Memes Test

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit No Comments

So, Elon Musk, proud new owner of the world’s largest open sewer-slash-lunatic asylum, a man who I am increasingly coming to believe is the earthly avatar of LOL, the trickster deity who loves us and wants us to be amused, tweeted out a cartoon the other day:

This was the signal for the newspaper owned by the world’s second-richest man, which has become deeply concerned over the threat to “democracy” posed by the world’s richest man owning a major communication channel, to cry “ACKSHUALLY” and let slip the dogs of fact-checking. I guess we’re not doing that “lived experience” thing anymore? How perfect. How “on-brand,” as the kids say these days, especially as a Democrat administration launches a “Disinformation Governance Board” (I assume because “Ministry of Truth” and “Committee of Public Safety” were already trademarked). Well, I guess I’m glad to see that journalists and political obsessives have finally found something to fill that Trump-sized hole in their hearts.

The Arbitrary Will of an Eccentric Owner

By in antisocial media, buried alive No Comments

Andrey Mir:

So here is the promised piece of advice to Musk: require a character minimum for tweets. The fundamental feature of Twitter is its limit of 280 characters for a post. Brevity was considered a virtue for a writer in the print era, but on Twitter, brevity has nothing to do with a sender’s virtue. Quite the opposite: short tweets tend to be short on rationality. In this medium, brevity is a business gimmick that makes the news feed faster and easier to engage with. What is needed to reverse radically this feature of social media is an opposite limit: tweets must not be shorter than 280 characters. A quantum of media must become time-consuming again, inhibiting responses via a technical delay into which thoughts, not emotions, might be squeezed. Alternatively, Twitter could prioritize longer posts, or give perks to users authoring thoughtful content.

This would encourage an unthinkable outcome for social media: requiring a user to think about what to write. And that renders it extraordinarily unlikely. After initial hype, such rules would undermine engagement, which lies at the core of Twitter’s business model. It could accelerate the takeover of non-textual media, such as TikTok. But solutions that slow down social media engagement cannot be driven by market imperatives. A source for such solutions, though, might be the arbitrary will of an eccentric owner—one who does not care much about the platform as a business and whose ambitions are peculiar enough to include sending humans to Mars.

I agree with Kevin Williamson that a good version with Twitter would not be Twitter, and that the problem with the platform is nothing more, or less, than good old human nature. I also agree with Alan Jacobs that Musk could be a hero by simply nuking the entire site from orbit. But mostly, I’m just amused that, once again, the solution to the ills of social media is to reinvent the blog under a different name (or simply turn Twitter into Reddit). Why were we expelled from the Garden of Blogging to begin with? There’s a loose parody of the Book of Genesis, based on the last two decades of the social web, just waiting to be written by someone more creative than me.

Obiter Scripta, no. 121

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments

I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality, into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom—in fact into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet unexplained Universe.

Then I, who came out of the Eternal Silence and seem to be on my way thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read, I pottered, I complained, and took exercise; and I sat punctually down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at regular intervals.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

I woke this morning, as I often do, with a strange self-consciousness of my own mortality. I’m alive! One day, I won’t be! I briefly thought about how fortunate it is that we don’t simply lose all our memories while we sleep and awaken as total strangers to ourselves. As usual, my mind stalled upon attempting to make the cessation of consciousness an object of conscious reflection. A short while later, I opened Smith’s book and read this aphorism, which gave me an eerie feeling of standing in front of an infinity mirror. After that, I was happy to work, exercise, and punctually partake of my meals. Smith seems to imply that this reversion to the habitual mean is some sort of moral or philosophical failing. I disagree. I concur with Nietzsche: deep problems are best approached like cold baths — quickly in, quickly out.

Obiter Scripta, no. 120

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta No Comments

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbors, and make the best and not the worst of them. But they are parvenu people as compared with thought and action. What we should read is not the words but the man whom we feel to be behind the words.

— Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler

My words have always been taciturn neighbors. We’ll exchange greetings over the fence if we’re both out in the yard at the same time, but we tend to mind our respective business. Lately, I haven’t seen them around much. I don’t see any lights on in the windows, and I haven’t heard them coming and going for a while. Maybe I should request a wellness check. Of course, if nothing’s wrong, I’m afraid I’ll cause an irreparable breach in our relations by having the authorities come knock on their door. What to do, what to do…

Even If We Knew Which Way to Head, Still We Probably Wouldn’t Go

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

Maybe opioids would be the better comparison. The product originally sold as a cure for anxiety and depression turns out to be addictive and debilitating. The obsession with optimizing mental health only seems to have produced a large population of mental hypochondriacs. Therapy: staring up your own ass in search of irrelevant reasons for your behavior as a means of procrastinating about changing your behavior.

I Think I’m Dumb, Maybe Just Happy

By in foolosophy No Comments

Also like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the day is a pageant of clouds. Aging calls us outdoors, after the adult indoors of work and love-life and keeping stylish, into the lowly simplicities we thought we had outgrown as children. We come again to love the plain world, its stone and wood, its air and water.

— John Updike, Self-Consciousness

I had to do something of an intervention this week. Not drug- or alcohol-related; more like having to tell someone that he should consider anger-management counseling. (In a surprising twist, he reacted angrily to the idea.) The next day, I was talking to his wife about it. We agreed that he had gotten himself into a bad habit of reacting to even mild stress and pressure with anger and/or self-pity, that the pattern was clear over many years and through different circumstances, and it was likely to continue until he finally saw it himself and made the decision to change it. It’s disheartening to think of all the wasted time and energy spent living in a prison of one’s own creation.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a couple of friends come over to spend an evening around the fire pit, enjoying the early spring weather. Amanda brought up a favorite theme of hers: bucket lists. It’s exhausting just listening to her rattle off lists of places she wants to go and things she wants to do. I argued that bucket lists are silly and challenged her to name three exotic or exciting experiences she’d done. I was aiming toward the point that once you return home from seeing Paris or bungee-jumping into volcanoes, you have to go back to the quotidian business of everyday life, and if you’re not happy there, well… She was a few beers deep at that point, so her story about the Bahamas meandered around a bit before she finally thought to return my challenge and ask what my idea of a great time was. I spread my hands and said I was already living it. She described that as a bovine byproduct best used as a fertilizer, but more succinctly. I retorted that the exotic trips and hair-raising adventures aren’t the sort of thing you reflect on while lying on your deathbed. Well, what would I be thinking of in that case, then? A Sunday in February more than a decade ago, I said, when I spent the entire day on the phone with the Lady of the House, who was then living far away. Nothing is ever going to be qualitatively better than that, not Paris, not volcanoes, not anything in between.

Spring is here, the bedside table is stacked high with books, and I recently made it into the 1,000 lb. club. Who has time for complaining?

 

One Day There Will Be Associated With My Name the Recollection of Something Frightful

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche No Comments

Imagine my horror, as I looked upon the name “Evan Selinger” and thought, “Wait a minute; I’m pretty sure I have taken issue with this dimwit before,” only to find an uncanny calendrical regularity to my issue-taking.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This post as you now write it and have written it, you will have to write once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…”

I Am Strong, I Am Invincible, I Am Birthing Person

By in atheism, jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening 1 Comment

Ed West:

Back in the 2000s New Atheists used to have a good old laugh at Christians, fighting and killing over the minutiae of doctrine. And then many of those same people evolved into social justice activists, and are now having their own tortured theological debates about the meaning of ‘woman’. In contrast to the bravery with which people attack sacred doctrine and dogma from centuries past, they find themselves powerless when it is staring them in the face.

I chortled, I did. If I may be so immodest as to quote myself:

The tragedies and dilemmas we encounter, individually and collectively, are not necessarily errors which can be fixed with more knowledge. Increased knowledge will only be used in service to the same old unenlightened desires, possibly even creating new dilemmas in the process. And even when we know how little we know, we find a way to convince ourselves that we’ve learned our lesson and become smarter for the experience.

Atheists are, it must be admitted, particularly prone to this. Despite their pretensions to rational objectivity, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for suspecting that atheists are just another group of tribesmen who slew a rival desert god and ate his brains, believing they were ingesting his powers of omniscience.

I see it was almost a decade ago that I wrote that. Despite a notable decline in my writing ability in the interval, I haven’t changed. I’m still an unbeliever; in fact, as the Official Atheists used to say before they caught the brain virus, we’re all unbelievers to some degree; I just happen to disbelieve in one more God than they do; namely the God of Social Justice, or RGHTSDFHSTRY, as the Book of Intersectionality calls him. But I digress. I didn’t call you all here to wrangle over theological disputes. No, this is a celebratory occasion! I raise my glass tonight to all my erstwhile progressive friends who used to treat my email address as a confessional booth, shamefully disclosing their heretical doubts over the revealed truth of transgenderism, even as they felt compelled to pretend in public that the real danger to the body politic came from rural theocrats in Indiana. As we watch Supreme Court nominees profess to be utterly stumped over the meaning of such abstruse legal concepts as “woman;” as we watch the various party commissars and commentators tie themselves in intellectual knots to justify this feigned ignorance while praying fervently that the gastric distress resulting from swallowing so many necessary lies doesn’t cause any thoughtcrime to squeak loose onto their permanent record like an inadvertently loud fart in public, we should remember, my friends, that these are indeed the best of times. In fact, I can’t even deny the evidence any longer. I can no longer in good conscience claim to be an unbeliever when it is abundantly clear that there is a trickster god who loves us and wants us all to be amused. I, for one, am quite amused.

Mobscene

By in free speech, revillaging, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds No Comments

Alan Jacobs:

My recommendation: Never, ever use the term “cancel culture.” Speak instead about the specific behavior you either want to reject or endorse.

OK, then. I reject progressive political orthodoxy. I reject the attempts to enforce progressive political orthodoxy by harnessing the power of social media to carry out organized campaigns of aggressive harassment, intimidation, and threats, usually directed at the target’s reputation, employment, or both. I reject the spirit of petty vindictiveness that motivates these crusaders. I reject the disingenuous arguments that “censorship” per se can only be carried out by a government, or that groups of fanatical activists preventing the willing exchange of goods and services is actually “the market” at work. I reject the insulting, legalistic, hair-splitting attempts by both cynical progressives and fatuous academics to simply define the entire phenomenon out of existence (see also, “critical race theory”). Most of all, I reject one of the oldest delusions in the history of this ridiculous species which steadfastly refuses to learn anything from its countless mistakes; namely, that the best of all worlds will come by giving in to our worst impulses.

Or, you know, you could just use a convenient shorthand term like “cancel culture” despite its unavoidable lack of precision and trust that those who aren’t being willfully obtuse will get your meaning.

You Must Change Your Life

By in calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Anna Lembke:

Over the course of my career as a psychiatrist, I have seen more and more patients who suffer from depression and anxiety, including otherwise healthy young people with loving families, elite education and relative wealth. Their problem isn’t trauma, social dislocation or poverty. It’s too much dopamine, a chemical produced in the brain that functions as a neurotransmitter, associated with feelings of pleasure and reward.

When we do something we enjoy—like playing videogames, for my patient—the brain releases a little bit of dopamine and we feel good. But one of the most important discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the past 75 years is that pleasure and pain are processed in the same parts of the brain and that the brain tries hard to keep them in balance. Whenever it tips in one direction it will try hard to restore the balance, which neuroscientists call homeostasis, by tipping in the other.

The comedian Steven Wright had a joke that went:

A cop stopped me for speeding. He said, “Why were you going so fast?” I said, “See this thing my foot is on? It’s called an accelerator. When you push down on it, it sends more gas to the engine. The whole car just takes right off.”

Another joke from Calvin & Hobbes:

All of which is to say: all this trendy neurobabble about dopamine is just a stupidly earnest version of Wright and Hobbes’s insistence on misunderstanding the meaning of the question “Why?” As even Lembke’s article admits, the solution for someone “addicted” to dopamine squirts is for them to choose to stop exposing themselves to temptation. How is this an improvement on centuries of moral and ethical thought? “I stayed up all night playing video games because they’re really fun.” “I stayed up all night playing video games because my brain kept soaking itself in dopamine.” What’s the explanatory difference? One doesn’t have to know anything about brain chemistry to be able to recognize when one’s life is out of balance and take steps to set it right. In fact, our insistence on keeping the search going for the “ultimate” reason behind our behavior is just a subtle form of procrastination to keep us from changing said behavior. For that, you need practical philosophy and honesty, but I suppose there’s not much grant money in that.

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