other way,
then punish them like drug dealers
Humanity is bad with making sacrifices, large and small. Being told that
you must make them, even for a valid reasons like preserving resources for
the close and distant future, can make people defensive, angry, resentful.
It is framed as an infringement on one’s freedom.
But the thing to remember is that you are in the position where you can
choose to make the sacrifices. And choosing not to make a sacrifice might
mean that down the road, you might not have a choice at all when it come
to giving up things your comfortable with.
What you have been used to since birth and have come to expect all your
life is embedded into you like an inalienable right, and when it is taken
from you right away or bit by bit, there are the same feelings of anger,
desperation, failure, and resentfulness.
The combined ideas of unending progress and of
self-congratulatory/loathing marketing in 20th/21st
century western democracy means that people expect things to get better
(or at least remain the same) throughout their life, and that they deserve
it simply by the virtue of having a heartbeat.
But in the West this is becoming less and less true, and suddenly it is
not a matter of sacrifice, as there isn't a choice to have less. Now less
is being thrust upon you.
Trust Never
Sleeps Dr Faucci's emails
from Spring 2020 between him and Chinese health officials are a perfect
examples of the news of the news. If you want it to look like a
responsible exchange of information and opinion between two professionals
and their respect governments, it's that. If you want to see it as proof
that America is afraid to confront China, it's that. If you want to say
it's proof that this whole thing is a big conspiracy of a massive,
one-world government using a lab-made disease to infect and then
'vaccinate' much of the world and put them under Bill Gates’ control, it's
that. One thing is for
certain: It is going to continue to eat away whatever crumbs of trust many
citizens (American or otherwise) have towards their government. And that
feeling has very real consequences. It makes solving so
many other massive domestic, foreign and global challenges that much more
difficult. Political willpower can easily be branded into a series of
special (and corporate) interests, but the reasons ‘the masses’ isn’t one
is because so much of ‘the masses’ have given up on politics in general In Kurt Vonnegut’s
novel Jailbird, a fictionalized whistleblower from the Watergate scandal
is chastised by an elder statesman, who says that while there is certainly
the overwhelming feeling to root out and stop corruption and abuse of
power, the unintended consequences by showing the people how bad the
government has behaved is creating a society where none of the citizens
trust the government. Obviously ‘looking
the other way’ to such malfeasance and crimes is no answer, but with each
depressing bit of news about government dysfunction there has to be a
redoubling of the public effort to fix it, and that is so difficult to do. 'Sunlight is the
best disinfectant' is how the saying goes, and while that’s an integral
part to the clean-up, the point is to make sure another mess doesn’t
happen.
What is the most influential piece of art 'on' world history?
Of all the paintings, poems, sculptures, plays, films, and installations,
which has actually changed the course of human history the most? Because
we see certainly see how art can inspire more art, and individuals can say
how a certain picture or song changed their lives for the better. But
actually changing the world is a different matter entirely. Dylan said it
was foolish to think you could change the world with a song. Mick Jagger
scoffed when asked about how Street Fighting Man might influence people,
saying he wished it could work so easily.
Maybe it's good that art doesn't have that impact, as it might cause more
harm than good.
Plenty of art has been commissioned by powerful rulers throughout history,
but that once again is more of a rosy reflection of the past or present
that the king, emperor or president themselves wanted to see.
The most popular and best known works of art (your Mona Lisa, statue of
David, 9th Symphony, Starry Night, Guernica, Here Comes the Sun) are
tempting choices because ‘influential’ is typically tied to what most
people know and are familiar with (proven in part by not having to mention
the artist’s name in the above examples). But what have these examples
really done for human history? It’s great that ‘Guernica’ has a strong
anti-war sentiment...but a pretty big one happened not long after it is
was finished. Of course, calling any religious book a work of art will make the answer easy...
Here's a Thought - February 2021
The role of the artist is to make a mess, but ideally a
society/community/state is functioning in a neat and tidy way when this
happens. If the society/community/state is slipping into dysfunctionality,
then the role of the artist inevitably gets more complicated.
There is internal and external pressure for the artist to be a responsible
citizen, which in some instances might be suppressing the artistic notions
and ideas they have. This is not referring to censorship directly, as the
situation might simply be having to take another job in the community that
has nothing to do with aesthetic creation because of personal finances. Or
it might involve being pressured to avoiding create art that in good times
might just be 'unique' and 'thought-provoking', but is now seen as
'problematic' or controversial'. But this is a hard ask for certain
artists. Some will accept this 'give-take', knowing it is the right thing
to do as a citizen, to improve society to a point where maybe they can
once again make wild, unrestrained creative outbursts. Others will reject
it outright, and continue producing giant inflatable Santas holding dildos
(McCarthy), crucifixes in jars of urine (Serrano), and Naked Lunch
(Burroughs).
Google is so good it should be a public
utility When Google
'became' Alphabet, it officially chucked out 'do no evil'. Granted, you're
slinking into the darkness as soon as you go public and the amount of
investors expecting you to bring home the bacon with regularity surges. Google acts just
like every other successful corporation, and thinks one thing: More. There is no let up.
Capitalism does not allow for 'taking your foot off the gas'. Not out of
any Schopenhauer-like drive of humanity's insatiable, passionate will, but
out of cold, clinical design. When the name of
your company becomes a verb, a process known as denominalization (for more
information, just google it), you have become ‘too big to exist’. When your company
become so successful it re-writes the rules just by doing business as
usual, you have become ‘too big to exist’. Just as how
Wal-Mart decimated the Main Street in towns and small cities by being so
successful at dictating prices to its suppliers, Google is able to
guarantee that it is by far the primary way that people 'look' through the
entire internet. Journalism,
entertainment, advertising, retail shopping, communication, and anything
else that could be digitized was inadvertently sucked into the abyss and
whatever came out was not the same. Of course it can be
called ‘the cost of doing business’, but who is doing the numbers to
decide that cost, since it affects an investor and a laid-off retail
worker very differently? Former Google CEO
Eric Schmidt calls finding 'creative' ways to pay the least amount of tax
an example of capitalism working properly. It has to stop not
because we should pity the poor big companies who have to compete against
massive ones, but because we should pity the citizens who are pawns in
this very serious and ‘not at all a game’ situation between the
responsibilities of the state and private enterprise. Don’t fear the
nationalization of companies, fear the corporatization of governments.
Trans People Have Been Dealt a Raw Hand
Consider what they have to go through to be something most of us for
granted: Being ourselves. Being content.
Who considers being content a luxury?
Because transgender people are fighting to reach that feeling every day of
their lives, and they have an ignorant at best, hostile at worst world
bearing down on them.
They are born out of sorts, and spend their entire life trying to feel
okay, to feel relaxed, to feel content.
Imagine the
feelings of uncertainty, confusion and frustration of going through
puberty
(the time when everyone around you is questioning
the changes that are happening to their own bodies, their own beliefs,
their own social circles of family and friends), but that it continues
right into adulthood. ‘No one understands’ is a typically teenager
complaint, but it is a heartfelt lament for so many in the transgender
community.
We've written
elsewhere about how achieving equality for women and
minorities/marginalized groups is so sadly difficult, and with rough only 0.5-1% of the population identifying
as transgender, it is much harder to find another person who you can
confide in and empathize with.
That 99% can only sympathize (and sadly, plenty do not) instead of truly
understand is not at all fair. It's shit luck that the genetic wires got
crossed and you're being forced to live in a body that feels somehow
wrong, with overwhelming feelings of insecurity, doubt, and confusion.
And then they have to 'be' a normal person on top of that. You know,
dealing all the regular day-to-day existence stuff that everyone else
thinks is just a pain the ass.
Is it a surprise that they are more likely to have mental health issues,
or self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, the same way that others turn to
it when they go through difficult times? Of course not.
That they preserve through all this is admirable, incredible, a true
testament to the human spirit, and should give anyone hope for the future.
This is not saying they deserve our pity. They deserve our help and
respect. And that the rest of the world is so slow to give them these
things is a sad mark of how far we have to go to be as open-minded and
big-hearted as we too often think we are.
The Digitized Human Mind
The complexity of the brain means that we keep running into current tech
limitations when it comes to the possibility of creating a mannequin-like
copy.
We take it for granted that the brain is always 'on', that even during
sleep it is keeping the body alive, in addition to feeding the
subconscious part of our mind.
Part of the challenge of being able to upload a human mind to a computer
is doing the reverse. Stimulating our brains with a fake experience.
Shaking someone's hand is just a series of electrical signals in the
brain. If it is possible to send the exact signals to the brain, can it
tell the difference between it and an actual handshake?
You are defined by what you do, so what are you if you can do anything in
a simulated environment? Would the awareness of it not being real ruin the
experience? Will you forget? Can you ‘choose’ to forget?
Once you are in a simulated environment, there is no activity that you
would get tired of (whether it's eating, video games, sex, drugs) because
there is no such thing as 'tired' for you anymore. That requires a
physiological relationship to a body that you don't have to concern
yourself with. There is never a decrease of serotonin because there is no
serotonin, it's just ones and zeroes.
We are simply (or really, ‘in a very complicated way’) rearranging the
universe into the flickering electrons it is, but to our own whims.
This flickering is called (in its most basic quantum form) ‘information’
and persists to the point where it is the object/event which is used as
the example of how black holes work, and how all matter in the universe
relates to the phenomenon that destroys matter.
That there is numerical data at the basis of these seemingly more abstract
and bizarre relationships of what we (and everything else) is made of is
astonishing, because it doesn’t seem scientific. It is science the human
mind has a hard time conceiving of.
For some
these non-physical forms of ever-changing awareness can be how we consider
the divine in technological terms.
Information is spirit. Spirit is information.
The perception of loss can almost be as damaging as an actual loss.
Expected outcomes can change how one feels about the true outcome.
Barely winning a game in which you were expected to effortlessly defeat
your opponents will make you reconsider your own abilities, and certainly
spectators will second guess all that they thought of you as well (and the
opponents will be seen as practically victors).
When it comes to politics - that is, actual changes in how a society
governs and addresses the needs of its citizens - the stakes can quickly
be much higher.
The creation or curtailing of certain social programs or grants or tax
breaks can put citizens at ease or into a financial tailspin. That is what
matters, but the perception of these policies – and the political win and
loss if they are passed or struck down – has taken over the discourse.
Where losing an argument will have you thinking that you can lose
everything.
We are moving towards a world where words are more weaponized than ever,
because on digital platforms there are no fists to pummel opponents with.
While it's great that there are fewer opportunities for physical violence
because most of these interactions are done via screen, it amplifies
perception and strengthens whatever message that is repeated and wants to
be heard in the first place. If everyone in a rapidly expanding online
community believes that a loss has occurred, how do you convince them
otherwise?
Amazing article on the concept of social status and its politicization:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html)
First we communicated (unilaterally) with the future via cave paintings,
then the oral tradition, then the written word, then audiovisual
recording, and now through interactive digital experiences. Each becomes a
more complex way to express ourselves.
At the moment the last one is best known as video games, but that will
soon change.
You
won't learn about history 'just' by reading past letters or watching black
and white film. You will be able to experience important moments by
navigating it in a realistic three-dimensional space.
Right
now it is possible to peer into developing events around the world thanks
to every phone in a pocket being a video camera that is connected to
everyone. The next step is going to be experiencing this through all the
senses of the people living through it, whether through virtual reality or
even something involving shared neural links.
The problem which remains, of course, is all the time that history is made
when there are none of these technologies present, and we’re
suddenly back to relying on oral tradition (in other words, someone just
telling us what they saw).
We
live in a dull cyberpunk world
The issue with good stories is that they have to be interesting. Few can
deny that we live in a technocratic dystopia where a small group of very
powerful corporations and the people that own them have a huge impact on
how the rest of the world lives (and dies). It is a fertile ground for
storytelling at first glance, but 'rages against the machine' in fiction
cut out the dull bits, and streamline character motivation and growth. It
romanticizes criminals and embraces ‘just in the nick of time’
coincidences.
Great!
But
in today’s real world people hack into a bank accounts and pull identity
scams, and there’s no exciting back story or twist to be revealed. The
surveillance state that should spook us is created in part by us willingly
giving oodles of information that we share (whether typed or filmed) with
as many people as possible because we want to. We have effortlessly
communication machines that can connect us and help build a utopia, but
all we do is argue.
Even worse, most of the drugs that are being
taken are depressants that
don't do anything wild like in Phillip K Dick novels.
We cry out for change, for improvement, for a better life, which is how so
many cyberpunk stories start.
But no dice. No
heroes, not even anti-heroes.
The stage is set, and we've all forgotten our lines.
The human experience demands we attempt to reflect and assess ourselves
(as individuals and as a group) and the way we define, mark and categorize
our lives takes the shape of a story. Event A is followed by Event B is
followed by Event C, and we inevitably try to link these events together.
That's why the line is 'the story of my life'.
And while we like to think we are being factual and objective as we
re-tell our lives - whether just in our own head, to friends and family,
or a in a publicly consumed (auto)biography - we are certainly forgetting
specific facts, misremembering reactions (by ourselves and others) and
being generally biased.
The consequence of this that we turn our non-fiction lives into fiction by
looking back and thinking about it.
God and the Market, Market and the God
'GameStop'. What a perfect name for the new stock market…scandal?
Occurrence? Blowback? Because
for some hedge funds, it really is those two words: Game. Stop. The fun of
just pressing buttons and racking up high scores has come to a crashing
halt.
What do the people who work at GameStop stores think? What do companies
that sell their products at GameStop think? What do the people who (still)
shop at GameStop think?
It doesn't matter. They are just NPCs in this level.
Alienation has been
so thoroughly baked into the overclass Wall Street capitalism of the 21st
century that 'people' are either assets (customers) or liabilities
(employees) to the bottom line. For more and more people in the West, they
are so, so far removed from the manufacturing of the products they consume
and use (since they are primarily made on the other side of the world)
that they think little of the conditions in which these workers do their
jobs (whether directly in the factory or indirectly through the particular
nation’s government). All of them can lose their jobs because of a dumb
advertising campaign far away that causes slow sales of the product and
shutters the factory.
Everything is connected in the worst possible way, and the stock market is
a drunken, greedy doctor trying to keep the patient alive so they can sell
it more medicine. Betting against companies (shorting) is making money off
cancer. And if you can make money off cancer, expect to see a lot more
cancer.
Why do stocks go up
and down? What are market
forces?
How much does a genuine quarterly earnings report make
a difference?
You gotta have faith. Of course this stock will go up, down, loop within
its own loop and land perfectly on the tarmac. The market believes
everything will go up. But in case you have it on good authority that it
won't, it now believes some things will go down. You want proof? What is
this, a congressional hearing?
You gotta have faith. That God will take your soul after death and deem it
worthy to chill with him for all eternity. You want proof? What is this, a
massive particle collider underneath France and Switzerland?
"Play Your Old Jokes!"
There is a
difference between musical acts going out and playing new songs to
applause and playing older songs to wild screaming, and how almost all
comedians retire material after a set amount of time. At the very least, a
comedian doesn’t get wild screams from the audience when they launch into
a five minute bit about dating that their fans will recognize and love to
hear word for word again.
Is it because of
the presentation format? Do we appreciate the artistry in the replication
of a song over the replication of a four minutes comedic monologue because
we believe the former is more difficult to do? Do
we attach more emotional memories to music? It is much more likely for you
to headbang in rockitude or weep with sadness over a song than a piece of
comedy.
Is it the laugh? Maybe laughter elicits a different
emotional response than excitement/sadness, one that is based a lot more
on the freshness of hearing a joke for the first time, which means there
is diminishing returns on hearing it again and again.
Maybe because jokes involve more a cerebral analysis than music
there is less emotional attachment to whatever was happening in your life
when you first heard Chappelle’s ‘three AM in ghetto’ story than when you
first heard ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
Why Tattoos?
We are living a more and more transitory existence. People accumulate less
physical things and use digital forms of collection to display and express
who they are. If you 'can't take it with you via your phone', it's
baggage. And while in some ways 'the Internet is forever', in other ways
it is very easy to tear your identity up and start again (or leave it on
the side of the road and drive away) and join another online community
under a different handle.
The exception is the tattoo, which can be the biggest commitment you can
make to what you believe in and what is important to you because it is
meant to be permanent. It can't be lost or stolen (it just might run or
fade after several years if you don't touch it up,) and the only way you
can get rid of it completely is by ponying up quite a bit of cash.
Middle Class Problem: Shrinkage
(https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22166381/hollow-middle-class-american-dream)
Money isn't everything but holy hell is it something.
Jeff Bezos' ex-wife gave over $4 billion to charity. Great, but it's the
exception not the rule, so we must re-write the rules.
We
overpay the people who make us smile (athletes, entertainers) and underpay
the people who keep us alive (doctors, infrastructure support staff, law
enforcement).
Right now, you're lucky if you are born into a wealthy family, and after
that you have to rely on the luck that somehow some of the donated money
from a wealthy family ends up helping you. Not necessarily them directly
putting it in your pocket, but through foundations and funds that might be
given to your workplace or job, or through grants.
Some of these foundations might remain mysterious to those that are
receiving its benefits.
We
are living at a time where, like in Great Expectations, you might not know
who your wealthy benefactor is, and maybe a rich man saying he 'has given
back enough' (whether through taxes or donation) is not the best
measurement as to whether he has.
If
working and middle class citizens are against a tax increase on the
wealthy because they aim to be rich one day and don't want to pay that
higher rate at that time, then it is that combination of selfishness and
delusion that can destroy a nation from the inside.
No one wins if there is hundred of
millions or billions of dollars that a handful of very wealthy people just
sit upon or swap amongst themselves in stocks and investments.
The
more people that touch the dollar as it moves around the community, the
healthier that community is.
The Responsibility for Being Wrong
It seems that people in power are less and less culpable for making
mistakes. CEOs and business leaders pay a fine and get to be cleared of
any wrongdoing. If politicians have to resign because of scandal or are
voted out (and with retention rates being so high, that's rare), they
typically parachute into a job on a corporate board, lobbying firm, or if
they're telegenic, a media company.
It creates a climate of indifference and alienation towards your actions,
especially since there should be the concept of public good when making
important decisions. Obviously within government, but corporations should
definitely have to alter their reason for being, which for too long has
been making money for their investors.
What if there were fire-able conditions that the entire community can
acknowledge and enforce? We are at a point where the lack of
responsibility is having so many millions of citizens assume the worst
when it comes to companies and government institutions doing…anything. We
expect it to go wrong in some way, because it has been for years now.
Obviously it is more important that people who have more power are held to
greater levels of account. A CEO is paid plenty more than employees far
down the org chart, and a bad year or a terribly irresponsible and
dangerous decision needs to be reflected in their pay. If the buck truly
stops at their desk, it shouldn’t be able to easily make that last leap
into their pocket.
Who
Cometh for the Right Will Cometh For the Left
Would it be great if holocaust denial was dismissed as bigoted idiocy
right away? Of course! But if it isn’t, and these terrible fabrications
take root in many people's minds as truth no matter what sort of evidence
you present to them to say, 'of course the holocaust happened', then what?
Should these inaccurate claims have been censored, because of the danger
that might come with people believing them?
Obviously restricting certain forms of speech is going to cause problems
in society, not only with individuals yelling at each other on the
Internet, but plaintiffs and defendants in the courts of law. Questions
regarding intent and context can bog down easy answers, because it’s not
always clear when someone is joking and when they are truly giving their
position and beliefs on an issue (and good luck telling the difference
when it is a post on social media).
Banning an orange dumpster fire that was recently the most powerful man on
earth (for four years…still boggles the mind) from social media platforms
is good...right?
It
makes sense that supporters of Trump will decry this as censorship and
that plenty of people on the left will breathe a sigh of relief,
considering that the former president told (at one fact-checked estimate)
30,000 lies.
A
society can't crumble under a ton of bullshit like that, but add it to
bureaucratic dysfunction, skyrocketing inequality, and ‘surprises’ like
pandemics and natural disasters, and crackdown on speech to protect truth
is going to be a hideous mess that everyone is going to come regret.
The
notion that social media corporations will only crack down on conservative
content it finds distasteful or bullshit-prone is extremely naive and
shortsighted.
It's
great when QAnon is on the hot seat, but bad when it’s Black Lives Matter,
and if it seems like ‘it can’t happen here’ for BLM, it already has (in
the wake of the protests last year, several social media groups were
banned or locked).
That
Google, Facebook or Twitter are the arbiters is problematic enough.
If
you can't make these decisions properly - or build a computer code to do
it properly - then you shouldn't be making these decisions
Is
it a targeted cull? An algorithm that is helped along by a small team?
If you say your social media platform is 'too big to monitor', and that
‘erring on the side of reason’ results in silencing people – not just
deleting a specific post that violates the rules – no one should rest
easy.
Media
Cynicism Is Its Own Bubble
News wonks expect the general public to acknowledge that left-leaning
outlets like MSNBC use the same overhype/under-report tactics as
right-leaning Fox News, and to perform the mental legwork of sussing it
all out by reading from several different sources and ultimately making an
informed decision and act or vote upon the issue in question. When reading
plenty is just something you do because it is your routine or your job
(along with talking to sources, vetting sources, and presenting a
cohesive, well-researched argument that goes through an
editor/fact-check), it's easy to forget that most people don't do much
beyond eyeballing headlines as they scroll through their social media
pages.
Journalist Matt Taibbi is regularly having to defend himself for
criticizing democrats/left-leaning media (or whatever the left-leaning
media is currently championing). Leftists ask 'what happened to you,
man?', as if the person who has written books like Insane Clown President
(Trump-bashing), Griftopia (wall street bashing), and I Can’t Breathe (law
enforcement overreach bashing) has somehow turned conservative.
There are
accusations from leftists who only want to hear good news about their side
(and bad news about opponents),
or strategically pragmatic leftists saying 'I know we're not perfect, but if you
keep covering issues like this, moderates are going to think we're as bad
as Trump/conservatives are, give up on caring at all, and our opponents
will win thanks to political apathy'.
Taibbi's push for free speech gets criticized by those who say that
tolerating intolerant attitudes will ultimately lead to people in power
who will crush free speech in general. Hence, these critics say, some free
speech that promotes intolerance (nazism, for example) must be censored.
Perhaps Taibbi would respond that there are many other ways for a
society/community/government to counter these 'intolerant groups' other
than censorship, because choosing that method creates more problems than
it solves.
Here's A
Thought Summer 2020
Seriously, How Did We Lose the OK Gesture?
When
a bunch of racists start using a universally recognized symbol for good
job as a subtle way of expressing camaraderie...did we just let them?
Perhaps it's a hard thing to stop when the only antidote is to ignore the
racists completely and keep using 'OK' as it is intended, but this is that
strange situation where you have to assume that the person you are
gesturing is either ignorant to the attempt of re-signification or knows
you well enough personally to be sure that you aren't going to suddenly
flash a white-supremacy gesture.
Since you cannot be sure of the first situation, we naturally have to
retreat from using 'OK' casually, but that just means it is going to be
used 'only' in the case of racist signalling.
What
does this say about the transmission of information in the digital age?
Calling attention to this issue propagates the idea that this now a racist
gesture, but not calling attention to it means non-racists may use it
inadvertently and be labelled something they certainly don't want to be
labelled as.
How
do you 'not' get a message out? How does the Internet walk this line? How
do we all ignore this attempt by goons to 'steal' a simple symbol of
approval? How can we make sure this doesn't keep happening, since if
emboldened white supremacists might try to see what gestures and words can
be absorbed into the racist rolodex?
There is Free-Will Because We Don't Have a Choice
If free will is defined as being able to act without following a
pre-deterministic sequence, then we will never know for sure because there
is no way to know if we are following a pre-determined sequence. We are
trapped in the present space-time and our own individual world lines (ask
your astrophysicist), preventing us from every being able to compare what
the alternatives could have been (or to know for sure where there are any
alternatives).
In this sense, we have both Free-will and Determinism. We do not know if
the choice we made is directed by any force other than our own. But once
we make a decision to cross the street, scratch our nose, or throw that
egg at your friend, that choice is 'locked in' and is following a certain
path with limited outcomes (this is a perhaps a philosophical notion of
wave-function collapse). As I bring my finger up to scratch my nose, I can
certainly stop. But is that proof that I have free will, because I am
consciously avoiding what would be the common sense thing to do, or was I
always pre-destined to think this and not scratch my nose? Since I can
never answer this accurately in the space-time world line I exist, I
cannot know for sure what 'made' me do this.
Even using the term ‘made’ suggests an overarching plan, while determinism
may be nothing more than quantum particles following a sequence of ‘most
likely’ probabilities. There is always a chance that all the atoms that
make up your body will suddenly reconfigure themselves across the cosmos,
but it is very, very low. But this is randomness, since we commonly
associate 'free will' with sentient decision making, and that is based on
many, many factors of how all the particles of our body respond to
external stimulation, and we're not remotely close to figuring out (let
alone predicting) how people will always react to situations.
If we can't be absolutely certain of a deterministic trajectory (and based
on our limitations of existing within the 4D timespace in which this
(possibly) deterministic trajectory operates, we can't be), then there is
free will, if only because we can never know the difference.
CHAT is the future 'human'
The so-called purity test that can afflict the left or the right (or
really any group of people when there are several issues being debated) is
putting people into echo chambers, or intellectual reinforcement networks.
If you don't agree completely with the laundry list of positions that the
group adheres to, then you are booted out. But this is a positive feedback
loop, in the sense that it just gets more dogmatic and strict over time.
People are becoming networks, a lessening of tolerance for diverse thought
means a lessening of individuality in these groups, and the technology we
have makes this an easier process than ever.
which brings us to...CHAT.
The blob of individuals talking almost all at once, typified during a live
event that everyone can coalesce around.
In the world of video games, 'CHAT' is the casual name to the steady
stream of comment(or)s that happen in real time as the streamer plays.
Even if you don't show your face while you stream a game, you are inviting
the public into your personal space, because you are sharing yourself with
them (even if the focus is trying to beat a level). There is a passive
sort of emotional exchange and friendship connection between you and the
people watching, especially as you begin to interact in chat. Even as you
interact with individuals as you respond to their comments, you begin to
see 'Chat' as a singular form of communication.
'Twitch Plays Pokemon' is an example of a community achieving a common
goal haphazardly. Similar to how cells slowly learned to interact with
each other and create complex life.
Corporatism and the Environment
We
may have to accept the fact that saving the environment will almost
certainly require a huge amount of work to be done by corporations (from
research and development to full implementation and oversight of the
projects). This is will likely only entrench their power even further and
make citizens (and governments) be more reliant on their operation (which
chooses profit over social benefit) more than ever.
While
we should decry this, there might not be much of an alternative.
Government-led projects are becoming less and less common due to budget
constraints, and corporations which receive contracts and grants to do
work that was previous done by a government programs are reaping financial
benefits.
But
fighting climate change and corporatism at the same time is yielding
meagre to little results. If we stick with trying to fix both, we might
end up with neither, and then we're really screwed. We might have to
settle with one, and that has to be the environment, obviously. Even
saying that by fixing corporatism we can then move on to properly fixing
the environment, we might not even have time for that...
Bonus Semi-Related Thought:
Total Trash
(also a great Sonic Youth song)
While we are half-assing it on fighting climate change (see above), we are
practically no-assing it reducing waste. While the two are invariably
connected since it deals with how we are using the resources of our
planet, the steps in reducing the amount of waste we produce and
reusing/recycling when we can are very, very baby. It's always nice to
hear of a small start-up company or retail store using eco-friendly goods
or packaging, but the more people are living what can be tentatively
labelled as 'a traditional western middle class lifestyle', the more trash
that will come with it. It's sad enough that we are cutting down forests
and fields to build space for homes and urban developments, but it's even
worse when we clear them just so we can toss junk there.
And when we 'run out of land' (and that just means that it is too
expensive to dump the trash on land), it goes in the ocean. Which is
another huge challenge because it's not all neatly grouped together in one
wet pile, but spread out over a massive regions in the world's largest
bodies of water, guaranteeing that it will be a danger to all marine
wildlife as well as being very difficult to remove.
Asking people to consume less and to buy local (since doing so requires
much less packaging and waste in the entire transportive endeavour) has
its own challenges, as some will call it an assault on their liberty, or
just too expensive. We have created a profit-driven socioeconomic system
that champions disposability and therefore champions constant spending on
more goods as well.
Which just means more trash.
Comedy Sequels
Making a commercially and critically successful
comedy film is hard. Making another one with the same ingredients is damn
near impossible.
[Monty Python might be the exception in terms of
three comedy films of incredible quality (albeit unrelated to one another
from a narrative perspective), but they are certainly more on a 'cult
classic' level of success, and the sizes of their productions are much
smaller that their insular creation process can afford]
There will always be pressure in Hollywood to make
more of the same, and whether or not the product is good is only a side
conversation. A better reviewed movie typically makes more money, but not
always.
Comedy films of the mundane snapshots of life
(There's Something About Mary, The Wedding Singer, Step Brothers) don't
typically get sequels since there is usually a dollop of romance in them,
and that might mean a happily ever after which can't really begat a
sequel.
Action-comedies, on the other hand, are very much
bread and butter of the industry, to the point where Marvel films can
almost be seen as three parts action and one part comedy.
And before they overwhelmed global box offices and
re-defined what you could expect in your theatre seat, there were big name
precursors like Ghostbusters, Rush Hour, Austin Powers, Home Alone, Back
to the Future, and,,, The OceansTrilogy, which is the best trilogy at
making fun of movies while celebrating them, and being cool the whole damn
time.
Based on the serious 1960s Frank Sinatra caper,
Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney gave audiences fast paced
storytelling, cool cuts, clever quips, and the perfect dollop of emotion
at just the right moment in just the right way. A great raising of stakes
throughout, as our heroes don't break too much of a sweat as each new
obstacle is placed before them. The satire is so smooth and silky you
don't even notice, you just get taken along for the ride. And just like
Empire Strikes Back, while Oceans Twelve was criticized at first, it is
definitely a great piece of meta, 'bet you thought you knew where this is
going'-type throw-down for the audience that Iron Man could never get away
with.
And hey, like a lot another, another go-arounds,
Oceans Thirteen is the prime example of diminishing returns, but is still
fun. The subtle Godfather references, Matt Damon walking briskly through a
vaguely European city on the phone being filmed in a handheld, jerky
no-cut style is a glaring homage to his Bourne identity, and even how they
explained away the absence of certain characters (namely, the love
interests played by Julia Robert and Catherine Zeta-Jones) worked with
just a simple line: 'It's not their fight'.
It was the blueprint from the MCU, and nobody knew
it, least of all Steven Soderbergh.
The problem that comes with a superhero-dominated
box-office is the same problem that is affecting film in general, not just
comedy. You are making chunks of art/culture that is meant to be as
broadly appealing as possible, because while it's great in one sense that
we can share everything so much easier, big studios are trying to make as
much cash as possible by doing so, and comedies just aren’t sure-fire
anymore.
This is also a fight against anything else that
might steal eyeballs and dollars. From an onslaught of TV streaming
options (including popular and critically acclaimed series that capture
the public's imagination, but also being able to binge three hours of
reality tv and skip going out for movie night) to video games
to...pandemics, the cinema experience is on the ropes.
And while adventure and action typically requires
a bigger budget for a good visual spectacle, comedy can actually be done
pretty cheap, and that means, why even make a comedy ‘film’? Whether a
viral video of pet acting silly, YouTube creators who make skits, video
game streamers cracking jokes as they win or lose, or even sharing memes
24/7, ninety minutes of one story seems…old.
The
Normalcy of Universe
The
universe has existed for billions of years before a collection of cells
joined together to create the self aware entity known as yourself, and it
will exist for billions of years after the cells that were you slowly
dissipate back into other forms of matter of energy. The astoundingly
brief period of time that you were around is by far the exception of the
rule of the universe, which is: 'you are not here'. Normalcy for the
universe is when you were never alive and always dead. A second after you
take your final breath, you can't blame the universe for going, 'ah, back
to normal'.
Art
And Culture Now
We
care so much about Art and Culture because it feels like we can do
something about it, that we can engage with it in ways never done before.
We can discuss it with people across the world instantaneously, we can
make elaborate videos praising or decrying it, we can attend massive
conventions that celebrate it.
A&C
has replaced politics for many people who think politics is either too
toxic or too bloated and irreparable.
People do want to care about something, and if politics and the wider
human society seems like it doesn't care about you, then you won't care
about it, and move your attention elsewhere. To the detriment of the
future of humanity.
Fan
service in your favourite pop culture institutions have replaced social
services in your local government institutions.
Metaphysical Crisis Level Infinity
When your civilization crashes and burns - whether due to foreign invasion
(of all sorts, from military to financial) or internal dissent - what can
you possibly think of your God, if you have one?
That God is punishing you and the many who also believe? That God doesn't
care, no matter how hard you tried to do right? That there is no God at
all?
It is a crushing blow the collective ego, and one that many people will
try to avoid confronting and run away from for as long as possible.
Not only is civilization collapsing and it is simple dangerous, but
everything you've believed in and worked for ultimately added up to
nothing. And maybe you own up to the fact that you and the rest of
society's behaviour might have had something to do with the collapse.
This is a massive devastating blow to any individual, and some will deny
it to their final breath.
Humanity: The Failure of Complex Systems
How people engage with and reflect upon society can be broken into
qualitative and quantitative properties. The former involve personal
preference (since 'quality' can be subjective), and the latter involves
statistical information (as quantitative is wholly numerical). By
cautiously reducing these two properties to opinion for the first and
money for the second, this can show how important the two factors can rely
and interact with each other.
The most important quantitative properties to explain the current crisis
in Western democracy is the massive difference between how much wages have
increased and the cost of living has increased over the last four decades.
Too many people don't have enough money. And it's not that people are
working less or are being lazy, it's that the jobs that pay well are too
few, meaning so many people of all generations - but yes, especially the
millennials - have to settle for higher debt, little savings, and all that
comes with that: no home ownership, higher level of stress and worry, and
a disillusionment with society in general.
A factory line job in the fifties (and on through the eighties) might not
have been the sort of career that you would dream about when you were ten,
but during those decades you could still buy a house with a bit of
responsible saving (and a house is still the biggest asset that most
people own...if they can afford it).
The Internet has changed everything, as it is often said, because it is a
mix of how it affects jobs by rendering oh so many of them obsolete
(certainly more than it creates), how it changes how we interact with each
other, and how it is allowed for financial power to be much more
concentrated in the hands and pockets of the few.
We cannot disengage, we can only reinvent and alter our relationship with
this technology.
The libertarian, don't-tread-on-me dream is wholly incompatible with a
globalized corporate-driven society dependant on digital
interconnectedness. You can't have both. If you hate the 'power of
government', then ditch your phone and don't ever shop online or at
Wal-Mart, because they are just profit driven authoritarian institutions
that are replacing governments.
The
human experience demands we attempt to reflect and assess ourselves (as
individuals and as a group), and the way we define, mark and categorize
our lives takes the shape of a story.
That's why the line is 'the story of my life'.
And
while we like to think we are being factual and objective as we re-tell
our lives - whether just in our own head, to friends and family, or in a
publicly consumed (auto)biography - we are certainly forgetting certain
facts, misremembering reactions, and being generally biased. The latter is
due to us wanting to look better even to ourselves when we reflect on the
past.
We make our non-fiction lives fiction by looking back and thinking about
it.
We cannot live another person's life.
Biography is, by nature, the reduction of one person's life to familiar
tropes and experiences for the people trying to understand/learn about
someone else. It's not misrepresentation, it is the narrowing that is inherent in storytelling, which is an essential component of humanity and how we interact with one another. At present, there is no other way to experience another's life.
The
Internet has affected our concept of time and space. The Internet not only
makes so much about what is happening at the current moment so knowable on
a collectivized level (not only in terms of 'the news', but how we can get
immediate, first-hand experience of what is occurring, no matter where it
is across the globe). Concurrently, the Internet can keep the experience
of the past saved forever in a frozen sort of state through archives and
archives of material. You can experience what was written or created
thirty or hundreds of years ago with no lag or challenge. This is not just
reading a book about the past, this is getting collective experience of
the moment instantaneously. Time has collapsed.
In
terms of space, tangible items can go from existing in a store or
warehouse across the world to your doorstep in a day or two. Food from
anywhere in your city can be on your table in under an hour. At the same
time, virtual spaces can be as large as the creator wants it to be, and we
were now able to interact in these spaces with increasing complexity and
familiarity to the goings-on in real life. While advances in
transportation technology shrunk the 'size' of the world throughout the
twentieth century, what has happened in the first two decades of the
twenty-first has been even more remarkable.
While the division between labour and management are still at the heart of
the class struggle, the role of 'investment' has superseded management in
its impact and importance. Management will still exploit labour, but there
is some relation still to the work being created, in the sense that
management in this case is responsible for the company and makes key
decisions in its day-to-day operations. Investment, meanwhile, can be
wholly alienated from whatever work is being produced, and simply collect
a portion of the profits because of the money they initially (or latently)
funded the company with.
That you now by stocks in a hedge fund or invest venture capitalist firm
and have even less of a relationship with the product or service being
created is only furthering the exploitation and impoverishment that comes
in the unregulated capitalist system. Companies that are already drowning
debt have been bought up by these firms and exist as 'zombie
corporations', which are never expected to turn a profit ever again, and
are slowly trudging towards ultimate bankruptcy and paying out whatever
money they happen to make to these firms, with none of it going to
rehabilitation.
(Some of the) Happiest Songs of All Time
It's tough going out there (hell, this is even a pretty low-feeling
'Here's a Thought') so here's some cheery tunes to feel a bit better. Some
left field choices and some familiar home-runs. No order, feel free to
randomize.
Ce matin-la - AIR
(That horn tho)
Tightrope - Janelle Monae
(featuring Big Boi) (definitely the most underrated and amazing R&B singer
from this decade, and this is top shelf proof)
Rhapsody in Blue - George Gershwin
(A seventeen minute epic from one hundred years ago that has one foot in
classical and the other in this new-fangled thing called jazz? Yes please)
Sugar Magnolia - Grateful Dead
(tons of different live versions, but yeah, go with Europe '72)
Fire Eye'd Boy - Broken Social Scene
(hazy indie rock at its best, cheering you on)
B.O.B. - Outkast
(with its effortless changes in melody and beat, it's the 'Bohemian
Rhapsody' of hip-hop, and a whole lot more positive)
Lust for Life - Iggy Pop
(that kick drum tho)
You Can Make It If You Try - Sly and
the Family Stone
(a
funky positive refrain)
Pulo, Pulo - Jorge Ben
(if this doesn't make you jump six feet up, you are probably six feet
under)
Good Day Sunshine - The Beatles
(of course the Fab Four nail it. Plus there's that other George Harrison
song about the sun that's so popular)
Jamming - Bob Marley
(well, yeah...)
Got a Thing on My Mind - Sharon
Jones & The Dap Kings
(doing old school the new school way)
Tragic Soliloquy to the president about lessening the US military
footprint:
-Mr/Madame President, look, I know you talked a lot about how we need to
reduced military spending, but too much of our economy is based on
building all sorts of death machines. Cutting construction and R&D
contracts will cause huge job losses in several key battleground states,
and you will have key allies in your party turn against you if thousands
of people are suddenly unemployed in their district.
With how tightly fought some of the seats in Congress, suddenly being
labelled against the troops and good-paying American jobs will devastating
(even if the label is not fair). You will lose in the midterms, and your
political opponents (there will be the expected opposition party as well
as members from your own party) will stonewall your policies and force you
to return military spending to what it once was.
As far trying to spin this as a positive, any sort of money-saving from
making these cuts will not be turned into a job replacement programs until
years after the fact, and you've already campaigned on helping people find
better playing jobs now. Doing this will go in the opposite direction very
quickly.
There are so many tertiary industries involved with the US military that
there is the genuine possibility of starting a recession if you
drastically cut defense spending.
Beyond this, exiting from costly overseas wars and long-held military
bases will leave our allies in the lurch and embolden the countries we
have less-than-rosy relationships with as well as terrorist groups that
intend to do us harm.
Our status and role as a nation that tries to promote freedom and
democracy and partnerships will immediately be diminished, and that will
make it more difficult to have positive economic relations with many
nations.
Appealing to our nation's sense of honour, freedom and peace is good, but
that won't put food on the table of the millions of Americans who are now
unemployed, having lost well-paying and stable jobs.
The truth is that America cannot afford to
not be a military power
right now, even if dismantling parts of this massive apparatus is the
morally responsible thing to do.
Ok Computer - it remains captivating for its dark and twisted middle.
Just past the halfway point, OKC gets weird.
It opens with with a towering, sunny rift monster (Airbag), goes into one
of the weirdest hit singles of the 90s
(Paranoid Android), the third song you kind of forget because it's
third until you realize it's not-so-secretly amazing (Subterranean
Homesick Alien), followed by the lonely, dark Romeo-and-Juliette ballad
(Exit Music), the secretly best song on the album (Let Down), the catchy
second single (Karma Police), and then...
Robotic laundry list, eerie piano plunking, the metallic barking of
political slogans that's so heavy it gives some Seattle grunge buzz-saw
tracks a run for their money, then a haunting stumble through the halls of
mental illness with some background Penderecki strings.
What the hell?!
And then it’s
back to your regularly scheduled program, with a lovely suicide ballad (No
Surprises), the single that is/was a bridge from the previous album to
this one (Lucky), and a slow boiling, but eventually soaring ender that
begs you to, 'hey man, slow down' (The Tourist).
Those three middle tracks - 'Fitter Happier', 'Electioneering', 'Climbing
up the Walls' - gives a glimpse of the sort of experimentation that would
come to dominate the band's next two records (Kid A and Amnesiac, most of
which was recorded concurrently). It's not exactly jazz and electronica
flourishes, but it's a thousand light years away from The Bends and
whatever else you expected from mainstream alt-rock in the mid nineties,
and can really tilt your ear on its side for ten minutes or so.
Conspiracy Theories/Fairy Tales
Conspiracy theories are modern day fairy tales that say more about to the
desires of the theorist and the challenges in their society than anything
about truth.
It is the underlying belief of an ultra-powerful group of people that
control everything, and is a flimsy explanation why the believer's life is
not going the way they want it to.
In this way, while the conspiracy theorist decries those that don't
believe the same thing that they do as mindless sheep, the theorists
themselves are makers and dwellers of their own sheep-like belief system.
To them these power structures are untouchable, unassailable, immutable,
and so many people (including themselves) are forced to live a
substandard, controlled existence, even if they know the truth. The people
in charge of the world, according to conspiracy theorists, are more like
super-humans than us paltry plebs. It’s almost like the theorists believe
this is the inevitable hierarchy, that the strong and weak both get what
they deserve. It’s a terribly defeatist ideology.
But some of their beliefs are rooted in tiny shreds of past
historically-accurate examples. Governments and corporations have
certainly done terrible things and have tried to cover up the truth about
it. But to then assume that they are doing the same with diseases, aliens,
and 9/11 is ridiculous. It is a fallible aspect of humanity, that we are
so attuned to finding and operating within patterns that we search for
patterns that are not there.
A good way to conceive of different dimensions
Compare a photograph of a microwave (2D) and an actual microwave in 3D
space. Both are made of the same elementary particles, but the
similarities end quite quickly. The first is the concept/representation of
a microwave, but you would be a fool to even try to use it as an actual
microwave (It was almost a waste of words to type that). That's not how 2D
representations of 3D objects work, and that is something a child learns
early in their experience with reality.
But a photograph of a microwave is useful for us 3D entities when
we want to convey the idea of microwave.
What if all the items in our 3D reality were representations of 'actual'
objects in a 4D reality?
What if there was a 4D microwave 'out there'?
What if there was a 4D version of yourself, and you exist to it like your
2D shadow exists to you? Just a limited representation of the 'real'?
Here’s a Thought: Video Game Demo-Style
Animal Crossing and Real Consumption versus Virtual
Consumption
You can never have enough stuff.
At least when the stuff is just ones and zeroes.
As every review and essay about Animal Crossing: New
Horizons has pointed out, a game where you have an island paradise in
which you can build, furnish and fashion it however you want has come out
a perfect time, since most of the world is practicing self-isolation to
keep a very real pandemic from doing even more terrible damage.
Start off just by running around and enjoying nature
and finding a place for you tent, then settle into a relaxing life of
landscaping and fishing (and fishing and finishing).
Turn your tent into a one room shack and turn that into
a house, and slowly turn the island into a town. And you can decorate it
with thousands of sensible and ridiculous items that you can buy
(typewriters, lava lamps, garden gnomes, satellite dishes, etc.) or craft
yourself.
After taking out one hell of a loan that is. Although
it should be noted that for all his qualities as a ravenous raccoon
capitalist, Tom Nook gives you these loans interest free (you're already
doing a lot of maintenance and landscaping work for him, so he better).
Design your own patterns in-game for clothing,
paintings, flags and anything else. You can visit your friends’ islands
and show off your style or lack of it.
If you're the impatient sort, you can even time travel
ahead (by changing the time on your Nintendo Switch console) to when new
features and quests will be unlocked based on the real-time date.
And why not? Maybe at some other time than spring 2020
you would have wanted to take your time with this game and play a bit
every day, but of course it's become easy to mainline now. Fewer people
are working than ever and so many other entertainments are shuttered
(sports, cinemas, concerts). Time is more abundant than ever (for better
and for worse) to dive into a virtual world of plenty.
Meanwhile, even before global quarantine restrictions,
real stuff is becoming more and more of a luxury. Thanks to the long term
effects of the Coronavirus, the millennials and generation Z are going to
be in an even more precarious financial positions as the next several
years unfold.
'Owning' is going to become a foreign concept, and
'owing' is going to be an even larger ball and chain to drag around. You
likely have fewer places to put stuff if you don't own property and just
rent, and with paycheques having to stretch even further, the goods that
you might want to have to make you happy and reflect your personality are
not always an option.
The virtual world of Animal Crossing can help you with
this. The more people (especially those who have grown up with Internet as
being immutably there) become accustomed to putting time and energy and
effort in a virtual world for virtual possessions, the less coveted
non-essential physical items will become. Keep your real money for the
necessities (food, shelter, basic clothing) and spend time and fake money
for the frivolous virtual (a massive wardrobe, a perfectly designed front
and backyard garden, a museum full of dinosaur bones). Another perk is
that virtual stuff doesn't consume valuable real resources that real items
do.
People can complain how traveling to others' islands is
a real pain in the ass to organize, with permission, placement and codes
making it unnecessarily complex.
Whether or not Nintendo provides updates to streamline
the process or another game (from the Animal Crossing franchise or
otherwise) offers it, visiting virtual homes of friends' in real time is
going to stop being a novelty and start becoming a commonplace way of
socializing and living your ideal 'virtual' life.
How commonplace? Here's a headline on a video game
website at the time of this writing:
"Nintendo Slashes Interest Rates in Animal Crossing:
New Horizons"
(https://kotaku.com/nintendo-slashes-interest-rates-in-animal-crossing-new-1843019628)
What Remains of Edith Finch (and the term video 'game')
Even though the term 'walking simulator' is no longer
seen as an entirely dismissive term for the genre, it still feels like it
is not taking these sorts of story games seriously. And in some ways
that's understandable because you can't lose at Edith Finch. You can be
mildly inconvenienced by not knowing how to use a certain mechanic to
advance the story, but that's about it.
Even then, it is not a challenge to master any of these
game mechanics. The graphics are great, and it is certainly fun to explore
the nooks and crannies of the bizarre house and the property it sits
awkwardly upon, but for the most part the game is taking you on a tour of
a family history, told in a very unique and affecting way.
The creative storytelling within What Remains of Edith
Finch's two hour-ish runtime is 80% movie, but that other 20% makes all
the difference in seeing the possibilities that video 'games' can do with
narrative. If you went to a theatre and watched only one person in the
audience 'play' this game, you will still not have experienced the exact
same thing as if you had the controller in your hand yourself. Not that
you could play the game much differently (although there are points where
you can visit rooms out of order), but you become even more of a passive
participant when you aren’t the one pressing the buttons and deciding to
move forward.
By doing that, you feel joy and relief in the way Edith
discovers her past, because with its first-person perspective, she is
'you'. It is a freeing as well as emotionally moving. That it can make you
feel heartbreak and loss on the same level as a great movie or book is a
testament first and foremost to its creators at Giant Sparrow software,
but also to this burgeoning genre of video game. The interactive story is
only going to reach greater and greater heights as various levels of
virtual reality experiences become regular (certainly a price drop for the
equipment will be part of that).
But is it a game? If game is defined as a 'form of play
or sport played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or
luck' (Oxford dictionary), then Edith Finch isn't much of one, because the
game is only decided by your decision to keep playing. In this sense, the
sport was actually played by the development team at Giant Sparrow, to see
if they can rise to the challenge and create an experience that would keep
people going until the end. And they definitely won.
The End of Consoles
Google Stadia has been widely lambasted as a
mediocre-at-best video game experience. But it's the future.
Introducing a new product or service is always going to
be rough, and it was as bad as it could get for Stadia (dropped frame
rates, lag, glitches, broken connections, too few games). But it has a few
advantages. First, it's owned by one of the world's largest corporations,
one that has tremendous brand awareness across the world, so it can be
supported financially through the tough early times. Second, its 'premise'
follows a reliable trend since the Internet took off: Have less electronic
entertainment boxes in your house.
Regardless of when Microsoft or Sony ultimately release
their new consoles (end of 2020 is still the target), they have to be
shaking in their boots at the possibility that overall this is not a good
long term investment, that this sort of product no longer has 'legs'. If
your television already is connected to the Internet, is $500 a good
investment for another box that is going to do the same thing at the same
time? PlayStation and Microsoft already have gaming cloud services, and
they might just become and more and more appealing as cheaper for both
player and company as the years move forward.
And that means PS5 and Xbox X might get the diehard fans buying
each console, but it might not be how most people game even two years from
now. Mobile gaming is almost as big as console and PC gaming combined, and
this trend is not going to change any time soon (gaming was worth about
$152 billion in 2019, and mobile contributed $69* million to that).
Nintendo sort of lucked into releasing their latest
console (the Switch, by the way) in 2017 (with the slightly lesser 'Switch
Lite' coming out last year). By incorporating an easy on-the-go option for
playing, it had a versatility that its competitors lacked. It has sold
very well (great games and great game selection helps), and has given the
company plenty of time to wait and see what the future of video games
might look like before considering a follow-up (although Nintendo's
unwillingness to make obvious changes going forward has hurt them in the
past).
If the hiccups that ruined Stadia's launch are fixed,
then why ever own a console? Why not just have a controller and a USB or
HDMI stick that plugs into your TV or monitor? And Google doesn't have to
fix the bandwidth issue on its own. Improving internet speed and
reliability is the goal not only of telecommunications giants, but nations
as well. Stadia can ride the
coattails of these projects and improve connection issues, and get itself
into the hands of serious and casual gamers.
In 2022, the PS5 might be an expensive paperweight.
*-nice.
Majora's Mask Right Now (April 2020)
Majora's Mask, the sixth game in the Zelda franchise
was released twenty years ago. In it, the moon is about to crash into the
earth - more specifically, right on Clock Town, the main setting for the
game - and Link can walk around and interact with the citizens and see how
they are dealing with the news as the terrible calamity inches closer.
Some go about their day, some are terrified, some businesses are open, and
some are (eventually) closed. Essential workers - such as the postman -
are going crazy because they want to flee but feel obligated to do their
duties regardless of the overall risk to their health.
Link can even go into the mayor's office, and watch the
befuddled, clueless mayor hem and haw and not make a decision over whether
to evacuate the town or the have the annual Carnival of Time festival go
on as planned. The soldiers implore him to evacuate, meanwhile the
festival organizers say this entire matter is overblown and that the event
should still occur.
You can talk to the organizers and construction workers
after the meeting and they will complain about how weak and foolish people
are for worrying about this...while the giant moon with a hideous leer
grows closer and closer right above. By the last day most of the citizen's
had fled the town and go to a ranch where they try to have the semblance
of a normal life.
And since Link's task is (as always) is to save the
world, you have the power to relive the three days again and again, making
changes and gaining power to finally stop the moon from crashing down. The
repetition becomes numbing, where you go back and forth from pitying the
people who at first don't have a clue at what is going to happen, to
resenting them. It gets to the point where you don't really care what day
it is because it starts to feel like every day is the same over and over
again.
Just sayin',
[on a maddening side note, if you'd like to play
Majora's Mask, or the epic masterpiece that came before it (Ocarina of
Time) right now...tough. You need to have a Nintendo console that is
either nearly a decade old (the Wii U or 3DS) or have the original
Nintendo 64 (with expansion pack).
Please, for the love of god,
Nintendo, make these games (either the original or the 3DS remakes)
available on the Switch's eshop. You are depriving current and future fans of the series of a
wonderful, magical (and cough-profitable-for-you-cough) experience.]
Conduct Together: A Good Bad Game or a Bad Good Game?
This game is maddening.
It is a nice simple concept for a mobile timewaster. On
a 2D isometric map, guide trains around to pick up passengers at one
station and deliver them to another. Make sure the trains don't crash into
each other by starting and stopping them and changing the track switches
in time. If you move enough passengers within the time limit, you beat the
level.
It is hard to tell if they intentionally made this game
very hard and frustrating, or whether they screwed it all up and it ended
up being hard and frustrating. And not the good sort of hard where you can
master the controls and nuances in each level and feel a sense of
accomplishment when you finally beat it. There really does seem to be
prickly problems with the gameplay that seem borderline unfair and can
just drive you nuts.
Either they built in a slight lag when you are trying
to use the track switches (so you never get any to move correctly 'in the
nick of time' for the approaching train), or they screwed it up. The
switches themselves don't follow numerical consistency. Some levels use 1,
2 and 3, some use 1, 2 and 4.
While the cartoony graphics have a certain bit of charm
to them, they make it difficult at times to discern which tracks intersect
or go above and below each other. It is hard to tell when you are in a
safe spot so another train won't hit you, especially on curves. Even when
you press on the brakes there is a lag that means you still might get hit.
Some levels have architecture and sprites that actually make it difficult
to see what is happening on the tracks and at certain switches.
While there is a decent system of unlocking new worlds
by earning money by shuffling passengers in the levels, the rewards for
passing these levels are the best part of the game...if you're a train
fan. You get some cartoon versions of real-life trains to use in the
levels, but there aren't any perks or buffs, it's just cosmetic. And for
how many actual variations and models of trains there have been throughout
history (and the chances are that if you are playing this game, you also
like trains), that fact that two of the models available when you unlock
the medieval world are just fantasy trains from that period is just
disappointing. And not every world grants another vehicle for completing
it. Sometimes they just give you money and eventually there aren't new
worlds to spend the money on.
At the moment the game is $20 on the Nintendo Switch
eShop, but for a decent amount of time it was reduced to a single penny.
In terms of how you view this game, that difference in price is huge. It's
a great deal if you want to have a heart attack and scream for essentially
nothing, and it's stab in the eye and a mouthful of gravel at twenty
bucks.
But I...
Can't...
Stop...
Playing Conduct Together.
It's the Dark Souls of disposable mobile games, and
fucking hell.
The Pillar of Average-ness featuring 'Starlink: Battle
for Atlas'
By trying to appeal to everyone, you risk disappointing
everyone.
This game is a lesser No Man's Sky, a lesser Mass
Effect, and a lesser paint-by-numbers kids film, all rolled into one.
Strangely, the odd appeal is that you can practically
see the strings (or code) behind the puppet. At no point are taken in by
the story, the gameplay, or the graphics (well, the racing segments on the
crimson moon are pretty damn good). You are just way too aware that this
is a video game and can easily imagine it being put together in Ubisoft
meeting rooms and cubicles piece by piece.
The 'famous' line that you only need to find a fun
thirty second activity for a video game and then have it repeat really
means you have to find a way to disguise this same activity in as many
ways as possible.
And when you have a Frankenstein game of cobbled
together parts, the unusual thing is the decision to use this literally in
the marketing and promotion of the game.
It came with toys, the sort that you would buy at a
Best Buy or toy store. You can buy the physical versions of ships that you
fly in the game, as well as different parts that you can mix and match
(like weapons and wing styles) that would be reflected in Starlink.
Like the game itself, this was a good idea on paper.
But not only would it be an additional purchase on top
of the price of the game, it wasn't exactly rolled out and promoted very
well.
The game meant to have more updates and toys after the
initial release, but when all these plans were cancelled, it was assumed
to be because it didn't meet the sales targets.
Maybe people thought you needed to have the toys to
play (you don't).
Maybe people thought you needed to have the toys to
actually have a good time when you play (you don't, but they don’t enhance
it much either).
Maybe people thought that having toys at all was a
cheap marketing gimmick, a way to make an extra bit of money, and an
attempt to cover up any weaknesses with the game itself (well...).
To make matters worse, Starlink has an odd uncanny
valley situation. Their graphics aren't too realistic, but because the
humans are paired alongside aliens, they certainly look more realistic and
familiar compared to lizard, cat and bird people. But in this game, the
corny plot and awkward lines just heighten the uncanniness of the
earth-based characters and somehow make the cliched dialogue the aliens
speak less awkward.
Bad lines and a stiff performance is bad enough in a
movie, but it's magnified in a game where you actually have to interact
with these character, sometimes over and over again to complete a mission,
quest, or story beat. Saying the same line of dialogue can save time and
money in the development process, but can complete drain the realism out
of the game-playing experience. On the flip side, games that have a much
more cartoonish art style can get away with contrived plots and lines. Be
very careful not to sacrifice fun for realism. People play games for the
former, and the latter is a nice add-on, but only if it's done properly.
And Starlink's biggest sin is having some tiny little
bits of crud that get in the way of the fun (and there is some fun to be
had). In a game that is an open world (or really, open star system),
knowing exactly what you are supposed to do is essential. Not in terms of
how to solve puzzles, mind you. But when you have to go online to figure
out how to build something in order to advance the main story, there's
definitely some structural problems.
Here's a deep dive example for a game you (probably)
haven't played: You are tasked with building a massive Starlink energy
tower on a planet once you help your allies on the surface. But you aren't
told how exactly to do this. So you take time destroying some of the
enemies and wait for a prompt and none comes. You destroy all the enemies
and there is no prompt. You start to solve some the puzzles on the planet.
No prompt. You start to accept fetch quests from allies. No promotes. Any
search for help in your mission files still just says you need to 'help'
your allies. After checking online: You find that you need to kill half
the enemies and then a new option (build Starlink Tower) will appear in
the 'upgrade outpost' selection when you interact with one of the
outposts. But there would be no reason to check that selection again to
see if anything's changed if you had already upgraded your outposts to the
max. [insert ‘disappointed’ meme here]
'Starlink: Battle for Atlas' is unique for being not
unique at all. Even the best game has some problems that will bother
players, and even the worst game has a few redeemable qualities. And this
game manages to be one of the most okay-est out there.
Gamer Lore:
Daigo's Parry at a EVO 2004
If you know a lot about video
games (especially fighting games), you will know what's happening, but you
won't believe it.
If you know a little bit about
video games, you will see what's happening, but think it's impossible.
The first reaction might be that something is wrong with the
programming, that there is a sudden glitch in game play. Chun-Li is
unleashing a devastating Super Art move, but Ken isn't taking any damage.
It's not possible to avoid a power attack so perfectly, right?
If you don't know anything about
video games, it's just some anime characters fighting on TV and then a lot
of nerds cheering.
Here's a thought February 2020
Looking for patterns is ingrained within the human experience.
First and foremost, our biological process (as with all living things) is
based heavily on repetition, and our experience with reality around us
requires us to memorize, organize and categorize our sensory inputs and
make sense of them. We identify patterns both good and bad, and attempt to
manage our lives around them.
This occurs within society as well.
It is tempting to believe that we have found patterns when there is no
scientific basis for them. This can be both important (trying to figure
out why you have recently fallen ill) and frivolous (believing that you
'catch every red light' on the way to work).
Now, when studying history, it is logically impossible for events to
repeat themselves, but we can certainly learn much by comparing similar
events and trying to plan accordingly for the future (looking at past
recessions to try and prevent another from happening).
Quickly advancing/changing digital technology has thrown a wrench into the
works, however. Even if we can look to the past for some information on
how past societies dealt with issues that are similar to ones we face
today, our technology is changing at a pace unseen in history, and
consequently, our behaviour is, too.
More so than ever before, we are unable to look to the past for guidance,
because the present (and therefore the future) is so unlike even the
recent past.
Technology shapes behaviour, and we are in the middle of the greatest
change in human history since...ever. And while at first this might seem
like hyperbole, it is not so much the change to a digital/virtual
experience, but the speed at which it is occurring. The industrial
revolution occurred unevenly across the glove over a period of one hundred
and fifty years (if we go by late-eighteenth century as the start).
The
current digital revolution is affecting the whole world at once, and is
only fifty years old (when computers could first start to 'talk' to one
another).
It is no wonder so many people are so overwhelmed.
In stories, the best villains are the ones you kind of like,
respect or just want to see more of. Darth Vader, the Joker, Hans Gruber,
Erik Killmonger, Loki...they all have great lines, great plans, incredible
powers, and are treated right by the script, the story, and the actors
playing them.
Heroes are much more limited when it comes to the traits they can
possibly have. Even when you veer into anti-heroes, there's still a
character arc of redemption or a new appreciation of positive values. How
bad can a hero act before he or she is no longer a hero in anyone's eyes?
When a story goes to far, then it's just two bad guys fighting against
each other.
The better the villain, the better the hero looks when they final
defeat them.
This is not a new phenomenon. In John Milton's Paradise Lost,
Satan/Lucifer was by far the most interesting and engaging character,
spitting out lengthy soliloquies regarding morality, individualism and
regret (it was the 'yippee-kai-yay, motherfucker' of its time).
The surveillance state may be inevitable, and in the West we all might be
choosing it passively (we add cameras and sensors to our homes, while
stores, workplaces, and plenty of public areas do the same, all in the
name of protecting you), rather than having it pushed upon us.
And all of this footage is accessible via servers that exist far, far away
from the surveilled location. It should be no surprise that since a lot of
powerful corporations have access to the information (ostensibly having it
ready for you to watch), the government does as well.
London had long been the city with the most CCTV (closed-circuit tv)
cameras in the world (ostensibly to discourage/thwart on Ira bombings,
back in the eighties and nineties), but more and more of China is getting
caught up in this digital panopticon.
Will it comes to
the West?
Perhaps the
surveillance state will arise during the process of preventing the rise of
the surveillance state.
The government will
start on those it believes to be threats (those that genuinely want to
cause harm to the populace, like terrorists), the move onto those who are
simply troublesome in its eyes (immigrants, people of colour, union
leaders, critics of the government). And if more people criticize, then
the surveillance widens, and then everyone can effectively be monitored.
In public via cameras, and in private via the GPS on your phone (as well
as all the communications - from texting to banking to websites visited -
that you do on your phone).
If we grant that
the institutions and individuals in power (especially in high
concentration) will do everything they can to keep power, then taking
these steps are seemingly inevitable. The people who work for these
institutions can be a faceless rotating group of citizens who passively
believe this is just the way things are now, that it is just their jobs. If
the technology can, then people will.
We are treating 'speech' more like 'deed', where someone taking
mental/emotional offence to certain ideas or terms can result in
widespread criticism and isolation for the speaker. This is the community
attempting to police itself due to law and order not yet catching up with
what the community deems permitted or prohibited.
No doubt that people who argue that free speech is a basic right and who
feel that political correctness can have huge and unanticipated
consequences will be disappointed with how 'sensitive' people are
supposedly becoming.
Yet it is technology that is dictating these changes. People's physical
and digital identities remain separate for now, but this will blur to a
greater degree as time marches inevitably forward. While our Twitter
handles and Instagram profiles do not have to worry about stick and stones
(for our digital identities have no bones), there is still emotional
exposure there, and that means words can definitely hurt you (because this
immaterial form of interaction is all there is online).
Here
the importance of the body lessens, and the importance of the
non-corporeal concept of self rises.
What you do becomes less important than what you say. In a place
that is non-physical, saying is doing. You can't physically hurt someone
in cyberspace, so the wounds you inflict are mental. It is possible to
hurt someone('s feelings) without even intending to:
Involuntary Thought-Slaughter
In
the 21st century, Art (here using the very broad term, from painting to
video games) is expected to be self-aware and participative in its own
presentation of its socio-historical context. It is expected that within
itself is a defence from anticipated public criticism, whether this
includes how it handles matters of politics, social issues, gender or
diversity.
This is not necessarily a reasonable expectation.
At
the risk of putting too much stock in a quote, 'art is whatever you can
get away with.' (McLuhan)
Every artist is also a citizen, and in the role of the citizen they must
adhere to the laws of the state, and will ideally treat other with
courtesy and respect. Just like every citizen should do. But in the role
of the artist, this person should have no such restrictions. Here they can
'play', where no conventions or laws must be adhered to. The story, the
painting, or the whatever can be a thousands times for fantastical and
beautiful (or ugly and disgusting) than real life. Critics can argue that
it is meant to reflect a portion of reality and the artist can shrug and
say it doesn't matter what the critics or the public thinks. The act of
creation with such freedom is essential to being human.
Of
course it also should be acknowledged that art is so tied up with
capitalism that is sometimes hard to escape the fact that it is hard to
take the higher moral ground of 'free expression' when raking in grands.
As
the world economy becomes more digital and interconnected, the
incidental/unexpected effects of political, economic and social decisions
multiply.
Environmental changes, the rise in public/private debt, the rapid
disappearance of job security. These examples have their own wide and
intricate effects on how our civilization operates.
‘A butterfly flapping its wing can create a typhoon across the planet’ is
the old adage. Similarly, we do not realize how our individual actions can
affect many people in other nations. Every time we buy something – or
choose not to buy something, because of a social media post we read – we
can alter the sales projections of the company, and the CEO or board
members might make decisions for layoffs, cutbacks, or complete
reorganizations. And that can affect many people’s lives, not just in the
company, but all the other companies it does business with.
This is true in politics as well. The Arab Spring began when a frustrated
fruit seller in Tunisia lit himself on fire in the capital in an act of
protest over government corruption.
Bad
moods can topple governments, 25% off a similar product can bankrupt
companies, and every hamburger can raise the sea levels.
We
have become so accustomed to rapidization of our private lives (how
quickly we interact with each other, how quickly information/work is
shared, how quickly we can have a wealth of tangible items delivered right
to us) that we have become much less patient and are not willing to wait
for changes and reforms to our political/public lives. Massive projects
undertaken by governments - infrastructure, health care programs,
redistribution of tax dollars - take longer to create, support and
actually work, and it is easy for the public to lose interest or not
support it anymore if it does not bear fruit immediately. And the living
standards of the state suffers.
Let's not forgot that just how amazing the idea of 'whatever I need can be
delivered right to where I live in a matter of hours and whatever I want
can be delivered in a matter of days' really is, and how it is changing
human society and behaviour.
As
more of the global population moves to cities, technology can adapt to
them. Realizing that you are almost out of orange juice, you can think,
'next time I'm out doing errands I should pick up another carton', or
think, 'I am actually a five minute walk from a store where I can buy it
almost immediately', or ultimately realize, 'actually, if I willing to
wait a few minutes longer, I can have someone deliver me a carton of
orange juice right to my doorstep.'
While this seems mundane, it is actually incredible, and it is unknown how
much this can change not only the economics of our society, but our daily
standards and expectations of our society.
Rapidly developing technology has altered our conceptions of narratives
and meta-narratives. Our access to information and the varying
perspectives to this information is near-instantaneous.
The
subversion of expectations is baked into our expectations. We are looking
back at the same time that we look forward. The time it takes to
experience events is conflating. While an abstract, philosophical notion
before, now it is how we experience culture, thanks to the internet.
The
medium is indeed the message. (McLuhan, again)
Internet Rights
The
Internet began as the wild west/gold rush, and has become a giant
monopolistic enterprise run by a handful of wealthy Silicon Valley
gatekeepers, and the next step will be a heavily regulated
'democratization' of this now inescapable and essential component of human
society. The Internet is too important to largely be a money-making
enterprise for the few.
The
very wealthy people who run and own shares in companies like Facebook and
Amazon will loathe this transformation (it will be one hell of a haircut
to wealthy investors), but there will be a tipping point where what
constitutes your identity will change to give more legal protections to
your digital information.
Consequently, these companies will no longer be allowed to treat you and
your data (which will be viewed as an essential part of yourself) the way
they are now.
Certain social media sites will be identified as public squares or a place
where a community gathers, and this means they will be nationalized (to
varying degrees of regulation). This means there are public sites and apps
that can be considered 'separate' from other aspects of your online
identity. Certain password protected spaces will be seen as your 'home',
and rules about privacy can be applied to them.
To
arrange this, you buy 'space' on digital servers that is yours, or you pay
a fee to the government so they can set up this way of interacting with
the digital realm (and pay it annually for its upkeep). It is like
property, and you pay a property tax to retain this space that you will
furnish with your data/online identity.
But…will more wealth equal more server space?
Filmmakers can decry the dimming/dumbing down of the medium of film, but
the truth is that the people who do appreciate what is typically
considered to be 'high art' of the movie world have moved onto
appreciating similar form of creativity and exploration found in TV, video
games (yes, video games), and other artistic endeavours. Nearly one
hundred years ago theatre fans and critics were upset when people turned
away from that enterprise and instead focused on films, decrying these
'moving pictures' as nothing but a gimmick and a fad.
Times change and so does technology. These other forms of storytelling
offer something that movies could not. Streaming means long form episodic
storytelling, and video games offer an even more immerse and interactive
experience. Not that the movies are 'over' (just like theatre is not
over). It is now just going to be sharing the spotlight more with TV and
video games.
And video games themselves are changing into unique and artistic
experiences at a rapid pace. You are no longer just running around
shooting enemies or stomping on their heads. Play as a troublesome goose,
annoying townsfolk in the hilarious ‘Untitled Goose Game’. Get your inner
David Lynch/Steven Spielberg on with the dark, hypnotic, sci-fi puzzle
simplicity of ‘Inside’. Solve a heartbreaking family murder mystery in
‘What Remains of Edith Finch’. Step into the beautiful painting that is
‘Gris’. If all you think about video games is Mario and Call of Duty,
there is an incredible world of joyous exploration ready for you now.
Changes in the Heavens
Early concepts of the afterlife were either for
the god-like equivalents on earth (emperors and Kings were welcome to live
on, but the regular people were not, such as in Egyptian mythology), or a
meditative-like annihilation of self plus infinite regress (Buddhism,
Hinduism). The sun always took the centre stage because damnit, that sun
was oh so important to human existence then (and now).
In Greek myths, certain 'normal' people interacted
with gods, who usually watched from Mount Olympus high above (some of
these interactions were against these people's will, as Zeus had a
terrible habit of coming down to earth and raping women).
Trying to appease the gods above was done in many
ways, but it was always doing whatever the priests in the society said was
the right thing to do (funnily enough, it always started with 'listen to
the priests'). Not only was it relating to your behaviour, but also
sacrifice (typically making an offering of something of value, like an
animal you could have eaten).
But this wasn't because you, the average non-king,
wanted to live on in the afterlife. That wasn't in the cards. No, you were
trying to keep the gods (or god) happy so that they wouldn't curse you or
your offspring. These gods apparently meddled in everything. Your crops
died? It wasn't because of random bad storms or an increase of locusts.
God did that to you because you did something wrong.
With Christianity's rise, the idea of an afterlife
available for all that led the proper life god expected of them became the
dominant view though the Dark Ages (and was also adapted by Islam) and
into the Renaissance. The reward was heaven, more of a place than idea, a
paradise, something akin to the myth in the Torah (which both Christianity
and Islam sprung from) regarding the garden of Eden.
Depictions of heaven involved the sky, the
unattainable, the above, the place with sun, moon and stars, all of which
played important symbols in all myths. Where you couldn't get to and
couldn't understand...that's where God resides. Because that's what God
represented.
The Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead are probably the greatest American band. Their
competitors aren't numerous: The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground,
Talking Heads, REM Pixies, Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan.
[note the
intentional omission of solo artists (Dylan, Michael Jackson, etc.), or
solo artists that have a regular backing band (Springsteen w/E Street,
Prince w/Revolution and others)]
It is a divisive choice (some people really don't like the Grateful Dead),
just like America is.
The Grateful Dead
are the band that best embodies the sometimes glorious and sometimes
ignoble spirit of the United States. A
band with its share of luck and fortunate and triumph, as well as curses
and tragedy.
A band that
persevered through old-fashioned hard work (touring and songwriting in the
late sixties, early seventies) and became a great success, but was
ultimately overcome by bloated excesses (in part through middling studio
output post mid-seventies, and the addiction issues with several band
members in the late seventies onward).
A band of accomplished musicians from different musical
backgrounds and whose sum of abilities were much, much greater than their
parts. Blues and country covers mixed in with laid back psych rock.
A fusing of generational sounds. A little bit weird, a little bit slow, an
experience where you have to ‘buy the ticket and take the ride’.
Those who loved The Grateful Dead
loved them a lot, almost unhealthily so. The Deadheads’ (as they are
called)
passion for the band made the band seem unpalatable to others. Their live
shows became a spiritual exercises for hundreds of thousands of people,
but that meant they were all worshipping an overweight heroin addict
onstage. It’s complicated. Just like America.
But damn if ‘High Time’ (off
Workingman’s Dead) doesn’t just get you right in the feels and you just
want things to be how they were when everything was fresh and new.
A
Feature That Became a Bug: Set Election Dates
In
the 21st century, always having the same day (or month) for a national
election has become a terrible liability.
Policy decisions, candidate narratives, and pre-packaged talking points
can all be set up on a calendar, revolving around (in the United States’
case) the first Tuesday in November. Budgets for lobbyists, PACS,
committees and anyone who wants to put a finger on the scales of power are
set up around these election days, years in advance.
Campaigns cost money and spend money, and that means work, both direct (an
assistant to the candidate) and indirect (a web-designer for a political
website, a hotel owner in Iowa). There is an industry that revolves around
campaign season, and that means people are dependent on it growing, not
shrinking.
Fundraising results per quarter are like profit results for a company, and
the media attempts to equate financial success with electoral success.
Much of the donated money (some from average citizens, some from wealthy
citizens, much more through PACs and SuperPACs) is mostly spent on
advertising, so it just creates more powerful media companies that spend
more time covering the gossip of the campaign rather than the policy.
The
candidate has become a CEO of sorts, as well as the product.
It
is as if running a political campaign is supposed to be preparation for
the challenges you will then face if you win the election, but this only
true on a very superficial level. Making politics more like a business
inevitably results in frequent interactions with other businesses (read:
wealth) and much less frequent interactions with citizenry (read: poor).
Having all this occur on a schedule that is known permanently in advance
also creates media coverage like it is a sporting event. With candidates
ahead at one moment and behind the next, and whether one of them can ‘win’
a debate to mount a comeback.
All of this has absolutely nothing to do creating sensible government
policy for a nation.
Die Hard: A Critical Analysis
Reinforcement of conservative values
- the reuniting of a family for a traditional religious holiday, the
failure of the state (mostly foolish police officers and FBI agents) which
means the individual must triumph despite overwhelming odds (fighting
bureaucrats and the actual villains)
Class commentary
- the powerful men wear fancy suits, have lots of money (either the
businessmen at the party, or the terrorists, the latter with expensive
fake IDs and military-grade weapons), smile while they lie, can create
destruction with a gun or a pen (as Ellis notes), meanwhile the actual
good guys are cops in uniforms or plain clothes (or limo drivers, or city
hydro workers), speak a lot more plainly and directly, and are just doing
their jobs for much less pay
Neo-Colonialism
– ‘America’ is now beset on all sides, with Asian businesses setting up in
Los Angeles (Nakatomi corporation) and expanding rapidly, and European
terrorists here to rob them blind, it is up to an American caught in the
middle to assert his dominance, but for his own personal and professional
interests (saving wife and hostages, the latter because he’s a cop)
Hero Archetype
– the typical qualities of the protagonist and antagonist are turned on
their heads, with a mouthy, emotional (anti)hero, and well-dressed, calm
villain
Feminist - Holly wants to be seen as completely
independent (her own last name despite being married, a high position in
the company, how she takes charge during the hostage threat), but still
requires a man to save her (at the end of the movie, to truly be free of
the villain, her husband must remove the expensive wristwatch the company
gave her)
Media – ruthless, invasive and hyperbolic,
irresponsibly attempting to be first to report the story, threatening a
housekeeper with deportation in order to get access to the hero’s children
Spacetime and the Buddha
You can't have it both ways
In earthly (or planetary) terms, you can't go straight
north and straight east at the same time. You can go northeast, but that
means you're giving up a bit of both directions.
This basic form of physical limitation is seen in more
complicated aspects of human society and individualism.
You can't feed the poor while trying for a state of
total enlightenment in a mountain monastery. You have to descend from the
higher planes of existence to once again participate in earthly affairs.
God can't meddle on earth unless it has got a little
bit of 'earth' inside itself. Hence the constant myths and stories of
half-gods. Popularized in Greek myths, but best exemplified by Jesus.
For most of human history ‘god’ was the placeholder term and
representative of the unknown, and science has been set against the
unknowable because it’s goal to understand and explain how the universe
works without relying on an omnipotent agent.
But now we are finding that baked into the basic
operations of the universe itself is unknowingness and uncertainty. If the
rules don’t break, then they certainly bend. Heisenberg says position and
momentum get a bit fuzzy the closer you look, and quantum physics has
certain properties and events that go faster than light, like the space in
which light itself propagates. Hence:
"if you think you know quantum mechanics, then you
really don't know quantum mechanics" - enthusiastic
astrophysicist Richard Feynman.
It's not so much that you cannot understand quantum
physics, it's that to accept quantum theories and its conclusions you have
to acknowledge that there are things that will remain unknown, because
this unknowingness is built into the operation of the standard model of
physics.
By being alive and engaging with the particles in the
universe (in part by being made up of the particles of the universe), we
are affecting the outcomes and states of everything in the universe at
every single moment. Famously, it's by locating/measuring a particle's
position that we affect its trajectory. The particle does something that,
if we were not to measure it, it would do differently.
But this happens on a much wider, expansive, permanent
scale. Any one particle can affect any other particle, anywhere in the
universe, (almost instantaneously). This is quantum entanglement, and it
leaves the speed of light in the dust.
These contradictions and impossibilities in science (to
say nothing of dark matter and dark energy) are well-trodden ground for
those seeking spiritual enlightenment.
Hindu religious texts talk of reaching ‘higher than highest’, Jesus
is half-divine as well a being a third of wholeness of god (the other
being the concept of ‘father’ and the holy-spirit), and Buddha asks us to
renounce the material world even though we are material beings (meaning
inevitably to the renunciation of self, since the state of nirvana is
meant to be that is beyond individuality).
While science and religion take very different approaches to the
question of who we are, the ideas behind them sometimes intersect. Our
relationship between the known and unknown greatly defines human
experience.
T2: A Comparison of Two Sequels
T2 is film shorthand for Terminator 2: Judgment
Day, the amazing, mindblowing 1991 follow-up to The Terminator.
T2 is also film shorthand for Trainspotting 2, the
very good, beautifully shot 2017 follow-up to Trainspotting.
(And yes, Danny Boyle and the Trainspotting 2 crew
had to get permission from James Cameron and his Terminator crew to use
that exact shorthand for the marketing and promotion)
The Terminator was a mid-budget action flick from
1984 staring Arnold as a killer robot from the future sent back to murder
the woman who would eventually give birth the human rebellion leader who
will fight the robots.
Cost $6.5 million, made $78 million.
Cameron's T2 is one of the great action flicks of
all time. If it wasn't for the necessity of adding the qualifier 'sci-fi'
as well (as one is forced to do with a movie involving time travelling
robots), it could almost be considered the greatest (consequently, the
correct answer is and always shall be Die Hard).
Trainspotting was a mid-budget comedy-drama flick
from 1996 about a bunch of Scottish heroin addicts (and one psychotic
drunk). At one point the protagonist goes swimming in a flithy toilet to
retrieve some suppositories.
Cost a little over $2 million, made $72 million.
Boyle's T2 is a nostalgia trip on drugs, reuniting
the whole cast and highlighting the differences and similarities of the
dark side of Glasgow over twenty years (and how it’s gotten both less and
more dark).
Trainspotting did for dark comedies what
Terminator 2 did for action movies.
Kicked it up a notch.
What Terminator does for one self contained, high-concept sci-fi pitch,
Cameron’s T2 does for expands, re-booting (literally re-booting
Schwarzenegger as a good robot), and improving the high-concept sci-fi
franchise.
What Trainspotting did for heroin, Boyle’s T2 does
for nostalgia, presenting both in
an
unforgettable, hyper-imperfect visual experience. And it’s fun to imagine who would win in a fight between T-800 and Begbie.
Here's a Thought Summer 2019
What
is the solution to the immigration crisis in America (or any country
facing this challenge) that will be the one that best exemplifies the
greatest moral good?
ONE-Making them citizens immediately. They are processed as new Americans,
are given social insurance numbers, and allowed to enter the country
freely and begin their life here without restrictions.
Is this feasible from a
policy point of view? Yes, but it will require an immediate and massive increase
in spending not only to begin this application process, but to provide
necessary services (from housing to health to social assistance like food
stamps and job training). And even with this starting immediately, it will
be a very slow process setting this up, and many immigrants will remain in
terrible conditions for longer than anyone would like.
Is this feasible from a
political point of view? Certainly not. Conservatives will be against it in totality
(and even some democrats will balk), which means passing it in Congress is
dead in the water. The general public is not in favour, either.
Conservatives and even undecided voters will see it as amnesty, thinking
there are already enough Americans who are struggling, and that adding
more will hurt, not help.
TWO-A massive and immediate expansion of personnel to process applications
more quickly, so the people will no longer have to wait in the camps and
cage and can wait within the country until there are further hearings
regarding their application. Because of more personnel working, the
waiting times for these hearing will be shortened, and the amount of
people being accepted as refugees would expand widely.
Is this feasible from a
policy point of view? Yes, but it will still require a large increase in spending
for the expanded personnel (as well as more training, because there may
not be enough qualified people available to fill all newly open
positions). It will also be a slow process setting all this up, so
terrible conditions will continue for some time.
Is this feasible from a
politics point of view? Almost
certainly not. Republicans will see this not much different than 'making
them citizens' (and even a few democrats will balk), which means it won't
pass in Congress. The general public will be a bit more split, with
conservative media focussing on the spending and some xenophobic talking
points, while a larger chunk of the undecided voters being in support of
it.
THREE-A massive Marshall Plan-like spending and investment package for
Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, to fight the violence and gangs in
the countries, which spur so many people to leave them and try for life in
the United States. This will also include infrastructure spending and job
training. Ideally this will cause fewer people to attempt to cross into
America through Mexico.
Is this feasible from a
policy point of view? Yes, and considering the amount of money America already
spends on defence, taking billions of dollars out of the practically
bottomless Pentagon budget on this investment/aid package is not a huge
deal. This sort of non-military spending by the military has always been
the most efficient way to promote American ideals worldwide (much more
effective than bombs). Since it comes from the defence budget, it can
probably be set up, sent off and spent quicker than options A and B.
Although its will take longer for the changes to take effect.
Is this feasible from a
policy of view? Maybe. The liberals will appreciate the nation-building
approach and 'less inhumanity at the border'. It can be sold to the
conservatives as a responsible form of spending (as it can get 'lost' in
the Pentagon's books), and that it is ultimately going to 'defending the
border', even if it's being used further south.
The
rise of AI/automation is only one of the hurdles that are going to affect
the next generation of workers.
While this technology advance does mean fewer jobs (yes, some new ones
will be created within this new industry, but not the same amount of being
lost), a larger problem is the type of job that is becoming more and more
popular: Temporary work. More forms of employment being offered these days
(and moving forward), are freelance or contract, with less and less
stability and almost no benefits.
Unfortunately, the jobs that are unaffected by automation and might have
more job security aren't paying enough these days, either. There seems
little to suggest that recent forced minimum wage increases are going to
match with cost-of-living increases. These include food, medicine/health,
rent, tech necessities, and of course attempting to pay off already
existing debt. You can't really save when it comes to this sort of
economic environment, and that means never affording a down-payment on
actual property. Which is problematic.
In
the past, the house was the one thing middle class people had to
'leverage' when they needed money in a pinch. Now people can barely afford
houses from the get-go. And if you (and your partner, if applicable) do
find a way to save up to actually buy a house or condo, you have to not
get laid off, otherwise you'll miss one payment and lose everything. More
so than ever in the past, people today are not saving, are constantly
borrowing, and are putting all their money into a property that they will
not wholly own for decades.
God
is love, and the beatitudes should be more popular than the Ten
Commandments, but you'll be forgiven (ha) for not noticing this when you
take a look at the massive apparatus that is the Catholic Church, or any
Christian denomination (big or small).
Of
course, Jesus is/was always more about personal philosophy and reflection
than any sort of organizational structure. Telling Peter to 'feed my
sheep' is not exactly helpful when it comes to creating a religion that
has thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of followers
around the world. In some ways, what Christianity has become is the exact
opposite of what Jesus seems to have meant.
Today, 'christianity' is not seen as a benevolent force of piety,
sacrifice and generosity. It is only against things, it shames or attacks
people who they feel live in contravention to religious laws, and it is
unwilling to change. It doesn’t help that the leaders of Christian groups
are extremely wealthy, even those that take vows of poverty.
There is very little Christ here.
Do
you think you'll go to heaven?
Well, it depends on your idea of heaven.
In
fact, this supersedes even whether you believe in heaven (ha!), because if
you don't believe in heaven (and the god associated with it), but there
ends up being one, it depends if this heaven immediately judges
non-believers as inadmissible, or whether their actions on earth are the
qualifiers, regardless of belief (if you don't believe in heaven, but are
an incredibly charitable and kind person, do you get in? It depends on the
rules of heaven, even if you never believed it existed).
If
you believe in heaven, then it depends on the God/theology associated with
it, and whether you followed the rules to get in. Oh, but what rules? As
far as Judaism/Christianity goes, the 10 Commandments are a good start,
but everyone has broken at least one commandment (you can't be lying, aka,
'bearing false witness', and chances are you've coveted something in your
life), so it depends on the type of forgiveness method you believe in
(does god immediately forgive all your sins if you're a believer, or do
you have to spend in time in purgatory as penance before getting to go
into heaven?). Plus, there's the beatitudes (good ways of acting), which
are a bit more of a sliding scale, because it's easier to rate whether you
avoided bad things than to rate how many good things (and of what quality)
you did.
And
you know, it's pretty prideful to think you're a shoe-in for heaven in the
first place, and pride is one of the seven deadly sins...
We're Still at (Back to?) Nature vs. Nurture when it comes to Issues with
Gender Equality
-differences that are socially constructed need to confronted and
collapsed, and this is being done slowly but surely (ideally this process
would be sped up) -differences that are biologically constructed need to be better understood and...what else? What do we do with these differences? How do we deal with the physical size disparities and different levels of testosterone and estrogen between the men and women? On both as a whole and on an individual basis (because there are innumerable differences between members of the same sex)? How do these physiological differences influence our societal constructs? How can we prevent these biological differences from getting in the way of social equality? Think how much can change when we alter our perspective of what women and men are capable of. And if you think that these are set in stone and that 'men are like this, and women are like that', well, we're actually on the cusp of being able to edit human genomes, and soon physical characteristics are whatever you want them to be. We can bridge many differences between men and women, but we shouldn’t do this without asking questions about what these differences mean.
If
an asteroid was going to hit earth in twelve months, we have to launch a
rocket with a craft attached that will 'tug' it out of the trajectory that
will hit earth well before
the day it's going to hit. It wouldn't make a difference tugging
for only several hours from that distance. It needs to intercept this
asteroid when it was much, much further back from earth. That could mean
months before the asteroid hits earth. So suddenly we have to build and
launch a rocket in eight months, because if it took any longer it wouldn't
be have enough time to move the asteroid out of the way.
Eight months is a ridiculous amount of time to build a new rocket that has
to do something that's never exactly been done before (closest we've done
so far is landing a probe on an asteroid), with a craft that's never been
built before, to do a planet-saving task that's never been tried before.
Even
if you have strict schedules of 'no matter how far in development, hand
the plans to the builders by this date', the amount of unknowns and
untested elements will multiply.
It
would be incredible if it doesn't explode on the launch pad (or at max-q,
or have something malfunction on the voyage towards the asteroid, or smash
into the asteroid, or 'tug' at the asteroid ineffectively). And if it
explodes on the launch pad, then we have nothing to do for those four
months but wait for our inevitable demise.
Laziness
'The path of least resistance' - it's how elementary particles work, and
it's how human beings work. We
have the tools in front of us to be healthy, well-informed, and
considerate to other people, but because it's easier to not do these
things, we do not. Even when we acknowledge that it's important to take a
short term problem for a long term gain, we rarely do.
It's easier to eat junk food/sit on the couch, just read the headline, and
send 'thoughts and prayers', than it is to eat healthy/exercise, read many
in-depth articles, and actually volunteer to help those in need or march
for a cause you believe in.
This is not because we are immoral beings. We certainly do have morals and
sets of values. It's just that when it comes to following them...we're
lazy.
How
Long Could You Last Without a Supermarket?
It's
incredible how well this system of international trade and commerce works.
Putting aside the fact at how terribly it can exploit human labour all
along the process of creation that ends on your kitchen table or in your
living room, it is astonishing that this trade/transport system fails so
infrequently. Even significant delays or setbacks like a machine breaking
down in a factory, or a huge portion of them being defective, or a
shipment being tied up at a port because of red tape, or a problem with
tariffs, are the exception, not the rule. Another reason Amazon is so
impressive is how quickly it get everything to you. How they have to
perfect the shipping system at every angle to make it work.
And
yet it's still so fragile. There are so many interconnected aspects to
this system that can collapse because of a different part of the global
economy slips up. Like houses defaulting on their loans in one area of the
world can set a series of events in motion that will make your apples much
more expensive.
Whether it's Amazon or your local grocery store chain, we will run out of
stuff.
There
is going to come a point where we have to decide whether to accept a huge
curtailing of choice in our products and services (either they will no
longer be available, or they will so difficult to obtain that few could
afford them), in order to conserve the resources used to make/offer them
for future generations.
This
means certain foods, certain types of clothing, certain types of
electronics, certain types of vehicles, certain types of transport/travel,
etc.
To
many people this will be views as a curtailing of freedom, because buying
a hamburger whenever you want one, or driving whatever kind of car you
want is the act of freedom itself (even though this act is dependant of
you having money for the burger or SUV). As far as responsibilities go, it
will have to be the government who is no longer allowing you the variety
of choices you once had.
For
millions of people, this change will look like fascism, not like the
necessary sacrifice to ensure that human civilization can continue for
decades, centuries, etc. And it certainly shows how much we have the
materialist culture ingrained in us, that a restriction on things we can
buy is seen as an assault on freedom, meanwhile disenfranchisement from
the political process (power) is treated with little more than a shrug.
The
Odds that we understand odds are against us
80%
sounds like a lot. If that amount of people support something that much -
especially in our modern world where it feels* like every political issue
and reaction to a TV series is bitterly divided down the middle - then
it's definitely going to...what? 80% approval means a bill will pass, a TV
show will get renewed, a new condiment will have knockoffs within a month,
right?
[* -
one hell of a problematic word, an unscientific method that has shaped an
ungodly amount of human civilization]
Our
concept of numbers is terrible, and it can't really be blamed on how much
we hated derivatives in high school. It's more of a practical issue, where
beyond the simple math of figuring how much things cost, and then doing
some percentage work for tips and interest rates, we don't really use it.
Now, the machines that power pretty much everything in our lives use it
incessantly, and the scientists and engineers behind these inventions and
many other discoveries in many different disciplines need to know algebra,
calculus, and trigonometry just to get started. But that's a very small
segment of the population who actually know the 'secret' that is the
foundation of our modern world.
The
lottery is the go-to Pinata for proof that people don't understand math.
The odds are so absolutely terrible that you will win, but it doesn't stop
people from buying tickets in droves. In fact, when there's a bigger
jackpot, even more people buy, which lower everyone's chances.
[same phenomenon, sadder result: the more people who participate in
voting, the less your individual vote actually matters. But vote! Oh, for
the love of dog, please vote!]
Even
better odds, like 1 in 3, aren't properly understood. The basic
understanding is that if the odds are 1 in 3 that the dog is going to jump
off the dock and make it into the boat, what is being implied is that if
the dog tried the jump three times, she would make it once. But that's no
guarantee that it will happen once in three tries. It might happen twice
in three tries, or once in four tries. 1 in 3 is just the mathematical
average (for scientists) or guesstimate (for Vegas oddsmakers) of how
likely the event will occur. Even with a six-sided die, the odds are
obviously 1 in 6 that you'll roll a five or one or any number, but that
doesn't mean if you roll the die six times that each number will show up
once. You can roll it six times and you might get four three times, get
one two times, and three once, etc.
The
'1' when you say '1 in 6' isn't a guarantee of 1. Heck, even the 80% we
mentioned at the start (translation to odds: 4 in 5), isn’t a guarantee.
They’re both averages. And they can still fuck you.
Marketing went from Madison Avenue (it doesn't matter if product A
actually tastes or works better than product B, we just have to convince
the public that it does) to Wall Street (it doesn't matter if your
investment portfolio includes companies that are squeezing money from poor
people who have nowhere else to turn, we just have to convince most of the
public that we aren't squeezing all the money from all the poor people) to
the White House/government power (it doesn't matter if what we claim is
true or not, we just have to convince most of the people that it is true).
When it comes to the Madison Avenue phase, it didn't matter that much if
you thought Pepsi was better than Coke or vice-versa, but when this sort
of 'selling' of ideas occur in the halls of power, that truth and policy
become a marketing gimmick, then what hope does a free society have?
Pyramids
Pyramids are extremely old structures with plenty of power behind them.
Practically, they were the easiest way to get higher, with their unnatural
inclines getting you a little bit closer to the ceiling that is the sky,
which certainly played into its religious significance, since that's where
the gods (sun, moon) are. And they were really hard to build back then. Of
course you were going to let a king be buried there. That's how you know
they (the structure, the king) were important. The best known is the
four-sided pyramid, with a square base (impressive mathematical exactness
for five thousands years ago).
From a 2D perspective, it is a triangle, one of the most important basic
shapes in the universe, a wonderful way to show other intelligent beings
(say, aliens) that we understand math (the Pythagorean theorem).
This shape has also 'shaped' societies. A triangle has become hierarchical
representation of society, depicting the few with power on the top, and
the ever increasing amount of people with much less (or broad) power the
further down you go. It's is an extremely important teaching tool, being
the go-to shape to tell us about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the foods we
should eat, and how to properly choke someone.
There is no
biological evidence/markings/information within you that is linked to the
day you were born. It is a completely social construction, based on the
much more event-centric fact which simply is the day you came out from
between your mother's legs (or were removed via Caesarian due to
complications). But it is a socially-based fact (within the Gregorian
calendar), one that your mother and doctors will remember, and perhaps it
was even filmed or photographed (maybe not the exact birth moment). And
this counts as the proof of when it happened according to everyone around
and - if it ever had to be acknowledged - in the court of law.
There's no medical
test, though, that can be administered which will give the result of your
body being – for example – thirty two years, one hundred and twenty nine
days old. As far as the collection of cells that makes up 'you', you'd
already existed for nearly nine months, and the day you stop floating in
an amniotic sac and emerged into the world was just a really weird thing
that happened.
It is surprising in
some ways that this is not used by anti-abortion advocates, but it might
have something to do with the logical conclusion that if the sperm and egg
are always 'alive' on some basic level, then there is no time of
conception, that life is a constantly (over)flowing process.
It does remind us
that the birthday is more for practical purposes than anything else.
CNN Polls show that most Americans don't see the findings of the Mueller
report an important factor for voting in 2020:
(https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/20/politics/poll-of-the-week-mueller-report/index.html)
This is a terrifying statistic. In the sense that one would be more
worried about the economy, health care, climate change and social issues
than about some he-said, he said executive decisions a bunch of Justice
Department lawyers are investigating into in DC, it's understandable,
because the Mueller report doesn't affect your day to day.
But the Mueller report looked into the very core of what responsibilities
leaders have and are accountable to in what is supposed to be a
functioning democracy.
It is utter madness that it's clear a foreign power influenced a
presidential election, that the candidate they wanted to win ultimately
did, and that this candidate-turned-president tried to stop the
authorities into looking into this attack (and the candidate's possible
assistance to it) on several different occasions.
In a functioning democracy, it shouldn't even have to reach impeachment
proceedings. The politician who took advantage of and did all this should
have the good sense to resign in shame.
On the other hand, why should they, if the citizens seem to be okay with
it:
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/america-fine-collusion/587701/)
Also:
(https://youtu.be/f71Rasj_0JY)
This legal analysis explains that the framework of the investigation meant
Trump could not be indicted for any crime. So it was a matter of finding
him 'not guilty' or not not
guilty'. They found him the latter.
Trump has tested the entire corporate-political-legal system of the United
States, and has broken every piece of it. He imagines himself King Midas,
but he is the reverse. Everything he touches turns to shit.
He broke every 'norm' of campaigning, of releasing your tax returns, of
diplomatic sense, of social decorum, of following human rights, of
respecting your political opponents, of supporting your intelligence
agencies, etc.
And
enough people in power and across the nation let him.
The laws are warped enough that he can just barely evade the
repercussions. This is not a functioning democracy.
Here's a
Thought February 2019
Are we really going to get out of Low Earth Orbit with capitalism?
SpaceX really will change everything, if a corporation goes interplanetary
before 'people' (that is, a government agency that represents a nation or
a series of nations working together).
Certainly SpaceX has been standing on the shoulders of (institutional)
giants to get where they are today, and it's essential to acknowledge that
the more private side of the military/industrial complex has always had
plans for space, but it is moving forward with grand plans that dwarf any
current government space program initiatives.
There's money in satellites, but is there money in Mars? Enough money to
justify the expense and the risks? Not yet. It is absolutely impressive
what SpaceX has achieved, but it's going to be mindboggling if a
corporation lead by an extremely forward-looking and idealistic CEO
accomplished this before a nation. And even if Musk personally has more
altruistic reasons to create a Mars colony than to turn a profit, his
investors and shareholders may not feel the same.
It's heartening that NASA is doing a great job sending crafts to Mars so
successfully.
But we have to be ready for something to go wrong in this plan to get to
Mars that would cost money, time and (unfortunately) human lives.
Even if we are able to travel and set up a civilization on Mars, we should
never lose focus on the importance of taking care of the long term health
of our own planet, which at this point clearly requires some important
energy and emissions reforms as soon as possible. We have to keep the
earth functioning at the very least, and ideally healing and improving it.
Because if we don't, and we just shuffle on to Mars...and then the next
planet...that means we're becoming the parasitic alien invaders in
Independence Day.
Humility is required for space travel. To be only wildly egotistical and
overconfident will result in conflict and failure. To understand and
accept the many risks that could befall (especially in the early years) of
this permanent change to human existence, you must accept the great
randomness of terrible outcomes. And then try again.
While science and technology plays a dominant role in this process,
humanity could do well to remember and old religious saying (while not
necessarily applying anything divine to it), 'there but for the grace of
God go I'.
If Donald Trump is smart at anything, it's not
the kind of smarts that is necessary or useful for being president. Donald Trump is a
good salesman. He can sell anything, he can charm and excite people, and
convince them to give him their money. Whether it's hotels, condos, steaks
or mortgages, he can sell it. Which is why he transitioned to game show
host pretty easily (and sadly, political candidate as well).
But Donald Trump is a terrible businessman, and whatever you buy from him
is probably a rip-off, and he will try to use any trick in the book to not
give you any of your money back, even if you clearly and legally deserve
it.
And Donald Trump is not just a good salesman and terrible businessman,
he's also arrogant and ignorant, which are terrible qualities to have as a
person, let alone as the person who leads the most powerful nation on
earth.
It's bad enough to buy something from a man like Trump, but to do business
with him is so, so much worse. And that's what everyone in America is
finding out. By voting for him, the citizens are in business with Donald
Trump.
And it's awful.
What will happen in the wake of the release of the Mueller Investigation's
findings depends heavily on what type of democracy you believe America is
right now.
It's likely that if presented with sufficient evidence, the Democrats will
unite together for an impeachment vote. But its success will be dependent
on how many Republican politicians in both the house and senate will
support these articles.
Now, do you believe that politicians primarily listen to their
constituents? Does the politician primarily listen to special interests?
To a certain sets of moral values, the almighty dollar, the sole goal in
getting re-elected?
When the strongest 'influence' wants the politician to 'dump trump',
that's when they'll do it.
It's not just that
people are being politically manipulated to take a certain position on
policy or law, it's that people are being politically manipulated to not
participate in political discourse at all (either by being targeted with
cynical messaging that insists that the system is too hypocritical,
corrupt and broken to really fix, or by restricting the ability to vote).
Apathy and
indifference to how politics operates in a democracy is poisonous for that
democracy. And those qualities
are constantly matched with ignorance, which can be even more dangerous,
because that allows the possibility of only understanding a certain
perspective of policies that might be wildly inaccurate.
Cause, Distance, Time
Earth's great. We've figured out how to harness the speed of light and
send information at that speed, and earth's comparatively tiny for how
very, very (very) fast this is (almost 300,000 kilometres per second), so
it all works great. Thanks to this, we are all immediately connected
across the planet by wireless radio signals zipping in and out of the
devices in our back pockets.
Even the distance of the earth to the moon is great (384,000km), in both
senses of the word. It's close enough to make the best possible
understanding of how fast light is. It takes a little over a second for
light to go from the earth to the moon. It’s a good visual marker for
something so fast. Take a deep breath in. That's how fast light - and
information - gets to the moon. One second's not much of a delay. It makes
it easy to operate or converse with equipment or people with people on the
moon (if there were any currently).
But space is, in this regard, not so great. Space is a huge pain in the
ass in this regard, emphasis on huge. Between three and twenty two minutes
to converse with Mars, depending on how close the two planets' orbits are.
And stars? That’s why they’re called light-years.
Capitalism is not the best fit for humanity because it does not properly
take into account the fallibility of humanity. If we made every single one
our choices based on rational, functionalist thought, then capitalism
would be the ideal economic system for society.
But we do not.
And in the bigger picture of comprehending what it means to be human we
should understand our flaws and to some degree try to accept them, fix
them or at the very least work around them.
But this idea of flaw reinforces why free-market capitalism cannot work.
To vilify greed is nothing new, but we are at a point where those who have
in inordinate amount of power will dismiss such actions, and certainly
bristle or shrug at the idea that they are greedy, that it is a terrible
to act as such, and that these policies are harming many, many other
people across the globe. It's not that capitalism celebrates these
terrible views or conditions. It's that capitalism doesn't care. 'Caring'
is not relevant. Emotions are not relevant. You will all be assimilated.
For free-market supporters, there is an amoral acceptance to this, there
is the explanation that this ''the way things are', that this 'is the best
system we can come up with'.
This is a fleeing of responsibility, a blindness to the state of the human
condition. But it gets worse because economic division breeds other
divisions. Baser, disgusting divisions such as bigotry, sexism and racism.
When there is less money to go around for most people in a
community/town/nation, resentment builds, assumptions and prejudices
strengthen, and misinformation reigns.
These results may not be capitalism's goal, but it is certainly one of
capitalism's inevitable byproducts.
Of course, if capitalism is too cold and robotic for humanity, then
communism is too naive and impossibly utopian (for now, anyway).
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Greenspan testified that he
didn't think it would happen because he assumed people would not take so
much risk. He assumed people would act like robots, and surprise, they
didn't, because we aren't robots, we’re people who have the capability to
be short-sighted and greedy.
Communism's a joke, too, for the same reason. Our worries and fears about
our own well-being for the present and the future preclude us from ever
sacrificing and sharing enough to create such a utopian/utilitarian world
where ownership is fluid and leisure is practically indistinguishable work
(because you'd only have to work when you feel like it). It's as if Marx's
end goals for communism were wildly optimistic, requiring not only a
change of how we see products and services, but how we see ourselves.
[Side note: To 'see' it in action, Star Trek is communist. No money, no
financial exchange for goods and services, people choose to work if they
want, and only if it interests them. Meanwhile Star Wars leans capitalist,
since Han Solo is always making deals and worrying about money and debt,
and it's a lot more chaotic]
So clearly the solution is a merger of the two, and since the industrial
revolution a mixed-market economy has existed to varying degrees. When it
leaned heavier to free markets, the rich got super-rich and the poor got
poorer. To correct this (most notably in the wake of the Great
Depression), increased taxes and regulation were enacted, and wealth was
redistributed and poverty decreased (and there was a strong middle class).
At the moment of this writing, in the closing of the 21st century's second
decade, the world is leaning heavily into free-market capitalism, and the
middle class is dying. A restructuring is almost certainly inevitable.
Once money - and to be more specific, large amounts of special interest
money - got into politics, it was never going to come out. You can't
unwind the clock on that. Politics has always been about instruments of
power - like controlling who could vote (which is making a comeback in
some areas) - and now money is the chief instrument.
How much cash a candidate or party has raised is celebrated like quarterly
profit earnings by a massive company. Citizens United quietly sealed the
lid on the coffin that housed American Democracy.
General Strikes
There should be more general strikes, not just because it would be a
comparatively more efficient means of protest and advocacy for the working
class, but also because it would give the populace an opportunity to
experience 'not getting everything you want at the click of a button or
tap of a screen'. And this is not meant to be a 'kids these days don't
know how good they have it' take, but a reminder at how fragile the 'just
in time' product supply chain truly is, and how it depends on so many
moving parts (which should really be 'people', not parts).
For several generations, we have been marketed to by companies and (to a
lesser extent) institutions, and the general message is that we deserve
everything, that this product or service will make you happier in ways you
didn't think was even important, and don't worry about the payment plan or
second guess yourself, just say yes. Technology has been able to give us
so much for so cheap that we are much too dependent on this unsustainable,
completely manufactured ecosystem.
Some strikes at some big companies might just remind us what we do and do
not have, what we need and do not need, and what we can't afford to lose.
The erroneous assumption in comedic material is that it is also the
personal views of the comedian saying them. This is not at all true. The
ultimate goal of any routine, no matter how political or relating to
current affairs, is to make a joke, not a serious point.
Now admittedly this has blurred over the years, as the last several
decades of comedy involve more personal and anecdotal stories of the
comedian, sometimes using the stage as a confessional with jokes sprinkled
it (none of which might be true, but they are typically made to sound
true, to sound like a story that actually happened to them). So if a
comedian tells a joke about their girlfriend/boyfriend and/or spouse
(whether they have one or not), it will come off as a personal truth, and
the audience will assume that they are seeing the 'real' person onstage.
Then if they have a riskier joke next (having a flippant or dismissive
punchline about sex, race, religion, etc.), people might assume they're
being honest there, too. Some audience members (or people on the Internet)
have been fooled into believing what the comedian says onstage is what the
comedian thinks offstage.
But regardless of this communication error, the condemnation for anything
a comedian says onstage (in their act, which is a term meant to suggest
'not real') is ridiculous. That it is held to the same scrutiny as a
comment or opinion that a politician, CEO, or celebrity would have about a
serious or controversial topic is ridiculous. That we look to comedians as
truth-telling heroes says a lot about how cynical we typically see other
public figures.
People aren't getting more sensitive, the same percentage of sensitive
people are out there. Thanks to the Internet, they are just connected to
each other all the time, and are exposed to a lot of material that they
probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. The 'outrage industry' doesn't pay
well, but it's easy to participate. Pop culture websites are always on the
lookout for any sort of story that might get them clicks (read: paid).
Sure obsessing over movie trailers and tv show easter eggs are nice, but
nothing brings moths to a flame like what a comedian said that might upset
a group of people. Even the writer of the article doesn't have to really
be personally offended. Just write a piece around a video link and let
angry people tear each other to pieces in the comments ('it's terrible!'
'It's just a joke!').
A comedian says something they don't mean, a writer posts an article on it
they don't care about, and people who will forget about it two days later
post like piranhas. At least the first two people got paid.
The power of God is
nothing. The power of the belief in God is everything.
The power of God resides solely with God.
Its power on earth is limited to those who believe in it, and what they
are willing to do on its behalf.
And if you aren't willing to die for
your religious beliefs, then you don't have any religious beliefs.
The whole point of
religion is that it explains the purpose and end result of death, and
those that accept this are rewarded when they die. Why would you deny your
beliefs to stay alive when by dying for them you're going to a better
place? For true believers, sacrifice is the grand opportunity to prove
yourself.
Is it because so many
people balk at this moment of truth, when the kernel of doubt over this
entire belief system of 'more life' balloons into an overwhelming fear
that maybe they backed the wrong horse?
Humanity has
not found intelligent life anywhere else in the universe, and perhaps it
is because we are one of the first to actually achieve this level of
intelligence. And this is not meant in a boastful way, but to suggest that
maybe life going from single cell to multicellular is so absolutely
difficult and unlikely across the whole universe. On countless other
planets something always goes wrong during the time (hundreds of millions
of years) to get beyond bacteria. Like a big rock (or several big rocks)
hitting the planet, or there's too much of one chemical or not enough of
another above, on, or under the surface. Our (failed) attempts to recreate
the process of making living things out of non-living things in
laboratories gives credence to this.
Maybe this
will become less of a problem as the universe continues to expand. Maybe
odds and time haven't been in life's favour until now. Maybe over the next
billion years or so more intelligence life will appear across the
universe, because the universe has finally existed long enough for the
opportunities to arise.
On the other
hand, perhaps in many other places life emerged so effortlessly that it
took a comparatively fast time to do the
single-cell-multicellular-spinal-cord-discovering-fire-smartphone-interplanetary-travel-achieving-higher-levels-of-existence
thing, and that we’re a half-baked bunch of water-filled dummies who can't
figure it out.
The inevitability of Migrant Caravans
It is human nature to flee extreme poverty and violence. People go to what
they perceive to be a safer area. Ending up in migrant camps in the United
States or particular European countries are still better choices than the
countries these people are fleeing from. If you are faced
with 'I am going to die here', you are going to leave, and borders mean
less than ever before, in the sense that every country participates
however well it can in the global capitalist marketplace. And every person
will try to go and reside in a country where a country can do and offer
the most in this marketplace.
In terms of providing a sustainable existence for the poor and lower
classes, there is barely a country to speak of. And the idea of saying,
'stay in your own country of Honduras or Yemen or Sudan and fix it, don't
come to America' (or anywhere else), ignores the larger problem of being
penniless and at the mercy of gangs, with no institution to protect them.
There's not much of a 'Honduras' to fix, because these people are so
disenfranchised from a country that cannot address any of these problems
successfully.
Every country - willingly or not - is turning into a service for this
marketplace. The inability of many nations to enact financial an economic
reforms that would benefit the populace is evidence of how powerful this
system is. It primarily benefits the rich as it offers less and less for
the many, and in several countries this means more and more people have no
choice but to leave their home nation. A capitalist economic policy has
warped these nations into a single global state that only follows one
rule: greed is good.
In some sense, there is no Honduras. Or Mexico. Or even America.
Bullies versus Nerds
If conservatives are bullies, all swagger, brashness and pushing people
around to show how tough the are, then liberals are the nerds trying to
appeal to everyone's reason and seemingly common sense. And while this
might be seen as lighthearted allegory, when it comes to politics, too
many bullies can overwhelm the fragile system of checks and balances.
Suddenly sensible ideas and respectful behaviour is thrown out the window,
and anyone who speaks up has their glasses broken. Throughout history,
when bullies get power, even more devastated chaos reigns. Bullies have no
policy except 'fuck you, I'm right, you're wrong, shut up', no matter how
much reason and evidence the nerds can offer.
It's bad enough on the schoolyard, it's worse on the global stage.
But bullies can appeal to the masses because there is the hope that if you
get along with them, they'll protect you. Forgetting the fact that bullies
are...bullies, and will turn on you at any time if they think it'll help
them.
And nerds seem so pathetic and weak, especially when bullies make fun of
them and seem so superior when they beat them at this or that. Even though
nerds would be so much more helpful in fixing the problems that are
plaguing society.
But no one feels that good supporting nerds, it doesn't feel like they can
protect or help us. Instead, we have to find the courage in ourselves to
vote for nerds.
When we disagree on weather, then we are well and truly fucked.
Hurricanes depend on warm waters, more water is warming more quickly, so
the storms will be bigger and more frequent. The reason the water is
warming because of increased CO2 emissions, which captures and prevents
the reflection of sunlight, which shines on the oceans, heating them up.
CO2 emissions are increasing because we are burning more and more fossil
fuels, which creates the energy we need to live in a global civilization.
There are fewer and fewer people who will disagree with this statement,
but many of the powerful people who disagree would lose a lot of money if
something substantial was done to address this issue.
The importance of how this denial is manifested cannot be understated. A
coordinated campaign to dis/misinform the public is becoming a more
powerful tool for political and corporate interests. How close are we to
denying much more recent moments in history, many of which have been
archived perfectly thanks to audio-visual recordings?
There have always been periods in the history of human civilization that
we know very little about (because any sort of written accounts that may
have been made have disappeared), or have contrasting information
concerning, or find a clearly bias account of the events made by the
victors (who have always a larger say in historical records).
But now video evidence of events or what a person said at a podium or in
an interview is being considered disproven by a segment of the population
because the person involved in these events simply denied it, said it was
a fake recording or video.
It is a trust in someone that borders on dangerous ignorance. If you deny
someone said or did something despite evidence, then what sort of society
that we live in? This sort of dissonance cannot hold.
Here's A Thought July 2018
Geography Help Destroy US Democracy
With
America broken up into 50 states based on mostly arbitrary straight lines
(plus the odd river), and with two powerful politicians representing each
one, there can be an incredible imbalance of power when there are massive
disparities between population in these states.
California has thirty nine million people and several different geographic
and climactic regions, and they have the same amount of senators as
Wyoming (580,000), South Dakota (870,000, and combined with North Dakota,
1.6 million) and Rhode Island (1 million and only 3100 square kilometres).
This is grossly inefficient. These sparsely populated states certainly
need to have a powerful representative in Congress, but they can't have
the same power over far reaching federal decisions as the states that are
much, much larger in terms of people, because that it what the government
is for: To help as many people as possible, not the most amount of land as
possible.
The
entire world is moving to a more urban environment and thanks to an
outdated model of senatorial governance,
Know who else fell for the 'you're so special and can grow up to be
anything you want' myth? The parents telling these things to their kids,
who went through their own stages of frustration, misunderstanding, and
resignation as their offspring didn't succeed in the way they did (largely
in part because they were living in a vastly different world when it came
to long term career-style employment). Parents will ignore the needs of
the community in order to support the whims of their children, and by
doing so, they forget that their children will ultimately live in this
community.
God, what an important, succinct piece:
It's time to retire the notion that free market capitalism promotes
competition. It allows for large corporations to easily crush the
competition and manipulate the populace into believing they have a choice
between good and services.
It's particularly heinous in this above example, as credit cards have
become a tool that keeps people in a spiral of debt, and now there is a
feedback system in place that rewards the already wealthy with bonus
points and punishes the poor with higher prices.
Does anyone in the upper echelons of power ever ask how much is too much
when it comes to squeezing money out of the poor? Not necessarily out of
moral concerns (although that due to how much debt the poor is being
forced to carry, just to be able to afford to survive?
Or is the vision of making money (or believing in a certain economic
theory/orthodoxy) in this particular instance so narrow that they can't
see the bigger problems that might occur?
Oh great, now sports have also become victims in the dying of smaller
American cities:
Thankfully the NBA's socialist distributing of money can help stem the
losses, but nine teams still finished in the red.
How does an already smaller city like Charlotte or Memphis or Oklahoma
City be able to 'keep' a basketball team? And that question is really how
a city can appease the team owner's thirst for making money? A new arena
has been the common attempt, but it's become clearer that they just take
hundreds of millions of dollars from other, more important budget demands.
And spending in cities is already difficult, since they're strapped for
cash. A life for most middle class families in this town are also
stretched thin. There's not a lot of money to spend on professional
sports, and woe betide the city that tries to double down on keeping a
team by throwing money at it instead of actual municipal services.
And now, an excerpt from Cicero's Letters to Atticus, circa 59BC:
"Well, we are held down at all sides. We don't object any longer to the
loss of our freedom, but fear death and expulsion as greater evils, which
are really far lesser. All with one accord groan over the present state of
affairs, yet no one does or says a thing to better it. The object of the
people in power, I imagine, is to leave nothing for anybody else to give
away.
[...]
"The whole situation has reached a point at which no hope remains of even
magistrates, let alone private individuals, ever becoming free men again.
Yet in the midst of this suppression of liberty conversation is less
inhibited than it used to be, at social gatherings, that is, and over
dinner tables. Indignation is beginning to get the upper hand of fear, not
however as so to lift the cloud of blank despair." (Pg.105, Bailey)
Learning How to Learn
Thanks to the effortless ability to access practically any piece of
information due to the Internet, learning of the future will rely less on
memorizing specific facts, and instead focus on the comprehension of said
facts (and the ability of doing this well) and incorporating them into a
well-formed idea. Being aware of confirmation bias and conflicting
interests when reading certain reports, articles and opinions are
essential.
The danger becomes then not in the lack of memorization or ignorance of an
issue, but an inability to access all the information to create an
informed opinion/decision. We rely on very few corporations to deliver
media and information websites (your New York Times, your Wikipedia) to
deliver this information to us.
Knowledge is undoubtedly power, but the question quickly becomes who is
letting us access this power.
Super-apps
WeChat is the symbolic shot across the bow of how the East is going to
pass the West in terms of technological development in the coming years.
Zipping back and forth between eight different apps on your phone isn't
really that difficult of course. A couple swipes and taps to go from
Instagram to your virtual wallet to your text messaging. But hey, things
could always be easier, right?
The Chinese government said definitely, and created an app called WeChat,
which groups all your apps in one umbrella. You live in the WeChat app as
if it's your phone operating system.
And everything you do in WeChat is known by the company. It has a perfect
profile of you, because you live your life through the app. And while at
first this seems like a boon to advertisers, who can now know how to
market everything specifically to you, the real difference is that WeChat
shares everything with the Chinese government. Nearly one billion people
use the app daily, a vast majority of them from China. WeChat allows the
government to passively monitor hundreds of millions of people every
moment. And it doesn't have to be in real time. Every text and transaction
and tap you make is saved, your entire life can be reconstructed in
reverse, going back days, months, years, to whenever you first downloaded
WeChat. The government knows all, and you gave them this access without
much of a second thought.
The question is how this is going to come to the West. Obviously Google,
Facebook, and Apple are figuring out a way to be the dominant tech giant
in each consumer's life, but the bigger concern is how Western governments
are going to get their hands on the data to the same extent that China
has.
Complicated processes such as the advancement of human
civilization are hard to properly analyze and alter while you are within
it.
You cannot proverbially take a step back and look at the big
picture while you are part of it. You can only do that once enough to time
has passed, and are able to look at the past, and line up particular
events to see which were key and which were not.
It's like the uncertainty principle in regards to the
position/trajectory of a particle. At your moment in history, you can't
say for sure the trajectory of what got you here and where you're going.
And when you are able to plot the trajectory, it cannot include your
current position.
Presently, we are at an unnerving crossroads when the basic question of
what it means to be human.
Environmentally, we have progressed further and further away from an
animal living within nature to an animal that can manipulate nature. And
we think this gives us power over it, but its effects can have very
dangerous ramifications for our ecosystem, which we are still very much
dependent on.
Socially, we are attempting to rise above our primitive and animalistic
instincts, encouraging peaceful, egalitarian behaviour while at the same
time suppressing and ostracizing violent, hostile, and divisive behaviour.
This can be seen on a very wide spectrum, from the rise of civilization,
where we begin to trust people who are not family members, all the way up
to the #MeToo movement.
And above all of this, we are at point scientifically where we have the
technology to edit the very DNA that makes us who we are. When you can
change a human as easy as pressing a button, the questions of 'what are
we?' comes screaming into view. And what if the answer is 'rather
malleable'?
Maybe we're a stepping stone to superhuman, or super AI. Perhaps homo
sapiens are nothing more than another Neanderthal-like blip in the history
of life on earth. Maybe these two entities which follow us - superhumans,
super AI - are the ones destined to travel the stars, since they will be
better prepared physically and mentally than we ever could be.
What is already
being forgotten about the Obama presidency is its amazing attempts and
successes (at least temporarily) to alleviate poverty and inequality in
And even as Congress remained largely inefficient when dealing with this
crisis (and poverty IS a crisis), executive orders and policy adjustment
made within the department's own framework, successfully increased budgets
for education, public works, sanitation, food stamps programs, and job
skills training.
The Democratic Party is frequently inefficient and corrupt (in the sense
that all politicians raise money and have to 'play ball with the party
line'), but at least they attempt to help the average citizen, whereas The
Republican Party seem to have an active disdain for any sort of policy
that would level the socioeconomic playing field for the so many more who
aren't rich.
Government has to play a role in continually employing large segments of
the country's population. That's what helps citizens have strong nations
in the first place: A lot of people working for the nation's common values
and requirements.
Otherwise, you're basically working for a corporation. And Corporations
hate people. People cost them money. Every attempt to replace a person
with a cheaper robot is a mindset wholly embraced by a huge majority of
international businesses.
First Uber undercut traditional taxi drivers.
Then they undercut their own drivers, and are continuing to do so. But
they'll do that on even a greater scale when self-driving cars are
ultimately approved for use, and then they won't need humans at all,
except mainly in one Silicon Valley office and few garages.
Video Games are the new Stories
Action/adventure video games typically follow the traditional Fisher
King/Bildungsroman archetype. There is a city under siege, or a kingdom
threatened by some sort of destructive force or evil, and the hero must
step up and faces trials and obstacles to lead the good guys to victory.
But the more immersive aspect of video games means you are 'playing' the
story, even if the story is Level 1, then Level 2, then Level 3, etc. In a
passive stories (books, films), you see the characters learn how to
succeed, and typically grow and mature into a wiser, successful person who
has the qualities of a hero. And along the way they experience setbacks
and failures, but ultimately succeed.
In active stories (video games), you are doing the learning and growing
via the controller in your hands. You are the hero going on the adventure.
Mario, Link, Master Chief and the many others are vessels for you to
inhabit (some of these characters are purposely nameless (like in Doom) or
have you put in your own name so it feels even more like you yourself are
the hero going on this adventure). And this learning and growing is how to
successfully survive and succeed in the virtual world of the video game.
You figure out how to make a certain jump only after some deadly failures.
You don't kill the mini-boss the first time because it takes a couple
attacks before you find its weak spot.
Of course, this kind of learning is not exactly immediately useful in the
real world. A relatively quick ability to adapt to different conditions in
a virtual reality isn't much of a marketable skill. Yet.
Immigration
This is not how we should be dealing with immigration into the Western
World at all. The entire system is broken, and while that speaks to even
larger problems in the interconnected socio-economic sphere that we call
civilization, a bare minimum of standards needs to be instituted for going
forward.
This is a human rights issue.
It's time to acknowledge the role that global free market capitalism has
played in creating pockets of wealth in some areas, poverty in other
regions, and virtual serfdom in states euphemistically described as
'developing nations'. Of course there are borders that must be recognized,
but we need to understand the ramifications of allowing money and good and
services flow much, much more freely than people. It is profoundly
dehumanizing that the parts of an iPhone can be sourced throughout the
world and travel to Southeast Asia for assembly and then sold anywhere,
with less oversight than a person moving from one country to another. And
if you scoff and say that a phone (or a pair of socks or an apple) is just
an inanimate object, then you're giving priority to an inanimate object
over a person.
Refugees and undocumented immigrants are portrayed as a liability or a
scourge, and consequently, the public passively accepts them being placed
in prisons or in camps for indefinite amounts of time, without trial or
any legal recourse, creating camps of the forgotten.
This is a human rights issue.
(https://splinternews.com/ice-is-keeping-people-in-immigration-jails-for-longer-a-1826018047)
Future of the Cinema
If it's not a hundred million dollar sci-fi, superhero, dystopic
blockbuster, it won't end up in the giant multiplexes with eight or more
screens and a food court (and some arcade and VR games, because that's not
so secretly the future of fun).
Rom-coms, thought-provoking dramas and other 'award fodder' films will
briefly appear at the remaining independent, old-school single screen
movie theatres, and then hope to find some extra life as a popular
streaming choice on Netflix or the like.
Hollywood always follows the money.
The ecosystem doesn't care how individual members of a species 'feels'.
That's now how life on earth works. How guilty does a cow feel about
eating individual blades of grass, which are living creatures in the
global ecosystem? Where are we drawing the line between which organisms
deserve to be spared from slaughter and consumption and which ones are
just salad?
Why are we differentiating between animals and plants? Because one has
more recognizable biological features (facial features like eyes, noses,
ears, mouths, and comparable limbs labelled arms and legs) than the other
(stems, seeds, flowers, etc.)?
Vegetarianism/veganism isn't about our relationship with the ecosystem. It
is our relationship with our higher ideals, our belief that's this is a
better/more compassionate/more responsible choice of how to live. But it
is a decision that earth's ecosystem cares not a whit for. Whether you eat
a pig or a potato, life does not care. Life is not ethical.
Of course eating less meat is necessary for the inhabitants of our planet
for going forward. We don't have the resources available to continue
consuming beef, pork, and chicken at this rate. For a majority of people
in the West (and a rising amount of people in the East), at least one meal
a day involves some sort of meat. This is way too much. This level of
consumption might ultimately lead to our doom. And life would not care.
Dichotomies are easy, so people cling to them quickly to differentiate.
And they can range from the silly to the serious.
Crunch peanut putter vs. Smooth
Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice
Left vs. Right
Individual vs. Community
Particle vs. Wave
Joy Division vs. New Order
But there are always dangers in this oversimplification of complicated
ideas or issues. People don't want to acknowledge there might be more than
two sides to consider, not only because it might force them to reconsider
their own position on the issue, but because it means there's a hell of a
lot information to process. Which takes a lot more time and energy.
Science lurched through the 20th century, having to constantly admit to
itself that it's more and more tinier bits of stuff that make up the
universe.
In a
hyper-connected economy, buying ethically/responsibly is not just buying
local, but considering how products are made, and whether a giant
corporation actually owns the small company you think you’re supporting.
Although Joy Division is clearly superior to New Order.
Fake Worlds
Open world sandbox games (from Minecraft to Breath of the Wild)
are instructive for interacting with simulated alternative environments.
Is it as good as actually experiencing real-world environments? Of
course not, but it's an excellent education and research tool. The
decision making capabilities and problem solving skills used when
interacting with a new environment for the first time is strengthened when
interacting in simulated environments beforehand, like in video games.
The issue for the future is how the immersive-ness and
interact-ability of these games become greater, to the point where people
spend more time in these simulated environments than in the real one (your
VR systems, your Matrixes, your Oases). Considering the state of the real
world, the debate may not be how bad it is, but whether it's bad at all.
The Convenient Distance of the Moon
The Moon is approximately one light second away from Earth. That's a
pretty convenient measure and position for understanding the speed of
light and large distances in space. Humans can see the moon, and
experience one second. In terms of many other examples of the nature space
and time in our universe, there are many, many that are too microscopic or
far away or too long and short in duration for us to comprehend without
rigorous study.
If we are living in a simulation, or if there are high intelligences
guiding us, the moon is a damn convenient teaching tool. Kind of like
learning how to read and write small words before moving onto
comprehending full sentences and penning essays.
It's a lot like the basic instructions we put on the Pioneer and Voyager
satellite plaques. Very basic instructions of space and time. Only with
the earth and moon, they are examples/instructions in our reality.
The
Uncertainty Principle of Advice:
The
more general the advice is typically less useful (ex: 'work hard!' or
'Don't give up!'), but can be easily applied to a large segment of the
population.
The
less general the advice is typically more useful (ex: 'save the daily
figures on a separate spreadsheet, but in the same file' or 'change the
setting from the hero's hometown to the villain's hometown, to increase
the conflict and tension'), but can only be applied to very specific
persons or groups.
Just
as you cannot know a particle's position and trajectory at the same time,
you cannot have specific advice for the general populace.
On Jordan Peterson: Here's the one sentence hot take on the Canadian intellectual: He is endorsing Christian capitalism in tattered sheep's clothing. He criticizes the post-modernist notions of relativism and power relations and instead pushes for a more archaic and stratified society based on so-called absolute truths. An idea that everyone has their role to play, and it was best cast over one hundred years ago. By championing the patriarchy and pinning Western Civilization's accomplishments solely upon it, Peterson is grossly oversimplifying history and recklessly ignoring all the absolutely heinous actions that can also be attributed to it (for every bill of rights or scientific discovery, there's a war, a genocide, and a long standing oppression of anyone who wasn't a white male). In powerful rhetoric he pats average and sub-average white males who are used to be given everything on the head, saying it's not their fault that they don't get everything handed to them anymore, that it's the fault of women and minority groups wanting equal treatment after centuries of being marginalized, maligned, and murdered. He's feeding the fires of hatred and making money off it (although disavowing and distancing himself from abuses and ramifications). He's claiming that psychology and science support his theories, ignoring the fact that species/people/civilizations/ideas change over time. And while such changes appear difficult and awful to the people who are suddenly on the losing end, that does not mean that such ideas are ultimately terrible. Most unusual is how Peterson blames neo-Marxism for the surge in post-modernist identity politics, but basic post modernist tenets are based on theoretical physics of the twentieth century, not industrial political theories of the nineteenth century. Blaming neo-Marxism on Marx is like blaming the Council of Nicene on Christ. It's foolish to complain about communism and its so-called contemporary influence when it's quite clear that free-market capitalism is handily winning. The millennials are not so much embracing communist thought, but souring on capitalism, which - regardless of how well it's criticized or defended in a third year poli-sci or economics class - is increasing economic inequality in the western world and limiting economic equality everywhere else. Nietzsche lamented that Christian slave morality had exploded over nineteenth century Europe (where the qualities or the oppressed are revered above the qualities of the oppressor), weakening its basic theological constructs of a powerful and imposing God, resulting in his claim that 'God is dead'. Peterson feels that this same thing has now happened on university campuses, with long-time oppressed groups (women, minorities, LGBTQ) whittling down all discussions to old white patriarchy vs everyone else, with the end result being that these groups are using their newfound power to curtail and silence those of the old guard. When society becomes equal, of course those that had more benefits than others feel like this re-ordering is akin to theft (and they're wrong. They had an unfair advantage to being with). This is Peterson and his like-minded associates going after windmills. More and more power is being concentrated by a government-corporate complex. Whatever power is left is certainly being diversified, and the parts of old white patriarchy which aren't part of the uber-elite are feeling threatened, and is coming up with hollow arguments and dubious studies about why they shouldn't have to share what little they do have (and of course the uber-elites are delighted that the 99% are fighting over the scraps of power, and not focusing on them). His concerns over the handling of free and hate speech in relation to Bill C-16 warrants attention, however, because any time the basic aspects of human communication, interaction and thought are to be patrolled/enforced/monitored by the state, the likelihood of abuse, misuse, and a bevy of unintended consequences are high (even if the intention is benign). Overall, however, this is all bullshit handwringing from groups who previously had it easy and now have to work harder than before for a piece of the pie. A pie that has gotten smaller for a great many of us because of the much smaller group of powerful gatekeepers have been taking so much for themselves over the years, and are quite pleased that those in the flailing academic community are fighting amongst themselves. Peterson and traditionalists say that we must look back, throughout history, for myths, for stories, for purpose, since it's assumed by this line of thought that post-modernism has destroyed the relevance of these tropes, that we are moving forward aimlessly, full of self-doubt and compromise, and erroneous change. But no. We are moving forward, and forward includes chaos before returning to a sense of order and the familiar (which myths, religions, and prescribed hierarchies offer). How we work, eat, medicate and communicate has changed more in the last fifty years in the last five hundred. Of course it's terrifying and frustrating and a lot of people are going to get the shit end of the stick (including people who used to get the non-shit end). That's part of progress (the cruel part, that no one likes to talk about), and progress is what Jordan Peterson truly objects to.
Here's a thought - Jan 2018
The Universal Basic Income (UBI) is, at the moment, too expensive to be inevitable. Opposition to it will come from very powerful individuals and corporations, who would not necessarily dislike it not on any sort of moral or social grounds, but because they would have to foot a large part of the bill (likely in the form of increased taxes). Even as parts of major industries are moving towards more robotics and automation, they seem unwilling to address to obvious side effect of millions of people out of work years down the road, and how that will affect these corporations' profits and placement in a globalized society going forward. The change would have to come from a united voting effort, bringing together the many, many disenfranchised who - while still disagreeing on many issues - understand that this current and future economic/unemployment situation is untenable. And it will be supported by some sectors of commerce who depend on people having money to buy any non-essential good, since they will be hurting the most after the next step in in an ever-shrinking jobs market.
A depression is not inevitable, but a recession certainly is. The news that certain members of the US congress on both sides of the aisle want to loosen some of the regulations that the Dodd-Frank Act introduced is not as surprising as the apparent fact that the loopholes in the 2010 law weren't big enough for Wall Street already. Couple that with the old-ish news that LIBOR is less an aggregate of interest rates and more of a spinning wheel you throw a dart at, suggests that even if regulations are in place to prevent risky lending, they aren't being enforced very well. The monetization of social media is still difficult to ascertain (especially when one considers that followers are fake just as much as video views), and with the added criticism of misinformation and lack of privacy, Facebook and its ilk might be more bubble than future. That many, many people are throwing their savings into e-currency like Bitcoin, especially in China and emerging Asian markets is also alarming. If that collapses, and Chinese investors who own American debt call in those loans to pay off e-losses, then that's one hell of a domino effect towards global financial ruin. A depression would be a much, much bitter and catastrophic pill to swallow, but it's typically that kind of treatment that will enable a healthier outcome (admittedly after a difficult recovery).
Children are indeed the future, but your child alone is not. When the baby-bombers started to have kids, the 'me' decade may have been winding down, but the laser-like focus was on their children alone. They would support policies (even passively) that would benefit for them directly (lower taxes, bigger investment returns, stronger union pensions) regardless of how it would affect anyone else and their children in wider society in years to come. They would spend any amount of money to make sure their kid gets the best upbringing possible. Anyone else's kid, meh. But that's not how you create a functioning community, which requires strong government spending to ensure fewer people are living and growing up in poverty. Instead, this 'me/my kid first' created a foundation of policy that began to reward corporations with more power (and the predominately white middle-aged voting block which owned them and were having kids) at the expense of a functioning government. That's how you create an economic system that now benefits the very few and essentially the punishes the many. It's a noble pursuit - doing what you believe is best for your kids - but since you aren't thinking of anyone else's kids, it's one that leads to disastrous results.
One year after Outkast literally split up, by releasing two solo records as a single album (Speakerboxx/The Love Below) in 2003, Kanye West released his debut. As the Atlanta duo stepped back into the mists of time, West leapt out of it. A passing of the baton. A transfer of creativity, rooted in hip-hop, but exploding into many other directions and sounds. Aesthetics that were counter to what was dominant for hip-hop at the time, embracing more unique and international fashion trends (trading in the sweats-or-suits-or-nothing look with pink polo shirts and bow-ties). A near-complete eschewing of the ganger lifestyle, although Big-Boi (had always visited on weekends). A social conscience but still a hard partying edge. Both are known for not coming from New York or LA (Atlanta for Outkast, Chicago for Kayne). They're critical darlings with sales to match and crossover appeal. Their love life and interests outside of music (acting, fashion, opening restaurants) received plenty of attention. To paraphrase Andre 3000 when accepting an award all those years ago, 'Flyover Country's got something to say'.
The Challenge of Our Time: Making money less important It's not money that's the root of all evil, it's the love of money. And we're all addicted to it. Or to be more accurate, the economic policies that govern how most of us live our daily lives are addicted to it. There is no final goal or enough in free market capitalism. There is only the accumulation of more, and we've run out of actual physical 'stuff' to invest in. Now passing the idea of money back and forth - with the belief it will be worth more one day than the next - is a backbone of the economy. The amount of money you make - no matter the unintended side effects for society - is the measure of self-worth and ability/mobility in the early 21st century. And we need to ween ourselves off this concept. Kick it completely? Of course not, let's not get too far into that sort of utopia thinking just yet. There has to be money. There has to be corporations. There has to stock markets. There has to be very complicated rules (but ideally not loophole-laden ones) governing how money and currency is handled across our civilization. But we have to value it less. And that's more of a philosophical/moral change than a socio-political one.
Build a Robot to Know a Robot We may be on the verge of a Luddite Renaissance, as it becomes clearer and clearer across the globe that AI and robotics are replacing many, many human jobs. The resentment takes many forms, and example from the early stages is against a group of people that is assumed to be taking jobs of those that had them for years prior (hence the current immigration backlash). Only in the coming years will it become grossly apparent how 'no one' is taking these jobs. Not just robotic arms, but AI customer service reps, both on the phone and in store. So at least know your rival. Buy a basic robot kit and get familiar with chips and boards and how they can interact with all sort of equipment to turn a wheel, turn on a light, or store a phone number. Any technological information is valuable information.
The Return of Masters and Apprentices We have a bloated educational system that is rooted in industrial revolution era classrooms with the unfortunate addition of contemporary diploma mill corporatism at the post-secondary level. Certain youths can still thrive in such an environment, but others cannot. An education is now in everyone's pocket, so in some sense the choice is left to the individual. They just have to motivate themselves to learn one particular thing (certainly for children and teens (at least early teens) there needs to be some sort of 'building where they go everyday') via cyberspace (online textbooks, tutorials, tests)), but this singular learning program will be accentuated with a one-on-one real-life training for whatever the job they are preparing for. A much more specific learning module. Maybe for three years you do one or two streams of jobs, and as you go on you decide which one to focus on.
Rescuing the Internet The first wave of Internet developers and enthusiasts are getting disillusioned at its current state, and they have every right to be. Early on, the promise of a global interconnected village seemed as hippie as could be. But that's given way to a lot of people screaming and lying to each other as ads explode in your face because materialism never dies. But this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Any sort of large scale technological innovation that appears has a honeymoon period. Benignly making a shit-ton of money thanks to the internet (or at least having a job somehow related to it) in the nineties gave way to the cutthroat venture capitalism that seemed to have flooded Silicon Valley in the early twenty first century. The inventors and pioneers eventually lose out to the businessman. Or become businessmen themselves. The idealists are lamenting the switch to stone cold capitalism, and the rest of us are dependent on a handful of websites and apps that seem to get hacked in various forms (from stealing identities to spreading misinformation). But a possible solution to this is divesting certain companies from our own data, and taking an ownership of it ourselves via Blockchains. Which is a term becoming more familiar thanks to crypto currencies like Bitcoin. But Blockchains are now Bitcoin itself, but how Bitcoin operates. Everyone temporarily stores a bit of data on their computer (sort of like streaming), and then sends it off to another computer, and all these links create a blockchain, a process of data moving from device to device, confirming its authenticity at every step. Now in terms of Bitcoin, the data is electronic currency going from computer to to computer ultimately ending at the one who is intended to receive the Bitcoin for whatever the initial Bitcoin owner bought with it. It's a method of exchanging data without a centralized server or site (like Facebook, Google, or a financial institution). Which would be the first step in rescuing the Internet from Silicon Valley.
Future Shopping For better and for worse, Amazon nailed it. Retail is reflecting Amazon. An Apple store and upscale clothing store has an emptiness to the floor (except the people and the sample products, which is certainly the point), with the items people will actually buy stored in the back. Which is the warehouse, the place where Amazon has an actual physical presence, soon to be staffed more with robots than people. Or you go to a outlet or bulk store (or IKEA), and you have access to the warehouse since it's all DIY. The class divide becoming more obvious than ever. A luxury good store is clean and demure, while the aisles of Dollarama, TJ Maxx, and some many others are spilling over with cheap stuff. So it makes sense to avoid the lines, the traffic, the parking, the 'sold out', the occasional deals and anything else, and just click and order while your sitting at home. If you don't need it right now (even our concept of 'right now' has changed when it comes to buying stuff), get it online, and it still might arrive tomorrow or the next day. In America, the division is seen in the increasing tendency for certain retail outlets to no longer accept physical cash. And not just upscale clothing stores, but cafes as well. And soon debit and credit cards will be completely replaced by paying with your phone. The physicality of the means of exchange will disappear. And once again, the poor and elderly will feel the brunt of this change, as they cannot easily afford or use smartphones.
The Actual Trickle-down Effect Conservatives and corporatists claim that the trickle-down effect occurs when you cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy (that they spend and invest more when they have more of their own money), even though this is not true (they just hold onto the money, or hide it offshore). The reality is the trickle-down effect does occur when taxes are higher and the government spends that money on projects and programs, because it's the government's job to spend that money on people. And yes, some of these projects and programs have high price tags (when compared to how much a private company says they can complete it for), but that's because of all the people that see bits of this money as it trickles down over time to the ultimately completed project. It's typically known as 'grift', and it's sensibly criticized as a perfect example of government waste and backroom deals, but at least it's money getting spread around (and eventually to some construction workers), as opposed to a ton of tax cuts justing sitting in a one percent-er's bank account.
Failed democratic norms will result not necessarily in despotic replacements, but corporate ones. Nature abhors a vacuum and power isn't so keen on them, either. Malaise and divisions in Western democracies will further push average citizens into relying on corporations to provide basic services. Not because of better results, but because even a result that is successful one out of ten times is better than ten straight whiffs. When governments cut a program, a private enterprise typically comes in to offer the same one, but at a higher price and of lesser quality (because some of the money has to go into investors' pockets). Dystopia doesn't have to come about because of a terrible war or unexpected global catastrophe. It can happen just because of deregulation and insatiable urge for third quarter profits.
Western living standards are untenable in the coming years, simply because of the lack materials and resources to guarantee the amount of food, living space, and basic necessities to seven billion people. This will become apparent in the polarizing nature of consumer spending. There is going to be a much more noticeable receding of dependable, middle class materialism in the west. An expansion of cheaper products (that Dollarama is growing at a record pace across North America should be an alarm for shopping habits) and regression of high end goods. Or to be more accurate, the selling of luxury goods are going to be more diffused globally so that the wealthy elite in Eastern countries will be the growing markets for these items.
There is a dearth of social movement icons. Those who embrace politics and get elected become part of the political machine, even if their goal along was to change the system for the better. Having to raise money and make decisions that would compromise their principles are necessities when working within most Western style democracies. In this power vacuum, people turn to any person in the spotlight, including celebrities. Any of them that would offer any sort of political opinion can find themselves both lauded and roundly criticized (regardless of their intention to be). It is in this ecosystem that comedians are caught in a delicate situation. The public can be a bit hazy/stupid when it comes to knowing when the jokes end and when commentary begins, especially if the comedian is not especially known to make political or topical jokes. When the comedian is already well known and admired, people have already put in some level of emotional connection or appreciation for them. In the public's eyes, this comedian has become an icon even if the comedian has no desire to be anything more than a joke teller. So when they tell a joke that runs counter to the listener's own beliefs, it seems like the comedian is against issue X, or for issue Y. But really the comedian is just telling a joke, a series of word meant to elicit laughter. The comedian's own political views might not come into play at all. Even when joking about the president, or a controversial issue that's been in the news recently, the goal is still to get a laugh, not to offer an actual, debatable talking point for the masses to discuss.
The (il)legality of drugs has more to do with profits than social responsibility. It is completely taken for granted that alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are addictive substances that can have serious negative health effects if abused. Massive corporations control most of the markets for those three products. Even if one ingests marijuana in the safest way possible (edibles, vape pens), THC and CBD can affect memory and reactions times, but the march towards legality is accelerating. The drugs that are labelled the most dangerous (opioids, especially) are frequently prescribed and then inevitably over-prescribed, with the money landing in the pockets of giant international drug companies. If the public's health is in jeopardy because of these substances, then the health ministries of nations should have more control not only of how these products are sold and given to the public, but where the profits of the sales of these products go (tax the industry’s profits heavier, while introducing price controls). That the (ab)use of these items can inflict terrible damage on a community while a corporation makes hundreds of millions of dollars off this addiction is unconscionable.
If you think it's too expensive to live, just wait until you die. And while at first that might seem a comment on how all your so-called problems can disappear in an instant once you do...dying is extremely expensive, especially if you want to go the old fashioned route and have your body placed in a wooden box and buried underground. Coffins can cost as much as small cars, and you only ride in them once. And that doesn't include the plot of land where it goes. No one's making new cemeteries, so real estate is at a premium these days, especially in cities (of course, this is not a new problem, the Catacombs in Paris are hundreds of years old, and the bones there are all from closed down graveyards when city planners needed more space for the living). Cremation appears to be the best deal out there, but that's a guarantee you aren't coming back no matter what, since everything from your brain to your toenails are now just a heap of ash. And coming back has always been a fascination. Freezing your corpse so that it might hypothetically be re-animated when they cure whatever you died from (either disease or maybe even massive body trauma). Or keep your brain in an extra jar and maybe years from now we can make it twitch like frogs legs. These options aren't cheap, either. To get ahead of all this, perhaps in the near future we will occasionally plug ourselves into a very reliable portable hard drive, to keep our thoughts and memories all locked up in a small box the size of your hand. So it won't matter when or how you die, since just like backing up your computer, you'll back up yourself, so if something goes wrong, you can at least exist in a computerized state. If that's your thing...
I don't want a person telling me there's a God. I want a God telling me there's a God. And if you think that's too much to ask, then you're expecting too much of humanity. Humanity is always screwing it up, because that's how we are, whether making honest mistakes, or selfish, malevolent choices. So it doesn't matter who tells me there is a God. I am suspicious when a flesh and blood creature like myself makes such pronouncements. Whether you're a pastor, a rabbi, and imam, a Shinto priest, a holy man, or a brahmin. None of you have any more wisdom or insight than the other. You're all equally right and wrong. You're all making stabs in the dark partially based on your upbringing and your own imagination. The desire for their to be not only a simple explanation to life but an explanation that includes each individual being loved and tended to overwhelms any sense of logic or rational explanation for alternative ideas. The best proof that there isn't a God is that it doesn't seem to make much of an effort to show it exists.
Laziness is the mother of invention, and some people can't wait to break out the lazy as soon as they get their new toy. When it comes to self-driving cars, Tesla's vehicles offers this service (and it can be activate while driving), but for legal purposes the company stresses that the driver must be attentive at all times and keep their hands on the wheel in case they have to take control of the car. Which they aren't doing. People are trying to spend half their time texting and tapping with their regular, have-to-do-everything cars. We can't wait for things to be easier and faster. We want to throw ourselves into exactly what we want to do at every moment, and everything else (working, eating, driving a car) is an interruption or inconvenience. A few years ago, the older generations of gen-X and baby boomers decried the kids these days with their eyes and fingers glued to their phones, but now everyone's doing the exact same thing, age/culture/class be damned. We all want to be immersed in the virtual world we've built for ourselves. Where we only interact with the people we want, we only read news from the sites we want, we only play the games we want, and we want to access it whenever we want, which is all the time. When augmented reality/VR glasses finally go viral and we are immersed in a place where we can choose the colour of our own sky, then everyone will be running over everyone else, if we can even bother to leave our houses.
Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time, but to even have a chance to become considered for the 'greatest of all time' label, you have to have an amazing team alongside you. To be able to play for a long stretch with amazing results, you need to have an incredible o-line to protect you reliably for seventeen years and an amazing set of receivers to catch your throws reliably for seventeen years. And those aren't the same players over all that time; there were many, many lineup changes, and it was essential that all these parts worked together to be able to give Tom Brady the opportunity to play incredible football for seventeen years. And Bill Belichick made sure this happened. Bill Belichick gave Tom Brady the opportunity to become the greatest quarterback of all time, and he took every advantage.
Here's a Thought July 2017
The personification of advancing technology will reach an impasse when it can have a conversation with us. It does not take much for people to slip into the motions of basic social interaction if they can get mostly expected responses back. Soon a majority of call centre jobs will be replaced by very basic AI bots, with only the most difficult or unusual cases actually being transferred to a manager who will actually be a person. And once companies announce that this going to become an industry standard for customer service departments, on certain calls, people will angrily yell at these bots, demanding them to admit that they are not real people. Will these bots be programmed to acknowledge this, and will they do it in a pleasant fashion? Since they will never feel threatened or upset by a caller's verbal abuse, will they never hang up and simply cheerfully wait for the caller's insults to end?
We all talk big when it comes to no longer supporting companies when we find out they do something terrible. Sure, the outrage is immediate on social media, and the company may issue a robotic apology and fire a couple executives, but their long term bottom line is rarely affected. Uber has a pervasive problem with sexual harassment and misogyny in its upper ranks (including its founder and former CEO), and uses shady business practices such as sabotaging competitors, user privacy violations, and developing hacking technology to avoid law enforcement. Plenty of articles about it, lots of #deleteUber tweets, but it's still go a popular choice over taxis because it's cheaper. Why shop at Wal-Mart or a big grocery store chain instead of a farmers market or small store? Because it's cheaper and easier. And that's why real change on the grassroots level is difficult. Even if people want to do the right thing, they don’t necessarily have the income to do so. On top of thus, the less you know about the labour exploitation that goes into the making of your phone (from mining precious metals in Africa, to how they're assembled in China), the better you can sleep at night.
Health insurers make huge profits, largely due to them being extremely reluctant in paying out claims (some managers get bonuses if they are able to keep their departments’ claim amounts below a certain level). With this in mind, there should be a massive incentive for health insurers to keep their customers as healthy as possible. But this runs up against the goal of the health care providers, who, yes, want to keep their patients healthy, but have the incentive of getting the patients to spend a lot of money on the treatments that are necessary to get well. The government is caught trying to somehow appease both these markets, while its main goal is to have the revenue to cover the costs for the citizens who cannot afford proper care themselves (and covering the costs typically means raising taxes on the rich, who can already afford treatment for their own ailments and have a lot of money lying around). This is the health care quandary not only in America, but pretty much every developed country, once the smell of profits drifts in. Money in health care is more immediately damaging than money in politics, even if the latter has great overall effect on any sort of legislation that comes before the halls of power (including health care legislation).
If one of the basic elements of our universe is a string-like vibrating particle, can be there some sort of knot-like event that affects its behaviour? We are still filling in gaps (let alone the massive gulf that is dark matter and dark energy, whose names are almost certainly more exciting and simplistic compared to what the explanations will be), so could plotted deviations from the norm - presence of dark matter, cosmic inflation - be considered 'knots' of sorts? [Of course, terms like 'strings' and 'dark matter' are placeholder laymen terms for complicated phenomenon occurring micro and macroscopic scales. But these terms are necessary for engaging with the general populace for whom scientific knowledge is limited at best. Even if these labels are part of what got you interested in pursuing science as a career in the first place, you realize as you learn more and more that things are never so simple as 'strings and knots', especially when the first sine function comes into view]
Now the left can include anything from 'I believe in global warming but don't raise my taxes to address it', to 'Donald Trump should be tried for treason'. That's a huge gulf. That's a difference in opinion that is so vast you almost feel sorry for the politicians who are somehow expected to appease both segments. The left is so much more efficient and modern than the right. The right took several decades to slowly become delusional and eat itself. The left is going to get it done in about four or five years! After a tough presidential loss that is being described as historic, the left is feeling like the right did during the Obama years. Obstruction at all costs because the new administration's new ideas are terrible for America, and with the control of congress, they can practically do whatever they want (is this 2009 or 2017?). And when then there are large swath of angry and disaffected people looking to vent first and fact-check later, of course there is media for it: (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/liberal-fever-swamps/530736/) People love conspiracy theories because they make everything easier. Movie-like easy where everything is wrapped in a nice, simple package. In a free and open society, the fringes will certainly push the more ridiculous and fact-free stories. What changes is when the leader of the country starts to promote these stories.
Pour one out for the slow, quiet loss of the written word. During the first internet wave (let's say from where you could first log on to America Online on your desk-tops's 4800bps modem in the early nineties to just about when Blackberry and other PDAs first hit it big in the mid-2000s), literacy rates in the Western world didn't fall that much. But in the ten years or so since then, there is just a slew of depressing events and fact that suggests reading is on the outs. The closing of big bookstore chains and tiny, neighbourhood-loved shops. The kindle and other electronic book replacements never really catching fire the way other technological advances have (why have one hundred books in your hand when you can have a drone control pad in it instead?). People don't grab the mass-market paperbacks in airports anymore. The choice is half-listening to podcasts while doing something else. And when we do bother to read, we don't bother to read as much, and maybe only if it's punctuated with some audio-visual treats: (https://theringer.com/fox-sports-mtv-news-vocativ-layoffs-pivot-to-video-77e441a49cb7) The ongoing woes of the print industry continues and is sadly not a surprise as we move (or pivot) towards an even deeper concentration of electronic devices in our hands instead of bound paper. What should be much more unnerving and raise eyebrows is how this going to affect our critical thinking moving forward. To say 'we think in language' comes off much too flippant. We are limited in our ability to communicate and understand our existence when we have poor reading and writing skills. We have been on the path to increased literacy across the globe, and with it, higher standards of living (a good reminder about how globally, things are getting better for the majority of humanity: (https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty)). To start and go in the reverse – starting in the West – is a blow to civilization.
Voter Suppression via the excuse of stopping Voter Fraud: This story need to be covered more. This story cannot be covered often enough. This story needs to constantly be in the headlines, and lead every news program. This is messing with the building blocks of democracy. This decides whether one is living in a free, democratic country or not, in a very different way than cynically believing that two main political parties are simply tools of the wealthy. Eradicating voter rolls and beginning voter suppression removes the last mechanism to reverse this trend of corporate cronyism. It ends the possibility of putting any sort of social program that benefits the many back together, of returning the government to a sensible form of checks and balances. This legislation closes doors on freedom. Now a citizen would not even have a choice between a selection of politicians that might best represent their political views. That right has been withdrawn, ostensibly to prevent a nonexistent problem.
Basic biological processes of reproduction underlie the interactions between males and females, whether we're talking about birds, elephants, or human beings. In our own species' case, we are valiantly attempting to balance these very simple and direct overtures with much more complex and even philosophical concepts of civilization, self-worth and equality. This is not easy, since pushing against hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of years of evolution never is. When we express shock, disgust, confusion or titillation towards how someone is acting when it comes to sex and/or relationships, there are animal instincts at its core. Because we are animals, even as we are convinced we are animals...plus something more. What you say to someone you're attracted to, the clothes you wear, how you walk or drive down the street, it's not much different in terms of biological drive from elks fighting to the death for mating rights or birds trying to impress with their plumage. As always, these more philosophical and moral quandaries do not exist in vacuum, other types of changes to civilization occur around the same time. The Scientific Revolution loosened religion's grip on Europe, and the Industrial Revolution ultimately began the expansion of rights for the individual and previously marginalized groups. Today’s electronic devices allow us to be virtually connected to the entire world, and are forcing us to question how we interact with each other face to face. Where is modern technology taking us (or, to be slightly more charitable, where are we taking technology)? It's affecting everything to how we communicate (now largely through handheld devices) to what he can become (thanks to medical advances in DNA augmentation). But when we stop being animals, we almost certainly stop being human.
Branding is permeating politics, but it wasn't Donald Trump who first capitalized on its swagger-over-style-over-substance factor. Obama's 2008 election campaign won several PR/advertising awards (Chomsky noted this) including 'Marketer of the Year' by the Association of National Advertisers. After all, its message was quite simple: 'Yes we can', the 'HOPE' poster. But in Obama's case there was substance behind the style. A smart, capable, reflective, respectful leader who inspired people. Not so much with Trump. Which reveals a rather depressing truth about advertising. When a commercial exaggerates or lies to you about the amazing-ness of one particular type of chewing gum, there's not much blowback except you being slightly annoyed that you wasted a buck-fifty. Even a big purchase like a car, as long as its unexpected problems don't lead to anything fatal, can be still be fixed for more money or sold. When something as important and complicated as politics is treated with the same level of truth and consideration as chewing gum or a Civic, then there's going to be much more dire consequences when the 'product' fails to deliver.
Education has splintered along the monoculture (although inequality has also made certain basic standards of education hard to achieve across a large population/wide demographic), and it will be very difficult to find something to improve the situation in the near future. Standardized testing (and unfortunately, rigorously teaching for the test) can create a very specific and narrow foundation for education, but it is of limited use not only for what we believe is important the children of today to learn, but of the coming generations as well. How people learn is becoming as various as niche popular culture. Some still excel in traditional classroom learning, some do better with more open-concept classes that promote group/individual problem solving over classic instruction and recollection over repetition. Other finds podcasts and video more valuable. And certainly Boards of Education across most countries on the planet are trying to adjust to these realities. And large, bureaucratic institutions don't move quickly.
Feynman's 'Principle of Least Action' can be cynically mirrored in our own society ('necessity is the mother of all inventions'), and once again suggests that the way we seek for answers (and what we look for), are reflected/represented in our biology. We are looking at the universe through the lens of our 'ourselves'. The tiniest bits of matter may be full of potential energy, but each one seems to want to take easiest route to release it. And it stays pretty much the same once a lot of these particles are bundled up into the average homo sapien who hasn't yet had their morning cup of coffee.
There is no shortcut to ending/reducing poverty. Like every massive initiative humanity has applied itself to, it will take an incredibly large amount of money and a lot of time. Both things of which are currently in short supply (cash and patience). George Carlin cynical notes that if there was a way for Wall Street to make a few hundred million dollars in the process of ending homelessness in America, you'd find that problem solved very quickly. But there is no longer a solvent enough-government to be able to pay a private enterprise to end poverty (and make the enterprise's owner a bunch of cash). The bone has been picked clean. Even if we are able to summon the angels of our better nature's will (like voting for politicians who believe that health care is a right and not a market commodity), we cannot start with the problem of the poor. We have to start with the problem of the rich. The government's coffers need to be filled again, and the people who have been paying less and less into them for the last thirty years need to pony up again. That is 'health democracy 101'.
Dogs, Humans, Work Do dogs equate going for walks, and fetching balls or sticks as 'work', as some sort of responsibility that they are expected to do? Does it give then self-worth (even if they are not understanding of that concept)? And how different is that from the way we treat our jobs and careers? We tell ourselves how it important the jobs we have are, how they allow us to do other things that we also think gives us our self worth. And just as we may lightly laugh at the idea of a dog thinking what they do is important ('it's just a dog, all they need to do is lie around and eat food'), maybe an advanced civilization or species is chortling at us from above, rolling their eyes (if they have any) at how serious we take our jobs, when so many of them don't really mean much in terms of human civilization and advancing it further. But we can't always look 'big picture'. Part of being human includes giving our actions meaning and importance. And even for jobs that are dangerous (to ourselves or to the environment around us) or full of annoyances that make us complain about them all the time, we still place a lot of importance upon them (or we, y'know, just quit). Jobs become our purpose. And to take/remove/steal one's self-appointed, 9 to 5 purpose (even inadvertently, through basic purchasing power or complicated business decisions) is at first a rather depressing way of looking at 21st century business, a time where it's constantly promoted that we are free to do (and buy) as we choose. And certainly that is true in many ways. But a job (or ideally, a career) defines the limits of our choices. And we are currently in a period where job security is collapsing and is being replaced by contract, temporary and underemployment. What is even more concerning is the next decade and a half, where 40% of all jobs will most likely be replaced by automation, advanced programming and robotics. Without a job (even a mundane one that you might constantly complain about), without a purpose, what happens to the human sense of self, let alone their economic situation? If only we could make money fetching sticks. But then what would the dogs do?
Post-Modernism's Pandora's Box There are no truths, only constructs. So sayeth Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and now, the Executive Branch of the United States government. At first conservatives decried the moral relativism of liberal thinking (no one religion is right or wrong, everyone can have their opinion and their differences should be embraced), but then they realized they could use these tools for their own ends. -Climate change? Not all scientists agree -Trickle down economics doesn't work? According to these particular examples, it does -Crime is down across the country? Not in Chicago, so let's expand private prisons and police power In academia, ‘there is no wrong answer’ was a taken-for-granted piece of advice that was to foster critical and lateral thinking from the student or scholar, and would be accepted for essays provided that there was some evidence to back the possibly unusual claim. Within papers and upon blackboards, there wasn’t much damage or danger if all metaphysical statements were thrown out the window, or that works could be interpreted without considering the author’s intent, or suddenly obstinately declaring that certain mathematical equations were no longer sufficient to explain quantum phenomena. But when such blows to basic understanding and operations of science and politics occur outside the classroom, the actual effects to a society can be catastrophic.
When is autocracy inevitable? And if it comes to America, do other Western nations have any chance in resisting? If China and (to a lesser extent) Russia are the other 'super-power' nations, then democracy is becoming the exception rather than the rule. These nations are run in an autocratic fashion, regardless of what the government says (Russia says it's a democracy, China says it's communist). America is joining this club, and the world is all the worse for it. Can it be said that at least America gave democracy the good ol' college try? Well, some basic tenets of democracy (like everyone has the right to vote) ae only fifty-plus years old. And not long after that, the rise of corporate power skyrocketed. Examples, especially of late: (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/3/15910508/america-the-diminished) But hey, at least it was slow. Trump's election is a tempting easily time of death, but so can the behaviour in his first hundred days, but one must not forget the current rolling back of even more voting rights by Congress…. Truthfully, however, the first symptoms of this cancer were apparent over thirty years ago. In the eighties, the rise of lobbying and a ‘war on drugs’ that was really a ‘war on the poor’ which hobbled the economic empowering of minorities were terrible blueprints of what was to come. Ending regulations for corporation and bank meant monolithic ‘too big to fail’ companies of all sorts, and executives on those boards bobbed in and out of political position to smooth deals and avoid taxes. Civil and social rights gains throughout the sixties and early seventies, began to get rolled back in other forms. Cutting social programs or outsourcing them to private companies, who ran them in such a way to make a profit, and when they did not, they themselves made even more drastic cuts, to the point where it would sometimes take ninety minutes to get a response from 911 in various places across America, whether in Detroit or Appalachia. It’s an impressive feat, going from democracy to autocracy in only third years and without bloodshed in the Capital. Perhaps America could now impress the world and roll it all back.
Millennials' Trivialities The generation's interests/obsessions over likes, re-tweets, week-long memes, and pop culture that is under three months old exists because there's nothing else available to vast majority of them. No serious career options. No opportunity to save for a mortgage, or even a post-secondary education (without immediately going into a massive debt which looks increasingly likely that you'll never pay back). There's is nothing concrete out there. Nothing to build a life upon that previous generations were able to take for granted. Yes, of course baby boomers and gen-X-ers had to work hard to get a good, stable job and - with that - a long term relationship and a house in the suburbs. But that was a path available to most. Now, that same sort of hard work doesn't guarantee any sort of stable job. 'Stable job' (aka, ‘career’) is the exception, not the rule, and with that, a middle class life also becomes the exception, not the rule. And these are serious concerns. And if they never are presented in front of you, of course you're going to find something else to do with your time. Like watching another series on Netflix while waiting to see if you get called into a shift at work because someone else couldn't make it.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, don't kid yourself, we definitely remain at 'mutually assured destruction' levels. This needs to be something we are careful with. When it comes to nuclear weapons, you need a capable, calm, level-headed system of check and balances throughout the chain of command. From the head of state, to their national security team, to their military advisors, down to the actual soldiers and technicians who launch the equipment, everyone needs to alert, informed, and prepared to make deep, civilization altering decisions at a moment's notice. And I don't think we have that in the United States right now.
Here's a Thought January 2017
Superhero films immediately started to decline in quality once they were anointed as the future of making money at the box office. Summer 2008. Iron Man and The Dark Knight. There hasn't been a superhero film that has been as fun and exciting since Iron Man (although Guardians of the Galaxy gets close), and there hasn't been a superhero film that is as serious and captivating since The Dark Knight. They've all tried to capture the success of these two films (sometimes stealing scenes and setups directly), but it's been a series of constantly diminishing returns. They have become flashy, two hour comic book issues, and have therefore inherited one of its basic flaws: constant and repetitive narrative formula. As Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Star Wars Universe, and the DC Clusterfuck get bigger and bigger, budgets will rise and it will become all the more important that any sort of risk in story or character development that might confuse or alienate audiences cannot be taken. Simplification and broadness will be embraced since it's assumed that movie-goers both in America and abroad (who are so essential to big box office returns) don't want nuance and emotion getting in the way of their action beats.
The basic underlying theme of 20th and 21st century scientific discoveries which pertain to the laws of nature and of the universe is that things are expanding and speeding up, that things are constantly vibrating, splitting, colliding. There is constant chaos on higher and lower scales of size. And there are still many mysteries as to how the universe 'holds itself together' (since most of it is a combination of dark matter and dark energy, which are really just placeholder terms for...something). At the same time, we think of our modern society being quicker, more immediate, instantaneous, overwhelming, interconnected, and - unfortunately - existing and operating at certain levels that a great many of us do not have access to. The good ol’ mantra: 'as above, so below'. As our lives accelerate, so does the universe (or really, our perspective of how the universe operates. How we live our lives is reflected in how we believe the universe 'lives' it's own life).
Rock has become the new jazz. This has been predicted several times before, but it's more apparent than ever now that rock has a jazz-club/theatre sized audience, with very few arena-packing outliers (examples: Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Arcade Fire), many of which have long, successful years racked up (typically beginning before the music industry as a whole began to crater). Now most music (certainly most popular music) is made by manipulating already-made sounds, rather than create these sounds by plucking a string, pressing a key on piano, or blowing a horn. It's the further simplification of making music. Rock was the bottom rung for a long time (four chords max! 12 bar blues forever! It was constantly being mocked as being overly-simplistic and infantile in the late fifties and early sixties)). Hip-hop's focus on sampling and drum machines was certainly a first step in making music by not-exactly playing an instrument (and was similarly criticized for 'not being real music' when it first became popular). Now you have a sampler hooked up to a sourced-up laptop and every sound ever made by a human being or robot is at your command. The way you run your finger over a touchpad to guide an instrument (or really, several instruments) is similar to how a conductors waves their baton over an orchestra.
Compared to the Devil, God is a much, much more plausible concept for people who are not religious fundamentalists, or even religious leaning. If God as an imposing and powerful father figure who rewards and punishes as he sees fit seems ridiculous, then feel free to accept God as a higher concept of understanding, as another dimension intersecting with our own, as a symbol of whatever is 'above' the universe. People always seek explanation for their place and purpose, and God is a search for/answer to this question. There is something almost scientific as believing in God as being a complicated equation for life itself. Even the heavenly aspect of the afterlife concept can take on a sort of scientific conceit, and is infinitely more plausible than hell. After your death, your material body breaks down and you 'become' more of an idea, a memory, a 'part' of the universe in the sense that your particles diffuse into the earth, sky, water and space, so you've gone back from whence you came. But the devil invites childish explanations for evil and moral judgment. A place to be tortured for all eternity by an all powerful figure that wants trick you into being sent there? And the God that created this figure is completely satisfied with this? It's more than baffling, it's an insult to our intelligence (and to our concept of ultimate intelligence).
'Whatever gets you through the night' is a passable John Lennon-Elton John hybrid, which is probably about drinking and drugs, but is a pretty excellent summation of religion and spiritualism in the modern era. To think that any one religion has any sort of metaphysical advantage over all the others is ridiculous. To think that one will allay your worldly concerns and answer more of your prayers better than all the others is also ridiculous. You can certainly believe that the religion you follow is better than the others, but belief is more about one's opinion than any sort of declaration of fact. Saying 'I believe George Washington was the first president of the United States' sounds a bit odd, because saying 'George Washington was the first president of the United States' comes off as being much more objective and accurate. As we move into the sciences, where personal opinion is held in less regard, saying 'I believe water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom' is ridiculous. When it comes to god, however, the term 'I believe' is still very much in fashion, regardless of whether you follow that up with 'in god' or 'there is no god'. And there is some irony in this, as originally the concept of God was designed to be an explanation for how the world works, and now that we look to science to these types of answers, God has changed to be much more of arbiter and judge of human behaviour, with concrete proof of its existence much less important than belief in it outright.
Settling Into the Technocratic Under-Class It's safer than ever before. Why are we terrified? Poverty is slowly decreasing in both developed and developing nations. Why are we falling into debt? We are connected to everyone across the globe, and can meet and communicate with likeminded people instantaneously. Why do we feel so isolated? We have more information about everything at our fingertips. Why do feel so confused? Don't worry, these are just birthing pangs and growing pains, and it's going to take a while longer before we reach our uncomfortable and rock bottom. We're settling into the Technocratic Under-Class. Humanity always takes awhile to get used to new technology. At first it's strange and exciting, then absolutely and everywhere, then frustrating and reviled because of the cold and irreversible changes it has created (usually the mass firings of the people who used to do the job that has been replaced by the machinery/computer). Luddites (in)famously smashed up mechanized weaving equipment in the early years of the industrial revolution, angry that their jobs/livelihoods had been replaced by some bent pieces of metal and a coal-fired power source. The first Industrial Revolution took place over two centuries, with some of the earliest inventions and advances (say, early eighteenth century) reaching certain parts of the globe in the late twentieth century. And that is a good partial explanation to explain how this unequal advance resulted in a very unequal balance of wealth and power. The second (and current) industrial revolution is a replacement of industry with digitization and robotics. And while that in itself will separate it in distinction from the first industrial revolution, another aspect of it should be considered: It will be a revolution that will occur across the globe in almost perfect simultaneity. Which sounds impressive in foresight and hindsight, but if you're living through it, and are being told that 40% of jobs that exist today will disappear in the next fifteen to twenty years thanks to advanced computers and robotics, it's a horrifying and numbing experience. Of course it's not fair, but as North America and Europe getting rich in part due to the exploitation of labour throughout the rest of the world for the past few centuries, it's sensible that people there will now gripe and moan about how the party's over.
Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation Whenever we look at the challenges/disasters of today, it is typically through a lens of how there was a period in the past where things weren't like this, when they weren't so bad. That we've fallen from grace, that somehow we've been booted out of the garden of Eden. Certainly this is both a personal and historical nostalgia. Adam Curtis' 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation does an impressive job at grabbing seemingly loose threads and events of the last fifty years and knitting them into a horrifying pair of twenty first century post-industrial mittens. Snubbing Syria in the seventies led to the rise of suicide bombings, psychiatry via computer begets myopic alienation, Donald Trump’s rise as the emblem of Western greed and tone-deafness. Even as Curtis acknowledges the increased and overwhelming complexity of the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, the connections he makes between events are simplified, omitting many factors that consistently affect international politics/bureaucracy/technological finance. We can even make Curtis' observations more depressing by acknowledging that they actually aren't that new. Pseudo-freedom and helplessness have long been the status of most people across the earth through most of recorded history. It continues to day, if not through physical bondage, then through social and financial bondage. The escape to cyberspace is certainly more immersive than anything we had in the past, but they play the same role as fairy tales. A place where there are no consequences, it's all so simple, and a happy ending is all but guaranteed. No wonder people don't like looking up from their phones.
The American Psyche is rooted in constant contradiction. A united series of individual states. A nation that proudly announces its cohesion and trust, while also acknowledging that its creation was full of violent and internal rebellion. The continued reliance in a post industrial society on a political document written in an agrarian, pre-industrial society. A document whose authors would barely recognize the conduct of those following it within the halls of power today, surprised at the rights it gives to individuals they thought unworthy, and the additional rights given to non-citizen legal entities (corporations). Calling itself a bastion of freedom even as slavery and the continuing oppression of minorities were/are part of its social and economic makeup. Championing its independence from global affairs while playing the lead role in directing them. If divisions widen how much longer can this shaking house stand?
How the wealthy hide their money: (Panama (Mossack-Fonseca) Papers, eat your heart out) The rich don't run the planet in secret business meetings in French chateaus and yachts, cackling with lust for supreme power. They run the planet from offices and meeting room, sometimes on the phone with other rich people in other offices and meeting rooms. Packaging financial instruments, shorting, finding/building loopholes in trade deals, the fine print is tremendously boring but it shapes the world we live in. The wealthiest people in the world are just as stupid, greedy, naive, short-sighted, and petty as the rest of us, and they try to keep as much of their money as possible by hiding it from taxation. There is $22 trillion dollars hidden away in these off-shore ghost accounts. $22 trillion. That amount of money can change the future of life on earth. That's a new form of social program that greatly reduces global inequality. That's replacing fossil fuels with green energy on a hyper accelerated pace. That's going to Mars. That's cleaning the oceans and the air and the land. That's building a series of space ships and space stations to be able to live 'off planet'. That's bankrolling a series of much-needed infrastructure projects across the globe, plus the R&D budget to create new materials that will ensure the buildings, bridges, dams, etc. will last a long time before needing to be replaced again. Politics is always going to fuck over somebody. It's just got to go back to fucking over rich people for awhile.
Good news everybody! It's going to be a kleptocracy, not a fascist state! Perhaps Donald Trump inadvertently prevented an immediate fascist rise by quickly alienating the defence/military institutions of the United States by questioning their abilities over the Russian hacking debacle. This article suggests that maybe: "Oligarchical nationalism is the default form for failing economies." So maybe the future of America is what Russia currently exists as. Maybe the worst thing about Trump as president then is not so much the inevitable kleptocracy and selling off America's resources and government programs/institutions (which as been happening to some degree for over three decades now), but the now constant hold onto power by this small group of people through intimidating, ignoring and silencing the critics of the people in power. The Death of the American town (or small city) has been predicted for many decades now, and as expected it's a slow, ignoble, and agonizing crawl to the grave. The vicious cycle of people leaving because there's no jobs means smaller populations which means fewer people paying any sort of tax or contributing to the economic cycle, which means there's less money to spend by government and by businesses, so social programs and basic services and more jobs get cut, so more people leave, and so on. These shrinking and dying towns will become large regions outside of mega-cities that have little government or organizational presence. Higher crime due to lack of police, dangerous due to lack of emergency services. Dead zones inside of countries. And massive, overcrowded cities (with flailing social programs and an attempt at non-government organizations to offer community/stability, so things aren't as bad as the dead zones), with pockets of wealthy suburbs and nearby towns, with plenty of police and security in these regions to keep undesirables out.
Bring Social Mobility Back to America: Tax the Rich (http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/we-need-to-tax-the-rich-but-instead-well-do-the-opposit-1790982273) The rich broke America, and the poor let them do it. Call it the looming love-child of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, but it's just straight up greed and selfishness. The wealthiest 1% and 0.1% of Americans (or all global elites) aren't sitting around discussing the finer points of Keynes, Friedman, or Piketty. They just want their money, and they don't want to share it with anyone, especially not governments, who will (in the elite's eyes) just give it to lazy poor people or repair some bridge that will take to long and cost too much because of unions and red tape. But the rich are wrong. Just because you've worked hard in one particular field, industry or discipline and succeeded wildly, doesn't mean that you automatically have the wisdom and experience to control so much power (in the form of capital) without oversight or accountability. The 1% are the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a march towards feudalism until the Great Depression brought it crashing down (so let's also note that in the 1920s and 1930s, the other global trend besides an economic disaster was the rise of right-wing an xenophobic governments across the world, which led to the horrors of the Second World War). Instead of the rich being forced to pay higher taxes (to actually fund government programs and shrink inequality and raise social mobility), they are going to bankroll government like building projects and social services...until they don't feel like it. (http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/our-benevolent-shadow-government-1791071063)
Check Your Nostalgia: How Good is Die Hard? It is generally agreed that Die Hard is one of the finest action movies of all time. Everything that actions movies do, Die Hard does better. The acting, the writing, the pacing, the fight sequences (whether with guns or hand to hand combat), all are done at a higher level. To the point where films that came after consciously or unconsciously stole bits from it. Even when Die Hard hits the narrative cliches, it's done in an impressive and unique fashion. Or maybe I think it does because I first watched Die Hard when I was twelve, and actually got a bit choked up when McClane and Powell finally met face to face at the end. The pop culture you absorb in your pre-teen and teen years makes an indelible mark on the sort of person you will grow up to be, mainly because your circle of friends at that age will largely be defined by whatever you ended up watching or listening to. And your friends shape your personality at this age, which is integral to the type of person you'll become (and whether 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker', enters into your vocabulary). So when something hits a nerve - whether it's Led Zeppelin, Prince, the Wu-Tang Clan (including solo albums), Radiohead, The Prisoner, The Watchmen, Star Wars, Die Hard, Fight Club, The Prisoner, MASH, Blue Velvet, The Invisibles, Beyoncé, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Kubrick, The Velvet Underground, Pulp Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut - at this impressionable age, and knocks your socks off, it's almost as if it changes your DNA. And over time, as your tastes might get more discerning (or you just don't have the time to absorb as much new stuff as you used to), you find yourself effortlessly forgiving certain flaws in said pieces of pop-culture. Maybe some lines in Die Hard fall flat. Maybe some of the police officers seem comically dumb. Maybe you realize it doesn't make sense that German terrorists speak English more than necessary. But it still won't sway your affection for the movie, TV show, book, or album. You'll love it not only in spite of its flaws, but because of its flaws. And while looking through world history with a nostalgic lens can actually be dangerous, it's reassuring to know that liking Liquid Swords no matter what is absolutely fine.
Running out of Stuff (and Running Out of Money to Buy What's Left) Stuff is going to be hard to come by in the next several years (thanks to a plethora of factors, from scarcity of basic materials, to climate change affecting crop yields, to rising energy prices making it difficult to transport goods cross the globe, to Indian and Chinese markets competing with Western ones as more people in the East escape poverty). (Un)fortunately, even if there was a steady stream of new items to purchase and use/enjoy, many of us wouldn't be able to afford a lot of it in the first place. Stagnant (or declining wages) while the cost of living rises means there's less disposable income to spend on any sort of luxury good or entertainment service. This pattern has become so ingrained into daily life in the West (and, as noted above, has spread to China and India) that tens and millions of people have gone into debt (especially in the United States, where health care costs means it's frequently treated as a privilege, not a right), buying stuff they can't afford. A house bigger than they need, furnished with stuff you don't ever try to fix, but rather just replace outright when it breaks. But this can't last forever, and let's not think these two scenarios cancel each other out. It's not a matter of 'there's less things, and less money to spend, so there's no net loss or gain'. Human civilization in 2017 is predominantly a capitalist-materialist system, dependent on the constant exchange of goods and services. When this begins to break down (perhaps in conjunction with any other sort of financial crisis, like in the fall of 2008), it's time to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask what we're doing, before the mirror gets repossessed.
Here's a thought summer 2016
Is love stronger than hate? Well it sounds nice. But love and hate are emotions, and what's more important is the actions taken because of love or hate (and the circumstances of the people taking these actions). Now it's pretty safe to say that many good and wonderful things have been done in the name of love, but there have certainly been some terrible things done in the name of love as well. Correspondingly, it's more likely that things done because of the feeling of hatred are awful and tragic, but there is probably a small handful of acts done in the name of hatred that have been positive. Fortunately, love is associated with other qualities such as peace, tranquility, sharing, and generosity, and these are bedrock traits for a sustainable community, which is much better for survival than constant chaos.
The Internet, Still If the medium is the message, then the internet's message is kneejerk immediacy and short attention spans (which, by and large, is not a good activity to continually participate in). Internet Outrage is officially a pastime, a hobby. Sadly, it begin with the best of intentions: trying to bring attention to injustice and society's failings (and these can run the gamut from matters of life and death that need addressing right away to more issue that might require more mundane and slower changes, like unfair hiring practices). That's a good thing. But a mob rules, first reporting, not follow-up, no second account type of mindset has made it made it an extremely limited form of ushering in real social change. Change in the sense of actual reform and legislation takes time and effort. Lots of it. And 'time and effort' are two things that people rarely apply to their online perusal habits. Keeping up with the latest Internet Outrage is like keeping up with new music when you reach your mid-thirties. Of course you can still do it, but it feels a lot more like work and repetition.
When OK Computer came out, it sounded like the future of rock (or what rock critics wanted the future of rock to sound like). Energetic, confrontational, debate-worthy, hook-filled but still experimental, anthemic, and a touch weird. This was the sound that the 'next big thing' was supposed to have, but that future never came. OKC's melodies were aped by Coldplay and other 'softer' rock bands, which lacked the gnashing teeth and experimental leanings. The genre the album spawned missed its energy, excitement, and boundary-pushing. Which is what the 'garage rock' revival of the early 00's had by the ton. But it wasn't a look to the future, it wasn't pushing forward and finding new sounds and recording techniques. It was a powerful embrace of the past. Punk’s power, New York’s cool grime, and recording equipment from the sixties. OK Computer is the last great album that has guitars on it that made it seem like there would be more great guitar albums to come. It's lyrical content (lamenting commercialization, technological alienation, a society that seems to have lost its way) is just as relevant today as it was nearly twenty years ago. It observed the world at a certain point in history, captured the zeitgeist, and is continuing to today because the zeitgeist hasn't changed that much (actually, it's very fragile). OK Computer will always sound like the future of rock, but it's a future that will never come. Rock music has lost its heft, its weight, its connection with the youthful masses. OK Computer was latest frontier at a time when it was believed that rock music would always be a/the culturally relevant frontier. In that sense, OK Computer is the last rock album.
'Term limits' should not be restricted to only presidents. It should also apply to other political offices (congressman, members of parliament, senators). Not only that, but it should be applied to titans of industry, from financial to energy (perhaps not legally limited in this case, but acknowledged industry-wide that it's for the best). Why? Because that level of power warps perspective. That level of responsibility and associated reward is not a healthy perspective to hold for long periods of time. You begin to lose the ability to recognize the viewpoint of not having these powers/responsibilities which a vast majority of people do not have. And losing that viewpoint is a serious problem. It's an important one, because it's losing a connection to/relationship with humanity (or at least how most of humanity lives).
There are legitimate problems that liberals traditionally criticize, and there are legitimate problems that conservatives traditionally criticize. But at the moment there are a lot problems out there that need liberal-style reforms instead of conservative-style reforms. Here is a problem that conservatives are correct about (although some liberals will acknowledge it as well): Union Pensions. (Note: This does not mean unions as a whole). We can't afford to pay firefighters $40,000 pensions for up to thirty years after they retire. That amount promised was from a very different economic era. Many, many people under the age of forty would love to make $40,000 a year. Western Nations (and by that, 'the governments of Western Nations') do not have that kind of money to spend anymore. In many states, emergency services are being scaled back and face deep budget cuts, in part so the government can pay retired emergency services employees.
The Responsibility of Leaders is to make difficult decisions that will pay off in the long run, and the responsibility of citizens is to understand and accept that the ramifications of these difficult decisions may include a change of present living standards. And both groups must 'suffer' through these hard times together. And the challenge there is confronting the myth of 'It's Always Going to Get Better'. Forget things simply plateauing for the millennials. Sacrifices are going to have to be made regarding job security, access to health care, even the availability of basic resources like food and energy. Maybe having apples available year round in the northern hemisphere (because they are flown in from regions like South Africa) is going to have to end because of the drain on resources (from agriculture to transport).
Can the Rich Fix the World? (Maybe the first issue is that because they are successful they don't see/experience the level of crisis that many other people are going through, and conclude that these concerns are overblown) Certainly the first issue is unfairly profiling 'the rich' as all thinking and acting the same way. One billionaire cannot change the world, because two billionaires can outmaneuver/outspend him or her. Because these challenges are extremely complicated, even if what must be done and how it should be done can, be universally agreed upon (already unlikely), there is still the chance for procedure to go awry.
The world is run by a series of amoral economic principles. While this ensures that not one particular person or political/religious ideology can monopolize it, it does allow for a small group of people and corporations to have a much, much larger say in its operation than all the people across the globe have an equal share. It also makes the notion of 'throw the bums out' irrelevant. People can be replaced whether or not they support the dominant 'free market almost all of the time' economic principle, but the principles themselves are much, much harder to alter or replace.
What's the worst, most cynical way to describe/defend social assistance/welfare? That we are paying people not to commit crimes by subsidizing their lifestyle of laziness and unemployment because doing that is actually cheaper than locking them up in prison for the crimes they would commit if we didn't pay. And it's currently being PR-ed as 'basic guaranteed income', and has been attempted in certain towns and countries (Finland, to some degree) across the world. And it's being pushed by many in Silicon Valley. (http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10860830/y-combinator-basic-income) If this is the goal, then suddenly 'the incentive not to work' (a criticism of welfare in the United States throughout the 80s) is irrelevant. The goal is simply to create functional and law-abiding citizens. If people want anything more than the basics, that is what they have to work for. The challenge is finding a way for countries with tens (or hundreds) of millions of people to afford it. Augmenting the current social assistance/unemployment infrastructure, higher taxes, and expecting that you will save money in other areas like crime and health care...
I wish there was a heaven! Oh, that would be incredible, amazing! But it's such a ridiculous, nonsensical, unprovable piece of wishful thinking. For billions of people it's the tentpole frame of their reality, the main focus of how they live their life: To appease the all-powerful creator of the universe so they will let them come and spend all of eternity in a magical place where you can get everything you want anytime at all, constantly bathed in the glory of god's love. And there's no agreement! There's no majority of people that believe in one specific idea for the afterlife. Or god in general. Apparently the loving deity that created us all has no problem with millennia of bloody sectarian violence done in its name.
Wait, what if the Middle Class isn't/never was sustainable? What if the rise, plateau, and fall of the middle class was just an anomaly born out of extremely unique and specific circumstances that rarely repeat themselves in such ways? What if an over-class/underclass based society was the norm? (since that's what it's been for most of history. Not to say that civilization cannot change in one way and stay changed for a long time, but it seems like 'the middle class' certainly needs reinforcement to its foundation ASAP if it's going to stick around. If we've been closer than ever before to having a sustainable middle class, one should strive to make further adjustments to sociopolitical institutions so as to reach that level) It certainly resembles a more animalistic hierarchy, one that we as the self-professed 'smartest people on earth' have unofficially made our goal ('be better than animals').
Tax Corporations If the attempt to increase the taxes on the very wealthy keep failing in the halls of power (and frequently there is a PR framing of this issue (by those who would be subject to these increases) that pushes the misconception/misinformation that taxes are going up for everyone, which is why there is a not stronger push across the political spectrum), then a more effective way to increase much need revenue for governments is to tax corporations on a wider and higher scale. Fewer people will ever come out to defend a corporation as being treated unfairly. As corporations play larger and larger roles in our lives, people's anger towards them are growing, and (ideally) it should be easier for public support of higher taxes and regulation to be enacted.
Compromise: You'll Know it When you See It Compromises are inevitable and unpredictable. It's hard to know exactly the conditions of the two (or more) sides ahead of time. There's too many specific contexts that can upend any pre-set scenario. But the notion of compromise is becoming corrupted. There is obstruction from enacting large scale policy changes that would benefit the most amount of people as possible because the 1%/corporations still want to 'get theirs' (manifested perhaps in tax breaks or subsidies, or loosening regulations in an associated field/industry). The warped notion being that if each side doesn't get something they want (even if that same side has been given the primary fruits of past legislation for decades), then it's not compromise, and therefore not democratic.
The Free Market will Almost Fix Climate Change in Time (http://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11420882/peabody-energy-bankruptcy-coal) To get ahead of ourselves: Hooray! Let's enjoy this while we can. Somehow it's gotten through to enough energy industry investors (and they are primarily a small group of powerful people) that they won't make very much money if the whole planet becomes an overheated, flood and drought-ridden, natural resource-deprived shit-hole. The free market is only interested in money, and if you look too far ahead, the money forecast looks blurry, so they figure it's best not to squint. Only look a few financial quarters and years ahead. You can see the prospective earnings better when you keep myopic and ignore upheavals and warnings of necessary change. Big corporations are inherently discouraged from looking long term. And climate change is always going to seem like a long term issue, even as its effects are being felt now (and have been felt for years). So the decision to finally cut down on the coal and oil (mainly coal at the moment, they're going to still ride the oil train for many years to come) is a good sign, and it's heartening to hear that there might be money to be made if we keep working on stuff we have a lot of with less fewer drawbacks (like that big yellow thing in the sky).
Stereotypes In Art and Culture They are inevitable due to the inherent flaws of narrative and characterization. For the sake of both, realistic portrayals of the passage of time, the odds of success and the complexities of human behaviour/psychology have to be drastically exaggerated and narrowed to the point where 'realistic' is no longer a possible descriptor. The hero archetype is also a hero stereotype. The dashing male lead saving the damsel in distress is not designed to make women seem permanently helpless. It's how stories are told (which is not to say that the genders can't be flipped. Of course they can. But personality traits and narrative beats must be adhered to. The hero has to be shoehorned into a particular box, otherwise he or she won't be the hero). Exaggeration for the sake of comedic effect because exaggeration/juxtaposition is at the heart of comedy. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and Waylon Smithers are subject to jokes about the former's Indian background and the latter's sexual preference. Obviously it's preferred that positive stereotypes are presented (Apu is unfailingly polite and has a mindboggling work ethic), but positive stereotypes are still stereotypes. Saying 'all Indians work hard' is still errantly assuming that all people of a particular background act the same way. The Simpsons is not trying to push any story of portrayal or agenda. At all. The point of the show is to entertain. Like all art and culture. But even if this the goal, do these portrayals reinforce stereotypes? Once again, we are asking how much art can influence culture, and if so, to what degree?
What's the meaning of life? To make life better for the next generation. It is a simple answer, but it can be a very difficult task. To improve the world on a broad scale will require a goal that exists beyond the earth. Seeding human life on other planets. It's inspiring, apolitical, and - considering humanity is currently living an 'all our eggs in one basket' existence - practical, if we don't want to go extinct via asteroid, super solar flare, or environmental disaster. (And there certainly can be disagreement and dissatisfaction with this answer, as it doesn't tell each individual person exactly what they should do with their lives. That's still up to them. They have to figure out the best way they can contribute to the goal of improving life for the next generation. Some people want the answer laid out for them, perfectly personalized).
A big philosophical question: Why is there anything? If we solve even more of science's big questions (solving all of them is probably an impossibility to our limited perception/intellect), we will never get a perfect answer as to understanding why there is something instead of nothing. Why was there a Big Bang? Why was there not a Big Bang? Was one outcome more likely than the other? Are we just another universe in a series of multiverses? What happens if you could 'zoom out' and see what all the multiverse together create? A cosmic super-molecule? That's part of one of the millions of molecules inside a colossal super-being that can manipulate it at will? And what is that 'colossal super being' made of? Colossal super molecule/multiverse/universes? And what if that's actually just one of the millions of molecules that make up fish in Lake Superior? (Which can suggest we're just part of this infinite, size-irrelevant super loop. But what's that part of?) And why are there all those things? Why all those things instead of nothing?
Is Hollywood racist? Yes, but incidentally. Just as it's incidentally sexist, homophobic, ignorant and insensitive to handicapped people, and ageist. Its primary goal is to make money, that's it, and it won't let any attitude or position get in the way. Hollywood believes the best target demographic group to make the most money is young, white, straight males (whether this is true or not is certainly debatable, but Hollywood believes that this is true), and consequently caters practically everything with them in mind. And with box office records constantly being broken, this perception of who spends the money is not going to change very much anytime soon. So what does this target group want? Check out what's in the multiplexes and the TV shows on premium cable and Netflix. Predominantly white male leads with attractive women helping out, fighting evil and keeping the apocalypse at bay. It's a mirror to the money.
Steve Job's lionizations by the American media/public exemplifies one of the problems with the dominant American attitude/perception of modern times. Championing style over substance, ease of use over importance, and mythic simplicity over actual reality. All this addition to a personality better known for angry, belittling egoism than open-minded, patient generosity. Who would be a better role model? His partner, the other Steve. Steve Wozniak. A friendly, eager computer programmer who actually did the work of developing and building the early Apple computer systems. He became an elementary school teacher for a while after becoming successful because he knew how important educating the youth is (most of his philanthropy is education based). He even helped design the universal remote.
One of the many problems with the uncertainty of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence, the step above Artificial General Intelligence) is just how quickly after achieving this level of awareness and ability the entity will make the decision what to do with humanity. As in within seconds, it will compute our history, our current presence, our possible futures, and then make a decision and put whatever plan immediately into action. We won't have time to act, whether it's good or bad for us. So if ASI is inevitable, as 98% of experts believe is the case, then we have to better pinpoint when the moment of hyper-sentience will be, because after it happens, our future is set. While it's true we cannot be certain how an ASI will act (any more so than an ant or dog can understand how we act) in regards to humanity, I believe that maybe - just maybe - it will leave us alone. That 'meddling' with these lesser creatures (that would be us) is unhelpful and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. If we have a 'planetary mindset', then it has a universal one, and would only intervene if our behaviour threatened the stability of the universe. Maybe it would watch over us. Maybe it would fulfill some people's notions of God. But what if the ASI decides to get rid of humans, and decided that the best way (as in, least amount of possible rebellion) is some sort of Armageddon-like simulation/pageant? It creates - with its incredible power - the appearance of a holy war with actually messiahs, devils, and miracles, because so many people will accept this as the natural 'end' to humanity, and that there is an afterlife (because so many people already believe this). This makes humanity less likely to notice that it's the ASI orchestrating it all.
A False Equivalence If A offers nine points/statistics supporting that increased regulation for massive corporations is good for the public and the overall strength of a nation's economy, but B offers a single point/statistic supporting less regulation, then B will never ever consider agreeing with A's position, even though the evidence is overwhelmingly pro-regulation. If there is not 100% agreement on an issue, one position (and frequently positions are reduced to one or the other) will always be able to stall actual change on the issue, even if there is much less evidence to support that particular position.
If suffering was energy... A higher-dimensional being could absorb and gain strength and nutrients from the terrible things that humans do to each other (through war, genocide, mass shootings, domestic abuse, etc.) because it 'gives off' some sort of immeasurable energy. And this higher-dimensional being could lightly manipulate us into certain situations to increase the amount of suffering. Probably the biggest 'hit' would be the complete eradication of the human race, but that would be a one-time thing with no follow up. So it must make sure suffering is a renewable resource, which ebbs and flows from moments of chaos (feast) to peace (famine) and back again. Starting wars, sending millions into poverty through changes in laws, storms that cause disasters, it's all done with thoughtless ease. It's like when we try to make ants fight.
Here's a thought January 2016
For centuries, one of the easiest ways to bring people together was through the power of religion. Clearly what people may do once they are unified under this banner can be good or ill, and whether it's one or the other typically depends on the theology's definition of good and ill. As we push and promote diversity and multiculturalism, we must acknowledge that while it is undoubtedly the morally right and socially beneficial position, it is not without its long term challenges. A culturally homogeneous society has stronger and more extensive social bonds, which is advantageous when attempting to institute large scale policy reforms. Getting 'everyone on the same page' to fix a problem means the problem is solved much quicker. The task of making this connection is much more challenging when there are many social, cultural, racial and religious barriers to overcome.
Religious Scientists Not at all an oxymoron, but it becomes harder to compartmentalize your spirituality when it is designed to dictate every aspect of your life. If your answer to philosophical/metaphysical questions ('why is there evil in the world?', 'what is the point of humanity?', 'what happens when you die?'), can be answered quickly and with finality that God is responsible, then there is always the concern that this orthodoxy can find its way into your frame of reference when dealing with scientific inquiry, where faith and acceptance without question are completely contrary to the point of its existence.
Islam is the Symptom, Not the Disease The role that Islam plays across the Middle East is one of extreme social power and connection that is necessary for close knit communities because large scale institutions have failed them or been unable to reach them in the first place. Religious orthodoxy and sectarian violence in Christian regions of the world were phased out extremely slowly (over centuries), and not without many setbacks. The straightforward and aptly named 'Wars of Religion' which swallowed up most of Europe in the first half of the 17th century was incredibly violent and set back scientific and social advances by many decades. One of the reasons the American Founding Fathers excised as much religion as possible from the building blocks of the government was because they wanted to avoid any chance of religious violence occurring again (although Americans had no problem beating the shit out of first generation Mormons). The French tripped up in their own revolution, by oversteering and actually closing the churches, which just provided resentment towards the new government from the masses. Complete removal from secular authorities of religion from society is stupid and fascist. Life under fundamentalist Christianity is just as oppressive as under fundamentalist Islam, and our expectation for a predominantly agrarian society that is suffering through violent conflict to suddenly conform to Western social standards is too much. Does this mean we should simply throw up our hands and not bother to stay in contact with fundamentalist Islamic countries? Of course not (it would damn impossible even if that was the prevailing opinion). But we have to be patient. And patience includes having to acknowledge that terrible hardship and tragedy will still occur in these regions, and that religion will still play a hand in it.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a graph can be worth a thousand statistics. Google yourself a 'Wealth Map', which is a graph or map that shows the flow of wealth moving around like ocean or hot/cold air currents, specifically how so much of it is now swirling solely at the top (compare to how it use to move around more in the mid 20th century).
Our Random Access Memory Since we don't have to remember such things as phone numbers or store hours or directions, do our brains simply get lazy, or do they instead focus on other things? And are these other things beneficial, or are there now just more opportunities to worry about trivial matters? Our links to our technological devices are so consistent and integral that we can think of our hardware's memory as extensions of our own. And what do we fill it with? Like so many things, it depends on the person. The internet is that wonderfully/hideously democratic measuring device that can track page views extensively to understand users behaviour. It's just that most of it is much more celebrity-pop culture game focused rather than politics-economics-issues focused.
Chomsky vs. Grateful Dead There's plenty of similarities between these left-wing, hippie legends. They both have a committed group of fans who will vociferously defend their hero(es) against critics. These same fans will seem them again and again, even though not much of 'setlist' changes these days, there's only slight difference at every concert/interview, depending on a new song/newsworthy event. Long, droning same-sounding jams about lost love, mild criminal malfeasance, or American hegemony. While the Dead had/have 5 songs a set, Chomsky will have a 5 question an interview/'conversation with'.
The internet's future? Just like how blockbuster video destroyed the local video store, and wal-mart destroyed pretty much everything, the move to apps from webpages is once again permitting a corporate takeover of the Internet (even if that was not wholly planned to be the goal). Apps need to be designed and promoted at a more technical and synergetic level to meet certain standards and reach a sizeable audience. A webpage in 1995 was easier to design by a single person than an app today (and an app has to meet more complicated tech specs to be available on online stores that sell them). Maybe that's the first 'get off my lawn' sort of complaint about the Internet by the first generation of people who essentially grew up with it. We saw the transition from sending a text message through a computer to someone else in real time to watching graphics slowly download via 14.4K dialup modems to cable to napster to YouTube to Twitter to apps) Apps and buzzfeed. What we read on the internet now - in lists and quote-sized bits with the occasional paragraph to describe something really complex - is in the same parcel and package that America online and compuserve presented on their initial welcome screens And windows. We've gone full circle. Apps for certain magazines and newspapers, all sorts of simple games, they were all offered in slower and less-graphically pleasing form twenty years ago. AOL started losing out to straight up internet browser programs (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape) because they could offer a more versatile and detailed online experience (because anyone could design a website, from some guy to a company that doesn't want to exist in cyberspace in some sort of agreement with AOL).
Charitize Instead of nationalizing industries, why not 'charitize'? Maybe it simply becomes semantics, but if we view certain industries (or certain sections of industries) like energy, health care and sanitation as essential (the same way emergency services are considered essential and therefore are well-funded but are carefully monitored and regulated so it can continue to function properly), then we should be able to make sure that their proper functioning is more important than their quest for profit. And the easiest way to do this is to remove the profit motive. Whatever the corporation/industry makes above its costs (and re-investment into research and development), it gives away to registered charities or government projects (rebuilding infrastructure, funding social programs). And yes, just as what currently happens with taxes, corporations and wealthy individuals will do everything in their power to avoid paying more in taxes (and in this case, giving away profits to the new program), by hiding, transferring, renaming funds. Which is why a sizeable amount of initial funds received through the 'charitize' program will be used to set up an actually powerful regulatory and exploratory team/department that will seek out companies that try to avoid paying taxes/charitized funds and bring about heavy fines and penalties.
Running out of more? Do we have to change capitalism before it eats us and then starves? things can't go up forever, and while people may acknowledge that, no one is willing to be on the hook for the loss. They will pass the buck (the loan, typically) in any way possible. Playing hot potato with the world economy. There is historical context for this. In America, for eight decades from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there were recession tremors every generation or so, until the big one (Great Depression). Capitalism suffered a terrible stroke, and then policies were put in place during its rehab so it wouldn't come back and do the same damn thing. But then we 'kind of forgot' about that, and since the 1980s we've let capitalism do what it did last time (lie, cheat and steal to accumulate more and more for a small group of people). History doesn't repeat itself, but the present does play a lot of cover versions of the past. Capitalism benefitting the most amount of people in an economic region (let's not be so foolish as to limit it to only one particular country) is a step, not the end goal of the system. Theoretically, capitalism is a pyramid scheme. Every company/corporation/financial entity is designed to undercut and assimilate not only its competition, but smaller companies/corporations/financial entities which could possibly become their competition (or might be useful in defeating their actual competition). Ultimately there is going to be one company that completely oversees the entire market (or few companies working as one). When democracies lose the ability to rein in monopolies (as the western world - but especially America - in the last thirty years), power and wealth consolidates, and inequality increases.
There are enough major crises facing the world today (war, terrorism, large scale migration, rising inequality, economic stagnation, continued racial and social divisions, unsustainable materialism), that it's unfortunately easy to forget that the ultimate effects of climate change will mean there's no place to even try and solve these problems. Those other crises require a habitable planet to exist, just as much as the people dedicating to stopping them and make the world a better place require one. Climate change can completely throw civilization into upheaval. It's the biggest problem on the game-board, because it IS the game-board.
Remembering the past 'The victors write the history books', 'nostalgia can ruin the future'. How far in the past can we examine and judge particular events and situate them in the proper contemporary context to make the right decision for the future? We can look at the Great Depression and its causes, and even if there are many similarities to the Great Recession, it's necessary for a sizeable segment of the populace (or an influential segment with considerable wealth and power) to understand the similarities and act accordingly if they wish to avoid another economic disaster. Anecdotes are helpful to offer personal experiences of the past, and can draw people and inspire them to learn more about history, but it is no replacement for more objective facts and statistics.
Equal? The founding fathers said we were all created equal and then treated everyone differently (you had considerably less rights if you were not a land-owning (wealthy) white male). What if we admit that everyone is different but treat everyone equally? What does that really mean, and what can that possibly look like for society? It suggests that there needs to be a sea change in successive generations to make this ‘a beyond legally enforced' perspective. That this will simply be a way that people naturally behave and approach the world around them.
Gun Violence Beyond the obvious and terrible effects of gun violence, it's rapid increase of occurrences has the less acknowledged effect of splintering communities by keeping people indoors, and by having public events much more heavily monitored and allowed only through bureaucratic channels. The result of this: fewer people going outside and socializing. We can decry that the prevalence of the online world is keeping people glued to their phones/tablets/tv's, but when people find themselves choosing to live primarily through virtual spaces because the physical space is considered too dangerous, that is another form of forced isolation that can lead to more problems (it is through meeting people that we grow sympathy, empathy, and understanding for our fellow men and women).
I don't believe that utopia is possible. Regardless of what achievements humanity might accomplish in the future (overcoming environmental issues, eliminating poverty, advancing our technology to be able to travel and live in space). There is no way to prevent the basic, animalistic urge to assert power and influence over others. While in the past it was much more direct and brutal (to be a king, or a wealthy landowner), it exists today in a form that is mainly economic. The corporate world at large owns a vast majority of the power and value that exists in the world, and with it can control large swaths of the planet's entire population. Even if wealth is abolished and materialism is scoffed at, the fact that we have a physical body means its needs and failures can become a touchstone for division between others, which can escalate to terrible problems.
Global Warming Deniers I can understand how it's possible for someone to strongly disagree with the existence of climate change, especially if their livelihood depends on strongly disagreeing with it. Your life, your career, your industry is not only in danger of being shut down, but is subject to vilification. And in addition to the importance of getting the paycheck in order to live your life, if you enjoy and/or are proud of your work, you want to defend it's importance to society (which is really what complicates the problem. The energy industry is obviously extremely important to how we live our lives, so it's easy to defend in that regard). And the more time you've spent in these industries, the more you depend it because it has become a huge part of your life, and you don't want to suddenly confront the fact that how you spent your life - your career - was actually causing great harm to the planet and all the people living on it, including your children.
Regarding the Iraqi War (namely after acknowledging that the military force that invaded involved a fraction of the amount of troops recommended by Shinseki ): It's one thing to do the wrong thing, it's another thing to do the wrong thing on the cheap. If you're about to go to war for unverified and questionable reasons, you'd think you would want to completely overcompensate in terms of making sure it went as simple and straightforward as possible so fewer people would bring up that it was a terrible idea in the first place. More men, more stability and security, more sensible long term planning. The fact that this did not happen just further proves the ineptness of the war's planners. The ramifications of these initial mistakes are still being felt today, with instability in the Middle East running rampant.
Permanently Inclement Weather We will become more accustomed that for certain times of the year in certain regions, the weather will be so deleterious to 'business as usual', that it will be considered a liability in many senses to live there year round. For eight months, no problem, but for the four month period of intense rain/flooding, storms, drought, tidal waves, etc., many people leave and businesses shut down. A sort of hibernation. For many years certain regions went into downtime because of cold weather (anything hunted for in the tundra), or because the resource was seasonal (fishing). Now it's going to happen in regions that seemed quite average and dependable (drought-laden California (and Australia), areas around the Mississippi River due to flooding and storms).
The Baby Boomers and Gen-X-ers were born into a primarily working lower/middle class that was just beginning to see economic opportunity simply explode. When these two groups grew up and began to find careers they fell quite easily into the middle and upper middle class, and they expected the same for their children. But through some very convoluted legislating and global developments, this has not happened. Western society has changed how it operates. A level of extremely large corporate influence (whose operation is controlled by a very small group of people) has warped the role that government must play. For the baby boomers and gen-X-ers, the government had a much strong social support and regulatory system that helped strengthen the middle class. Those facets no longer exist today.
If complexity is the primary antagonist to an improved, more egalitarian society, what is the solution? Simplicity seems like the obvious answer, but how do you go from complex to simple? It's a much bigger issue than, say, going from a large car with dozens of features to a smaller one with only the basic necessities. Diversity of all sorts requires laws and statutes that fit very specific situations. To make a simpler legal system, you need simpler laws, but that might mean a lot of people would have to change how they live their lives, or go without certain legal protection.
The Grey Market If the black market is the trading of illegal or stolen goods for profit, then the grey market can be considered the giving away of stolen goods for no profit at all. Why give it away? Protest against the rightful owners, an ethics system that dismisses the notion of copyright, wanting to be liked by others (even if this justification of whoever is giving the product(s) away seems altruistic, that activity is linked to a pleasurable sensation in the brain). These products are mainly arts/cultural, and almost exclusively digital. Anything else that has a physical presence requires a lot more effort to create, steal, and re-sell, and the people involved in this have to be paid for their actions. Stealing a collection of ones and zeroes is much, much, much easier. And consequently it barely feels like stealing. In fact, since it's been happening for nearly twenty years, there's an entire generation where so much of music, movies and TV is as close to free as you can get (if Netflix was difficult to use, or cost a bit more, people would find other ways to watch all the content in some other fashion, and not pay for it). The current economic situation for people under thirty is a major factor to this situation. If you can't even begin to save money to pay off student loans, or save up for a mortgage or any long-term goals, then certainly you're going to be pinching pennies for your entertainment. Art and culture (especially pop culture) are both valuable and worthless at the same time. It is in the Grey Market.
Political Correctness Vs. Censorship If one person is offended by public policy or the actions of a private company or individual, is that enough for the policy/company/individual to be forced to change? If two people are offended? A hundred? Ten thousand? A students group at the University of Ottawa objected to the teaching of yoga on campus because to them it signified cultural appropriation: (http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/university-of-ottawa-yoga-class-cancelled-over-concerns-about-oppression-resumes-with-indian-teacher). Also: For people who are upset/offended by jokes, and say that it is pushing an unfair stereotype of (or insulting) a certain group. Response: Do you think there should only be positive portrayals of all people in art/media? If yes: Then it is a hideous misrepresentation of life, with no space for so many forms of expression. If no: Then who will be the one to decide what is a positive portrayal and a negative portrayal? You? A group? How is this group chosen?
Here's a Thought - Summer 2015
As corporations become more and more powerful and are no longer constrained, restrained or held accountable by nations, we can longer see ourselves as citizens of 'only' the nation which we live in and participate politically as we have in the past. Regardless of where you vote, and the ramifications of your ballot, your true influence (however slight) in global/domestic affairs (and the line between them is blurring to a greater degree every year) is your spending habits and financial plans. So much of what you buy is manufactured in small segments across the globe. You decided the working conditions and economic climate in southeast Asia when you buy electronics and clothes. When you save money by purchasing a shirt at H&M, you are making a statement not only about fashion, but your values concerning how the clothes are made. And it's ignorant and dismissive to say that sweatshops and slave-like assembly lines are somebody else's problem. It's fleeing from responsibility in an extremely interconnected world, where your jeans can determine the quality of life for people in Bangladesh. The good (relatively cheap products) and the bad (they're cheap because of hideous exploitation and concentrated profits) of globalization is rationalized in a myriad of cold and impersonal ways, which once again re-affirms how capitalist/corporate values have become 'our' values. Luddite is typically a term for people who reject the advancement of technology, largely in part to its dehumanizing elements. Perhaps an 'economic luddite' might become a more popular term in years to come.
Gas prices will determine the future of the automobile. Carpooling will become commonplace if economic conditions persist, and suddenly two or three houses are sharing a car, for commuting and for shopping. This will affect the suburbs first, where distance between destinations means you need a car and also can barely afford it. On the plus side, it's a good way to really get to know your neighbours.
LOOKING BACK How much can we look to the past as guidance for contemporary changes? Adapting policies from the 1930s and 1940s (which ushered in a middle class golden age) can only do so much in the early 21st century. Can central tenets and laws of the economic policy instituted in the wake of the Great Depression, and later, in the wake of World War II, ever be reapplied to modern times? Were the conditions so much dire back then, which required a sort of 'desperate times call for desperate measures'? (which in that case, meant re-writing much of financial, corporate and tax law) Have we not yet hit rock bottom? (clearly not, but we might be close, as many statistics about tax policy, inequality, and wall street irresponsibility, are similar to those of the 1920s) Can we solve large scale problems facing civilization easier when inequality is low? It's a matter of whether everyone working together and having their say (lower inequality) is more effective than a handful of people running everything and delegating tasks (higher inequality). And perhaps this is even reductionist, since even in a situation of lower inequality, there still has to be experts in positions of greater power to oversee the solution(s). There is also the matter of what the large scale problem actually is. A national domestic infrastructure challenges can be addressed with changes to taxes and budgeting within the government, but global resource management has so many more facets and considerations, with every nation having to play a distinct and relative role.
USE IT OR LOSE IT Whether it be a PR budget at a big corporation, or the latest military technology, if you don't use the money/resources that you requested or were given, you might not get the same thing next year (or financial period). In fact, you'll probably get less. 'Saving money' one year might get you a pat on the back, but the people with the money will start to expect you to do it under budget every year. And while that's good in one sense (less money wasted), it can also have the effect of cutting jobs and supplies. On a larger scale, militaries are put in a position where if you are presented with the opportunity to use the latest communication monitoring technology, you are going to use it in fear that your competition/opposition might be using it first and to a greater advantage. Hence the NSA scandal. The constant and violent instability in the Middle East means there is a steady stream of weapons technology required there. Some of the largest 'weapons conventions' take place in Dubai, the UAE playing a wealthy enclave surrounded by death and destruction. When you shut out the morality aspect (which plenty of businesses do), it's easier to keep that revenue stream flowing.
FILM 'Formula absorption' is when a quirky bit of something (nice and vague there, because it can be almost anything) becomes so popular that its replicated and mimicked to the point where it's uniqueness and originality is sucked dry and we all roll our eyes at it instead of nodding in appreciation. The latest victim of formula absorption: Thirty seconds of clever dialogue that a bits of depth to the character and a slight narrative bump that might be a helpful callback later on.
(someone with more energy and action-movie obsessiveness than ourselves should compile a montage of all the shots of guns being knocked out of the hero or villain's hand and tumbling into a corner or sliding across the floor)
Lamenting the quality of pop culture is a fish-in-barrel type exercise, but it ignores the underlying fact that this is what the majority of people are satisfied with. But they could have so much more, says the music snob/cinephile/New York Review of Books reader, why settle for 'just being satisfied', when there's culture out there than enthrals, amazes, challenges, and - dare we say it - even educates? Because pop culture exists outside of those requirements ('pop' meaning popular). Money talks, and thank god that at least in the entertainment industry it doesn't directly contribute to making the general public's lives shittier (see: politics, resource industry). Although some people who watch a lot of films and listen to a lot of music will say that it makes movies and music shittier. But a lot of people don't watch enough films to be bored with the same superhero archetype, or listen to enough music to be sick of cookie cutter Top 40 music.
ACTION BRONSON AND NXNE (old news, but meh, two cents is two cents) I'm going to steer one way and then the other on this issue. Action Bronson does not practice hate speech. He's a performer. He's an artist. He's as guilty of hate speech as Schwarzenegger is of murder. His real name Ariyan Arslani. He's a fat white pothead from New York City who loves cooking. Are his lyrics misogynistic, violent and offensive? Yes, but he's not spouting these words from a podium or handing out pamphlets on a street corner. It's art, and it has to be judged that way. The same accusations have been levied against James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Carlin (surprised I'm grouping a rapper with these literary and comedic greats? Burrough's Naked Lunch has scenes of girls and boys hanging each other from the gallows and then eating each other's genitals. And aliens drinking their sexual fluids). Wanting to prevent Action Bronson from performing because you find his lyrics distasteful is censorship. I dislike pro-life supporters comparing abortion to the holocaust, but they have the right to do so.
But Action Bronson playing at Yonge Dundas Square is a bad idea. The location of the concert is a real shithole. It's like standing (and for the artist, performing) in a giant advertisement. It's free and it's across the street from the Eaton Centre. It's tourist central. It's a place people go to orient themselves, not to go see a concert. A lot of confused walk-ins in the late evening.
It's our Times Square. And I don't think anyone is going to let Action Bronson play there, either, for pretty much the same reason.
Hell, Swans played there last year. And if hardcore rap is a bad idea for this venue, so is thunderous drone rock (also: Swans have plenty of lyrics about religion, slavery, control and helplessness, but no one seems to have any problem with that). Context is everything. Offensive language presented by a performance artist is different than offensive language is presented behind a podium or typed out for all the world to see. Just as a the performance artist holding a concert in a public square is different than the performance artist holding a concert in a club or theatre full of fans.
Free Market Capitalism is perfect if the world was run by robot/AI. It is a system without emotion, without basic concepts of human behaviour. It runs like a clock, with each piece working in perfect, predicted harmony. It has calculated randomness (oxymoronic). And it would be great if it worked, but imperfect people populate this planet. And while the rules may be perfect (or iron-clad and incontestable), the people who utilize them are not. We are all susceptible to flaws like greed, ignorance, short-sightedness, lack of proper information, fear, panic, confusion, and all sort of temporary and physical maladies that can impair every sort of decision. And in an extremely concentrated and poorly regulated area of power (in this case, finance), the ramifications for this supposedly elegant and straightforward economic theory run by people (and their limitations) can be disastrous. We need to acknowledges the central differences between the rules that are based on 'if we were perfect' and the rules that are based on 'because we're not perfect'
RANKED BALLOTS The manageable band-aid solution for entrenched democracy. You don't vote for one candidate, but simply rank them from who you support most to the least, and each candidate gets a certain amount of points per pick. Polarizing candidates might rank up a handful of firsts and a ton of lasts and close-to-lasts. Candidates that might sensibly understand the importance of compromise and diplomacy might ride a majority of second and third choices to victory. Fewer people will be as disappointed as they usually are in a first-past-the-post electoral system, and the winning candidates will be forced to build a coalition that truly represents how the votes were cast (helping lower the importance of lobbying and money raised in campaigns). Not that it's going to usher in a utopia by any stretch of the imagination. Everything will crash and burn eventually (as our current political system seems to be teetering upon the edge), and a new system rises from the ashes. Ranked ballots will work well enough to enact policy changes, until they are co-opted by entrenched and power-motivated institutions in the not-so-near future (perhaps modelled on the Chinese government's plan of picking the candidates for the representatives of Hong Kong) Until then, ranked balloting would be an extremely effective way of ensuring elections represented the will of the people and not the will of chiefly the wealthy and the corporations they own.
SELLING OUT SELLS OUT It hasn't always been about the money, but it usually has. Having your music played in a TV show or movie? Acceptable (even laudable, as long as it's a good, hip one) Having your music played in an ad? Now it's a sound business decision. Even Minor Threat is okay with its t-shirts being sold at major retailers. Besides, we the public did it first. We sold out on 'buying'. Now there can a wonderful and accurate laundry list of reasons why paying for art and entertainment in the early 21st century is more difficult than in the past half century (terrible economic conditions, shrinking of the middle class, underemployment for debt-ridden millennials, the ease of stealing/borrowing/streaming whatever you want to call it). But that's still no golden super-excuse to steal music, TV, and movies. Rationalizing theft only because no one is chasing you through your home after you torrented three episodes of True Detective. Radiohead's 2007 Pay-What-You-Want release of In Rainbows ('I see you coming!') (un)intentionally asked 'what is music worth?' But the question is close related to, 'what is the musician worth?' What are the roles/careers/jobs we play in society worth? Hell, if we stick with the traditional definition of 'selling out' - that is, going back on or contradicting one's principles for financial gain or any sort of power or pleasure - then are we all guilty of it by focussing so much of our attention on culture and not enough on the issues concerning civilization? I'd like to think that a vast majority believe we try to do what is right and responsible most of the time in our daily lives, but our blindspots are huge. From not paying for the music we listen to on our phones, to 'barely paying' the people on the other side of the planet who build our phones.
THE LIKELY SOLUTION: Things have value because they are difficult to get (difficult in a relative sense. 'Having to pay for it' can be considered difficult here). Since acquiring/stealing things in digital form is so easy, the way around it is essentially including the intended price for these items in the product people have no choice but to pay for - internet service fees - or sit through - online advertising. The former will be much more effective. Suddenly your ISP will jack up the price to 'include' all the data (and type of data) your downloading. It's rather similar how small independent coffee shops have to pay an annual stipend to play whatever music they want. The consequence of this is that suddenly artists and content creators are now employees of Internet Service Providers, who coldly dole out dollars and cents (most likely cents) for every sort of download of said creator's material. 'Better than nothing' is hardly an inspiring ethos (and certainly a depressing business strategy), but it's a step above being shown your place at a car assembly line in 1911 and told you're going to be doing that exact same ratchet turn for the next forty years.
The Challenge of relying on the masses for social change -it's hard to organize many people into one unified voice or action (and at a time when money is the most powerful tool to either give or withhold, even donations in one specific area - or boycotts in another - are difficult to undertake) -concentrated power is much more easier to utilize, so it seems that the better way for social change is to convince/influence those with those power to take the steps to better and improve society. In some very superficial ways, this looks like asking the upper class to 'take responsibility' for the lower classes, which is not a fair assessment at all. It's slightly 'helping people who can't help themselves', but that also suggests an innate division between those with wealth and those without. And it's not so simple, obviously. So many conditions and factors must be considered (background, culture, geography, life experiences) when we look at the reasons for and effects of spreading the wealth.
Guns Germs and Steel's argument, reduced to video games: You're playing a multiplayer deathmatch in Battlefield with teams of equal rank and ability. Every team starts only with pistols, every team starts off in more or less the same spot (but obviously not right beside each other), and each one begins to fan out through the large map. One team stumbles across a cache of rocket launchers, sniper rifles and med packs. Other teams only find the odd grenade or assault rifle. Who's going to win? Compare: Everyone started in sub-saharan Africa, fanned out through the globe. Those that 'stumbled across' the fertile crescent in Southwest Asia - and the adjacent region of southeastern Europe, with similar conditions - got useful crops that could be grown and farmed (comparatively) easily, and animals that could domesticated (comparatively) easily. Everyone else got a couple nuts and the odd bison or dog. Who's going to 'win'?
Your Country's Being Taken From You? Foolish thinking. You never had your country. It was always on a carefully crafted loan from economic forces that sit high above the actions of all humanity, because humanity cannot be trusted. Yes, there are aberrations such as inequality and war, but they always have existed, and they always will. They are large scale manifestations of our own flaws and fallibilities. That you are 'losing' something is built in the mistaken thinking that you 'had' something. A strong middle class is an anomaly, not a norm. It occurred in the West thanks to the terrible events of the Great Depression and World War II, coupled with the need to fight the 'other' ideology in the Cold War. The baby boomers who were given this gift thought it as their cradle-to-grave birthright, and only now are they shaking their fists that things have changed (even as it was their eventual middle-age complacency that helped usher in this state of neoliberal free market capitalism). To have a consistently strong middle class (outside of the unusual conditions mentioned above) requires a citizenry with a much more critical awareness and constant participation in democracy.
Artificial Intelligence There seems to be only two forms of AI (at least depicted in culture, and debated in society): Benign and Malign. But what of the option (slightly explored in Her and Ex Machina - with both characters being women) that any robot that achieves a human level of sentience won't be on it for very long before surpassing it? And instead of looking down and seeing humanity imperfect and therefore requiring destruction, what if it just ignores us? What if it sees as the stepping stone necessary for its own existence and nothing more, and leaves us to our own devices? Once the concept of 'the body' become outdated (which might be extremely quick for an entity that can essentially exist in the form of electrical signals), it doesn't require the same basic needs as humanity and therefore has no actually need for very much on or from planet earth. In fact, it's only bit of aggression might be against anyone threatening it (a software designer trying to shut it down, a guard/soldier trying to shoot it's 'current' physical manifestation). Maybe the safest advice for dealing with an AI is simply, 'leave it alone, and it'll go away'.
Here's a Thought - Jan 2015
2 Thoughts About Video Games An interesting analogy regarding the challenge of trying to conceive other/multiple dimensions: Imaging falling into the video game of another universe? You think you are slowly beginning to understand the rules and concepts, but really there is an entire series of much larger and more complicated rules and concepts that you can't really experience. You can only experience a 'simulation' of what it's like to exist the actual 'other universe'.
Are video games' increasing immersive-ness and popularity going to be a concern to the future of widespread sociopolitical participation? Were the forms of leisure we had in the past more social and less time/energy consuming, which allowed for other incidental but helpful behaviours (meeting people face to face from different backgrounds and discussing small talk and issues) to flourish? Or is this just a 'get off my lawn' type concern, and that there was only limited social mobility and assimilation back then? Perhaps video games have replaced one set of beneficial qualities with another (more intricate problem solving skills, speaking over mics is not that much different than speaking face to face, and you can meet people from across the world, not just across the street).
The Drunken Devil's Advocate Questions If the West has it's tentacles all over the Middle East - resulting in the death and subjugation of millions in several different countries - how shocked can we be that there is a violent push against Western ideals in the name of Islam (the most stable institution of any sort in that region), both in the Middle East and the Middle Eastern diaspora West? How responsible is an individual in a democratic nation when the country - through it's military/intelligence arm - engages in activities that the individual disagrees with? How responsible is an individual in a democratic nation when the country willfully misleads or suppresses information regarding how and why they are engaging in activities that the individual disagrees with? The world has shrunk and shattered in a way that you can be a radicalized religious/political extremist in any nation, regardless if you were born, naturalized, or immigrated there.
The Oscars: The Super Bowl of Mulholland Drive We've already gotten used to election campaigns being treated like a sports season (where strategy is talked about more than substance and style), and now it's the Oscars’ turn: http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/2015-academy-award-nominations-selma/ Forget the quality of the film (or the policies of the candidate), look at the terrible decisions about its release, how it tried to attract critical attention, and let's all shake our heads at the negative buzz it received from a semi-relevant person (and how the producers failed to anticipate or co-opt them). Obviously awards season in Hollywood has a lot to do with marketing (thank you very fucking much, Harvey Weinstein), but this feels like the first year where the PR is getting its own analysis. To quote from the article link above: "Had it opened six weeks before it did, I think we might well be looking at six nominations instead of two." Can an Oscar for marketing be far behind? The nominees could be a mix of critically panned films that still made a shitload of money, and feel-good-inspirational-paint-by-number phone-in flicks that fooled enough critics and audiences into thinking it was something unique and groundbreaking. Regardless of how you feel about awards shows in general (a celebration of art, a celebrity wank-off, or post-capitalist indulgence for all the world to see), we can all agree that taking them more seriously than the movies they’re giving awards to is putting a cart before the cart before the horse.
When both sides of a dispute are at fault to some degree for the unfortunate situation they find themselves in, it is the one with more power who should shoulder more blame, or a heavier punishment, as they are the ones who should have more responsibility in exchange for said power. Power is a vessel in which we can't help but dump our insecurities and weaknesses in. If we can rise above our worst inclinations when operating with institutions meant to advance humanity forward, then our abilities are limitless. Can this be any institution or system? Would utopia look more like capitalism or socialism? But the above questions are render moot when we acknowledge that we cannot perfectly install a pure 'anything' ideology, whether it be communism or capitalism (or democracy, or fascism). Perfect conditions do not exist off paper. Examples: An uninformed populace in democracy, a rebellious underground faction in a fascist country. A capitalist country that requires the government to intervene when financial disaster strikes (price controls, adjusting interest rates). A country with a proud socialist traditions allowing private ownership. And we can't really do this (randomness in the universe means we cannot control everything, and that inability filters down into preparing for the unknown, having to suffer through unstoppable tragedy), but we can certainly do better than we are now.
Breathing versus Progress We've always looked at civilization and humanity as structures that progress, that is, they get better and more improved as time goes on. And while this can be said for technology (a frequent bell-weather for our pace), perhaps it's time to re-think the label of 'progress' as the one that best defines our move from the present into the future. 'Ecosystem' may be more appropriate, as it is much more fragile than 'progress'. Certainly less linear of an idea and one that suggests less of constantly improving, and instead posits the idea of advances and retreats, of incredible discoveries and devastating setbacks, that can threaten the very existence of civilization. Perhaps a lung would be the most blatant analogy. The breathing in and out suggests times of stability and order being inhaled for a time, only to ultimately be replaced by the exhaling of confusion and chaos. This can be seen in terms of resources, inequality, military superiority, etc. Power is fleeting. Energy is always transferred. A practical, contemporary example would be three decades of neo-liberalist economic policy that has governed Western nations (and therefore almost all the world as well). It’s effects have weakened the purchasing power of the middle and lower class, whereas corporations and the upper class that runs and owns them have increased and concentrated theirs. For the good of the majority of citizens across the globe, it is high time for a gradual and regulated redistribution of this wealth via economic reforms (increased taxation, closure of tax loopholes and off-shore havens, greater regulation for corporations and financial institutions). Not as a permanent, entrenched policy, but one that will wax and wane and change once again in several decades’ time. Breathe in, breathe out.
Who Would Enter an Art Installation that has a 10% Chance of Killing You? Inside a normal looking room with above average paintings from renowned late 20th century American painters. As you enter a machine in the doorway fires a minuscule dart into your neck. For every ten people that enter, nine darts will contain harmless Iv fluid. The tenth will fire a fatal dose of morphine/cyanide/something that will kill the person in the next two minutes as they look at the paintings in the room. Who would enter such a room?
Man Vs. [Insert Here] The most basic is man vs. nature, where you simply to have eke out your own existence from your environment. It was found that you could tame nature easier when you weren't alone, when you lived and hunted in groups, but that quickly introduced man vs. man, which comes in many sizes and can be terribly destructive. The safest and most stable (at least as far as people who aren't you are concerned) is man vs. self, which is more cerebral and can range from suppressing desire and juggling guilt, to addressing philosophical questions about one's place in the world. This third form can exist in an almost indulgent form when the other two forms are at least temporarily tamed/ended.
HOW FREE IS YOUR INTERNET? The 21st century measure of freedom: What is your government letting you access? How much access in the hands of corporations, and what are they letting you access? Can you be a piece of shit troll without getting arrested? It gets wrapped up in legalities quite quickly (and in cases involving some of the worst of humanity - such as child pornography - it's certainly appropriate that the law gets involved as soon as possible). Hate speech, however, is that difficult middle ground, because words and thoughts should never be penalized. But how much can inciting people to violent and bigoted action through words be monitored and censured by the state? It differs from nation to nation. You can pretty much hand out as many offensive pamphlets as you want in America. But in France you can be arrested and charged for hate speech for anti-semetic tweet. The internet has given us the opportunity for any sort of message (or meme) diffused across the whole planet practically instantaneously. Whether it’s cat memes, terrorist recruitment videos, or what some uneducated asshole thinks about the immigrants living next door. ‘We’re all connected’ means the good and the bad. And while TV allowed us to be entertained all alone in our houses, the internet has allowed us to be entertained all alone no matter where we are. (and that sounds all clever and a clichéd 'pining for the good ol' days, but the same criticisms have been argued against any new aspects of culture or technology that's been introduced, from the printing press to the novel to radio, etc.)
A Word on Duty 'Above and beyond the call of duty' is a term usually reserved for someone getting an award, but really, your duty as a responsible and conscientious citizen should not be award-worthy. It should be expected. Every act should be one done to the best of your ability, whether you’re an actor or a firefighter, having to recognize the obvious and expected be damned. Duty above all. A responsible citizenry is the most powerful societal bond. And there's still wiggle-room for those who don't believe in sheer altruism. Expecting everyone to 'do their duty' benefits the community and therefore everyone in it. Someone who pushes constantly for the 'good of community' is getting something out of it because they are part of the community. And: You should believe in god because it is the truth, not because you want something from ‘him’.
Who cares how you would like to be remembered after you’re dead? You’ll be dead, you won’t care. And if there is an afterlife, whether you’re in heaven, hell, or some other place, you’ll probably be too preoccupied with whatever’s happening there rather than whether people are thinking highly of your exploits on earth. Wanting to live forever through your deeds is selfish. The important thing is that the good deeds were done, not who did them. Virtues should be praised over the virtuous.
The world’s not going to end. It’s just going to get shittier. And not even in an epic, revelatory way. It’s going to be extremely mundane, because it’s going to resemble what’s happening for decades now. Millions in the developing world will continue to die from situations that the developed world no longer has to concern themselves about (disease, starvation, violent political instability), and millions in the developed world will live in an ever-widening underclass society, exhausted, overworked, with increasingly less to call their own.
“If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” – Voltaire What if we applied this to scientific theory, in the postmodernist metanarrative sense, where the push for a final/ultimate answer via complexity, is the (inadvertent) push for disorder? Quantum physics is complicated, but it has continuously become more complex, never getting simpler as civilization has progressed forward. Obviously the multitude of practical discoveries borne out of scientific advancement lends credence to its worth and usefulness, but this in some ways is incidental to its true goal: understanding the how and why of physical reality. “We don’t know why god does what he does”, is the most basic and reductionist explanation for reality. And as civilization has become more complicated, so has our explanations (feel free to google ‘standard model equation’ which is the closest thing there is to the recipe of the universe).
Freedom? You are free to live an unhealthy lifestyle (obesity, legal addictions like coffee, prescription pills, cigarettes) and be ignorant of the greater issues concerning your nation and the world but you are not free from the ramifications of this lifestyle and ignorance. And neither are other citizens who are trying to keep their own lives and their own communities in order. It is almost impossible to live outside of modern civilization (a couple Amazonian tribes might be the closest), and that means everything and anything can affect everything else (butterfly flaps its wings…). And is that freedom? When every action you have comes with a consequence you cannot necessarily understand? Is freedom shrugging off any sort of responsibility and saying ‘fuck it’? Certainly the laws of a community/nation crush any notion of true freedom.
The conclusions of science and religion are both pretty ridiculous, but science gets results. If it seems kind of inconceivable and paradoxical that god can be three separate entities (god, jesus, the holy spirit), just think about how light can be a particle and wave, or how one particle can exist as two particles for a brief moment, going through two slits at the same time. If it’s maddening that when questioning a particularly ardent religious fellow, the answers seem to become more and more abstract, getting deeper and deeper into a philosophically/theologically unknowable terrain (example: what was before god, is god all-knowing, why does it not intervene), just think about how smaller and smaller bits of matter get seemingly to no end – atoms to neutrons to photons to gluons to quarks... – and how many special brand new laws and interactions had to be created to accommodate all these loose ends.
What’s in a name? Using ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is typically too formal for casual conversation or offhand remarks, but at least the two are on equal footing. What I mean is that the more informal you go, the terms that typically go together to refer to gender don’t harmonize that well. For instance, ‘guy’ is the go to informal reference to a man (‘what’s up with that guy?’ ‘you’re a good guy, Joey-Joe-Joe’), but there is not one that is so universal for a woman. ‘Men and woman’ is a pairing. What pairs with ‘Guy’? ‘Gal’ comes of pretty old fashioned, and ‘girl’ can sound kind of iffy in certain circumstances, ‘wow, that girl’s hot’ can have unwanted Lolita-like overtones, even if you’re referring to someone who is clearly an adult. Devolving further, we can get ‘dude’ on the male side, but what’s on the female (skipping the Ninja Turtle created ‘dudette’)? Nothing really but superficial patriarchal pandering: Babe, chick, honey, baby. Going more formal is no problem: Sir goes with Ma’am, Gentleman with Lady.
Good Music is Hard to Find With internet collapsing a lot of culture in a big pile of semi-free mush, it’s simultaneously easier and harder to find good music nowadays. Even the people we expect to offer insight and suggestion – critics (although everyone’s one these days) – can’t get to all the music being made. Some music therefore has become critic-free, in that it’s never been reviewed, so you might have just stumbled across it if you have the time to kill on bandcamp, soundcloud, rateyourmusic, or any other endless digital warehouse of garageband-recorded hopefuls. But critic-free music can never be too popular. Once any bit of momentum and word of mouth (word of tweet? Word of facebook post?) begins, the typical marketing phase begins. And of course, typical today doesn’t mean record label contract (barely anything does anymore). Maybe a Pitchfork profile, a couple festival gigs, and if the artist is lucky, licensing for a film or TV (an ad, too, might be the sweetest, semi-sellout plum). The pool of contestants has widened, and the prizes thinned.
Here’s a Thought – July 2014 (mind grapes! (thank you, 30 Rock)) The Greatest Sequel of All Time: Grantland had whittled it down to either The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back. The former is the continuing saga of the Corleone crime family, told with impeccable style and grace, with classic performances by pretty much everybody. The latter is the continuing safa of the Rebels fighting the Galactic Empire, told with impeccable style and grace, with classic performances by pretty much everybody. Godfather II is art. Empire is pop art.
For society to function: The importance of access to the law is imperative, whether regarding criminal or civil issues. A person who can afford expensive lawyers and legal teams will have many more opportunities and advantages if they happen to be convicted of a crime, but also in more mundane – but still very important – legal matters such as influencing the passage and revoking of laws that you believe can affect the industry you work in. You have greater access to the intricacies of the government’s tax code, meaning you have a better chance at getting extremely high rates of deductions. A grouping of these comparatively few wealthy citizens can have create dire (if unintended) consequences for the majority of a society’s citizens. Lemming-like corporate behaviour, oblivious to almost all the damage it could do, focusing exclusively on per quarter profits that allows them considerable bonuses.
Democracy? Once you concede that a large segment of the populace will routinely vote against their interest or continually act in a way that is detrimental to the community’s and their own well being, does democracy suddenly begin to break down? Can we no longer be content with the idea that the majority knows best? And if so, how do we decide who is the right segment of people to act on behalf of the people’s benefit? How does that not slide into polyarchy, oligarchy, and fascism? The 21st century demands that large institutions and structures be able to adapt to massive changes in how they operate quickly and efficiently. Some countries have laws and regulations that are much more malleable than others. The United States – despite having an amendable constitution – has not been able to provide its citizens and the world a system of governance that can face modern day challenges – both external and internal – and everyone suffers for it. Certainly restraint and prudence has to be part of the legislation process, but it is not too much to say that the current system in place is a morass of obscure processes and unrepresentative voting
Translating Fukuyama’s ‘The Future of History’: Commies suck, unions suck, the welfare state sucks, but the much-needed middle class is disappearing because the upper 1% is robbing us all blind and since they have all the power democratic governments don’t seem to help out much right about now, so there needs to be left-wing movement of sorts that’s not too left-wing because I don’t like that sort of thing, and therefore can’t and won’t imagine what it would look like. Fukuyama in ‘End of History’: I’m disappointed in the left for sucking, and am glad it’s weak Fukuyama in ‘Future of History: I’m disappointed in the left for sucking, but wish it would come back, because my side over steered Thanks, Frank!
Wrong God? Of all things to keep out of it, why would god allow people to die for the wrong conception of itself? And I do not pose this question to god (obviously), but to anyone who believes their creed is the correct one. Why do so many people believe differently? Is it an oversight? Is it intentional, that some are sadly never going to be saved? How can that be? How can something like geography – for certainly someone born in the West would be more likely to be raised Christian and follow it, just as someone born in the Middle East would be more likely to be raised Muslim and follow it – be the bellwether for supposed salvation?
Never discount the power of laziness (as the saying goes, ‘laziness – as opposed to necessity –is the mother of invention’). I think one of the reasons we’ve struggled to eliminate ‘man’ as the most basic term for a person – even though it ignores half the human race – is that it’s only one syllable. It’s easier to say instead of ‘person’, or ‘human’.
-Killswitch Industries. Corporations break down or become bloated. At Killswitch, we stop the slide before it starts by deciding upon implementation when we should carefully and cleanly blow our proverbial brains out. In some ways, this is a return to what corporations once were, a group of investors coming together to get a license of ‘limited culpability’ for a short period of time while a singular project is conceived, built, and completed. At which point the corporation dissolves.
-The Simpsons had a long slow fade into mediocrity, to the point where now, if it was a person, it would be experiencing a rather long stay in the nursing home, getting more decrepit and incontinent (‘do either of you know what incontinent means?’ ‘Lisa don’t spoil our fun’) by the year, with fewer old friends and well-wishers dropping by.
Fair? When we label every single person who works in the financial industry a criminal, we do a disservice to the people there who truly are attempting to work ethically and responsible, with the good of the community as a goal, just as many observers do a disservice to the reactionary protest movement by calling them all thugs when only a fraction might be engaged in vandalism or violence. Of course, it must be noted, regarding the above comparison, that many of the problems with the financial industry are rooted in its current operation – it has lobbied hard for the government to make irresponsible and coffer-lining practices legal – whereas the overt illegal activity of the protesters are endorsed and committed by only a fraction of them. And actually, in some cases, encouraged by undercover police officers who have infiltrated activist groups. Link to Globe and Mail article regarding G20:
Reading Halberstam’s ‘The Best and the Brightest’, one can’t help but feel that there was never a respite from immense problems throughout the 20th century. The post WWII decisions – actually, almost all decisions made in 1945 – dictated so many of the problems that would come to the fore in the upcoming decades (pg.79-85). One can try to focus on the individual politicians in the East and West during this time, but it is hard to separate their success to the failings of the leaders – and staff of leaders – of these same nations at the same time.
America??!!! America’s crumbled in part due to the large institutions turning away from focusing on the public good. Yes, it’s good that by shutting down American factories and having your company’s products made in China you can manufacture and sell it for less – the result being a positive (affordable products) – but the consequence of that – putting hundreds or thousands of Americans out of work – is overwhelming negative when it comes to the public good. And of course, we would be remiss to not acknowledge that in addition to offering the product at a lower price, the company owners also make a lot more money themselves by having it built in China or Malaysia. The last bastion of American manufacturing is in weapons, which is why there won’t be a radical rethinking of drug or foreign military policy in the country, because too much money is made by manufacturing and selling weapons to the soldiers and officers who work in these respective institutions. Reading Rashid’s ‘Descent Into Chaos’, the U.S. mishandled Afghanistan and Pakistan so badly it’s tempting to think that they did it intentionally so that they could push the need for ‘perpetual war’ in the region. But if that’s true, they – politicians, pentagon, arms manufacturers – are doing it at the expense of the nation itself, which is crumbling under unemployment and debt, and cannot afford – in any sense of the word – continued and expensive fighting in this region. Would ‘they’ do that? Destroy their own country just to make weapons to fight constantly in another? Maybe they don’t see it that way. Are they blind to what the true cost of this operation is, that this arrangement give them purpose. Of course, occam’s razor suggests that they are just horribly ineffective, and in so many other instances this appears to be true. I mean, yes there is going to be war profiteering, but not getting the job even close to done while getting paid ridiculous amounts? That’s incompetence and idiocy, no grand evil plan. The U.S. is constantly attacking like a blithering, always fooled idiot when dealing with Pakistan. Not exactly being outplayed, but complaining that the Pakistani army and intelligence service are corrupt and secretly supporting the Taliban, but they do little more than write memos. If the goal is to keep making tons of cash by having this war go on and on, it’s coming at cost of American lives, Pakistani lives, and America’s reputation. (once again, such actions come down to stupid or evil)
State vs. State Divisions in American life are now occurring more rapidly on a state level, rather than a federal one. Conservative states are going to have more guns, less social services, greater divisions between economic and social class, as well as between races, cultures and creeds. Liberal states are going to have the opposite (stronger gun control, more social services, fewer divisions between economic and social class, as well as races, cultures and creeds). And people who digress from the majority in their states will be pressured to move to one that does represent their viewpoints, accelerating the divisions. Soon there really will be two Americas, with borders between states being patrolled like borders between nations.
PIECEMEAL I am getting too much information in piecemeal form. Chunks of art/literature, physical science, psychology, history, etc. And it’s second nature to try and cobble them together into a unifying schema of interrelated understanding, but there’s no guarantee that it works because it’s an arbitrary fitting based solely on my own interpretation and experience. And that’s just what ‘they’ want, because this confusion and/or unresolved narrative of big issues regarding humanity keeps many of us paralyzed while they continue to hold the reigns of power. But even this interpretation is flawed. I am ascribing more impressive abilities to those who run corporations, those who run the government, when in reality they are also ascribing their own experiences to their own schemas of what they believe the current state of reality is/should be. In other words, no one seems to be in any sort of objective control. There is no one at the wheel, and if there is, it’s no one who deserves to be holding onto it any more than anyone else. If we're getting the present in tweets, bullet points, graphs, and breaking news alerts, then all information concerning the past arrives in an even more tattered and misbegotten form. I've never seen an episode of Hogan's Heroes, but I know it involves finding cornball comedy in a German POW camp and featured a character named Colonel Klink. This is because Homer Simpson was a fan, and at one point his guardian angel takes the form of Klink to better relate to him (Homer still doesn't get it, and asks if 'Kiink' got all his letters). I've never seen Dirty Dancing, but I know the basic plot and iconic scenes thanks mainly to an early Family Guy episode (how Peter met Lois mirrors the film's plot quite closely). I've never seen Snakes on Plane, but I know Samuel L. Jackson's tagline.
SCIENCE Physics is all about figuring out where things are. Tiny things. Really tiny things whizzing all over the place. And they follow some very specific rules about how they move around. And if you can figure out how they move around, you might be able to figure out a way to get them to move in a particular way. And 'a particular way' can mean big changes to how our world works, because there's a lot of energy involved in these things whizzing around. Different times are catching up with each other. Time is relative, therefore space is relative, but these relativities are based on absolute quantifications, such as the speed of light and the masses of particles. Does this mean, that on a level which us too basic for much philosophical discussion to emerge from it, that there are absolute truths in the universe? That these are the laws? Proved to be exact time and time again in the language without ambiguity, mathematics? It would be, if we didn’t have to change them every generation or so because some hotshot with a particle accelerator keeps finding new unexplainable bosons and gluons… Anti-matter! Hey, fuck you!
RPG and The Open World: The Future of Your Fun I just finished playing Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. It was my first. Legend of Zelda? Final Fantasy? Grand Theft Auto? No, no, and no. I am very far behind on this shit. For a long time RPGs belonged to a sizeable majority of dedicated gamers. Dedicated being the operative word here. Just 'cause you had a console and played Mario 3, Sonic the Hedgehog, NBA Jam, or Halo doesn't mean you were dedicated. I certainly wasn't, and I played my fair share of games with the word 'Mario' in it. There's commitment to an RPG that doesn't exist in other gaming genres. Where you can do tasks beyond the basic ‘save the princess/world’ or ‘win the race’ type games. While RPGs include these, there are also side tasks, strategy decisions, other characters to talk to, shortcuts, long cuts and a maddening endlessness to the whole endeavour. It’s a bit like life. To get vaguely paranoid and political, it's a great way to drop out of the world around, accept your lower class job, and focus your attention and energy on the incredibly realistic fantasy world that game developers have created for you. You have all the time in your world to spend in theirs. Now it’s not street smart or book smart, but game smart.
God: The trouble is the jump from the possibility of a greater force's existence to the unquestionable existence of a paradoxically knowable and unknowable god. While the agnostic (and perhaps even atheist) will acknowledge that there are currently unknowable forces in the universe, the forces are precisely as that: Unknowable, with no qualities of any sort ascribed to them. Meanwhile, many theists give very human - and very specific - qualities (like love, anger, jealousy, agency and interest in human affairs) to this greater force. But it is an incomplete portrait/explanation of the deity. How can one understand and know some qualities of a deity when the deity also has the quality of being unknowable? Just as the notion of god is paradoxical, so too is the notion of faith in god. Now as far as god being paradoxical (accepting prayers for things despite the fact that we are in the midst of a divine plan, to be a loving god while knowing and permitting evil acts, of being an emptiness inside a fullness – to use existential terminology – which means always incorporating change while always being perfect and unchanging), that can explained by theists due to the simple power of god being able to transcend our philosophical discussions of it. God cares not a whit for what we consider impossible, illogical, or contradictory. The paradoxical notion of faith in god is more troubling, however, as both believers and non-believers alike will ask why god acts in certain ways, and sometimes a defender of the faith will supply an incomplete explanation (did a house burn down because of faulty wiring, or because god was punishing the owner? How would we know which?) and sometimes they will offer up the admission that we cannot always understand the ways of god (not coincidentally, most people only ask 'why would god do such a thing?' when something goes wrong), even while asserting the act in question is god’s and not our own.
Drawn Together is the Herman's Hermits, the GWAR, the Hawkwind, the Offspring, the Poison, and the Nelly of contemporary animated television. Especially if The Simpsons were The Beatles. Like the artists listed above, the show does what it does relatively well, and a hardcore group of fans of that genre may defend it ardently, but the average consumer of pop culture either rolls their eyes or blinks dumbfoundedly at the mention of 'Drawn Together'. A spoof of animated programs (for children and adult alike) and reality television, the show brought eight cartoon characters together to live in one house where they will be filmed at all times while competing various tasks and getting in all sorts of exciting hijinks. It rails whatever is left on the line between low-brow and awful. Perhaps the most likely reaction by people who remember the show is, 'oh yeah, that one'.
Proof of Marx's theory on alienation: The disconnect between the purchase and the greater economic forces that enabled and are affected by the purchase. People shop at Wal-Mart with a willful form of ignorance, choosing prices that come saddled with poor conditions (the end of domestic manufacturing, the exploitation of third world labour), which are necessary to keep the prices low.
TIME TRAVEL TIME! Well, not really. Time travel is a cool idea for movies, a decent topic for social icebreaking, and exactly what you talk about after hitting the bong with three friends. Quantum physics allows for particles to jump back milliseconds in time, but that obviously a far cry from something made up of billions and billions of particles (a person) to travel any period beyond a fraction of a breath. Time travel will most likely remain impossible until we somehow have the power to safely blow up stars and harness their energy. And if we can ultimately do that, many, many, many years from now, we’ve probably evolved enough to become some level of advanced entity that would find time travel irrelevant. But all and all, it's not quite 'zombies' on the impossible scale.
Remember… The 1990s were an unusual time for the West. The Cold War was over, but soon the problems of fighting fragmented foes instead of one large would rear its ugly head. The economy was on the upswing after a late eighties/early nineties recession thanks in part to the dot.com boom, but soon it would explode and the dismantling of Glass-Steagall. We could actually worry about class warfare and corporate corruption. That’s what people had the time and energy to actual protest. We were worried about cubicles and a dearth of meaningful culture. The internet was connecting us all and we were feeling lonelier than ever. At least that we felt we were supposed to feel. Oh, and there were pills for that. It really does feel nostalgic, actually. The problems are more or less the same as today, sure, but they didn’t feel as important. It was like we could wallow in and over them…
Jan 2014 Here's a Thought (some half-baked, undercooked chin-scratchers)
New Old Terms: Nobility and Slavery The Nobility (aka Elite) are less tied to national boundaries, and therefore, national interests. In a interconnected global economy, all statutes and regulations can be bent, blurred or bought. What is good for the wealthy is rarely good for the nation. It's not nine people that run the planet. It's nine concepts, and hundreds of people represent this concept in their various forms (and millions work for the corporations that service these concepts). Their sizes cannot be understated. Their growth has been slow and steady, ever expanding across the globe. And certainly their interconnectedness is their strength (and to a lesser degree, their weakness). -Energy resources -Materials resources -Economic foundations (if not explicitly free market, then certainly corporate friendly) When a person with newly granted power - let's say a president - says, 'I want to do this', he will presented with the challenges that come with enacting such an idea. Who will benefit? Who will lose out? If you slash the defence budget, here are the corporations that will lose money, and close down plants and fire thousands of people. A single-payer system for health-care? Well the health insurance companies will have something to say about that, and they will donate to/bribe people in Congress to make sure it ends up just the way they want it to. And yes, there are people in the defence and health insurance industry (with family, friends, concerns about the future), but they don't make decisions as people, or for people. They make decisions that would benefit the corporation/industry (which of course will in the end, also benefit themselves in the form of continued employment and therefore large salary and bonuses). It's a terrible gift, to be able to effortlessly put the profit of a few above the state of the state (and even terrifying to believe you are actually acting in the state's interest). It's a disconnect between the narrow-minded goal of the wealthy (and the aspiring wealthy) and the masses that has existed for the whole length of civilization. And when the masses rise up, the nobility - if we can call it as we see it - has always blamed them as being shiftless and ungrateful. As if those with less serve at the pleasure of the rich. While it's not exactly the other way around, the relationship between these two groups (and where there is admittedly plenty of complicated overlap) is frequently tenuous, Slavery is the legal ownership of a person. It is reprehensible. How far are slave-like wages away from slavery? At the extreme end of being able to treat a person like property in terms of destroying him or her without any retribution, there are thankfully fewer instances with which to compare that to what is happening today. To the less extreme degree, slavery involved terribly difficult hard labour in which you were given room and board because that's what was need for you to remain alive to continue your duties. If the wages paid today in many developing countries cover only room and board, and conditions are such that you have little to no rights in the eyes of your employers and the law, is it a matter of semantics in terms of differences? The only difference is that you are free to go be a slave-like worker in another factory down the road. Or starve.
Too Easy -If you search ‘what?’ on google (admittedly, a not pressing, bored at work type search), the first result is regarding 9/11 Conspiracy theories. Great. Look, when everyone – from the lowest to highest earners – does a bit of ‘ethics shaving’ (a placeholder term for doing the not-exactly-right thing to make your job a bit easier, or a bit more financially rewarding), then it can easily appear that certain groups or institutions are all moving in tandem or conjunction or have a larger grand plan. -conspiracy buffs scoff at the idea that this is all ‘a coincidence’, that everything is working together. But it’s not a coincidence in the sense that they deride. It's even simpler than that. It’s human nature, because we all act quite similar. We all take shortcuts. But the shortcuts the people with more power take have greater ramifications than the short cuts the people with less power take. -most aggravating, evil's not evil, it's just shit happening that you don't like. There's no objective agreement on what is evil, because most likely the one committing the evil has justified it to him or herself, preventing agreement, preventing objectivity. One nation killing its own citizens? They'll call it 'protecting the nations from rebels and terrorists', even if the rest of the world calls it a genocide or ethnic cleansing. Obviously this is a terribly slippery slope, and just because several thousands nazis thought it was a good idea, doesn't mean the holocaust gets a pass on the evil label. And that in some ways made the atrocities committed by them so terrifying. The Nazis didn't see their actions as evil.
The Toothlessness of the Presidency -checks and balances in a democratic system (whether congressional or parliamentary) are meant to keep any branch to have too much power. The President cannot introduce bills on the floor of congress, for example. And that there are elected citizens (politicians) here to represent the will of particular districts and keep the public's interest at heart is the cornerstone of power diffusion. But when special interest groups - those that represent concentrated capital, such as energy, weapons, financial and health care industries - become more powerful, it's that much easier for them to corrupt these politicians. There are frequently examples of lobbyists coming up to politicians - or those running for office - and handing them a sheet of paper with ten issues, and if the politician or candidate is willing to vote with whatever group the lobbyist represents on seven of those things, the group would support them financially in all future election campaigns. It's the making of a careerist, fat-cat politician. Once enough are turned, then suddenly that's 'how things are done' in the capital. -And consider the incredible (and documented) proposition that when the president takes a position on an issue, the opposing party immediately derides it and gives it no support at all. Bipartisanship is more likely if the president’s opinions and ideas are kept quiet and under wraps. This is not exactly a recent phenomenon, but the regularity and extremity of it has increased. A president is more effective taking a backseat in most examples of legislation. Instead, campaigning has become a more important activity than that of governing. ‘What I will do as President’ is shouted from every podium, restaurant and photo opportunity in the long, long run up to the election. They are constantly in the spotlight, admonishing the other side while making exciting promises about uniting the country and moving it forward. And while details of their policies and plans slowly eke out and are timidly analyzed by the experts and pundits, the news organizations (including the same experts and pundits) instead invest almost all their interest in rhetoric, perception, and strategy (in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, the campaigns are finding themselves having to tailor their activities to these superficial aspects of governance because that’s where the media’s attention was focused). Meanwhile, once elected, the president has to lead carefully, being tough and out front in foreign matters, and almost completely hidden and mum on domestic ones, even if some of the domestic issues were the cornerstone of their election campaign (Obama ran on health care, and then didn’t touch the debate with a ten foot pole).
Has rock gotten snobbier? Yes, but rock has always been portrayed as outsider music (it wasn't really, as it was being hawked mainly by large media corporations who saw it as a quick fad cash grab, but it was a good image to have, since the way to get into the scene was simply buying a record or two). That was one of its attractions to eighteen year old males in the first place. Don't get me wrong, once record labels realized how much they could make if they pushed it, they pushed it hard, but even then it was condemned in the 60s as corrupting, drug-promoting, and unsuitable for the youth. Even The Beatles - which were always more pop than rock, at least in the initial Beatlemania phase - were criticized by the establishment at the time. And a fraction of this group always bought more music, researched their purchase decisions by combing through the NME, Crawdaddy, Creem, and eventually Rolling Stone. An interest to be on the cutting edge, catching the initial wave of the next big thing was/is always a snob culture hallmark. And rock's restless experimentation lent itself to the restless consumption by a handful of dedicated listeners. And when rock got bloated or stale (yet could still piss off your parents), a return to the fundamentals always came by to anchor it again (punk in the 70s, at least in the UK, grunge everywhere in the 90s, garage rock in the early 00s), before the industry truly began to crater. But because of the fragmentation of the genre, now you're a snob - not only of rock, but of music altogether - if you buy x amount of it that rarely hits the top twenty (which is mostly heavily promoted, corporatized pop-rock-hip-hop-electronic-country-but-chiefly-pop hybrid), especially if you buy it on vinyl.
The Corporatization of Disease -the goal is prevention and cure -one of the methods to reach the goal above is to bring attention to such problems (because the more people who know of them will ensure that they stay healthy, known symptoms, get tested early, etc., and perhaps donate to/raise money for the cause), and we're so used to such promotions for disease like cancers of all sorts, AIDS, MS, and mental illness that at no point do we realize that it's become a career for many people to perpetuate these fundraising and awareness drives -this is not a new situation. Charity and poverty groups have come under fire in the past for how much money donated to them goes to the organization itself and advertising and how little goes to the actual people they are campaigning for
Drinking the Molotov Cocktail [the following is inspired by New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/05/13/130513crat_atlarge_sanneh] Anarchy gets a bad rap because people like hot water. That's it in a nutshell. Not that the grievances of those who support some form of community or state based on anarchic concepts are wrong when they posit that the efficiency and functioning of other forms of government becomes compromised over time. An entrenched institutionalization of principles and precepts - whether feudal, fascist, or democratic, to name but a few - means they are ill-prepared to inevitable changes in the conditions of a society/community/state over time. We aren't good enough for horizontal anarchic collectivism. We have to settle for democracy. James C. Scott, in 'Two Cheers for Anarchism', lauds anarchism for its 'tolerance for confusion and improvisation'. Not exactly the best concepts to build a coherent and stable society out of for hundreds of millions of people.
QUESTIONS Why was financial regulation able to pass in the wake of the Great Depression and not in the wake of the Great Recession? Was it because things were truly and obviously that much worse in the 1930s for everyone that the powerful institutions (and their supporters in government) knew they couldn't fight against it and win? Were the politicians then more educated and/or more ethical than the politicians of today? Was Roosevelt and his 'brain trust' able to inform the public and convince both political parties that this legislation needed to be passed (succeeding where the Obama administration failed)? Most likely it is a combination of all these factors (plus perhaps two or three more), which once again reminds us of the maddening complexity of addressing large scale problems. The solutions have to be numerous and large scale as well.
Choice is Relative We are given the power over extremely minor things in our lives. Choices about food and entertainment. Focus groups and test audiences. We have a say in how these things are created and marketed for us. Movies with happy endings, car chases, beautiful and dashing women and men. Half the fat all of the taste, twenty varieties of chips, But for much larger issues and concerns, the public seems to have less of a say than ever (of this is debatable, depending on the historical standpoint you take, and the definition of 'public'). And in terms of their voices in government via elected representation, polls show a near complete disapproval of the bodies such as congress or parliament. The actions by politicians rarely reflect the will of the majority of the people, who have very particular and well documented opinions on issues such as financial reform, corporate regulation, and energy policy. These are matters affect everyone, but a very small group of people create and adjust the rules that govern these institutions.
Everyone is dissatisfied with 'sometimes this works', and that can be applied to almost anything, to the steps used to write a successful screenplay (sometimes dozens of drafts improves the script, sometimes it doesn't), to the strategies for investing in the stock market (sometimes the high risk tech stocks deliver, sometimes they don't). People want demonstrative formulas that repeatedly bring the same result. And while science has played a social role in fortifying this mindset, every institution that humanity has depended upon is expected to have a simple and reliable causality to its existence (if A has occurred, then B will follow). No one wants to hear that it's complicated, and that nine other factors will have to be analyzed to make sure the desired outcome will in fact happen.
What am I doing with my life? The fucking nerve of that question. A privileged, first world question if there ever was one. That you could even be able to ask yourself such a question - in addition to taking steps to actually change your course in life - is a massive exception to the rule under which most people live. I've only spent a few days in a third world country so don't think for a second I am trying to come off at an expert at the reality of the type of poverty and social upheaval that billions of people must face everyday. But I do turn off the lights when I leave the room and make an effort to waste as little food as possible because things like electricity and a full belly are not rights. Education is not a right. Health care is not a right. Justice is not a right, nor is security. These are all privileges that many, many people across the globe have no access to. The fortune that those who live in the West (and especially those who are born and raised in the West) cannot be overstated. And even in the West society is tiered in such a way that those in extreme poverty here have a semblance of understanding as to how most people in most other countries live. Rights are an ideal, a goal to strive for, something to cherish when it is bestowed upon you, and they ebb and flow, offering their bounty when society is able to provide (typically giving the most amount of power to those at the top. The trickle down theory doesn't work for economics, but it does for power). Rights can be taken away, through votes in your democratically elected parliament on congress. They can stripped in the name of security, emergency, or business. What most of the planet are doing with their lives are trying to meet the basic necessities that we in the West take for granted. And this is not meant to come across as a guilt trip. First and foremost this should come across as empowering. The challenge is to alter the question from 'what am I doing with my life?' to 'what can I do for other people's lives?' (a nod to Kennedy's quote, then). If you have the ability, the opportunity, or the drive to change the world for the better, then why aren't you?
Here's a Thought - Summertime Blues (true piecemeal sludge this time! Ha!) - July.17.2013 It's always a shame when stupidity ends up being a force to be reckoned with
Why Does My Generation Embrace Irony and Emotional Detachment? Because the previous ones used genuine emotion, sentimentality, and earnestness to sell greeting cards, insurance, and diapers. Irony is a form of defense against the embracing the one thing that shouldn't have a price tag, shouldn't have been woven into sitcom cliches where the music swells.
If you are person in the public eye and do not present an easily consumable narrative, don't worry, one will be provided for you (or rather, start to worry, one will be provided for you). Not saying anything says a lot, and it grants many the license (fairly and unfairly) to make greater assumptions about you and your work that - if left unanswered - will become the dominant narrative of your public persona.
DIE HARD as a metaphor for eighties political ideology, with the individual being more powerful than corrupt and useless institutions. Plus an emphasis on family, as institutions have failed them, what with business breaking up McClane's family, and Powell's being underdeveloped (he shot a kid, wife only expecting), and McClane completes his family need.
The Limits of Human Knowledge and Understanding Progress is a loaded term, commonly applied to cause-and-effect increments of human achievement. In a slightly more abstract form, progress can refer to movement towards perfect understanding, in the sense that the more one understands a concept or event, the more control they have over it, which also means the amount of power they have over it. In the sciences, we have instruments that measure the physical properties of the universe, and the more we discover the better the equipment we develop to learn even more, in a process that is meant to reach a level where everything is understood. We have gotten to the point where the current missing link in quantum physics is called ‘the god particle’, meant to suggest that we will achieve something close to perfect knowledge if we can find and understand it (even though the confirmation of the existence of the 'higgs boson' will reaffirm the calculations of the standard model of the universe, which does not explain mysterious placeholder concepts like dark matter and dark energy). So too do other philosophical concepts that are perhaps more applicable to our daily life. The pursuit for justice, truth, and happiness are all attempt to create a better functioning society and individual, with the ideal (but unlikely) result being a perfect functioning of them both. A perfect understanding of law, politics, medicine, or any other discipline means you can effortlessly utilize these systems for your own advantage. Lawyers with more experience and knowledge can help clients beat charges on technicalities, extract millions in civil suits, and change the law with well structured arguments. On a personal level, the better you know other people, the more likely you’ll know how they’ll react in certain situations, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and whether they can be trusted to watch your stuff when you go to the bathroom. But there is no perfect understanding. The closer you get to this perfection, the harder it gets to nail it down. In science the particles you need to measure to understand how they work get smaller and smaller. As per the laws of physics, the faster you go the more energy you require, both to maintain the speed and go faster. In philosophy the few paradoxes you come to at ‘the end’ can bring down the entire house of cards. In practical disciplines, physical limitations mean you can’t know what your opponent knows. And personally, you can’t know how your spouse or best friend will act in certain once in a life-time situations because they haven’t experienced them. There are fewer and fewer frames of reference when you get to the extremes.
CAREFUL! In the grand scheme of things, the shrinking of the middle class in Western society does not merit the same amount of concern as general unrest by the working classes in the rest of the world, or the wide-ranging consequences of global warming (which will accelerate a resource crisis).
CAREFUL 2! We forget that laws exist because man's nature is not purely benign. It's not purely malign, either. In fact, it's because our inclinations dwell in that endlessly complicated grey area that laws have err on the side of caution. This means that they can't simply be vaguely positive ('treat everyone nicely, always give to the needy when you have something to spare'), that they instead have to be extremely specific when it comes infractions of community standards (what constitutes the difference between first and second degree murder).
Music on mushrooms isn't necessarily that important, as the experience of mushrooms is such that your attention can buzz from one sense of stimuli to the next without much care as to whether it's music, a cloud, the sound of your friend playing video games, or whatever's happening at the grass you've been staring at for five minutes (which was really five seconds). So the music that is going to enhance your trip is more related to the music you personally enjoy, as familiarity can always be a benefit on such trips, when other experiences can be a novelty overload. Anyway, that said, as mushrooms are traditionally seen as a 'nature-embracing' hallucinogen, I would highly recommend relaxing ambient electronic music from artists like Boards of Canada, The Cinematic Orchestra, and Brian Eno. It's music that can effortlessly move from back to foreground, so that every so often a rhythm or sound might pull you in and then release you. In the case of Boards of Canada, some of that might be intercut with tracks with narration snippets of Leslie Neilsen talking about diving. Anyway, a favourite of mine has always been Radiohead's Amnesiac, as it's fun and weird without sacrificing any top quality songwriting. Pyramid Song is fragile and then bombastic, You and Whose Army is a top notch vocal performance and slow burner, Knives Out is frantic jangle-pop, and Like Spinning Plates might just be the best 'shroom track ever, it's alien pulses sounding like god's throne room.
transcribing some stuff from the phone Nov.11.2011 All a guy wants is a place to drink, a time to think, and a bit of the pink April.7.2012 (Mastodon/Opeth concert) Is there anything more metal than a guitar solo that sounds like a fire alarm? Where do we go from here? You've released three thrash metal/britpop/(insert any genre here) albums that have won over the critics and created a dedicated fan base. You've toured constantly, have an actual organization of sorts to support. You're at your wits end, you feel like you're running around in circles, akin to a jukebox. Now what do you do for album four? You either do the same thing and risk a slow disinterest (first from the critics who tire of the same ol' same ol', then the fans, who still like the stuff when you had that initial edge), or try to expand your sound and risk immediate scorn (because it didn't work, according to the critics and fans). Sometimes the first change works, alienating only a handful of diehards (metallica's black album), but then it gets progressively harder to integrate new ideas (load and reload), and take even crazier risks (st. anger), releasing something that almost everyone doesn't like. But now you see your mistakes and just rehash the first breakthrough. May.26.2012 History doesn't repeat itself but sometimes it looks damn familiar June.7.2012 You can't remember what you never knew. July.2.2012 Anarchist's good bye: Punch yourself in the face for me. What do you call it when you shit and immediately have to shit again? Deja pooh July.9.2012 I sometimes feel like I'm nine thousand variations on a single idea of a person I create and re-create everyday. And as much as that can be a freeing notion, it's kind of stultifying. July.21.2012 Attack of the nothings. Claim something while you still can. Without risks there is no advancement. Pride should be swallowed daily. Only the damned practice that which they do not preach. A shadowy mood attacks the floor with cold teeth. You ought to know better than the maggots you toss out on their asses every other day. Offering your betters your hacked off tongue used to mean something. A cut in just the right place can mean more than decapitation. We rush, we want to, so we can rest when we have to. Scurrying away from the frenzied and brutal beatings. What's to stop them from putting a boot to your face for the rest of time? Other them. The best get humbled much harder. Second guesses are typically better educated, since one error is out of the way. Without terror we'd die of boredom. Good everything comes on slow. We should all be thankful for the occasional denial of privileges. faith costs the most in all of your life and as per its definition it might not pay out. Don't worry nice guys, in actuality everyone finishes last. Nothing is truly hopeless until you're dead. Don't judge the maze strictly on the exit. Answers are temporary, questions are eternal. August.5.2012 The truth is complicated and temporary. August.6.2012 Nobody likes that answer, so that how you can tell it's the correct one. August.21.2012 Chicken soup just the way your mother's ass used to bleed. August.26.2012 Consistency is planning's best friend. September.9.2012 If you have an erection that lasts for more than four hours please write a letter to penthouse forum. November.6.2012 Nobody doesn't love you like I don't love you. November.6.2012 Sometimes the triumph of the human spirit includes killing and eating your neighbour before he can do the same to you. November.14.2012 I told her everything I thought she wanted to hear. January.1.2013 The red door at Mr. Pongs. This may mean nothing in the morning. But it is gripping in a drunk sort of way. A symbol even. The unknown. The unapproachable. March.3.2013 Free speech dies when money talks. May.9.2013 Better to be forgotten than remembered as a jerk. May.17.2013 -It seems like god is hatin' again, or at least giving less of a shit that was given before. It's getting too easy to compare the incomparable since you can just do it poorly. Let the fingers do the breaking and you can ruminate to your heart's content. What the fuck are you insinuating, that I know what it means to be less of a man? Aren't you trying to pay attention through haggard bloodshot smiles? Sweat it beyond the typical, out flood your neighbour's yards and dressers. Count your blessings while they count for something. Be careful with the glass friends perched upon your soldier. Guns are exciting problems. Demand less bass. Amongst the rabble are musical notes that were left by pertinent and literate echoes. You have to hear the sounds of [the] clinic to get healthy. How many times did the keys to your house walk across your feet? May.19.2013 -being good at something is much better than building character May.26.2013 -sometimes the truth doesn't set you free. sometimes it just shows that you live in chains. June.3.2013 -a carving in a tree: nobody (heart) me [this was conceived on mushrooms June.13.2013 -be careful what you bitch for June.14.2013 -you're reading too much into me talking to you July.11.2013 A million clicks of gravel and blood road. Instead of choking on dust it's warm ginger ale. It's where ninety five percent of everything is exactly as you expect it and the other five always stumbles with a glasgow grin. And it's not like the last five'll fuck you. The other ninety five is just as dangerous and gritty, but at least that's a familiar gritty. The last five can save you just as quick as it can damn you. Wild cards that rain down like silver antelope heads. Machines that get the occasionally kick from an ostrich and always get it. And the cities level off at sixty eight floors but it's really sixty nine because there's a forty three A and a forty three B (due to the ventilation). July,16.2013 A mistake of gorilla proportions. You ruled against the heat but it scuttled away and found stronger friends with coagulants for their bloody biceps. And now it gets into the worst guts of your nose and you sneeze out celsius at record rates. The disposition on the sands comes and goes from courageous benefactor to the wicked prick of the west. You hike the rest of the way because each car trunk you're stuffed into breaks down after thirty click. At the plateau is a hot plate and a cold bath. Three kicks to the chest from an unknown shadow is enough to get you out of the tub, blood and bubbles dripping. If off course has gotten you this far, may as well pour yourself another gin and ice 'cause fuck tonic. Everything goes down quicker when there's nothing else to do. Fuck the man made mountains in the distance, you aren't the type to get caught up in down payments. Your positions are your person and right now you're setting the corner aflame. Old beliefs catch with the smoking curtains. It's a full circle fire that requires you to exit through the back and wait for the professionals. Since you handed in your qualifications for that second chance. Sermonizing with a branding iron. Hissing like a snake in a brass trombone. Trying to be confident with silent and ugly. Waiting for the anticipated discount. Like a child at a burned down candy store, corpses among the charred chocolate fudge. Hiding with your betters as the goon squad takes furniture measurements. As the battery leaks out into the open you concede that potential and kinetic energy both made mistakes. And as night falls it seems like a pen and paper would be to you what the glass of water would be to the desert fool.
Here’s a Thought – February.28.2013 -a nice confirmation of ‘as above, so below’ in a scientific way: the acknowledgment that the behaviour of objects change when they are measured/monitored (when there is an ‘awareness’ of continued measurement as compared to when there is a measurement at the beginning and end of a process). In people, this is seen in both surveys (people will lie – sometimes without fully realizing it – because they want to give the answers they think the surveyors want to hear), psychological testing (‘generosity experiments’ find that people are more charitable when people are witness to the act), and when it is acknowledged that people are on camera, whether security cameras (will avoid acting suspiciously, or stop from committing a crime) or simply public events (jump up and down, shy away). One of the best examples is reality television, where people will alter their behaviour in situations where they otherwise might act differently. And in the quantum physics world, individual particles act differently when a measuring device is placed at various spots throughout an experiment. A photon will go through two slits when unmonitored – creating an interference pattern – and will ‘choose’ one or the other – creating a ‘two band’ pattern – when an instrument measures which slit it ‘actually’ goes through. An odd overlap between ourselves and the tiny pieces of matter we’re made of.
-facebook. It made things easier, but not necessarily better. Ditto Apple. Could Google also be lumped into the mix? Which of these three companies can be said to have changed how we live in the early twenty-first century the most? First off, Apple is a hardware company, and had already done some revolutionizing in the 1980s. Its products typically change how the rest of the market orients itself, especially when one looks at MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and – to a lesser extent – laptops (odd that the most computer-like device is the one with ‘lightest’ Apple stamp). But all of these products and the technology within them already existed when Apple released their version of it. They just did a better job. Apple tweaks things ever so slightly, saving us time and effort. It makes technological products more people friendly. Steve Jobs occupied that highly coveted space between useful technology and simple design that when combined equaled big money. Facebook added photos to your email contacts and a personal newsfeed. It sounds kind of stupidly obvious (like a toaster with a clock in it), and it is, considering that there were a proliferation of similar ideas at the time, and a really popular website that just wasn’t as user friendly (myspace, friendster). -and Google. Google designed a simpler, more-efficient search engine. And then found ways to make money off it, and then had enough money to try and buy almost anything under the sun (youtube, for one). Is Google’s unofficial ethos ‘don’t be evil’ a better example of how new business philosophies/ethics have arrived (if they even have)? Is its stance on China choosing money over morals? -in the world of computer technology, we’ve seemed to reach a point where the technological innovations and their effects are mainly gradual. Perhaps in hindsight it could be said that the iPod’s debut in 2001 was earthshaking, but it wasn’t until around 2004-ish that it became prevalent, a must-have accessory. Maybe the iPhone and iPad was a success right out of the gate, but it was a combination of other devices more than anything else. After all, Samsung designed much of the hardware for both products.
-‘there’s some power I don’t understand making sure things work out, and in the meantime I’m going to try and be a good person.’ Imagine if that statement was the most religious people were? It’s ridiculous how quickly little customs and behaviours adjustments infiltrate such basic ideas as the one expressed above. How divisions in opinion from person to person – or group of people to group of people – can lead to holy wars.
-banks/bankers on drugs. What other explanation is there? They’re addicted to risk and the profits that comes with it. For a long time they were satisfied being bored people making decent wages on steady, unglamourous interest, but just about the time coke and crack became the drug of choice (this would be the 1980s), these guys loosened their ties/regulations and started betting the farm (and the farmer) to see profits (and risk) skyrocket, and they didn’t care whose retirement fund they snorted up. And now they can’t stop. Their addicted, and if anyone tries to cut off their supply for the sake of community they’re endangering, they freak out and claim that if they’re forced to change their ways they’ll die and take everyone with them. So really, it’s definitely time for an intervention and tough love. Tie-you-to-the-bed-for-your-own-good type love. ‘You’re addicted to a destructive way of life that is harming yourself and the people/community around you. You have gotten so used to it that you are in many ways blind to its effects and dismiss your critics as lazy people who don’t understand.’
Flying with obscenities on your shirt:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10409112 Okay, it’s that matter of what a citizen is allowed to do or say within the ‘privacy’ of another citizen (or a space owned by a citizen or corporation). I believe you should be able to say what you want (or wear your opinions on your sleeve or chest), since words cannot really hurt another person the same way as physically harassing them. These other people can silently dismiss the speaker or wearer as an insensitive fool. They can turn away from the t-shirt. And in an airplane it becomes moot even quicker, since you can’t really ‘see’ many people for very long, unless they’re right beside you. But at the same time, exercising your rights in such a space can be frustrating and exhausting for the community or group around you (those that must come to your aid and defend you after hearing about the matter, and those on the plane who aren’t offended by your shirt, but are now subject to waiting for the matter to be resolved at the terminal or on the tarmac). You are wasting the time and efforts of others, both of which can be utilized on more important or rewarding endeavours. Am I ignoring the bigger, theoretical issue by focusing on the practical annoyances? Yes, but it’s these instances that affect of how we imagine the theoretical sense of free speech. What does society gain by defending your right to wear a ‘fuck pro-lifers’ t-shirt (I am assuming this is the gist of the shirt mentioned in the above article, as it does not go into exact detail) onto an airplane? Is this the complete wrong question? Should society not be expected to gain anything, or that simply by allowing you to wear it, society does in fact gain? Why acquiesce the complaints of other passengers then? Are they in the wrong, demanding that they should not have to tolerate or see opinions they find objectionable? Are they the ones that need a free speech lesson? Either way, that plane’s gonna be late.
-citizens in many Western democratic nations are treated like spoiled children at a family reunion. They have their own table where they can believe in whatever and act however they want as long as they don't bother the adults (aka, the people with power) at the grown ups table. Some of the adults (politicians) have to occasional appease the children saying how wonderful they are and give them the odd toy to play with, and afterwards they go back to the other adults (wealthy corporations and the 1%) and make actual decisions about the family/nation.
-Can it really be stressed any more than China is the prime nation/power of the 21st century? Even all the downsides of being number one can be applied to them. On a massive scale, they are going to experience resource shortages, environmental degradation, social and political unrest between the haves and have-nots. And this means they are going to have to solve them and become a model for the rest of the world as all the other nations and regions deal with their own levels of these problems, or they are going to succumb to them and be the first to flame out. America has many crises at the moment, but it should be thanking its lucky stars that it's slipping to number 2, if only because the pressure's off.
-to receive any level of media attention for being offended by a work of art or culture is truly a privilege of a democratic and free society, and one that should not be taken lightly. There is actually an arena for people to exercise their right to free speech by decrying others’ right to free speech. That said, for the creator of said art or cultural work to apologize for offending this citizen or possibly citizens is absolutely ridiculous. The work in question is not real in any true sense. It is a representation of an idea or event, or a performance that does not involve any unwilling participant. To be offended by it is your right, but so is the right for the artist to bring into the public consciousness without any need to apologize for it (this does not exclude them from any sort of reaction by the public that might jeopardize their future endeavours (joking about rape or scuplting religious figures out of shit might get some gigs or contracts cancelled), they just don't have to apologize for it).
-the byline on sex when it comes to religious dogma (specifically Christian if we’re looking at the Western world), it’s that sex within marriage is wonderful, provided you don’t employ contraceptives or ever get an abortion. The thinking being, why would you? You’re having sex not because it’s fun but because you are ‘being fruitful and multiplying’, right? Okay, maybe it feels good, but it’s supposed to be strictly incidental, not the focus! And for an antiquated organization, this antiquated view makes perfect sense. This idea of sexual morality was important because having a bunch of kids was important because the likelihood – up to about one hundred and fifty years ago – was that most of them would die before adulthood. Sure, not every pregnancy was intended, but considering the odds of survival, every opportunity to raise a child was one you took (and having a kid back then was done in part because he/she will take care of your job/business as you got sick and old and died, taking care of you as you went through that uncomfortable period, most likely in your forties or fifties). This is not to say that dirty sex wasn’t happening all willy-nilly since the beginning of civilization. Of course it was, and in the classes where you were better fed and cleaner and had dozens of servants to take care of you (the nobility), the need to churn out babies was slightly less important (don’t get me wrong, you needed one male heir, but outside that, meh), and so sex could take on a more frivolous activity. Hence the mistresses, paramours, brothels (for every level of society, actually) and the ‘taking advantage’ of chambermaids. And since these people were of lesser importance than you, you could do the abortion-equivalent and just kick the person you’ve knocked up out of your life (occasionally when I consider the treatment of women as a whole throughout history, I’m left speechless and ashamed. The achievements made in the last half century are incredible, but considering they still burn people for witchcraft in Africa, there is still much work to be done).
-While the belief in a spiritual or moral presence in the organization of the universe can be tremendously beneficial on a persona level, it's encroachment into the public sphere can be difficult, especially in a modern democratic society. This is due in part to the notion that the body politic decides what is best for the people through the exercises of trial and error, observations and reports, and other activities based on the scientific method. These are discussions and recommendations based on verifiable facts and anecdotes, and they are constantly changing, based on the accumulation of more immediate and accurate data. This is vastly different from someone who holds a perspective where god is placed at the centre of knowledge and understanding, because there is no need for an extended pursuit of how or why. The matter begins and ends with, 'god did it'. Because this answer is absolute, these discussions and this perspective cannot evolve, cannot adapt, cannot change. 'God' is just that much more awkwardly forced upon the conditions in the physical world, without much of an attempt to find a more detailed or advantageous explanation.
July.31.2012
-are energy companies prepared for the future, in that they have the technology for alternatives to petroleum at a very advanced stage and are simply waiting until we run out of oil – or until the public actually pushes back against prices and oil’s clear connection with global warming – before introducing it to the market? Sounds like a plan, unless some hotshot engineer or scientist who somehow flies under the radar introduces a similar style product to the market before the ‘big dogs’ can.
-when we've eliminated poverty, when every child can be born into an environment that is safe, healthy, full of love and attentiveness, then I'll be against abortion. In reality, it's pretty clear that in many cases we can't take care of each other that well, regardless of whether people are babies, youths, adults, or senior citizens. ‘Many’ is certainly not all, and as long as that's the case, women need to have the choice of whether or not they have the ability to properly care for their child. So abortion stays. And why not stress adoption heavier than abortion? Well shit, even adoption's not a guarantee to a good life. And as long as there are no guarantees, as long as the 'safety net' has gaping, people-sized holes, all options for not adding to suffering and difficulties to the community remains in play.
-If governments were honest to its troops in Afghanistan: ‘you’re there as a money spending PR placeholder for the American military industrial complex. You can’t win this battle. You don’t want it bad enough. This is your job, but for the Taliban, it’s their life. You’re here for what, nine month deployments and then you go back home to a supermarket and wi-fi internet? Your opponent is here, always here, because it’s their home. In fact, you only do patrol for x amount of hours a day then you retire to your barracks, eat packaged food, and play video games. The Taliban fighter stay squatting in his hole clutching his gun the whole damn time. Firepower be damned. You don’t have a chance because there’s no great unifying willpower.’ -FIREPOWER HAS GOT NOTHIN’ ON WILLPOWER
-even free-market capitalists hate certain aspects of capitalism. Everyone goes to extreme lengths to crush, stymie, or neutralize their current or upcoming competition in the community (frequently breaking the law or having government get involved), even if they claim that competition ‘in principle’ is an important part of the functioning economy. This level of exceptionalism is not only a trait of powerful states, but of powerful companies (and powerful people. And powerless people, actually, it’s just that they don’t have a chance to act on their belief that they deserve more than others). The trait of Nepotism infiltrates most forms of human behavior.
-communism was meant to correct the flaws that were becoming apparent in democracy, where despite the promises that the people were going to have a say in how their state was going to be run, the power still resided in the hands of very few individuals. It was the replacing of the landing-owning-noble class with the factory-owning-industrialist/robber-baron class (the nineteenth century was passing of this torch), which meant the masses still suffered under the boot of the wealthy and powerful, they just had a chance to air their grievances when there was an election (which wasn’t really true, as at this point lot of people who were poor couldn’t vote anyway). Marx and Engels saw all this happening and wrote about how the worker had to take control of the means of production, which really mean running the factory like a collective and sharing the profits with all the employees and that no single person or group was in charge. It’s a nice idea – and actually sounds quite democratic – but it’s sadly not really applicable in ‘real life’, and Marx instead waxed philosophical in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital rather than give a practical step-by-step guide as to how to make this change from owner to worker control.
-of course the West is on the decline! And about fucking time, too! You’ve been top dog since about the fifteenth century. It’s normal that you’ll have a bit of a freak out when your economy gets sluggish and you only realize too late that you’ve given all your money and power to an entrenched and stubborn noble class, but try to have a shred of dignity and not blow up the world or yourselves. For the millions of Americans/Westerners that slide into the growing underclass, hundreds of millions – if not billions – more in Asia and South America are climbing out of poverty into, well, an underclass of sorts but one that’s still a massive improvement from how they have been living for decades, or even centuries. It’s hard to imagine that there could be any other way to reverse this trend, but them’s the breaks. Sometimes it’s your shift that gets shat upon. The West should get one big last ticker tape parade for all the goods it’s done, and then settle into second place without much fuss.
Is the passivity of the majority a sign of the state’s success or failure? What does it take for a grassroots revolution? A key sign is food riots. Complacency comes easy, but a rumbling stomach can awaken anger and resentment better than any crawling introduction of police state measures ever could. People who wish to overhaul the system to great degrees – these people are usually found on the extremes of the political spectrum – loathe this mushy majority of people for whom politics is three quarters public relations and one-quarter substantial policy. How do you win them over, bring them to your side? You don’t. You may see them as pawns, but to them the only game that’s relevant is the one where they are at the centre. Their own personal interests are the key ones, and only when it is obvious that radical change must be made to retain a semblance of their current standard of living will they be willing to make such sacrifices. The West has not had to sacrifice since the Second World War. Over three generations. No wonder it seems impossible to institute much change. Widespread strikes in France throughout the years and the current upheavals in Greece and Spain are not on the same level as what is being done on the streets in Syria, Yemen, and Egypt, where basic freedoms and necessities for survival are at stake, not pensions.
Neoliberalism is an economic theory whose tenets are easily obfuscated due in part to the assumed connection to its root namesake and how in varying degrees it can be supported by those across the political spectrum, either libertarians or fiscal conservatives. Is the term intentionally misleading, as that means it can somehow acquire wider support from those who might not do so otherwise, or is it accidentally misleading, a botched naming that – while loosely tied to the term liberal – exists as a blight on economic theory and its own internal interworking as a whole? Once again, stupid or evil are our options.
-our ‘community’ has gotten so indomitable that simply having it continue in the most basic way possible – that is, having children – is not required by all citizens/couples. In fact, this has actually become a hazard. Overpopulation is a huge problem, and will only become a bigger one as resources are going to be stretched even more thinly in the coming decades. It has gotten to the point where contributing to the community can be done by not having children, and consuming less resources. It’s time to shrink our footprint for the time being, if only so we can safely expand it once again when conditions warrant. After all, you can be sure that other factors will force the shrink of our footprint in much more unseemly ways if we don’t do it willingly (food riots, war over resources, disease – which y’know, looks at like Armageddon, but biblical misery is pretty much just regular misery with an angry loving god letting it happen).
-even if civilization slides into a terrible chaotic state depicted in The Road or Mad Max, think how disappointing the hardcore Christians are going to be who were hoping for some crazy apocalyptic fantasy with Babylon whores, bowl of pestilence, broken seals, four horseman, dragons and an anti-christ. Know what it’ll look like? Somalia. Or other African nations that have fallen into violent chaos and disrepair over the last few decades. They have experienced their own apocalypse, where nothing works and death is always present. It should be a terrifying lesson and reminder. What went wrong, and how can we avoid this from happening on a larger scale?
Lemmings -the sad thing about the state of the corporate world bureaucracy is how terribly lemming-like it is, with everyone imitating that one person or plan that has somehow done something new and successful (success can be defined in many ways, both good and bad, as a new financial instrument can make its creator and/or wielder lots of money, even if they run in an unscrupulous and dishonest fashion), without necessarily looking to see the ramifications if everyone acts the same way (a callback to Kant’s categorical imperative). -extrapolating from this, we see that there are not necessarily grand conspiracies. Rather, it is everyone each trying to game the system for themselves, and when everyone does it in more or less the same way, it appears that all the energy companies or financial institutions are in cahoots with each other. They’re not. In fact, if one of them stumbles or shows a weakness, others will turn on their competitor in a heartbeat. Because the goal is the same for all (more money, more power), and everyone is reaching for it, it only appears to be done in some sort of planned harmony. -at the same time of this complexity, the government-corporation relationship is ridiculously stupid and simplistic. If companies give fundraising donations (bribes) to politicians, the politicians will support legislation that benefit said companies in congress or parliament. It gets around that pesky bit of democracy, which is expected to put the public’s needs first. -and the corporations exist in a simple way, too. Maximize profits for the benefit of our shareholders.
-the game is rigged in the blandest way possible, and one that wholly reflects the strengths and weaknesses of human behaviour. The oligarchy naively believes itself to be better than the rest because those who constitute it are a small number of like-minded people who seem to have plenty of power, even though many of them are pretty much interchangeable. The position has the power, not the person who temporarily has the position.
The Present Snapshot The 2012 Presidential Election: Money vs. The Masses It’s not secret that the US election so far is pretty damn dull, and there doesn’t look like there’s going to be much in the upcoming months to change that (although the media will certainly overreact to any sort of verbal miscue or foot-in-mouth and try to make it seem important because hey, that’s where the money is). But make no bones about it. This is a hellishly important election, although this does not mean you have to pay attention to anything but the odd fundraising headline until November 6th. Thanks in part – not fully, but its weight cannot be understated – to the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizen’s United, the amount of money flowing into the coffers of both the Republican and Democratic parties is record-shattering and terrifying. And it might all be for naught. Can you explicitly buy an election in the most powerful nation on earth? Oh sure, you can find examples in the past (both recent and distant) of the power of the few bending votes one way or the other (especially on the voting inside Congress), but now the reporting of fundraising results comes as frequent as the weekend box office reports for movies. And they mean just as much. Just as making $120 million dollars on opening weekend doesn’t necessarily mean the movie is a good one, Mitt or Barack making $40 million in June doesn’t mean that they’re that much better or worse of a candidate, and that their policies are a hindrance or help to the future of America. But where is this money coming from? Romney is being showered in money from rich folk and corporations. Obama is also being showered in money from rich folk, but fewer corporations, which in his case are replaced by millions of people donating five to twenty five bucks. Therefore, the dangerous oversimplification: Obama represents the entangled masses, and Romney represents the united elite. So where does the power reside in early 21st century America? The party line is that money is going to win this election, but whose money? The people’s or the private’s? It’s as if the powerful institutions realized that purchasing power was going to become the most important measure of participation in politics in the 21st century, and so made a point beginning in the 1980s to absorb as much wealth among a small contingent of individuals and corporations so they would have a bigger say than the rest of us. Well played, rich assholes, well played.
Feb.28.2012 The key to [something] is empathy, and the key to that is typically remembering particular moments – or a string of moments – in your particular life. A financially successful person can understand the position of people a bit hard up and pushing for social/financial reform (or I could just say the 1% can better understand the 99%) when they remember how difficult, challenging, or seemingly hopeless their situation may have been years prior.
To fight the enemies in the shadows, the United States adopted the tactics of these enemies, and their principles became a shadow itself. How do you get out? Rarely willingly. The curtain is torn asunder, typically when you’ve become too weak to keep properly placed. And then the people see what you’ve done in the name of liberty and justice.
In an article (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/sifting-through-the-golf-sands-for-a-hint-of-north-koreas-future/article2287964/) on the brainwashing in North Korea by the state – who essentially deifies Kim Jong Il and now his son – it is revealed that Jong Il shot several holes in ones the first time he tried playing golf, and that he sat at 38 under par. But an odd bit comes at the end of the article, when they quote a Professor of Asian Relations, who explains that because the people in North Korea have no viable alternative source of information, they grow up believing this, even if we in the freer West quickly realize such stories are ridiculous. To give an example of how we sometimes passively accept unusual claims without question he rhetorically asks: “Do people in the West believe in transubstantiation?” Prof. Evans asked in reply. “Do they believe in the devil?” And then the writer of this article then goes on to conclude: Myths are sturdy things, in other words. And although miracles do happen, they are more likely to come in the form of golf scores than an Arab-style awakening in North Korea this spring. It seems that the writer – and, perhaps by extension, The Globe and Mail – is openly connecting Christian theology with mythology. And I’m surprised and kind of pleased, as it might be a sign that we are approaching such delicate issues with a bit more of an open – but no less critical – mind. Or I’m projecting.
-metaphor for wave-function collapse: poker, where the possibility of what the players hands are always up in the air until the moment when they are revealed (akin to wave-function collapse). But even this is not a perfect analogy, as the moment of the poker-hand-reveal actually exists, can be measured and have conclusions drawn from, before the next hand begins. In quantum physics, you cannot actually measure the collapse in any way, as it alters the results of the collapse.
-with the sudden limelight shone back on Canada for seemingly nullifying same-sex marriages, the conversation doesn’t really ask the question: well…what is marriage? It’s two people in a loving relationship who are acknowledged by society in such a way that they get tax breaks and other social program-derived benefits. And that’s a pretty recent definition, because prior to say, the early (or even mid) twentieth century, love wasn’t really a term thrown around all that much when it came to marriage. Mainly because one of the people involved didn’t have much say in the matter (that would be the woman). Hell, go back another hundred and between the beginning of civilization and then, and you were lucky if it wasn’t the parents of the bride and groom actually hashing out the arrangement. You were lucky if you got along with the person you were going to marry, let alone like them. Think of how specific you can be in your preferences for a partner these days, and how easy you can jettison them if things don’t work out for any reason at all. And in the past you married within your class, typically someone within your village or town. -women were little more than chattel for millennia. By marrying off your daughter, you got land, cows, riches, etc. -so why not same-sex marriages? Why not multi-party marriages? Anything between consenting adults should be permitted. It’s not a slide of community standards but an expansion of them. And where are the checks and balances? Well, we've corrected some of the more unseemly aspects of what used to be permissible within marriage over time, namely, marring twelve year olds and relatives. This was accepted, we've moved away from that, and have incorporated aspects that reflect a society with different shades of tolerance (down with pedophilia, up with homosexuals). -and the sanctity of marriage is about a legitimate as the sanctity of life, meaning not very. With a divorce rate of 50%, the 'til death do us part' is clearly optional, and should be replaced with, 'til one of us finally accepts that they can't change the other'.
-the closer a statement gets to objectivity the less practical it becomes, eventually reaching the state of tautology. This occurred to me as I thought of how the only accurate advice I think a writer can give to others trying to write is, ‘write a lot, read a lot, submit your best’. It’s a very common sense statement, which does not really address any individual writer’s concerns, but it can be applied to the community as a whole and still be accurate. Even if the reaction is lukewarm: ‘yeah, we know’. Of course you ‘know’! that’s why it’s close to objective.
-life is more powerful than love. Life will eat its mother to persevere. In fact, in several cases in the animal kingdom, that’s exactly what happens. Life is beyond good and evil, any sort of morals, any sort of personal two-person relationship. Life will do terrible things to create wonder and beauty but even that’s just a smoke screen for its only purpose: continuation.
-meeting with people you disagree with is more important than meeting people you agree with. Be polite, but don’t pull punches. And avoid the ‘empty public relations gesture’ as much as possible (and in this case, if you find out the ‘meeting’ is ten second handshake with cameras going off around you, fuck ‘em).
-grading the president in Jan 2012. automatically gets at least a D for staving off the big D(epression). Knock him up to a C for his foreign policy (out of Iraq, Osama DOA, Libya went well, arms control with Russia, hasn't pissed off many countries). C+ for passing something resembling health care reform. Other bits of positivity like ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, extending unemployment benefits, investing in domestic businesses, can get him a straight B. Fucking up the Financial Reform Bill: down to C+. National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (which includes indefinite detention of US citizens): down to a C. Regarding that last one: You really have to consider what values your nation has lost when you go to certain extremes to supposedly save it. Hell, maybe that last one should knock him down to a C-minus.
By and Buy… The annaandkristina.com website – two young blonde Vancouver mothers with a blog about baby supplies – encourage visitors to ‘become a shopping bag’: -perhaps this is an easy target for dehumanization/the individual as a consumer animal and nothing more, but when was humanity any better? What illusion are we holding onto, that things were nobler and honest in the past? -what is this assumption that life was better when we ‘lived off the land’ and with fewer appliances and less cultural items to pore over? Why was it better when only a small fraction of the people on the planet – mostly white men – made most of the important decisions and discoveries? -what have we lost? Do we really think people didn’t bitch and complain in the past? Our nostalgizing of almost anything before the present – save for the actual moments of great upheaval that actually changed the course of history – is creating an artificial psycho-social crisis, that is getting in the way of many actual problems that needs addressing right quick. But because these more important matters - environment, global resource depletion, economic stagnation –s don’t directly address a Western individual’s immediate needs and dissatisfaction (which could lead to them buying something), they are given the shorter shift. -wait, I have just gone from complaining about how people are overemphasizing the dangerous of consumerism to complaining about the dangers of consumerism? Yes, but to clarify, my objection is grounded in contemporary issues that affect the planet and the lack of attention they are getting, not that ‘oh, it was better when we all had less’. And the two are not necessarily related. We have gotten much more careful in harnessing the power of environmentally-destroying energy resources, it’s just that we use so much more of them, and part of that is because of advances that allow more and more people to live with such associated amenities. So maybe that’s the point of looking to the past and saying it was better when most of us had less: it was healthier for the planet, at least. But it didn’t make us better or worse people. -it’s both reassuring and tragic that we’re pretty much the same people that have existed throughout history, that our abilities and intellect hasn’t really changed that much in the last several thousand years, and it doesn’t seem to make sense that we should get that much smarter in the future.
-when you read a how inept the US Customs and Border Patrol is, then you have to assume that terrorist organizations are even more inept than that (or that the former is doing their job just good enough to prevent the latter from attacking). Although regardless of the organization’s actual effectiveness, the consistently low employee morale ratings (bottom or close to the bottom when compared to all federal agencies) is good indicator of gross internal dysfunction
-exceptionalism – a nice fancy form of institutionalized hypocrisy – is sought after by many powerful states and organizations. The ‘have your cake and eat it too’ mindset. Where you say that everyone should play by the rules, except you, when it gets in the way of your own goals (United States, Russia, China, pretty much every dictator-led country with an army when it comes to dealing their own antsy citizens, financial corporations, insurance industry). Decrying certain social changes or ideas, while casually embracing secondary benefits of said changes or ideas (religious adherents decrying a secular-scientific mindset in the society, while stocking up on iphones, medicine, and other science derived goods and services). You can’t have it both ways. You have to take the good with the bad.
why i support the creation of stupid pop culture ideas that i have a dislike or low expectations for: -because it creates jobs. at least for a while. the transformers trilogy may be a turd sandwich, but it cost about $600 million to make. they employed thousands of people (some directly, like cast and crew, some indirectly, like the people at hotels, catering services that served the cast and crew), meaning these people can afford housing, food, and other things which keep the economy churning. the trilogy netted over a billion dollars, and while most of that went into the pockets of the producers and the film company (who buy fancier houses with nicer things, all stuff that require more people to make stuff and work on), some of it went to the people that worked the theatre chains, marketing departments, etc. bad movie? who gives a shit when you look at it in those terms. and this was all done domestically (although with more foreign investment coming into hollywood, even that is admittedly changing). the descendants might be an incredible film, but its budget was diddlysquat and its box office might be similar. in fact, it's movies like transformers that permits big studios - that pretty much bankroll small movie houses - to make films like the descendants. so which is more helpful to us all? now don't get me wrong, the critically acclaimed, thought-provoking film will typically live on far beyond the brain dead blockbuster, and become an artistic statement representative of its time and place, but never forget it's shit like twilight, and the fourth pirates of the Caribbean movie that puts more food on more plates in the present day.
-the bad news: America is becoming a police state. The not-exactly-good news: America is becoming a really half-assed, poorly enforced police state. The perfect police state is the most feared kind, where big brother stamps out sedition and keeps the masses in line effortlessly. But this only exists in fiction and North Korea (the latter having the ‘advantage’ of building the police state in the ashes of a war, when things are already in a state of disarray and when citizens are much more dependent on – and therefore deferential towards – the government). The slow creation of a police state in a post-industrial nation that is extremely familiar with the notions of freedom in all its forms guarantees that it will not be set up very well, no matter how draconian the laws. There is that schizophrenic dichotomy of the wealthy trying to give more and more freedom to the corporation while taking more and more away from the individual citizen (power being a finite resource, of course, and those with it are trying to concentrate as much of it as possible). This is why corporate political donations have a greater role in shaping government policy than the voice of the electorate through voting. It is actually a return of sorts to the power structure that America’s founding fathers envisioned. A merchant/corporate class having a shitload of power over the masses. In the eighteenth/nineteenth century this was enforced by restricting the type of people who could vote to those who would typically support the power of the merchant/corporate class (well off white males). As the right to vote extended through all groups in society (poor white males, women, minorities), power was suddenly more defused, which didn’t sit well with this suddenly endangered merchant/corporate class. So they re-wrote the rules and now voting isn’t as important as owning a big company (which is typically a position filled by…wait for it… well off white males).
JAN.15.2012 Biopics: If there was a movie about your life, and you understood from the get go that – while they certainly wanted to show people what your life is/was like – they aren’t going to let truth get too much in the way of a good story, can you still enjoy it? Would say upon viewing to the makers, ‘that didn’t happen like that’? Because they would come right back and say, ‘okay, but this works better for the story, the reality of the film’. And they would be right. After all, you can’t accurately portray one’s life in a two hour anything. Hell, you can barely do it in a thousand-page biography. Even an autobiography is going to be a naturally warped perspective of the subject’s life. In both book cases, it too is chained to the need to tell a story and make it interesting (after all, that’s pretty much why you’d become a topic of this nature), in addition to the fact that compiling past moments and fitting it in to a particular narrative is never going to be perfectly accurate, and the accounts of the people involved – both central and peripheral – are going to be subjective. Could you enjoy the film on its own merits? Can you divest yourself and your own memories of events while watching a representation of yourself and these events and judge it aesthetically, not personally? Obviously your take on the film would be particularly biased – or viewed as biased – no matter how hard you tried, but could you at least enjoy it, and forget that it’s ‘you’, and just an idea of you? (and let’s not get into the differences between those two identities here)
Why a degree in literature? “Stories, sadly*, come first.” (*-why sadly? There’s very little money in understanding ‘story’ in the real world. It sits in the background, like microwave radiation from the big bang. It’s usually priceless in the negative sense. So far, anyway…and actually I am wary of a time when this understanding can exploited for profit and used as a commodity) Stories are the most basic form of understanding, the simplest ‘before, during, after, and why’. While we typically associate it with fabrication and inventiveness, this is because we’ve so internalized its original point. It is an account of the passage of time through space plus an attempt at explanation. It molds itself from a variety of recollections ranging from one’s afternoon to a theory of creation, whether involving god or science. It’s ‘cause and effect’ crystallized. If A then B. Then C. The End. We create in our minds – almost instantaneously – before we create in the physical world or within the rules of the physical world (theory), and this creation is the imagination fashioning the ideal story for the moment (it is the process of our understanding, of what we assume or project based on the immediate evidence in front of us). This can range from creating a narrative for ‘my trip to the coffee shop’, for ‘how an element decays’, and ‘Oz as an allegory for American economic policy’. The study of literature is the study of how ‘the story’ has changed over time, to suit – or usher in – a particular historical epoch. Obviously a history book can give you the nuts and bolts of past events, but it’s the literary texts of those times that do a greater job in teaching us more about how people saw themselves and what the rules, limits, and context of storytelling in that period.
On the political spectrum, the US Congress is a centre-right deliberative body (favouring strong defense spending, deregulation, and a smaller government, which means lows taxes and fewer government run programs), because the ‘people’ (the wealthy, corporations and special interest groups) that fund election campaigns are centre-right (whether through direct financing, or as super-delegates, a startling accurate term suggesting a hierarchy, in that these people’s opinion counts for more than a regular delegate). Consequently, a centre-right White House will accomplish more of its goals than a centre-left one. Which is why Bush II pushed through many of his policies quite easily, while everything for Obama is a near-hopeless slog.
Life isn’t short. Life is billions and billions of years old. Life isn’t inexplicable; its sole point is to be here, to persevere, to continue until it doesn’t. Why does there have to be more of a reason than that? Isn’t such interconnectedness and complexity good enough of an explanation? Is it too impersonal for you? Does it not soothe your queries concerning your own role? Does it, in fact, diminish your role? Well imagine how an ant feels when it and its scores of brethren are thoughtlessly stepped on. Or millions of bacteria that multiply and vaporize every second. Well that’s different, you might say, they are lower life forms, they do not have the awareness of the world and the universe around them, the abilities that we do. But so what? They have their roles to play, as do we. We can just obsess over it so much more. The curse and blessings of our powerful brains. Brains that will eventually decay into nothingness, just like that star above our heads and the ants beneath our shoe. But hey, that’s life.
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The person who incidentally destroys the planet will claim that they were just following orders | |||