Shopping List, Enemies List

By in fresh hell, the geist of the zeit No Comments

The best-case scenario, it seems to me, is that the threat of mutually-assured destruction finally intimidates corporations away from political pandering in advertising. More likely, perhaps, is that this kind of raging partisanship will just become the way we live now, with fanatics scanning advertisements for political subtext the way they used to for Satanic symbols. I feel pity and revulsion for people who are so warped that even shopping becomes politics by other means.

Pardon Me, But That’s Bullshit

By in technology, the geist of the zeit No Comments

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Ben at Flying Totems:

Updates in tech are often a matter of taking something good or at least functional and making it worse. You’ve probably noticed this. So I hope that at the very least this one is equivalent to the status quo.

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Matthew Crawford:

But the counter-productivity of today’s “tech” that I have in mind is not of this sort. It is not an unintended consequence, due in part to collective action problems (e.g., the congestion caused by everyone else also using a car). Rather, the very business model of tech, often, consists of adding layers of control to activities that don’t need them, and then locating that gratuitous, extra control in systems that need constant updating. The rents collected are various in form, some of it taking the form of hostage-taking, since the dysfunction that comes with failing to maintain and update the extra layer of bullshit can cripple any operation.

But the bulk of the rents are paid in the frustration and uncertainty that accompany tasks that were once simple and easy. Of course, this isn’t really rent, as it doesn’t benefit anybody. But neither is it a cost that registers anywhere in the system. It’s just part of the vast, subterranean economy of shadow work we do to make things more convenient and legible for some IT system that is profoundly stupid, compared to human beings when they are allowed to go about their business without being harassed. We also do emotional labor to keep ourselves on the non-felonious side of the very natural, Unabomber tendencies that are the only rational response of a self-respecting person to being constantly fucked with in this way.

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Both of the companies I order nutritional supplements from have recently redesigned their websites. Company A did that in March. Since then, the products I already had on monthly subscription have been duplicating. That is, they send (and charge for) two bottles instead of one. Each time, I write and explain what happened, and to their credit, they remove the charge and tell me to keep the extra bottle. I don’t mind getting free supplements, but I’d just as soon avoid having to save receipts and write extra emails.

Company B just did their redesign this week. I placed an order on Monday, on the old system. When I hadn’t gotten a shipping confirmation by Wednesday, I went back to log in to my account, only to discover the redesign. The new system wouldn’t let me log in, so I wrote to ask what to do about it. Yesterday, I got a barely-literate email explaining that, yes, we have a new website [I noticed that, thanks], and you will be required to create a new account, and sorry, none of your previous order history will carry over. I wrote back right away: OK, so does that affect Monday’s order, or is that in limbo now? I still haven’t gotten an answer to that one, still haven’t gotten a shipping confirmation. Eternal optimist that I am, I thought, well, maybe this new system will solve the previous problem that Company B was infamous for — failing to update their site to accurately reflect whether a product was in stock or not. I’ve lost count of how many times I ordered something that was advertised as being in stock, only to get an email at the last second before shipment saying, “Sorry, product X is currently backordered.” Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that, just an invoice with the product quantity zeroed out, at which point I’d have to email for a refund or a replacement.

If the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down were to be rebooted, I’d suggest that the road construction scene could be replaced with one in which he takes his RPG to an IT call center instead.

I’m aware, of course, that we all get more curmudgeonly as we age. It may be that these kinds of petty frustrations were always there in some form, and the only difference was that we had more patience and energy when we were younger. Either way, this learned helplessness seems to be a common experience three decades into online life. I expect things to break down frequently, and I don’t expect to encounter anyone who can even take responsibility for the problem, let alone fix it. The petty frustrations multiply like gnats in the summertime.

All Hail the Book Conqueror

By in books 2 Comments

I can’t listen to audiobooks for the same reason I can’t listen to podcasts. If I’m sitting still, I quickly get sleepy listening to someone’s uninterrupted voice droning on (I believe Sun Tzu noted this in the first chapter of his famous book on parenting advice). If I’m active, with an audiobook playing in the background, I can’t focus on it. The Lady of the House can spend all day with earbuds in, listening to books while doing other things. I evidently lack the necessary railroad switch in my brain to do that. Reading books is for the couple hours before bed, when there are no other distractions.

I do sometimes read e-books, but I still feel like something’s lacking in the format. Sometimes the combination of convenience and cost-effectiveness wins out — “I can have this right now, for half the price, or wait a week to get the physical copy.” But it never quite feels the same somehow. I have a better sense of location in a physical book. I often remember where I encountered a particular passage— left-side page, near the bottom, about three-quarters of the way through — which is useful when I want to look for it again. In an e-book, I have no such sense. There’s no physical geography to an e-book; it’s just a blizzard of words in a shapeless landscape. I have to digitally highlight anything I want to find again (admittedly, it is useful to have a menu option to see all of your annotations).

Ultimately, though, in an age of sensitivity readers, I think it’s foolish to trust anything important to the cloud. We’ve already heard of incidents where a previously-purchased e-book was stealthily “updated” to eliminate words or thoughts that suddenly became unfashionable. Eric Hoffer said that the features of an idealist loudmouth always contain the lineaments of a commissar, and Lord knows we have a surplus of that type these days. I’m afraid that sensitivity reading is probably a growth industry. It’s basically a profession designed to absorb the glut of overeducated, otherwise-unskilled orthodoxy-sniffers who can’t do any useful work, so I expect it to expand in the coming years. Buy physical copies of any media you want to keep.

The signaling charge is the easiest to sidestep. I do have hard copies of books on shelves all around my living room. If I never have people over to my house, though, who am I showing off for?

A Sign of the Times, Going Forward In Reverse

By in the geist of the zeit No Comments

James Lileks:

Turns out we can’t even have a debate about debating. Members of the debate team at James Madison University have decided that “free speech should not extend to requiring us to platform or amplify ideas that are exclusionary, discriminatory, or hostile.” Apparently, debate meets will now resemble a Soviet show trial but without so much suspense over the outcome.

In seventh grade, I needed to choose a second exploratory class to accompany band, and I wanted to avoid woodshop and home ec. My friend Richard said I should join him in debate class. “All we do is hang out in the library during class!” Sold. As it turned out, debate, along with introductory philosophy, was one of the only classes that I consider worth my fourteen-year stint in the educational penitentiary. To my surprise, I not only enjoyed it, I happened to be good at it. (If I remember correctly, “second constructive speaker” was the position I excelled at.)

One of the topics we debated was vivisection. I had to argue the pro-side. My mom, who is very sentimental about animals, had angrily said that if I was assigned that position, she would refuse to drive me to the university libraries where I did most of my research (ah, the days of going down into a library basement to scroll through microfiche.) She relented eventually, I made my case, and our team lost that one anyway, so I guess it all worked out. Still, I remember feeling…disappointed, I guess, that I, a twelve-year-old, should need to patiently convince my mom of the value of open debate and honest inquiry (let alone the necessity of a good grade). I suppose I had already began to assume that this was just something that all adults knew and practiced. Nearly forty years later, I still have trouble disabusing myself of that notion. And yet, here we are. I remember kids in my class clamoring to take on the most hot-button topics there were, like abortion and apartheid (I can’t recall, but we may have actually done the latter). Evidently, we were braver than today’s college kids.

Want to Want

By in battling personal entropy, books, bring me the head of nicholas carr No Comments

Epicurus thinks that if we’re honest with ourselves, though, it’s more that we want to want greater understanding, freedom from our phones, time to cultivate and maintain close friendships, etc. Or, to be more precise, we wish our desire for these things were more powerful than our desire for less important things. Epicurus might say, “Now, of course you want to walk out the door to enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon with your friends, and it’s in fact quite easy to walk out the door, but people often do not leave because they want to stay alone indoors on their phone more.”

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

Freddie deBoer:

Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

In 2015, when Jurgen Klopp took over as manager of Liverpool FC, one of the major changes he made was to bring along a backroom staff, including a nutritionist and a conditioning coach. Such specialists weren’t entirely unknown in the sport, but, shockingly to me, they weren’t ubiquitous either. Multimillion-dollar athletes at the top level at their profession would still eat the equivalent of fast-food takeout after games, which itself was still an improvement over the not-too-distant past, when players often partied like rock stars. Anyway, Klopp, who had a background in sports science himself, brought a stereotypical German efficiency with him and his staff and set about raising the standards. The club would release promotional videos for the fans, behind-the-scenes stuff, showing the staff at work and having them describe their methods and goals. It was then that I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and sports science. I couldn’t get enough of it. The Lady of the House suggested one day that there was a gym in town where I could indulge my interest, and the rest is history.

A couple years ago, I convinced my stepson to start doing a nutrition program, even if he didn’t want to train yet. He’s lost seventy pounds since then, without doing any exercise at all. It’s not even a diet, per se. You just learn how to combine the optimal amounts of protein, carbs and fat at each meal to achieve whatever your goal is. True, certain foods don’t fit within the meal plan. He hasn’t eaten pizza, ice cream, etc. in two years. But it’s not like you’re forced to eat nothing but salads. I have more possible variety in my own meal plan than I could ever make use of, plus, because I also train, I get a cheat meal once a week. Point is, it doesn’t really take superhuman levels of willpower and self-control. Best of all, it only costs twenty-five dollars per visit. I go in every two weeks to get my body fat and proportions measured. My stepson only has to go about once a month. Twenty-five, maybe fifty dollars a month, to have expert advice on how to structure your diet and adjust it if needed. Trust me, fellows, this is not esoteric knowledge or unattainable luxury.

I’ve often mused out loud that if I ever had the chance to meet anyone from Liverpool FC, I wouldn’t choose any of the players. I’d want to meet Klopp, of course, but also Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist, and Andreas Kornmayer, head of conditioning and fitness. Oh, for a chance to sit and pick their brains! Dreams aside, though, I still often marvel at the fact that here, in a small, unremarkable town in the middle of Virginia, for an insignificant amount of money, I can still get the benefits of a comparable level of expertise. I don’t blame individuals for not realizing how easy and affordable it can actually be to be fit and healthy. I do feel nothing but hatred for people who profit by promoting the fatalistic message that technology, marketing, genetics, whatever, have robbed you of your agency. We’ve always been constrained by “structural” forces, whether man-made or natural, but within those limits, there’s still enough freedom left to use. As Epicurus knew back in antiquity, though, the relevant thing is whether you actually want what you claim to want. Honesty and self-awareness are, as ever, rare commodities. We’d rather lie to ourselves and pay others to lie to us even more. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives.

Keep Sleeping

By in political philosophy, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Of course we can define “woke.” We can define it as “left-wing racialist ideology.” We can define it as the attempt to achieve “critical consciousness,” which is a neo-Marxist term, meaning awakening the subject to his own oppression, then recruiting him into left-wing revolution. Or, if we use it as a stand-in for an ideology such as critical race theory, it simply means that “the United States is an oppressor nation that divides classes along the lines of race and then endorses active discrimination in order to create racial equity or equality of group outcomes.

This was a hot topic several weeks ago, but, tortoise that I am, I’m only now ambling over to examine it up close, having considered it from afar. The precise definition of “woke” is unnecessary, of course. We all know it when we see it. Only pedants, activists and academics care about such squabbles. But if idle speculation on irrelevant topics is wrong, then baby, I don’t want to be a blogger.

Anyway, I’ve seen several people define it along these lines. Wilfred Reilly has one of the most frequently-quoted versions:

a “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.

To which I say: OK, but how is this anything other than the basic logic of affirmative action applied as widely as possible, and how is that anything new? In other words, what, if anything, makes “wokeness” unique, not just another way of saying “left-wing”? If a mainstream liberal Rip Van Winkle nodded off in 2003, he would awaken in 2023 to find himself regarded as a conservative, if not a “fascist,” without changing a single thing in his outlook. This dramatic shift is what people are referring to when they say “woke.” What explains this?

Look over the last decade or so, at all the significant trends and events. Race riots? Those were happening before I was even born. Spoiled rich Ivy League students acting like Red Guards against their hapless professors and administrators? Likewise. Political correctness? Nothing significant about it has changed since the first wave of my youth. Cancel culture? I think that’s just what you get when you combine the vindictive, vengeful parts of human nature with the power and reach of social media. Even transgenderism is just the hastily-attached caboose on the civil rights train, a desperate attempt by the St. Georges of the left to avoid retirement after winning the gay rights battle. How much of this is anything but typical left-wing politics, amplified and magnified to the extreme? It just seems to reappear each generation now, like a plague of locusts.

If you ask me, and even if you don’t, the thing that gives this era its particular character is the increasing illiberalism of the left, driven primarily by what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called “safetyism.” I don’t particularly care for the term, but I’m not sure what to replace it with. Call it the therapeutic mindset, the victimhood revolution, the glorification of fragility, weakness, and mental illness. Whatever it is, you find it behind all the most characteristic pathologies of our time. How did the left, in the name of anti-racism, come to embrace racially-segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, something that would have pleased an old Klansman? How did the left, which created the Free Speech Movement sixty years ago, come to disavow the concept and openly embrace censorship in the name of preventing “harm”? How did the left, which made “question authority” into a bumper-sticker slogan, come to embrace the increasingly-fluid integration, or even collusion, between corporate, tech, and government authorities as revealed in the Twitter Files?

I don’t think any of it would have been possible without the safetyism mentality which permeates everything now. Black students have to be kept separate from white ones, not because they’re inferior, but because they need to be protected from the micro, nano, and picoaggressions they’d be subjected to from their white peers. Unfettered free speech carries the high risk of mild discomfort or annoyance for anyone exposed to ideas they don’t already agree with. People who don’t have advanced degrees or the proper cultural conditioning can’t be trusted to make political decisions unsupervised, lest they elect a reality TV star to the presidency, or vote to leave the European Union, so elite guardians have to secretly monitor their media diets for harmful levels of “disinformation.” Even transgenderism is frequently presented like a demand in a hostage situation — if you don’t “affirm” them in their delusions, they’ll supposedly be at heightened risk of suicide, and it will be your fault if that happens.

Say what you will about the pre-Awokening left, it generally claimed to be working toward providing downtrodden people with dignity. The woke left has given up all pretense of that. There is no dignity in being an object of pity and condescension. There is no dignity in an identity constructed entirely on a sense of fragile victimhood and emotional incontinence. There is no dignity in accepting perpetual infantilization. This is the most significant thing that has changed in recent years, the willing exchange of dignity for a sickly sentimentality and endless resentment. This is the climate of opinion under which we live now.

The Only Way Out Is Through

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

Tonight, I practiced doing squat walkouts with 405 lbs. I did a full squat at 385, but it wasn’t convincing enough to justify trying it with an extra twenty pounds on there. So instead, we loaded the bar at 405, and I just practiced stepping back into position with the weight on my shoulders, making sure my breathing and stance was correct, acclimating my nervous system to the feel of that weight, before replacing it in the rack. In the coming weeks, I’ll make an attempt at an actual squat with it.

Like any simpleton, I’m impressed by the significance of big, round numbers. 400, oooh! But the thing I’m really proud of is that less than four years ago, I couldn’t even do that with 55 lbs. I could hold an empty bar on my shoulders, but putting even a five-pound plate on each end put too much pressure on the rotator cuff in my right shoulder. I had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in January of 2004, which itself was three and a half years after symptoms first appeared. My right shoulder was particularly affected — I had long since been in the habit of rolling it forward to ease the pain, since holding proper posture — chest out, shoulders back — was too painful. My orthopedic doctor had been talking about possibly doing surgery, involving drilling a hole in one of the bones. I don’t remember the details, but suffice it to say, it would have been a complicated procedure, and who knows whether it would have worked. In any event, other than the medication that eventually relieved my symptoms, the only rehab I got for my shoulder was one of those resistance bands, which I would tie around a doorknob in order to do rotator cuff exercises. Fast forward nearly twenty years, and I’m still in much the same state. I had no expectation that things would ever be different. That’s when I started doing actual work with my trainer. Within several months of that first aborted attempt, I was able to actually do real squats, to my complete surprise. And now look at me go!

I’ve worked through several other problems along the way (I refuse to call them “issues”). My adductor, piriformis, IT band, and ankle have all required patient perseverance at one time or another, as well as the services of a vicious massage therapist (I say that affectionately). Tennis elbow and plantar fasciitis have made appearances as well. At first, these setbacks were discouraging, but now I’m confident enough to think, “This, too, shall pass.” My philosophy has always been that of the tortoise: slow and steady will, if not “win the race,” at least get me to where I’m going eventually. I don’t fear those aches and pains anymore; I trust that they’ll fade with enough consistent effort.

I don’t distrust or blame doctors in general. If anything, in my own experience, their biggest failing was an overabundance of caution. In fact, I find it’s the alternative medicine types who tend to leap to unjustified conclusions in their haste to show up “mainstream” medicine. But when it comes to those mysterious, debilitating ailments that fall in the no-man’s-land between drugs and surgery, those things that we resign ourselves to enduring as the inescapable cost of aging, I’m firmly convinced from experience that the best thing you can do for yourself is attempt to make yourself stronger, whatever your limitations. You don’t have to become a powerlifter, you just have to challenge yourself, little by little. I’m telling you, it’s worth it.

Obiter Scripta, no. 126

By in obiter scripta 4 Comments

Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words, the less litigation.

— Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

I did it, fellows. I recently went an entire work day without speaking to anyone. Now, like Apocryphal Alexander, I weep, for what is left for me to conquer? In order to extend my silence even longer, I’d probably have to officially join some kind of monastical order. No, I’m afraid I’ve reached the limits of my potential.

I haven’t intended to be silent here, by the way. It’s just the usual thing where the inanity and fatuity of the world reduces the onlooker to mute incomprehension. These things always pass, though.

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