The god of abstraction subsumes all other gods.
[a follow-up to What is it like to be batshit? . See also Voting as Ritual and Republic of Heaven . ] So there is this election happening in mere days, and it feels like a crucial choice point for the country. If we re-elect Trump, that means something very definite for the story of the US and for the American character, to the extent there is such a thing. And if we don't, it means something…
I asked this on Twitter the other day and got not much in the way of answer. What is it like to be a Trump supporter? — mtraven (@mtraven) October 24, 2020 Although I have studied the right, and even gone so far as to try to intellectually engage with them at times, I find I can't quite wrap my head around what it must be like to be a Donald Trump supporter. That is to say: I can to some extent…
This is the list of books I've read so far during the lockdown, although it includes a few entries from just before things got serious. In fact the first two I remember reading on my last BART commutes back in February, which seems like the distant past now. It's kind of all over the place, for better or worse. I'd like to say it represents my wide-ranging intellect but it could also just be…
The blog is obviously close to death, but somehow refusing to die. Two posts this year, barely. I՚m doing just as much thinking, and presumably have about the same level of somewhat-blogworthy ideas as I always did. But the shape of the media landscape has changed. It՚s weird because I never really thought of this blog as part of a trend or movement, but I started it when blogs got started and it…
Erik Davis ՚ recent book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is an engaging work of cultural history, focusing on the lives and works of three important countercultural intellectuals: the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, the writer Robert Anton Wilson, and SF writer and later visionary Philip K Dick. These three psychonauts all inhabited California in the…
[ this blog is pretty much comatose, but every so often my pet mission of anti-anti-politics comes up and I can't resist. ] Some people are horrified and disgusted that people are celebrating the death of David Koch. It՚s distasteful – wasn՚t he a fellow human being, with a family and people who cared about him? And isn՚t reveling in the death of a political opponent rather extreme? Should one…
A new record low number of posts, yet this blog isn՚t quite dead. The past year obviously sucked politically but also sucked for me on a personal level. Details don՚t belong here, but in the good news department I started a new job in October which is infinitely better than the last one. I՚m once again hacking Lisp for science which seems to be my professional destiny, one I can live with. I had a…
I՚ve recently composed a number of aborted posts relating to “conflict theory”, arguing for the importance of the political, or speculating on the nature of political conflict, etc. None of them made it past a few paragraphs, because we aren՚t in a time for high-minded meta-level thinking. Shit is getting real. So I՚m pointing to a couple of writers who are making that point. First, by Jacob…
In my last post I declared that in the meta-conflict between conflict-theory and mistake-theory, I found myself on the side of the former. I had plenty of justification, but I also tried to acknowledge the best arguments of the mistake-theorists (steelmanning their position, in the rationalist lexicon). I tried to credit not only their arguments, but their motivations. They seem well-intentioned,…
[Warning: This very long post was inspired by a SlateStarCodex post, but from there goes rambling all over the place. I take more potshots at Scott Alexander than he deserves. For that I apologize, but I can only say that I find his writing extremely thought provoking, and I feel a need to provoke back. I had to divide this into sections to make it even moderately navigable.] Blind spot I՚ve been…
I just got phone spam from some health insurance seller (and who would be dumb enough to buy health insurance from a company that sleazily skirts the do-not-call list?). I didn՚t pick up, but they left a long voicemail that ended with “And You Have a Blessed Day”. This really twinged my weirdness detectors. I don՚t think I՚d ever heard that locution used before. But apparently it՚s quite the…
This speaks for itself: This was sent to me, a screenshot from Facebook. He deserves to have his post shared. It's literally the least we can do for him. pic.twitter.com/wAIIjohGXs — PebblesJ (@MadisonJourdan) February 16, 2018 Except I fear that if Sandy Hook didn՚t get something to change, then nothing possibly can. Not to take anything away from the most recent tragedy (apparently we have to…
On this Martin Luther King Jr day I am thinking (god knows why) of the various people I encounter around the net who are alt-right or just so alienated from the mainstream that they have decided to be on the side opposed to social justice. The mocking term SJW encodes the reality that there is a war going on. They feel attacked and are just fighting back, although what they are fighting for is…
Well, this is hardly worth doing – only 9 posts this year, a new record low. The usual reasons – a new job, attention sucked away by Twitter and Facebook and family. Not to mention the truly ghastly state of political reality. I had a number of clever posts that I started and couldn't quite finish, on political matters from a theoretical point of view. Like the finer points of agonizing about…
The recent enormous Buzzfeed article describing the links between the Breitbart, and the larger world of rightist extremism was notable in how unsurprising it was. Everybody knew about these linkages, getting documentary proof seemed almost redundant. Yet it can՚t be repeated too often, because it doesn՚t seem to quite register: we are living in a world where there is almost no distance between…
I find myself once again writing a L abor Day post , and it՚s basically the same one I write every year – not just on the date, but having almost the exact same thoughts. It՚s a little disconcerting, because it feels just like having original thoughts, yet they seem to run in these timeworn grooves. It՚s become a ritual in other words. Appreciating rituals is a probably a symptom of aging. In my…
Eclipse of the Heart So I went to see the eclipse in central Oregon, in the company of 30000 or so hippies at a music festival , kind of a lighter weight version of Burning Man (same esthetic, less extreme in weather and participation practices). Not sure how much I belonged there, of course – even more so than BM, the crowd is dominated by the young, the beautiful, and the partying. But for some…
The tech world is buzzing over the latest political/cultural/gender workplace skirmish, this time when a Google engineer published a long internal memo on his painfully obtuse theories of gender. The memo was leaked to the public, causing a category-5 shitstorm. The guy was fired after a few days later, which only added energy to the vortex of moral posturing, a vortex that sucked in everybody՚s…
Who are you more afraid of – psychopathic individuals , like Ted Bundy, or psychopathic systems , like communism or Nazism? Or capitalism, which while it may not be as inherently murderous as the others, seems to be far more efficiently destroying us ? Which of these scare you most, and emotional reactions aside, which are actually the most likely to do harm? What if the entities in questions were…
Every time I read a Slate Star Codex post that touches on politics, I want to pick a fight with it. I՚m not sure why – Scott is such a bright and well-intentioned and witty guy that it makes me question my own motives. But I can՚t help it, something seems deeply wrong there, in a way that connects to various issues I tend to obsess about. The recent post entitled Against Murderism attempts to make…
I՚m as happy as anyone to see thousands of people in the street marching in support of science, but something about it feels kind of strange – like, should science really be a political cause? "Geez" #ScienceMarch SF pic.twitter.com/XXdKv7pi1c — Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) April 22, 2017 The first answer that comes to mind: of course is no, it shouldn՚t be, but the right wing crazies have forced it…
My parents both entered the US as refugees from Nazi Europe, My mother and her family were from Nuremberg and got out via the UK. Here՚s the passenger manifest from their trip from Liverpool to the US in 1940. And here՚s her passport from Nazi Germany: Trump, because there's no level of cartoon villainy too farfetched for him to play to, chose International Holocaust Remembrance Day to announce a…
I am always fascinated by controversies around the border between speech and action – like the fracas about banning Moldbug from a conference , and the more recent punching of alt.right leader Richard Spencer that has been both celebrated and deplored across the internet. It made the front page of the freaking New York Times . As with the earlier controversy, there are scads of people on both…
This was a sucky year for my blogging, in addition to all the other ways in which it sucked. Politics dominated of course. And loss and grief. My company went under at the end of October, which I haven՚t written about here, but it certainly contributed to the overall feeling of disaster. This is also the year the rabid wingnut fringe of the internet went completely mainstream. I feel a touch of…
In my last post I wrote about some earnest, well-meaning, but kind of lame efforts of the San Francisco startup scene to do something to fix politics. This was formally nonpartisan, but obviously leaning towards the left. Today, let՚s look at what the other side is doing: They conducted a masterful Facebook ad campaign They՚re using Mechanical Turk to recruit an army of low-paid workers to churn…