earthli News 3.7 https://www.earthli.com/news/ 2026-02-08T21:42:28+01:00 https://www.earthli.com/news/icons/webcore_png/app/news_100px.png https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6023 2026-02-08T21:42:28+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, "[image]In un editoriale pubblicato su "L'Ordine Nuovo" nell'aprile 1920, Gramsci attribuisce il motto a Romain Rolland:" "La concezione socialista del processo rivoluzionario è caratterizzata da due note fondamentali, che Romain Rolland ha riassunto nel suo motto d'ordine: - Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5977 2026-01-20T21:18:43+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. They are largely unaware... ]]>

. They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The same guy who cited the following, "We create tools. And then, we mold ourselves to the use of them." Also refused to even discuss anything that the Unabomber had written because his manifesto was trash and he was a trash person and his ideas were trash and anyone who murders anyone doesn't have anything worthwhile to say. Q.E.D. Also, he hadn't actually read the manifesto because why bother? A true intellectual. Stewart Brand is a much stronger thinker, capable of separating the medium (Kascinski) from the message (what are we doing with technology? What is it doing with us? Are we heading in a useful direction?) Dammbeck received a letter from Ted: "Florence, Colorado, 28 Februar. "Sehr geehrter Herr Dammbeck "Vielen dank für Ihren brief und Ihre fragen, die ich versuchen werde zu beantworten. Ich nutze diese Gelegenheit, um meine Kenntnisse der deutschen Sprache zu verbessern. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler. Vor 30 Jahren doch Mathematiker. Aber ich habe den größten teil von dem was ich über die Mathematik wusste vergessen. "Ich meine, dass Utopien wahnsinnig und gefährlich sind, besonders die von einer technologischen gesellschaft. Die Technologie ist eine ganz eigenwillige und äußerst gefährliche macht, die uns dahin führt wohin sie uns führen muss. Das wird weder durch den Zufall noch die Willkür arroganter Bürokraten, Politiker, oder Wissenschaftler bestimmt, sondern das technologische System muss einfach menschliches verhalten seinen eigenen Erfordernissen anpassen. Das ist notwendig damit es funktionieren und sich immer weiter ausdehnen kann. "Sie fragen mich auch einiges zum Manifesto. Alle veröffentlichten Versionen des Manifestos sind unrichtig, denn sie enthalten schwerwiegende Fehler. Wenn sie eine richtige version des Manifestos bekommen wollen, kann ich sie Ihnen liefern." There follows a long section on Norbert Wiener and the origin of cybernetics, arguably the disease that infects so many otherwise useful minds. The next interview is with Larry Roberts, the guy who founded Arpanet, whose work was deeply linked to the U.S. military buildup in the Cold War. He also has nothing to discuss about Kascinski's ideas. "Roberts: He's crazy. We have people like that in our society. "Dammbeck: But he was a mathematician. He studied in Harvard. "Roberts: Hitler was a painter. He studied in Vienna. "Dammbeck: Have you read the manifesto? "Roberts: [jokes] You mean, Mein Kampf? [seriously] No, I didn't read it. I didn't read Mein Kampf either. "Roberts: What am I afraid of? I'm afraid of the Al Qaeda. I'm afraid of cancer. But I don't know enough. Even if we knew how to cure cancer, if we had more knowledge, then we wouldn't be afraid of it. "Dammbeck: How do you know that cancer is an illness? Krankheit? It's an illness of modern society. It's an illness of civilization. "Roberts: Yeah, but someday, I believe will understand how to cure cancer. Or prohibit cancer. I believe that will happen long before we have an electronic battlefield or a machine that we can't control. "And, when we know how to cure or prohibit cancer, we will no longer be afraid of it. It's a question of knowledge, of eliminating ignorance. Ignorance is a state of no knowledge. Ig-no-rance. It's not stupidity. That's something else. Ignorance. It causes fear." This is a wonderful segment that illustrates how un-self-aware most of these intelligent -- and powerful -- people are. He is incapable of learning anymore. He is incurious. He doesn't even listen to Dammbeck's question. He just repeats something I'm sure his wife (who lurks in the background) has heard him say a million times. Knowledge is the savior. Sure, buddy. And let's look at your prediction, 22 years later. Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have world-girdling data centers to write smutty haikus? Yes. Do we have electronic battlefields? Yes. Do we have machines that we can't control? Well, someone controls them, but it's not us. But I wouldn't expect even the 2003 version of Roberts to have been able to grasp the nuance of that argument, or to be at-all willing to engage with it. He already knew everything. The narrator: "Was habe ich bisher? Ich habe einen ehemaligen Mathematiker über dessen Systemkritik keiner meiner Interviewpartner reden will und ich habe Ingenieure und Künstler die von Technologie besessen sind. All das gehört offensichtlich zu einem System dessen Konturen ich erst erahne. Anscheinend ein geniales Feedbacksystem [Rückkupplungssystem], dass jeden angriff und jede Störung umgehend als Energiezufuhr für seine weitere Perfektionierung nutzt. Wer braucht so etwas? Wer denkt sich so etwas aus?" Another letter from Kascsinski: "Als ich ihnen schrieb, dass der begriff einer Utopie wahnsinnig und gefährlich ist, meinte ich nicht, dass alle Utopien wahnsinnig gefährlich sind, sondern, vor allem, die Utopie, dass man eine Gesellschaft nach einem bestimmten idealen Muster erschaffen. Könnte Sie selbst zweifellos Ihre eigene Vorstellung von einer Utopie haben. Ein anderer mensch hat eine andere Vorstellung, die sehr verschieden von der irrigen sein kann. Würde es ihnen gefallen, dass er Ihnen seine Utopie aufzwingt? Haben sie das recht ihm ihre Utopie aufzuzwingen?" Next is a historical segment about Heinz von Förster, who worked at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. He interviews Heinz, who is very, very old. Heinz speaks perfect German. They watch a video of him, another recent interview, where Heinz talks about how he'd learned the Tractatus Philosophicus by Wittgenstein by heart, as a child, and he'd made himself unausstehlich with citations from it during family discussions. Heinz is introspective and much more open than most of his American counterparts (except for Stewart Brand). "Ich habe erkannt, im laufe meines Lebens, [dass] je mehr ich mich mit Physik beschäftigen, dass ich eigentlich ein meta-Physiker bin." It gets much better from there. "von Förster: [...] weil die Frage nicht beantwortbar ist. So, kommt es nur darauf an wie interessant ist die Geschichte die der erfindet, wie der entstanden ist. "Dammbeck: Da ist man natürlich ganz nah bei der Kunst. Wenn also, dass es darum geht eine gute Geschichte zu erzählen, also eine poetische Geschichte. "von Förster: Ja genau. Das ist die Sache. Es besteht ein Zweikampf oder Dreikampf oder einen Zehnkampf zwischen den verschiedenen Poeten." They discuss how our worldwide system of interacting machines are based on what he called Lückenhafte Theorien, where placeholders serve to cover up missing knowledge. "Dammbeck: Aber es gibt doch irgendwo grenzen? "von Förster: Eben nicht. Das ist das schöne. Da kann man immer wieder weiter. "Dammbeck: In der Logik? "von Förster: Genau. "Dammbeck: Aber in der Realität? "von Förster: Wo ist die Realität? Wo haben Sie die?" Much later, he interviews one of Kascinski's victims, who lost an eye to a mail bomb. "Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know of him, is that he is a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering. And his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being." I'm gonna say it: That's dumb. Yeah, he lost an eye. Kascinski took an eye from him. But a worse thing he did to that poor man is that he made him dumb. Ignorant. Information is information, it doesn't matter whence it comes. I'm interested in any opinion, any formulation, if only to learn how I would counter it. People find value in what Kascinski said. Just saying "DON'T" is stupid. It's not going to lead to a world where people can read Kascinski, whose ideas are interesting -- and which have gained more and more relevance to our dystopian reality -- but whose acts were evil, without worshiping him. That's the problem. Everyone's dumb. Everyone's a fool. The people who can't read him because they hate him, and the people who can't understand what he writes without revering him. It's all stupid. Except for this documentary. I very much liked it. "Mad" by Zach Weinersmith [image] "You're not actually crazy, though? How else would you build a death ray. I think you're just unhappy with how the world is and you're acting out." Are we watching the same documentaries, Zach? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6004 2026-01-18T08:45:17+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [image] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5979 2026-01-17T16:03:35+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6003 2026-01-14T06:48:31+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5983 2025-12-28T09:29:55+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, a place where the flurry of writing, notes, thoughts, responses, and ideas would have a home. These articles have the character of "notes" and thus allow me to convince myself that they can slip through onto my published web site with only "light" -- or even "no" -- editing. But the other mass remains, much of it having been published in "notes" form but not in "final" form. That's OK. It's nice to have a backlog. It's better than the yawning emptiness of "no idea what to do", I suppose, though there's value in that, as well. Anyway, that's the context for a thought I had this morning, which is that, should a friend read what I've written here, and should this be a casual acquaintance, who doesn't know me very well, they might wonder why I don't avail myself of "AI" to help bring these articles over the finish line. Can you guess? Is it because I hate AI? No, that's not it at all. [1] It is because getting the work published in any form isn't at all the point. The point is for me to go back over what I've written, which is a reflection of what a past self has learned. The repetition is the point. The re-learning is the point. The anchoring of that knowledge in the firmament of my own, personal context is the point. Publication is one step on that journey. The first step was reading the material. The next was writing about it, thinking about it, contending with it, firing ripostes at it. All of this serves to bring this new information further into the web of my existing knowledge. The next step is publication. Another, possible step is when I find this information, years from now, in a search for a vague memory. Seeing what I'd written -- what I'd already experienced three times -- lights up those old registers, heats up those old tubes, and brings a section of knowledge online that had lain dormant for lack of use, but will then be quickly ready for use. This is the work of learning. You're loading your own mind with knowledge. You're building your self, your own sense of morality, ethics, and justice. If the point of my web site were monetization, if I cared more about turning my firehose of thoughts into money rather than wisdom, then of course an "AI" would help me produce reams of content per week. It would do so, diligently smoothing away all of the rough edges of my writing until I could no longer tell what my voice was really like, until the suggestions of the "AI" seemed naturally better than what I'd written originally. My interest in ever-more-efficient monetization would carry me naturally and easily toward publishing corrected drafts without even really reading them again. They might even take me to a place where I'd have "AI" summarize what I'd read for me. Or perhaps I'd even get to a place where "AI" would summarize what I'd planned to read or watch or hear, to save me the trouble of doing so. Now do you see how counterproductive it would be to use an "AI" to "finish" this job? There is no way anyone can help me finish this because getting help defeats the point. The point is not to publish, but to learn. Learning doesn't happen in one attempt. It takes repeated layers of learning to finally know something, to nestle it amongst all of the other things you know. Sometimes it accretes gently, dislodging nothing. Sometimes it knocks other things loose, or moves them a bit. Sometimes a whole cliff face comes sliding down. But the idea is to emerge with an amalgamation of what I've seen, heard, and experienced, which serves to represent what I've learned. The point of my web site is not to publish; it's a tool for learning, for growing. An "AI" cannot offer a shortcut, because there is none. It would be like getting a machine to exercise for you. [John Henry] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I have been accused of hating AI but that's nonsense. Those accusations come from simpletons who are incapable of accepting a spectrum of nuanced opinion between their unquestioned devotion and faith in their masters' ability -- and desire -- to deliver to them tools from on high, and an unthinking refusal to engage with anything new. "AI" is Ok. I use tools that are useful. If they are not useful, then I try to improve them, or I use them less, or not at all. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5692 2025-09-14T11:23:56+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses how buying 10% of Intel does not a socialist make. "When National Socialists speak of “the people,” they never mean, as social democrats do, all the people, but rather the “real” people, the ethno-racial-sexual-religious" ... ]]>

discusses how buying 10% of Intel does not a socialist make. "When National Socialists speak of “the people,” they never mean, as social democrats do, all the people, but rather the “real” people, the ethno-racial-sexual-religious group that they identify with the nation, to the exclusion of all other citizens and denizens of the state. "[image]Trump, of course, checks all 3 National Socialist boxes. It’s no secret that his “real” people are white Christian heterosexual patriarchs. And that nobody else matters. That exclusionary message is what bonds his base to him. As Trump once said in a campaign speech, “the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.” And like all fascists, his promise to them is to restore them to their former supreme position in the nation." This is the appeal for so many people: they don't feel secure enough in their lives -- either because of real desperation or because of a desperation imbued by a predatory society farming them for consumption and growth -- they accept the embarrassingly simplistic zero-sum framing of society, and therefore quickly have no compunction against plunder -- as long it's at least one degree removed from their actions and, therefore, plausibly deniable -- and they have no compunction against othering vast swathes of people that they don't know, rounding them down to vermin that can be extinguished without causing a single ripple in their moral calm or sense of superiority. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5690 2025-09-14T10:57:56+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses how the grinding progress of the market toward maximizing margins by delivering the minimum amount of value that satisfies -- sometimes by adjusting value delivered but mostly now by adjusting people's expectations downward of what is... ]]>

discusses how the grinding progress of the market toward maximizing margins by delivering the minimum amount of value that satisfies -- sometimes by adjusting value delivered but mostly now by adjusting people's expectations downward of what is satisfactory -- affects music and how AI-produced music is a natural progression from blandly mediocre musical blasphemers of the past -- who produced "lite" versions of everything: easy listening and muzak, which have dominated our lives, and continue to do so. "I imagine the encore medley must have been at a John Tesh concert at Disneyland on a hot August night in 1991. We see now in fact that Tesh was a great visionary, or auditionary — he was making the sounds of the future, not as the late-20th-century rivetheads imagined it, with a Front 242 CD playing on a Discman plugged into their mom’s Volvo’s cassette-deck via one of those adapters that were such a hot sales item at Radio Shack that same summer of ‘91 (don’t pretend you don’t remember, Aaron), but how it really is — where Disneyland is at the center of a pagan cult, and everything predigital is prehistoric, beyond the limit of the known past." [image]While on vacation in the U.S., staying with my in-laws, where WKTV News is on in the morning as we slurp our morning coffee and watch the bluejays swooping in to pick peanuts off of the bannister of the backyard terrace, there is literally a commercial on all the time in the summer of 2025, 34 years after that August concert, where Tracy Morgan smashes popcorn into his face while purportedly watching John Tesh crash a few chords of a sport-show's intro theme on a concert grand piano and says, "John Tesh still got it." Jesus wept. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5689 2025-09-14T10:47:56+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

makes many interesting points, many of which have been made before, in other ways -- perhaps most famously and thoroughly in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent -- but it almost always bears repeating because the lessons are so often and... ]]>

makes many interesting points, many of which have been made before, in other ways -- perhaps most famously and thoroughly in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent -- but it almost always bears repeating because the lessons are so often and easily forgotten. "[...] these technologies, while they have thrown off the old masters, have acquired a new one. And this new master is harder to see. It’s not a person who tells you what you can and cannot do. The new master doing the talking is a market force — nudging, pushing, rewarding, penalizing… On the surface, these new platforms have shaken up the way the media operates, made it more democratic. But deeper down, in reality, what they have done instead is to bring the media — and the people who produce it — closer in line with market forces. In that sense, they’re just another manifestation of the slow grind of neoliberalism — bringing everything into the market, commodifying every little bit of human life that hasn’t been commodified yet." "[...] alongside it was another truth: There’s no editor telling us what to do, but there was something equally powerful: the market. It pushes and nudges, it regiments…It’s all very subtle, too. The control is basically invisible. And lack of success can be explained as your own personal failure, rather than the censorious nature of what the market wants." "[...] working overtime, blasting through production goals, working for the collective good…but the collective doesn’t care about me nor does it even care about the collective. [...]" That is an unfortunate modern truth: community is either dead, dying, or being hunted down for sport. For many people in so-called modern societies, they are encouraged to evince no compassion, no empathy, no sympathy, no solidarity. The watchword of the 21st century is atomization. [image]The elites see that balkanizing people into individual islets is incredibly useful. Alone, they are uncertain. People yearn to join groups. The market gives them groups to join. When that purpose is served, they will be atomized again, only to be invited to another, more politically useful group. Hate these immigrants, hate those other people, hate Chinese, hate Latinos, hate the poor, hate the unemployed, hate unions -- hate everyone except for billionaires. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4944 2025-08-25T03:17:07+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4943 2025-08-25T02:20:04+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5542 2025-05-31T22:01:14+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5540 2025-05-30T16:42:53+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

linked to it to point out that the vultures of Wall Street have been after Social Security for a long time. [media] 🎩 h/t to "George Carlin on the American Dream (with transcript)" by Shoq for the... ]]>

linked to it to point out that the vultures of Wall Street have been after Social Security for a long time. [media] 🎩 h/t to "George Carlin on the American Dream (with transcript)" by Shoq for the initial transcript. I've tweaked it a bit more, mostly for punctuation. "But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed. "It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got. "Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the big owners! The Wealthy… the real owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions." "You have no choice! You have owners! They own you." "Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have owners! They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls -- they've got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They've got you by the balls. "They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want: they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. "Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!" "It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it." "You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. "[image]By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good, honest, hard-working people; white collar, blue collar -- it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a fuck about you." "It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." "They don’t care about you at all… at all… at all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. "It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5544 2025-05-30T16:33:37+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

describes this era as a time when "[...] completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore." He writes further that, "If you don't care, [AI] is miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly." And that, "Most people [...]" ... ]]>

describes this era as a time when "[...] completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore." He writes further that, "If you don't care, [AI] is miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly." And that, "Most people [...] use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity." He gives what I consider to be good but probably career-killing advice in the our era. I really hope its not because I'm an optimist. "As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book. "Be yourself. "Be imperfect. "Be human. "Care." I was discussing the article with a friend who'd sent it to me after I'd already read it the prior evening. He asked about how to get people to do just that -- to care, I wrote: Man, that’s a tough one. The youngest 'uns are becoming increasingly convinced that you can get through life without your pulse going over 80, either physically or mentally speaking. They also are being taught that life is something to "get through" rather than to "enjoy" or "savor". Or, God forbid, that their time here could or even should be used to "contribute meaningfully to our shared existence." A good first step is to realize -- or remember -- that they might care less not out of maliciousness or laziness but because expressing that they care (e.g., about code-quality or spelling or grammar) requires a lot more work for them than it does for you. Whether it comes more easily to you or whether you’ve already put in the work, "doing it right" probably looks like a much steeper climb for them than it does for you. You might need to meet them where they’re at and be a Sherpa. [image] "Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body." I remember a somewhat silly expression from Outside magazine a long time ago: "pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body." Some people avoid all sorts of pain. They’re like water, finding the path of least resistance. They don’t even know what they’re missing … but because they don’t know, they can’t care either. It’s tough not to land on "ignorance kinda bliss, ya know?" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5469 2025-05-21T22:24:10+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes about how most people don't actually stand for anything. They don't have principles; they root for a team. She writes, "I saw a post on Twitter where a leftist responded to a liberal who was acting like ICE just suddenly" ... ]]>

writes about how most people don't actually stand for anything. They don't have principles; they root for a team. She writes, "I saw a post on Twitter where a leftist responded to a liberal who was acting like ICE just suddenly transformed into a modern gestapo under Trump, saying, “Liberals believe in nothing and remember even less.” "And it’s just so true. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t stand for anything. It’s just a team sport for these people. Politics for the mainstream liberal is not about advancing values or building a better world, it’s about their team winning solely for the sake of winning. And because they have no real values or causes beyond winning for its own sake, what their team does when it’s in office doesn’t matter to them. "A Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as he wants and liberals will just brunch away in cheerful obliviousness, content with their knowledge that their team is holding the trophy." A good example is "The End of College Life?" by Jason Kottke in which he wonders whether he can even send his own precious kid to college because he wonders whether it might put his kid's life in danger. But how else will the kid learn to be a good part of the empire's machine like their father? How else if not at an elite institution? Kottke hadn't written a word about foreign policy since Trump left office. He sure as hell hasn't said a word about Israel. Instead, he's blithely asking about how to avoid having his own rich white kids avoid the downsides that have only very recently starting to affect people like himself and his family. Hell, he's already prepared his kids well: if they're anything like him, then they have absolutely nothing to worry about, as they are 100% not going to say anything that the government doesn't already approve of. He and his kids are absolutely not in the crosshairs. Instead of worrying about people who've always been in the crosshairs -- and who likely always will be -- people have suddenly woken up because they are terrified that they might lose one of their myriad privileges. Most of the rest of the population was already living with a "fear that they might be picked up at any time for nothing," no matter who the president was. It wasn't as bad as in Israel for Palestinians...but it rhymed. Instead of making any connections, these richie-riches all just worry about how they can shore up their own privilege, which has crumbled by a sand grain or two. Is Kottke rich? He would probably say no. But he's openly asking people to advise him on how to matriculate his kids into elite institutions that cost near six figures per year. He's not asking which institutions his kids should go to now that it's become apparent even to a blinkered fool that traditionally elite institutions are instruments of power and empire and not, as they would tout, "places of higher learning". Oh no, he likes that part and the cachet they will lend to his kids' futures. Instead of asking that, he's asking how he can keep his upper-middle-class white kids safe from ICE when they are in practically no danger at all, considering that they're almost certainly not politically motivated. This is just more pearl-clutching and worrying about yourself rather than people who are in real danger. As Caitlin finished up, "Mainstream “centrism” is just as toxic, murderous and tyrannical as Trumpism. These people will watch entire populations being mowed down by the hundreds of thousands via the policies of the people they voted for, and as long as it doesn’t interrupt brunch they’ll keep sipping their mimosas and laughing and tweeting and feeling smugly correct, and then go to bed and sleep like babies in an ocean of human blood." [image] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5513 2025-05-20T22:31:20+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. It's OK. He said it was 2/5 but was interested in my opinion on it. I wrote him something like the following (it's lightly edited for clarity): [image]Libertarianism is a superficial dead-end that has a deeply unempathetic core. While its... ]]>

. It's OK. He said it was 2/5 but was interested in my opinion on it. I wrote him something like the following (it's lightly edited for clarity): [image]Libertarianism is a superficial dead-end that has a deeply unempathetic core. While its proponents will tell you all day long that communism could never work because people suck, they never acknowledge that, by that logic, libertarianism is doomed to the same Hobbesian nightmare for the same reason. The author mentioned Reason Magazine. I've been a subscriber for years and I've listened to the occasional Nick Gillespie podcast (though he's a smug sonofabitch). I'm not even close to a libertarian but they have some good writers and it's good to keep an eye on alternative points of view. It's better than the Atlantic, the NYT, etc. simply because they don't just regurgitate the opinion that the state demands of them. They're critical of the state even when Trump's not president. The argument of "I should be able to smoke crack if i'm not hurting anyone with it" is a good summation of how many people see libertarianism. I think the more nuanced form has to consider not only societal utility (are you doing something useful in addition to smoking crack?) but also the degree to which pathological behaviors are addictive and will overwhelm the system. How large a percentage of freeloaders can a society bear before it collapses? What even is a freeloader? If all you do is smoke crack and crap on the sidewalk, you're going to wear out your welcome quickly. If you also happen to be an expert at keeping the water-filtering plant running, then ... hmmmm, ... I guess beggars can't be choosers. If you're the crack-smoking sidewalk-crapper but you're also congenitally mentally disabled, then what? Compassion, right? This is where simpleton libertarians already stumble and get cruel. But it's also where so-called liberals are unable to admit that there is an upper limit to how much slack a society is both capable of and willing to take up. Libertarians want to throw useless people into the ocean, and also are quick to define a pretty low bar for "useless." Some liberals define the bar so high that they forget that society has to limp forward somehow and that there's only so much labor you can redistribute from underperforming individuals to thankless backs before there's also revolution. This article is all fine and good -- and, honestly, pretty well-established by now -- but I am 100% still waiting for a mainstream rag like the Daily Beast to discuss the also-extremely-powerful-and-influential, if not more influential-and-powerful "insidious Progressive-to-Neoliberal-to-Neocon" pipeline, where so-called progressives "progress" from caring about many things holistically, to caring only about themselves, their in-group, and its safety and security, to actively promoting wars around the world in order to maintain that status quo, damn everyone else to hell. The dog-eat-dog instructions pounded into your brain by nearly every part of society (advertising, news media, education) lead naturally to people adopting superficial forms of libertarianism. Perhaps a richer form of libertarianism would be closer to anarchism but it's hard to tell if that's being too generous, simply because of how the word "libertarian" has been tainted by its deviant proponents over the years. In a way, it's the same with anarchism, which people think of in terms of punk gang members robbing grandmothers rather than, say, Noam Chomsky or "David Graeber" . [1] There is nothing antisocial about anarchy. The state wants you to think it would be violent chaos so that you stop looking over the fence at the greener grass there and settle for the violent chaos you've been given. Anarchism posits that all of the "system X won't work because people suck" theories fail to point out that it's more like "desperate people suck" or "desperate people will exchange their principles and humanity for mere survival." A logical person might think that you could also solve problems by keeping people out of desperation. They'd be nicer to each other because there's more to gain than by being cut-throat jerks. The solution we've settled on is to build a society that promotes cut-throat jerks and keeps everyone else miserable and sniping at each other so that they don't notice who's picking their pockets. This sets things up so that the cut-throat jerks pick the pockets and make sure that the two sides blame each other. Rinse, lather, repeat. Exhibit A is the psychotic degree to which nearly the entire U.S. is focused on what is very obviously not its biggest problem, which is immigration. My interlocutor responded with the following flurry of thoughts. "I think that everyone has good in them, and they need only be given a chance to show that niceness. "it seems to me that libertarianism is cynical anarchism. So, instead of, "Without older brother we can self organize like starlings" you get, "I want noone entreating on my personal freedom to smoke scrack in society." The differing sentiments, for my money, being the preservation of individualism in the latter. "With some cursory research, libertarians believe in a minimal government for upholding, "individual liberties". [...] I'm old enough to know that "upholding of individual liberties" means "we play by my rules"." I responded with my own. "Without older brother we can self organize like starlings" Such a pretty phrase. "I think that everyone has good in them, and they need only be given a chance to show that niceness." This is where I've landed, if I'm honest. Perhaps I'd write "almost all people" to offer a carveout for the handful of incorrigibly depraved, congenitally broken, or institutionally shattered. "minimal government for upholding, "individual liberties"" Without stronger social obligations and programming, this inevitably devolves into storm troopers. The word "minimal" is quickly blown out of reach by the strong wind of authoritarianism. The thing about the "lemme do what I want with me" is that we live in a society. While you think you're being an individualist, you look like a narcissist to everyone else. Your loved ones are not only neglected, they're forced to take up your slack. Mom and Dad are getting neither a call nor a visit. And what does "not bothering anybody" even mean? Can you fly your drone over the pristine mountains of Switzerland, imbuing square kilometers of the idyllic landscape with a high-pitched whine? Can you ride your E-bike/E-motorcycle up any hiking trail because bikes aren't expressly prohibited? Can you jet-ski on a lake others are trying to swim in? There are always going to be disputes about how much "I've got mine, Jack" is too much. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] My friend liked this article but wrote, "[It's a little "Are you like christ" coded" Touché. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5460 2025-05-20T22:12:20+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. [Look behind the curtain] Learn how things work. Be the kind of person who wants to know how things work. It makes you much more resistant to ephemeral fads, trends, propaganda, and algorithms. Be a problem solver. People love problem solvers. For God's sake, learn how to problem-solve by asking questions. What is the use case? Who is this for? What does it need to do? Learn to resist the urge to get started without thinking. Be generous with your wisdom. Show people how you do what you do. Be open-source. Be confident in your ability to share your process and still succeed. Your success will be measured in having made everyone around you better and happier. [Choose tools wisely] Choose your tools, learn them, use them, and evaluate new ones. Learn which tool is most appropriate to a task. Don't just be a tool-using monkey -- be a tool-building monkey. Excel is a tool. AI is a tool. Coding is a tool. Rhetoric is a tool. Writing is a tool. Diplomacy is a tool. Learn how to get a feel for the right tool for the job. The world is not just nails waiting for your hammer. [Culture is free] If you make yourself the kind of person who loves poetry and jazz, then you will be happy (almost) no matter what. If you learn to cherish things that they can't take away from you, then no-one can take your happiness. So, yeah, poetry and jazz are free. Be a philosopher. [Be lucky] Life isn't fair. Talent without opportunity is frustrating but not uncommon. Charisma is a gift and often feels like a cheat code. So you'll need to be lucky, too. The best you can do is to remember your goals, steer your course toward them as best you can, and seize opportunities when they appear. The worst you can do is to not only lose your principles, but to not even notice that you did. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Doing the work is how you learn. There is no way to get around putting stuff into your head. It's the only way that you can expect anything useful to ever come out. "Dude, how do you write so much?" "Dude, how could I not?" I read and assimilate so much information that my f&@king cup runneth over the time that I'm not sleeping. And half of my mornings, I get up and stumble to a screen so that I can write down what I woke up thinking. How do you make conversation when all the components of your conversation are a search or a prompt away? [1] I spent a couple of summers working in a library shelf-reading and dusting books. I read a lot of spines. I discovered a lot of books and authors. One summer, I shelf-read the entire Science Library. Nowadays it's a good story I can tell. You don't have any of your own stories if you never do anything. And nobody's gonna be interested in stuff that doesn't take effort and time, least of all you. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5492 2025-04-21T12:17:40+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

isn't deeply thought-provoking or revelatory but it does what poetry does best: it seems to distill meaning from elegantly juxtaposed words. "Tell me how to weave tomorrow into yesterday without tangling, without strangling today" You see? I love it but... ]]>

isn't deeply thought-provoking or revelatory but it does what poetry does best: it seems to distill meaning from elegantly juxtaposed words. "Tell me how to weave tomorrow into yesterday without tangling, without strangling today" You see? I love it but I don't know what it means. Not yet. A poetic friend wrote to tell me that, "About the poets and their words. Can you 'know' what they mean? Nope! Like a good question maybe we can "die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben" and one day find ourselves walking into the answer or meaning/those coordinates. 💃" Yes, yes, yes. 💯 We each imbue words such as these with our own meaning. They at once haunt and promise something, implying meaning that feels like it would be so powerful if only it could be fully grasped. But that feeling is fleeting, escaping again and again, whenever it's considered too directly. Far better to sidle up to it -- again: again and again -- each time getting a better look out of the corner of your eye, before, as you say, "walking into the answer". Patience. Meaning will come. Or not. You don't have to sweat it if you can make the journey worthwhile. [image] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5481 2025-04-20T22:03:44+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, "[...] also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:" "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." "The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized." This is the reason AI is so dangerous: it's a productivity and efficiency sink, unless you're very careful. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5333 2025-04-18T23:01:35+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes of reading Thoreau in the 21st century, "[...] is it the content that’s boring, or are we simply less capable of appreciating it? I propose that we’re the boring ones. Or more precisely, our thinking is too small and" ... ]]>

writes of reading Thoreau in the 21st century, "[...] is it the content that’s boring, or are we simply less capable of appreciating it? I propose that we’re the boring ones. Or more precisely, our thinking is too small and frantic to follow where Thoreau’s mind goes. It’s the same reason we find meditation so hard and boring. It’s the same reason most of us haven’t stared off into space at all in the past 15 years. It’s why you never see anyone waiting in line without a phone in their hands. Our minds have seemingly lost the ability to sink into an awareness of and interest in our surroundings that Thoreau presupposes his readers will share." Most people are no longer used to governing what they do, having been brainwashed into floating on the current of an algorithm that selects what they watch and, perhaps even more rarely, read. Anything that doesn't slam down on the dopamine button is considered "boring" in the same way that a heroin addict considers unmedicated time to be not worth living. "After all, there’s nothing inherently more boring about the water level of a pond than about the way a random YouTuber has organized their freezer. In fact, if the pond description is well-written, it can even be a thing of beauty, while no amount of freezer organization ever could. And yet, I’d bet money that most of us would have less trouble focusing on a freezer-org video than reading Walden with our undivided attention. Thoreau’s book is a pearl before swine, and we have just enough non-swine in us to feel this to be the case, and it makes us angry." This is an excellent point: people have an ability to sit through boring stuff -- they have just been trained to think that long shows that purport to entertain but really just advertise are inherently more interesting than reading a book about ponds. I am personally delighted to learn that people are watching videos of other people organizing their freezers and I hadn't even suspected that such a thing existed. I suppose it makes sense. I imagine them watching them with ads. "Sometimes you have to wait for the rain to come or the fever to break. You have to wait for the sun to rise, the fish to bite, or the year to end. These things can’t be rushed, and maybe a typical reader from that time period would have felt that to really get a sense of Thoreau’s life in the woods, the description of the pond couldn’t be rushed, either." Have we moved to a better or worse version of humanity? Is the hyperactive dopamine addict with every minute scheduled -- even though long hours are wasted -- an improvement? "The world that Thoreau describes, and perhaps Thoreau himself, couldn’t care less about earning your attention. It is there, and you can observe it, and learn something about your world and yourself – or not. It’s up to you. Nothing is relying on your engagement. Nature is not designed for your convenience, nor is it calibrated to your preferences. It is the anti-phone, delivered with flinty Yankee indifference." This is also an excellent point: paradoxically, being trapped in an algorithm's choices fools people into thinking that they are in charge of those choices. Messy nature and messy outside and messy people can't be controlled -- or don't allow the illusion of control -- nearly as easily. Randomness implies uncertainty and uncertainty is an unacceptable discomfort to those addicted to comfort. "This is the real explanation of what people mean when they say “I want to read more but I can’t find the time.” Being a reader of any kind in 2025, but particularly a reader of works like Walden, does not mean becoming a person who “has more time”; it means getting used to shifting down to first gear while the culture is racing past you in fifth gear." Slowing down to read tough books is worth the time investment. Learn a language. Read a book in that language. Those are journeys of many years. You want to do it, but you want it to happen right away. Take the first step. Take the next. Enjoy the journey, enjoy the progress, give it time, train yourself to be the kind of person who doesn't seek immediate gratification. The article summarizes it perfectly with, "Whether this was on purpose or was just the way Thoreau’s mind worked, he knew something we need reminding of these days: Doing the right thing slowly and with difficulty will always be better than doing the wrong thing quickly and effortlessly." This is a well-written article about how we choose to spend our time. Funnily enough, if you don't have time to read either this article or the original article, then the following single-line post summarizes it nearly perfectly: " Unread Lord of the Rings Books Look On As Owner Binges Movies For 25th Time" . A perfect companion to Rebecca's article above is the video "Small Data" with the song "Small Bytes", which has the refrain, "Just live your life in small bytes." [media] "We have been data-gatherers since the very beginning. The hunters and gatherers, you know? The data that they had, it didn't come from a machine or a network or a app it came from their eyes their ears the world around them" "I do run a small platform for data-veganism, data advocacy, and, specifically, a website dedicated to ending the absolute travesty that is the Java programming language." As someone pointed out in the comments, the video is shot in the 4:3 aspect-ratio. The credits song is a legit banger. You can download "EXTRAS: "Small Bytes" Music Video & MP3" . The music video's almost better than the video. It's so poignant and lovely. It really makes you wish for a simpler, more joyful, and artisanal world. "It ain't no use in usin' up your bytes, babe. The bytes, small and slow. "It ain't no use in usin' up your bytes, babe. My dialup won't download. "I wish there were something I could ... do or say to free this space up in my memory lane But ... we never had our heads in the cloud anyway. "Just live your life in small bytes. "[Harmonica solo]" This brings joy. [image] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5328 2025-04-06T21:49:55+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5327 2025-04-06T21:44:26+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. It is pretty cool. I'm glad I listened to it. I was "working on a jigsaw puzzle" the whole time. [image]Listening to this feels like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology... ]]>

. It is pretty cool. I'm glad I listened to it. I was "working on a jigsaw puzzle" the whole time. [image]Listening to this feels like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology of the epithet "Willard", the application of the definition of said epithet to bands after a lengthy discussion achieves consensus, an immediately ensuing discussion debating to which musical acts one could realistically justify applying the epithet "peach" -- the illusion fell down a bit here, as it devolved a bit too much into the typical flailing back-and-forth of eliciting information from an LLM -- the same for "coolness" -- same flailing -- "Axolotl"... ...to Justin himself -- "a hallmark of a deeply thoughtful mind," ... "a provocative and deeply introspective scholar," ... "intellectual versatility," ... "insightful critiques," ... ...to a truly gobsmacking and overwhelming number of detailed suggestions about how to keep people from assuming that you named your donkey "Pippin" because of the Lord of the Rings, whose length nearly exceeded my patience but also left me unsure as to whether the garrulous descriptions were from a tireless AI or an at-least slightly obsessive-compulsive philosophical researcher. The twist at the end where the interlocutor changes his mind after the apparently tremendous amount of work put in by the LLM was both funny and a reminder that LLMs are machines ... and also that Justin is going to be one of the first ones up against the wall during the robot wars. The final part is more obviously AI research, delving into the meta-topic of asking an LLM about Pascal's wager (which is pronounces wah-jah 😂 ), Roko's Basilisk, Searle's Chinese Room, and, finally, the deliberate subterfuge of having LLMs formulate responses in the first-person -- "neither the cake nor I possess the internal conditions, such as consciousness, intentionality, or self-awareness that would truly make us an 'I' in the philosophical sense." And yet, as usual, the lure of lucre trumps foresight. ... all read to you in mellifluous tones that sometimes present as Chatbot to-and-fros and sometimes more like reading from Justin's essays. Thanks for this. I personally don't have the patience, time, or inclination to spend this much time with an LLM, but I found this curated and linked series of sessions to be a fun accompaniment to my Christmas jigsaw puzzle. Contra current trends, I actually listened to this and wrote the summary myself, instead of having a machine do it. It might be amusing to see what a machine would write, perhaps illuminating the mediocrity of my summary, but ... I'm wedded to doing it this way. I've got time to kill anyway; what's the point of hurrying through everything? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5450 2025-03-23T22:07:25+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5435 2025-03-16T12:01:14+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5422 2025-03-15T15:11:18+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5417 2025-03-15T14:13:23+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

included the following passage as part of a longer discussion . "I do not think, I mean to say, the deep state’s presence in America’s political life will ever be off the table now that Trump has put its insidious presence on it. This is a good thing." [image]I... ]]>

included the following passage as part of a longer discussion . "I do not think, I mean to say, the deep state’s presence in America’s political life will ever be off the table now that Trump has put its insidious presence on it. This is a good thing." [image]I wouldn't be too sure of that. People are remarkably capable of going back to sleep, especially when their salaries depend on it, especially when their lifestyles depend on it, and especially with an incredible amount of simultaneous media services, all cooing nursery rhymes day and night to lull the population into thinking its lords and rulers need it to think. Think about what happened "after" COVID: there are several epidemics raging right now, debilitating industry and economies with the ill, hospitals filling up again. There's H5N1 -- currently mostly among animals -- there's RSV, there's the flu -- bigger than in the last quarter-century -- and there's still COVID, which has stayed at epidemic levels throughout. Polio, whooping cough, and measles are making a comeback. The numbers of infected are higher than a sane civilization would be willing to accommodate but it's just accepted that this is how it is. We learned nothing but how to be sullen, sulking children, only somewhat mollified by having been giving back all of our toys. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5411 2025-02-22T18:17:28+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5398 2025-02-16T22:18:52+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

explains how the ideas of a philosopher who died over a century ago are not only applicable today, but are vital to understand if we want to come out the other side intact. [image] "Your entire business model is to take control of the free exchange of" ... ]]>

explains how the ideas of a philosopher who died over a century ago are not only applicable today, but are vital to understand if we want to come out the other side intact. [image] "Your entire business model is to take control of the free exchange of information, and manipulate it for your personal gain! "See this chart? The red portion is what you created. The blue portion is what you built off pre-existing open source technology, science and stolen data. You can't see the red part because it is so small. "The only possible ethical thing to do is destroy this company, open-source everything, and hand over control directly to the people, to use it for the common good." Mohler wrote underneath the comic that, "In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin makes the argument that all technological progress more or less belongs to everyone. "We simply find ourselves existing in the modern world that inherits the efforts of billions of people to make it livable for us, spanning tens of thousands of years. The very land we live on has been cultivated by our ancestors to make it suitable to farming. Technology created in the past is handed to us to work this land. The crops we grow have been selectively bred for thousands of years to feed us. Animals like sheep and cows exist, which are nothing like their natural selves, having their DNA altered by the long slow efforts of our fore bearers. All this work belongs to all of us, but often the capitalist comes in at the last moment to buy the land, buy the animals, and patent the last 0.0001% of technological improvement to some contraption. From this ownership they are allowed to control everything. "[...] literally billions of man-hours have been spent just on the software side to create operating systems which are free and open and given to capitalists (such as the Linux kernel and ecosystem). All of this work, as well as the scientific work to create the hardware, represents 99.9999% of the work to create something like OpenAI, and it belongs to all of us. From this, they spend a small amount of money to create a system, and in their case they also train their model off the additional billions of hours of man-hours in writing text, producing knowledge, and creating art, and then they seize control of the output of this work, and use it exclusively for private gain." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5385 2025-02-11T22:42:24+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5330 2025-01-19T08:23:27+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes about a magic trick that seemed nearly impossible but it worked because Penn had buried 52 cards in a park and waited months for grass to grow back over them, "Teller [of Penn and Teller] describes the underlying principle like so:" "Sometimes magic is" ... ]]>

writes about a magic trick that seemed nearly impossible but it worked because Penn had buried 52 cards in a park and waited months for grass to grow back over them, "Teller [of Penn and Teller] describes the underlying principle like so:" "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." In this case, the trick isn't dextrous hands or a nimble mind but dedication and planning. "It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. "[...] "Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success. You’ll have achieved something that seems magical – impossible, even. "It just takes some time." Achieving long-term goals is much easier if you can enjoy the journey rather than just anticipate the destination. It takes a lot more willpower to stick with something if you don't enjoy doing it, or if you don't get a feeling of accomplishment from completing a piece of it. Nothing worth doing can be done quickly. If it seems impossible or would take years, consider what it would look like from the perspective of your future self. If you don't start now, that future self won't be able to benefit from the investment that you began in the past. What I'm saying is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and get-rich-quick schemes only work if you're a criminal, taking from others. What you're doing might be legal, but you didn't earn it. So why should you have it? But that sounds so f'ing self-help-y that I'm mad at myself a little bit. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5301 2024-12-23T12:52:07+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5281 2024-12-08T22:27:20+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

was pretty good. I credit both participants but, if we're honest, Justin talks about 95% of the time. It was quite an interesting discussion, touching on several salient points. [Misinformed about Trump] I'm still somewhat surprised... ]]>

was pretty good. I credit both participants but, if we're honest, Justin talks about 95% of the time. It was quite an interesting discussion, touching on several salient points. [Misinformed about Trump] I'm still somewhat surprised to hear how empire-tinged some of the Justin's information is, despite his conclusions being decidedly anti-empire. In particular, he completely mischaracterized Trump's comments about Liz Cheney, which were -- especially for Trump -- a surprisingly very well-reasoned argument against war hawks, who talk a big game about sending other people to war. Even taking our transcript from the execrable liberal talking-points site "In Context: What former President Donald Trump said about Liz Cheney facing a firing squad" , we see that they admit to Trump having said, "When asked about Liz Cheney campaigning for Harris, Trump said, "Well, I think it hurts Kamala a lot. Actually. Look, (Cheney is) a deranged person. The reason she doesn't like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq." "Trump covered many other topics, then said: "I don't want to go to war. (Liz Cheney) wanted to go, she wanted to stay in Syria. I took (troops) out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if were up to her, we'd, we'd be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it's very, very expensive." "Later, Trump added "I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."" Here, we hear Trump taking a very anti-war stance and calling out Liz Cheney for being a stupid war-hawk, ready to send other people into combat all over the world. You will note that Trump doesn't say anything about a firing squad. He doesn't even imply it. When I first heard him say this in a video (from Glenn Greenwald, I believe), I didn't even think of a firing squad. I just thought that he was talking about sending Liz Cheney into combat to see how much she likes it. In fact, if you read not even very carefully, Trump's hypothetical posits to "put her with a rifle", which is an odd way of painting a scene with her facing a firing squad. These people make things up out of whole cloth. I'm ashamed for Justin that he chose to talk about this without even spending 45 seconds watching what Trump actually said. You don't even have to defend Trump's right to talk about sending Liz Cheney before a firing squad because he never said anything like that. He actually said that we have to stop fighting wars and that the psychos promoting all of these wars should have some empathy for the soldiers they send to fight and die for their causes. His hypothetical proposes to scare them straight. Feel free to debate the sense of that, but don't mischaracterize what he said. Furthermore, if you look at the quote, he cites three reasons: 1. "it's very dangerous" 2. "a lot of people get killed" 3. "it's very, very expensive." Since Justin didn't actually watch the clip, he's free to accuse Trump of focusing on the waste of money, even though that is absolutely not what Trump said. Sadly, Justin is just lazily promulgating liberal talking points, even as he purports to be disputing them. In the end, he's still buying some of the narrative -- that Trump is only about the money -- because his thinking is colored by the sources he continues to trust. Again It's possibly still true that Trump is only interested in the money! He might be lying! He lies about so many other things! You don't have to take Trump at his word but, if you are going to cite Trump, then you should at least cite him accurately. You are then free to to express doubts about the veracity of his comments rather than mixing the two and pretending that what we think he meant to say is what he actually said. You can still posit that he's being dishonest, based on nearly everything else he's ever done having been about making money, etc. etc. without diluting the point, I feel. [The danger of tainting science with politics] At 01:07:00, Justin says that, "[image][...] and I haven't been thinking about that [COVID] so much over the past, say, year. We are to some extent now facing the fallout of the chaos of that period, right? And the perception, right or wrong, that our important institutions' claims to a monopoly on knowledge and to scientific authority were being called into doubt, right? "Rightly or wrongly, but I think inevitably I have to concede to some extent, right? We were getting directives from one week to the next in some cases that just said A and not A about masks, about hand-washing and stuff. And that's okay. I mean, sometimes authorities just don't know, right? "They do their best and there's nothing blameworthy in that. But the combination of those vacillations with this strange new emerging discourse in the pandemic era that you must trust the science, smelled fishy to a lot of people. I think rightly so. "Like, I'm supposed to trust the science no matter what, even when it says A and not A? How can I do that? How could I possibly do that? Wouldn't it be better maybe to say trust the science with some reasonable degree of reserve or something like that? "And the insistence became so dogmatic that I think it's only natural that the populist movement at that time, I mean, the populist movement pre-exists COVID, but that at that time the populist movement started to kind of take up the baton of COVID skepticism, right? "And this follows the same dynamics as so many other things in American culture and politics, but we would have done a lot better to tolerate and even encourage skepticism rather than pushing it out to the populist margins, because now ... those are not the margins. "Now we have a COVID skeptic who's positioned to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. So there again, it's massive, massive blowback from the kind of reduction of authority to a kind of caricature or a zombie version of itself to leave us because we're in power and we told you so. "A lot of people are saying, well, no, I won't. I'll just take power instead, right? Yeah, and we spoke about sort of spirituality earlier. That almost felt like a sort of religious reverence for the science rather than sort of this is how you understand it and therefore... You have faith in it because you understand it. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, I teach history and philosophy of science. I think a lot about the epistemology of authority in this connection. And, you know, this is kind of my bailiwick long before and was long before the populist movement started gaining steam and I can affirm, as an expert, and you have to listen to me because i'm an expert. Science never won its authority by command. You know, by saying, believe us. "And so it was just such a distortion of the actual role of the institution of science in society that it's not surprising that many, many people smelled something fishy." I thought this was great and have no notes. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5209 2024-11-19T22:36:31+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5227 2024-11-09T12:17:26+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5260 2024-11-08T23:32:48+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5007 2024-08-18T21:00:29+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4936 2024-08-12T16:17:42+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4986 2024-08-12T15:57:18+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

was surprisingly superficial. It deals only with the question of whether we should do a "war on drugs" style... ]]>

was surprisingly superficial. It deals only with the question of whether we should do a "war on drugs" style campaign against deep fakes -- a hopeless and utterly ineffective crusade that causes misery for the innocent and pours money into the coffers of the usual suspects -- or whether it's completely hopeless because there's nothing you can effectively do to censor without undoing the entire Internet. I'd hoped for more of an analysis about whether we even want to ban it and why we want to ban it. De Boer lays out his basic tenet: there is no stopping anything on the internet, at least not in anything approaching a permanent way. "The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors" He tells of a colleague who'd worked hard to eradicate pictures "shared for a prurient purpose." "He sometimes worked with a group that sought to address the phenomenon of “jailbait” content on the internet - technically legal images of underaged women that contain no nudity or explicit sexual acts but which are nonetheless clearly shared for a prurient purpose." Cast the net wide and you're bound to catch something. Can you prove the prurient interest? Is it illegal? Can you prosecute? Do you even need to when you can just post someone's face to all of their friends on Facebook with an allegation? For example, what if you get turned on by pictures of traffic cones? You'd be posting the hell out of these for your own prurient interest, but you can'tI'm almost certain that no-one seriously believes that you can harm a traffic cone. "Some of the more popular independent sites had been shuttered, often through applying pressure to web hosting companies. Google had made it much more difficult to search for such things by delisting certain terms." To me, this sounds like China's technology, no? Do you really think that Google is using its blocking technology only on "jailbait"? Of course not. There are certain topics you'll never find on most search engines, unless you really work at it. If this works for "legal-but-unsavory images", then there's nothing stopping someone from taking down your site of legal-but-unsavory writings. Let's look at some more citations from de Boer's essay: "Instagram has in fact had a problem with actual, honest-to-god illegal child pornography, in part because of this very difficulty in having too many holes in the dyke and not enough fingers. At precisely the point in our history that entities like Reddit or various web hosting companies were getting serious about the “jailbait” problem, social networks dedicated to images and video were attracting huge user bases and opening up all kinds of new opportunities for spreading it. The problem had not been solved; it had simply been distributed on a vast scale." "As this issue is specifically about images that are legal but indecent, there’s also the problem that indecency is a moving target and difficult to define through policy. How do you write a terms of service that fairly adjudicates what is an appropriately or inappropriately provocative image, and can you possibly adjust that definition depending on the age of the person in the picture?" "The volume problem comes from another direction, too. My friend told me that what really caused him to despair was the sheer percentage of high school students who seemed to be taking nude or even sexual photos and videos of themselves and sharing them with someone else via their phones, photos and videos which very often end up being shared all over their schools." Young people don't care about the things they've been told to care about. Well, they do but their pea-sized brains are awash in hormones are telling them to win at sex, to win at hierarchy. The combination of powerful hormones provided by millions of years of evolution with the heavily propagandized media-scape of the modern Internet yields incoherent, self-destructive, and, to an outside observer, nearly amoral behavior. They don't do it because it's right or wrong; they do it because they've been told that it's personally beneficial and that something being personally beneficial is the pinnacle of human achievement. "Does that mean you give up on, in particular, trying to shut down actual child pornography? No, of course not. Just like you don’t stop trying to arrest and prosecute murderers even though we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder. But… we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder, and it’s way, way harder to stop someone from looking at an AI fake porn video of an actress in a WhatsApp chat than it is to prosecute a murder." Just because something's difficult to combat doesn't necessarily mean we should give up. Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein but man, you better enjoy the trip because the destination is really far away. And the degree to which a societal goal can be achieved is also not distributed evenly -- in modern western societies, which are growing more and more unequal, opportunity is distributed incredibly unevenly. "[...] as a practical matter, justice has been to one degree or another unobtainable for any and all human beings for the entirety of human history. Life’s not fair. Yet there’s a lot of people in contemporary times who seem to have lost sight of the basic wisdom that we can always do more good, but aren’t entitled to a solution to any particular problem." No-one is entitled to a solution to a particular problem but it can be particularly grating when people see some people get that problem solved immediately while others have to see the solution on the horizon for their entire lives, never moving any closer. But to come back to the original topic: I wonder why people are so up-in-arms about deep-fake porn? I've heard people say that it's because it's not of real people, that people are masturbating to something that's not real, so that's not healthy. News flash: (nearly) everyone you've ever masturbated to is not real, in the sense that you have never seen them, you will never meet them, and they might as well not be real as far as you're concerned. How would you know the difference? Our society metes out punishment for being associated with porn (i.e., you won't get certain jobs, you'll be ostracized from certain things, etc.). Deep-fake porn of real people who are most definitely not associated with pornography is a problem in that regard, in that people will end up being punished by society for something that they never did. Because of technology and the sheer distributive power of the Internet, people you do know will now be able to masturbate to those people, probably doing stuff that they would never do, and of which they're not proud of being depicted doing. No-one would really complain if there was deep-fake video of them rescuing puppies from a burning building. The problem kind of comes down to the level of shame that a given society associates with sex. That's the only reason deep-fake porn has any power over us, right? If it were a video of you jogging somewhere, no-one would care? It it were a video of you boxing, no problem. Boxing toddlers and blasting them out of a ring? Nope. Hanging out at on a dinner date? Holding hands on a nighttime stroll? No problem. Smooching? Borderline. Fucking? Absolutely not. You will be ostracized by everyone you know, even if they know the video is fake. That's how people do. Some food for thought: Can I think about an illegal picture? Yes. Can I describe it to a friend? Yes. Can I publish that description online? Maybe. Can I draw it? Yes. Can I use Photoshop? Yes. Can I use an online LLM? No? Can I use a local one? Maybe? This has already happened to a large degree and almost no-one has noticed. Think about the tools that you use. There are so-called guardrails all over them, preventing you from even cursing in private conversations with other adults. Try swipe-typing the word "fuck" on an Apple device. It will never work. Try to get auto-correct to suggest the word "fuck" when you write "fuc". It won't do it. You can fool it by adding the rule "fuck" => "fuck" to your personal replacements but you have to do it with every single forbidden word...and it still doesn't work reliably. This is just the tip of the iceberg of how the corporate nanny-state is controlling how you express yourself and, inevitably, how you think. Where do we draw the line? Is distribution the problem? Is it monetization? Or are we prohibiting wrongthink? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4972 2024-08-12T04:12:12+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

from February describes, for example, when, during a genocide, the west cut off funding for the primary aid organization keeping people alive in Gaza. "[image]The Israeli dossier against UNRWA was based largely on interrogations, likely involving torture, by Mossad and Shin Bet of Gazans seized on October 7. The allegations had not been verified when they hit the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; yet, the US immediately suspended funding for UNRWA, the primary source of food and shelter for 1.6 million displaced Gazans. The US’s rash decision was swiftly followed by 14 other nations." It's the result that Empire and its vassals was looking for. The Empire hasn't gotten the memo yet that, what to them looks like legitimate and solid evidence and proof, looks like a fantastical and ludicrously unbelievable web of lies and fabrications to everyone who's not drunk the Kool-aid. No-one with a modicum of sense -- or who is at-all interested in what is actually happening rather than having their bellies rubbed by Israel -- believes anything the Mossad, Shin Bet, or any part of the IDF has to say. They may have actually tortured people into saying the things that they reported that they heard said. But that seems like an awful lot of work when you could just make up whatever you want and it will be reported just as loudly and unquestioningly. So, just do that, instead. You get to go home earlier. The important thing is that you've all pretended to care about having justifiable reasons for cutting off funding for the only aid organization which has had any ability to get food, water, sanitation, and medical assistance to the population of Gaza. They all clap each other on the back for a job well done in ensuring that the people of Gaza will starve or dehydrate or die of otherwise easily treatable diseases and medical conditions. It's a lot more efficient to let nature claim their failing bodies than to shoot each and every one of them. Biden can only sneak so many munitions past Congress. Even stupid Switzerland cut off funding, probably because it's afraid of being accused of being a bunch of terrorist-loving anti-semites. Belgium didn't cut off funding and their entire building in Gaza was coincidentally bombed by Israel a couple of days later. No-one died because they'd pulled out their staff two weeks ago, but now they definitely don't have a place to back to. Was it a strategic target? No, not a classically strategic target in that it could have served any Palestinian military purpose, but it was a powerful message to send to the other countries that those who don't follow along with the Don's orders will pay the consequences. Pay your protection money and nothing will happen to you. St. Clair listed the countries that have cut off aid funding to UNRWA in Palestine based on an Israeli allegation: 1. United States, $343.9 M 2. Germany, $202.1 M 3. European Union, $114.1 M 4. Sweden, $61 M 5. Japan, $30.2 M 6. France, $28.9 M 7. Switzerland, $25.5 M 8. Canada. $23.7 M 9. United Kingdom, $21.2 M 10. The Netherlands, $21.2 M 11. Australia, $13.8 M 12. Italy, $18 M 13. Austria, $8.1 M 14. Finland, $7.8 M 15. New Zealand, $560.8 K 16. Iceland, $558.7 K 17. Romania, $210.7 K 18. Estonia, $90 K It's kind of sad to see the sweet naivité of these poor, deluded nations that still believe everything that Israel says without any proof. But the person being scammed always kind of wants to be scammed, especially if they keep falling for it. And what's really going to be fun is having to put up with all of the hand-wringing years from now, about how no-one could have known how bad it was or how bad is was going to get. That they'd been duped, despite their best intentions. They'll demand forgiveness for all, and no loss of status or fortune for anyone important. 'How could this have happened?' they'll ask in plaintive tones. How could Israel have fooled us so badly? No-one could have guessed how this would turn out. It will be so very tiresome as we watch every one of these reprehensible people fail upward into every more powerful and well-remunerated positions. "Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, clinics, water treatment plants & 60% of its homes, but 80% of the “tunnels” it claims to be targeting remain intact, according to the Wall Street Journal. I guess the tunnels need to remain intact to justify bombing the rest of Gaza’s homes." What if Hamas were to arrange to hand all of its hostages over to NATO or some other coalition that represents most, if not all, of Israel's enablers? The hostages are a moral liability for Hamas right now. But they can't just give them back to Israel because Israel will just continue with their bombing and nothing will have been won with the hostages' return. What could be won, though? Holding onto them is moral blight, and it's not winning them anything. They got a few hundred prisoners back, but Israel just kidnapped even more people the next day. That's a dead-end. Giving them back is a dead-end. But turning them over to, say, Germany, England or the U.S. would put the recipient into a bit of a quandary, no? Their instinct would be to just return them to Israel, but they couldn't just do so without gaining even more opprobrium from the rest of the rest of the world. They would be even more complicit if they just handed them back to Israel without extracting any promise of a ceasefire -- since, without the hostages, Israel would no longer have a reason to continue their assault. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4937 2024-07-27T07:43:38+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4975 2024-02-19T21:52:19+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is about how well younger students really understand their digital devices and apps. This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It's a bit long, but I thought the following... ]]>

is about how well younger students really understand their digital devices and apps. This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It's a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting. [The Internet vs. Apps] It contrasts using the Internet with using apps, which are not at all the same thing. The Internet is an open place with links and content, accessed by a machine with a keyboard and nearly boundless opportunity for creativity -- within the strict confines of the pathetically crippled and dysfunctional dumpster fire that is all software -- whereas apps are walled gardens and deliberately designed to restrict interaction with other sources. The input mechanisms on phones and tablets necessarily restrict many forms of creativity by making them impossible to do efficiently. [Digital Natives]These digital natives can enter data quickly enough into a phone, but that mechanism is so limiting and limited compared to a laptop, with a real keyboard. Tablets and phones are a fallback for when you can't use a laptop or desktop computer. They are not a replacement -- not even close. If you can replace everything you need with a tablet or phone, then you have nearly no requirements. You've already capitulated to a very restricted worldview. You're satisfied with extremely limited capabilities relative to what other people can do with other devices. The author of the post thinks that poverty limits people's access. But a phone or tablet isn't necessarily cheaper than a computer. It's just cooler and necessary and ultra-portable. So-called digital natives know only apps on tablets and phones. They have no familiarity with web sites on desktop computers. But apps are very limited in their ability to offer true creativity, both by their nature and also by their purpose, which is to make money for the app developer. More critically, almost no-one at most businesses does any or even some of their daily business on an app. Although many LOB (line-of-business) apps purport to be usable on mobile, they are incredibly inefficient as compared to their desktop counterparts. Even browser-based tools like Microsoft's Office tools are really limited relative to native desktop apps. So the tools that businesses use to run their world are out of the reach of most of the people in the next generation. They are not being trained or even introduced to these tools. There's a training gap that no-one thinks they're responsible for, which means that capitalism doesn't have a solution. Its solution is to wait around for the state to do it. This is probably not going to end well. [What's data? Where is it?] The problem goes deeper, though, to a complete ignorance of where data resides or how to find it other than to "search for it". Imagine, instead of knowing where you live, you were just to get somewhere close to your neighborhood and just start shouting the names of the people in your family until someone pointed you to your house. We aren't teaching people how to organize information, or how to think about where their information is, or how it is being shared or used, or how they could preserve it for later. It's just assumed to always be available -- or not. I think a lot of people assume that, since they can't find the information anymore, that it's just gone. Words like "upload" or "download" mean nothing in this world. "Save" is also meaningless. It's nice that people don't have to remember to save files anymore or necessarily know where they are in a file system. But that convenience stops when you need to coordinate with other people, when you all need to be able to find things. Then, you need to agree on a system. 📂 Stuff 📂 Good stuff 📂 Bad stuff 📂 Horse porn 📂 Misc. In the old days, we used folder hierarchies. These were limiting in that they allowed you to encode exactly one categorical dimension, but it was better than nothing. A boss of mine in NYC in the 90s simply stored everything at the root of his hard drive. No folders. That won't do. Nowadays, a lot of systems offer tags so that we can assign as many categorical axes as we want, but you still have to do it. You have to be aware of the value of categorizing your data rather than hoping some machine can match your fuzzy query against categories that a machine has intuited from the content. There's so much room for interpretation that no machine can fix this. You have to label your stuff. People don't know this. They have tens of thousands of pictures that they can only search by date. They scroll endlessly on their phones looking for a photo they know they have. [No notion of privacy] People like this can't care about privacy because the concept is illogical, it means nothing. They showed their friend a picture, not the whole world. What's the problem? That picture is on their phone and on their friend's phone -- and that's it. The EFF may argue that young people care about privacy, but I don't think that they have even the same concept of what can be made private. They upload everything to one cloud after another, without a thought about who gets to use it. [No, AI will not rescue them] Reading is hard and tedious -- and writing is even worse. No wonder that people immediately welcome the very first snake-oil salesmen who appear to sell them a tool that will do it for them. They welcome so-called AIs with open arms because they purport to summarize long texts to avoid reading and to generate long texts to avoid writing. [Apps are a step backward] Most people know as little about the Internet as people in the olden days did, when they thought that AOL was the entire Internet. Most people spend their time in data silos, being spoon-fed content that they didn't choose. The latest generation of users is about as good at using actual computers -- the ones that people use in the real world to earn actual money -- as the so-called greatest generation was, a generation that grew up with no digital devices at all. This is a sad situation for which I'm at a loss to offer a remedy. Other than work and effort, so it's probably over before it's begun. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4953 2024-02-12T22:50:25+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, so when I saw his name again, I figured It'd check out the video below. It was reasonably interesting, but not really worth noting, except that I noticed that it exhibited some core fallacies evident in the so-called liberal project. [media] At 34:00,... ]]>

, so when I saw his name again, I figured It'd check out the video below. It was reasonably interesting, but not really worth noting, except that I noticed that it exhibited some core fallacies evident in the so-called liberal project. [media] At 34:00, Becca Rothfeld says "Biden is pretty leftist in some ways." In which ways? I'm honestly interested to know because I can't think of anything that wasn't just something he said once or twice, or things that he might have "enacted" but without real teeth to it, so that kind-of the opposite things continue to happen, or start happening. [image]I get the distinct impression that both Rothfeld and Moyn are arguing as members of a tribe -- the liberals -- who are at-once admitting their tribe has failed to follow through on its espoused ideology in nearly every way, and also completely failing to see that this makes their tribe no different from the tribe that doesn't espouse that ideology -- that, in fact, espouses a very opposite ideology that lines up with its actions and policies and which also lines up very well with the enacted policies and ramifications of so-called liberal policy. If that got too confusing, what I'm saying is Republicans say they're going to fuck you, and then they do. Democrats say they would never dream of fucking you, and then they do. Either way, you're fucked. They -- especially Becca -- don't seem to be able to step outside of the tribe to notice that, if you're not in either tribe -- and you turn down the volume to simply watch what the tribes do rather than listen to what they say -- they look exactly the same. I can't imagine using the word "leftist" and "Biden" in the same sentence without the word "not" between them. But, hey, I'm not the one with a PhD in philosophy or whatever, name-dropping Rawls and other so-called liberal philosophers all the time. I'm sure, though, that she would be just the kind of person who thinks that she definitely gets to vote because she's so well-informed on the issues and candidates, but could easily end up voting for Biden because he's "pretty leftist in some ways." If that's the story you have to tell yourself, then OK. If you want to vote for a real leftist, then check the box for Cornel West. At 50:00 Samuel says that, "[...] liberals have a lot to learn if they're going to make liberalism credible. [...] the last years since Trump have been kind of disappointing in that regard. The kind-of cold-war-liberal approach of saying 'no, the enemies of liberalism need to be extinguished to make it credible.' Well, that's not what Charles Mills taught. It's that liberals need to clean their own house, if they're going to be a credible ideological source in our time." Amen, Samuel. Amen. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4931 2024-02-11T13:52:21+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a "child rapist", then an "alleged child rapist" and finally settled on "ex-alleged child rapist". Just using the epithet "child rapist" suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually... ]]>

, Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a "child rapist", then an "alleged child rapist" and finally settled on "ex-alleged child rapist". Just using the epithet "child rapist" suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually went to trial were from someone who claimed that they'd been assaulted when they were 14 years old. That would have been awful (had it happened), but it's somehow less awful than if they'd been 5 years old. I'm not sure the law makes a distinction, but terminology does, as someone who assaults a 5-year-old is a pedophile whereas the term for someone who assaults someone who is post-pubescent, but still under the age of consent is ephebophile. Using other terminology imbues descriptions with implicit judgments. It's like deciding whether to call someone "president" or "ex-president" or "mister" when speaking about someone who's been President of the United States. [image]Spacey's since been exonerated. It took a decade. It's accurate that both Liz and Brace eventually landed on "ex-alleged child rapist", because it's technically true. But with those rules, someone could accuse someone else of being a child rapist, stop doing that, and then technically still be able to call that person an "ex-alleged child rapist" for the rest of their lives. You get to continue to cram the words "child rapist" into every sentence mentioning that person's name without running the risk of slander. A neat trick. Is there a point at which it's no longer still ok to call Kevin Spacey a child rapist? I think that point is when it becomes obvious that there is no evidence whatsoever for an accusation, but I'm a justice extremist. At the very latest, people should stop associating people with crimes they've not done when they've been exonerated by the justice system. You can say that the justice system is corrupt, that Spacey could have simply purchased his exoneration. Let's examine that. If it's true that a relatively modestly fortuned movie star can purchase exoneration from a judgment that pretty much everyone in the world wants to see go the other way, then we have to also conclude that anyone of that stature can purchase their way out of conviction of pretty much anything. While it's true that the wealthy exercise outsized influence, it's not true that they can get away with literally anything. If it were true, then we would have lost all faith in our justice system. We would have to conclude that we're living in a completely arbitrary society with no rules, other than the golden rule: he who has the gold rules. While true to a degree, it's not absolutely true. Let's assume that even money is not enough, that one also needs the favor of the elites in order to avoid justice. But that's not what happened with Spacey. Ten years later, he'd completely lost the favor of the elites. He was being tried in a country where he doesn't even live. He was never charged in the U.S. He was charged in the UK. He won anyway, on all counts, after only a few minutes of jury deliberation. And still, people will not stop calling him a child rapist. From "Spacey's Wikipedia entry" : "In his first British court appearance, on June 16, Spacey denied the allegations against him.[184] On July 14, he pleaded not guilty to the charges in London.[185][186] On November 16, the CPS authorized an additional seven charges against Spacey, all related to a single complainant arising from incidents alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2004.[187][188] Three charges were dismissed before or during the trial, which began on June 28, 2023, and, on July 26, 2023, a jury found Spacey not guilty of the remaining nine charges.[4][5]" If none of that matters -- if the outcomes of trials don't matter -- then people just don't believe in the rule of law anymore. They believe in their gut feelings more. If society allows people to slander other people based on their gut feelings, then we have chaos. There seems to be no mechanism for lowering the relevance of an accusation from the public record if there are enough people interested in maintaining it because (A) there is no drawback to doing so and (B) people love dunking on other people. Once you're accused of something, you're that thing for as long as people say you are. Where relevant, it's the only thing you'll ever be, whether you did it or not, whether it could be proven or not. This obviously opens the door to completely fantastical character-assassination, but people seem to enjoy doing it so much that they don't care. Most people also know that it will never happen to them. I wonder what engenders such an instinct for injustice? Is it mean-spiritedness? Spitefulness? Or is it a subconscious awareness of injustice in their own lives that makes them lash out at those wildly more successful? Is this one of the few weapons that people have against the obscenely wealthy and successful? You know, because we've utterly failed to put a check on amassing stupid amounts of wealth and the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us continues to grow? Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fall into this category as well. Nothing was ever proven, with every case involving a large number of self-interested parties muddying the waters to the point where you can barely tell what is legitimate and what is an allegation. Journalists piled on for the delicious feeling of destroying a person's reputation, while media-company C-suites dined out on the increase in advertising revenue. It's a win-win. All it requires is an inconsequential sacrifice. It doesn't matter whether they did anything wrong. They will have retroactively done something wrong, else why would they have been accused? Lurid "facts" stick in the mind that have no basis in reality, but come to define what everyone "knows" about what happened. On this topic, I recently watched the video "LIVE at The People's Forum: Katie Halper, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin & Claudia De la Cruz" . It's a good conversation with three extremely good people, who are fighting the good fight against propaganda and war crimes. At about 16:00 or so, Abby Martin led the charge on Woody Allen, just dropping jokes about how much he loves abusing children and that he could only like a movie if it involved abusing a 15-year-old. From "Sexual abuse allegation of Woody Allen's Wikipedia page" : "According to court testimony, on August 4, 1992, Allen visited the children at Mia Farrow's home in Bridgewater, Connecticut, while she was shopping with a friend.[316] The next day, that friend's babysitter told her employer that she had seen that "Dylan was sitting on the sofa, and Woody was kneeling on the floor, facing her, with his head in her lap".[327][328] When Farrow asked Dylan about it, Dylan allegedly said that Allen had touched Dylan's "private part" while they were alone together in the attic.[316] Allen strongly denied the allegation, calling it "an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives".[329] He then began proceedings in New York Supreme Court for sole custody of his and Farrow's son Satchel, as well as Dylan and Moses, their two adopted children.[330] In March 1993, a six-month investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused.[331][332]" The case was settled in 1993. It doesn't mention that Farrow and Allen were going through a pretty ugly separation, during which Farrow used the allegations against Allen as a lever. That context cannot be ignored, but it's absolutely not part of the conversation about Allen's supposed predilections. No-one cares. They just love to call people pedophiles. They just seem to relish it so much. "In June 1993, Judge Elliott Wilk rejected Allen's bid for custody and rejected the allegation of sexual abuse. Wilk said he was less certain than the Yale-New Haven team that there was conclusive evidence that there was no sexual abuse and called Allen's conduct with Dylan "grossly inappropriate",[333][334][335] although not sexual." So, thirty years later, Woody Allen is still known to otherwise-intelligent people as a child-molester. It's honestly f&@king incredible. These three ladies are literally having a two-hour discussion about Israeli Hasbara, about their completely evidence-free and unsubstantiated propaganda, but yet here they are, blithely spouting completely slanderous untruths that have been proven untrue for three decades -- and patting each other on the back for it. If you'd mention to them that the case had been thrown out, they'd probably dismiss it because they know better. Even though the prime proponent of the allegation is Dylan Farrow, who's made a lovely career out of it writing for every large NYC publication. They will dismiss everything the NYT says about U.S. foreign policy -- they've built their admirable careers on doing so -- but go just one centimeter out of their bailiwick and they're right there, spouting other NYT propaganda. About an hour into it, they were going a bit nuts about listing all of the things that Israelis steal, including Palestinian skin, apparently. I don't believe any of this, really, and I very much believe that this type of demonization is unfair and counterproductive -- and is basically what the worst of the propaganda does in the other direction. It's just so stupid to cheer on Lebanese warriors on Instagram while swallowing every online rumor about the Israeli people (not Jews!). Cool, so you're not antisemitic, but now you're anti-Israeli, as if all of them are actually evil. I've made this argument too many times, but somehow people can get all swept up in demonizing all Israelis, but somehow not see themselves -- as Americans -- as part of the problem. It's unjust, unproductive, and stupid. Just stick to the facts about the Israeli government. Most of its people are no more deluded or ethically bankrupt than the people of any other part of the empire. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4934 2024-02-04T21:38:07+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is the first of two about genders and biology and stuff. I read with interest and took some notes. The follow-up is linked in the second half. "Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine" ... ]]>

is the first of two about genders and biology and stuff. I read with interest and took some notes. The follow-up is linked in the second half. "Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine the case for trans rights. The whole argument is that physiology does not dictate gender, and acknowledging that most people with penises go through life uncomplicatedly accepting a masculine gender does nothing to undermine the felt, lived, and thus very much real gender identities of people who have penises but go through life as women." "The vast majority of people who are trans-identifying identify as transmen and transwomen, and not misgendering them is simple. Some people identify as non-binary or gender queer. Do I fully understand this? Not really. Do I need to? No, as I’m someone who knows how to mind his own business. Simple human respect and basic manners compels me to call these people what they would like to be called. (I cannot stress this enough: it costs you nothing to respect someone else’s gender identity.) "Are there some people out there, particularly on social media, who have more exotic gender definitions? Sure. Do I sometimes find that stuff a little silly? I guess so. But, again, since it costs me nothing to respect their gender identity - as in, I literally don’t have to do anything at all - I’m very happy to do so. I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age, but if they don’t, again… who cares? It’s none of my business." I've heard the argument that all of these new identities make extra work for businesses, and agencies, and forms, and such. I suppose it does, at the beginning, but a little flexibility on both sides ameliorates the situation. Forms should stop asking for gender or sex or whatever -- unless it's relevant. They should stop asking for titles -- because no-one cares outside of Germany. They should even just move to "Name" and "Preferred Name" and be done with it. But if someone with an unlisted gender identity has to fill out out a form for a little old lady who needs that item on a form filled out, they could maybe not suspect a vast conspiracy of gender reassignment and just randomly choose one of the ones available. It's what I've done with all available fields in all sorts of forms for years. I rarely give my real birthdate. I rarely give my real gender. None of it matters online, so don't make such a big deal out of it. "In this they are no different from people who take Ozempic or steroids or TRT to treat “fatigue.” If you’re a trans man and you want to look more like conventional ideals of masculinity, you might take hormones. Some trans men have no interest in that, so they don’t take the hormones. It’s not particularly complicated; if you’re concerned about people using medical advances to change their physical bodies, I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed. The hormones don’t make you a woman or a man, they just make your body more like the body you would like to have." Excellent point. "The right to gender self-expression does not require any underlying biological reality. Even if there had never been a single intersexed person born in history, the right to define your gender identity in a way that’s consonant with your heart would remain." "Someone asking you to respect their pronouns is by definition not trying to eliminate any notion of sex or gender differences! No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman. Besides, I have to live in a country where seven out of ten people believe that God sent Jesus to save us all from a hell he created himself, which doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense to me. And that set of beliefs is of course vastly more consequential than trans rights are for our society. You can live alongside people who believe things you find crazy. That’s the whole point of freedom." "[...] let’s say that, over time, transwomen do come to dominate in women’s sports, and at the Olympics in 2028 transwomen are on every podium, OK. Then we as a society will come together and find some equitable, just solution that respects everyone’s rights and personhood, a solution which takes as a core requirement that transwomen be treated with dignity." That's a glib response from someone with no skin in the game. There is a strong focus on sports. Women fought for years to gain legitimacy, which led to the viability of female sports careers. The window is short for them. Some have invested their whole lives. They were told that their investment was legitimate thing to do, something that society valued. There were certain parameters. Their competition was circumscribed by certain biological realities. Those realities no longer apply. They had grown used to having a chance, to knowing their rank. I think it's silly, but it's their lived experience. Fuck them, I guess? Or, maybe, just maybe, we think about it a bit more before just obviously offering preference to those who came later. Those who came before can hardly be expected to react generously, especially when the game is, by definition, zero-sum. "Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once! Because aside from a class of professional busybodies, most people are normal and just want to be chill about stuff. Honestly. The number of LGBTQ people who just go about their lives, asking only for rights and respect, dwarfs the number who yell at you on TikTok. Yes, there are social justice-y annoyances and excesses in this domain, as there are with any constituencies favored by progressives now. Don’t let that distract you from the fact that almost everyone just wants to live in peace and dignity." And, equally, don't let yourself (FDB) be distracted by all of the extremely loud and boorish and intolerant and hateful voices who overwhelm the more timid voices who have legitimate concerns and questions about how all of this is to work, what is expected from them, what will change for them -- in a non-dismissive manner -- and how they can navigate the new world. Maybe the answer is that "nothing changes for you" and maybe it's even true. But people are naturally sensitive to change and have become very accustomed to change meaning "something bad that makes your life tangibly worse." We owe everyone the same generosity we show to our trans brothers and sisters, don't we? Not everyone who's not trans is automatically a potentially transphobic, privileged piece of shit, guilty until proven innocent. Holy shit ... am I arguing that "all lives matter"? I guess they kind of do. "I think that there is a cohort of people in our political world now who have made a fetish of counterintuitivity and who have mistaken the absurdities and petty corruption of many liberals for an affirmative argument against any liberal ideals. And that is a powerfully stupid thing to become. Let me say this as directly as I can: adopting a politics that is merely the inverse of what you take to be contemporary liberalism does not make you any less of a follower. You’re still allowing your fundamental political identity to be derived from the beliefs of other people; that you’re trying to turn those beliefs 180 degrees doesn’t make you any more independent." "I’m asking you to be kind to a group of people who have become a political football in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, given the scope of our actual problems." All humans deserve dignity and comfort. Done. We have bigger fish to fry. Namely, the real possibility that there might not be any humans left to whom we can even give comfort, if we don't get on top of these little climate-change and nuclear-power-pissing-content problems. "[...] if it’s indeed true that ordinary people reject these values, is it not the case that the rights of trans people are the ones that are in jeopardy, not yours? And might it occur to you that, even if you feel some sort of personal revulsion at the idea of people with penises wearing dresses and people with XX chromosomes being referred to as “he,” the dictates of personal freedom should come first? If you’re a conservative, can you not focus on the wisest conservative value of all, which is the right to be left alone?" "I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems. Certainly this happened to many gay people, of the past several generations, finally coming out and living according to the dictates of their hearts, only to be reminded that openly gay people have to pay the rent and squeeze onto the subway and be subject to all of lives little indignities. Equal rights, I’m afraid, generally lead to lives of equal disappointment. I do hope that young LGBTQ people will understand that, beyond all of the Instagram memes telling them to love themselves, there’s still just this broken world." "[...] it is better, far better, to be able to say that you are the gender that you feel you are, that you love the people that you say you love, that (even if a bit crass) you are down to fuck the kind of people you want to fuck. It’s easy to be cynical about the gains we’ve had in the past several decades, as I frequently am, but the reality is that in the societies which have dedicated themselves to LGBTQ rights, the ability of people to love and live in a way consonant with their hearts is one of the most significant positive changes in our collective lives, a sign of genuine societal progress." Amen. [image] The article "What Goes On in the Public Bathrooms Where You're From, Exactly?" by Freddie deBoer is the follow-up I mentioned above. "I did what I usually do when it comes to this issue: I asked them what they want. Literally, what do you who oppose so-called “trans ideology” want? What do you want that trans people won’t let you have? What do you want to do, that trans people won’t let you do? This is very instructive, and I think it points to a core reality for a lot of this “gender critical” stuff: those who espouse it are mostly motivated by feelings that trans people are freakish or revolting or ungodly, but know that such arguments have little purchase in modern society, and so dress up those feelings in a lot of argumentative kabuki that doesn’t really add up." I usually ask, 'what should we do, specifically, with the group that you're railing against? What would it take for you to consider this issue to be resolved?' Plow 'em all into the nearest body of water? What is the endgame?' "[...] the anti-trans contingent talks about this issue as though the very status of having sex-segregated bathrooms amounts to a protection against assault. As I said, this logic seems bizarre to me - someone determined to sexually assault a woman in a bathroom is not going to be deterred by a sign or policy saying that that person can’t be in there." Perfectly average and non-psychotically conversative women do too, though. And it's not really about assault: it's about making the decidedly uncomfortable custom of using a public restroom even more uncomfortable. I advocate for individual stalls with sinks for everyone, like many places in Switzerland. No.gaps anywhere. Civilized. Obviously this a first-world problem and this is a first-world solution, but we can dare to dream, can't we? Still, maybe we could take this opportunity to address how terrible public-restroom infrastructure is for everybody rather than just shuffling the deck chairs. Or I guess you could hypnotize us all into having fewer hangups about public bathrooms. It's an uphill climb, though. We have little to nothing to do with strangers, but then we gather together into close places to expose the parts of our bodies that society has brainwashed us into thinking are our most private, and to perform some of the more noxious acts our bodies are capable of, in environs in which we're quite poorly shielded from one another, both visually and aurally. "My argument is that formal policies dictating sex segregations in bathrooms do nothing to actually reduce sexual assault, and can’t, and so the idea that women are losing an important protection is simply incorrect. There is no reason to believe that sex segregated bathrooms, which anyone can walk into at any time, actually protect against sexual assault" The taboo against someone being allowed to go into the wrong bathroom is strong, though. It's been built up over generations. People actively police it. Don't pretend you're stupid enough to think that a reduction in potential contact doesn't reduce incidents. Why the hell do you think they tell women not to walk down dark streets at night? What difference does it make which street they're on? By FDB's argument, rapists are going to find them on any public street anyway, if they really want to. Being able to intervene when seeing a man going into the women's bathroom makes it easier than having to wait until someone makes a move, already within the relative privacy of the bathroom. "Let me underline that last part. There is no credible evidence that the presence of transwomen in women’s bathrooms increases the prevalence of sexual assault or any other crime." The "there is no credible evidence" is disingenuous. We went through this with COVID. People cited the "testing parachutes" story ad nauseum. Sometimes you have to make a decision with little to no evidence because no evidence for or against exists, because the situation is too new for any data to have been gathered. For and against are both engaging in speculation, are both asking for things to be done based on gut feelings. You either have a gut feeling that allowing biologically male people into women's bathrooms will cause problems or you don't. You don't have any evidence either way (yet). But what I've heard from people who are not psychotic and hateful strangers online is that women are not afraid of actual transwomen. They are instead afraid that others, riding on easier access, will cause problems. It's debatable! Of course it's debatable. But the fear exists. And it causes discomfort. And it leads to pushback. I think it behooves us not to overestimate members of our own cisgender here (males) because they are capable of truly disgusting acts and many of them hold truly shocking opinions and attitudes, in their heart of hearts. Especially when drunk. While I admit that being able to prevent obvious males from entering women's bathrooms was a crude and shitty tool to prevent assault, but I'm not as ready to round its effectiveness down to zero as FDB is. "And if we acknowledge that sex segregated bathrooms do nothing to create an impediment to sexual assault, then the only way to seek to exclude transwomen from women’s bathrooms is to base that desire on the evidence-free claim that trans people are unusually likely to commit sex crimes." That's quite a leap, but again, I think that you're listening to all the shitty people online. That's not at all the argument I've heard when talking to relatively normal, real-life people. I've heard that women are worried, whether that's justified or not. Perhaps they just hate change. A lot of people hate change! Even if what they've gotten used to isn't particularly good for them or others -- or fair to themselves or others -- they're still going to cling to it, if only for its familiarity. The devil you know. It's a natural instinct to not consider what harm your lifestyle is doing to others, especially when you don't think you have it so great yourself. People are like this. Making an argument that condemns nearly everyone isn't very helpful (even if you're morally in the right). What I trying to say is, is that the reason they feel this way doesn't have to be overtly evil. There's room to work here, I think, but you can't just bull-in-a-china-shop accuse everyone who doesn't already agree with you of being transphobic. Well, you can, but that almost guarantees that your movement will stay pretty exclusive. That can't be what you want? Or maybe the tactic will work, who knows? Maybe you're exceedingly lucky and can buck the trend. Yelling at people that they're disappointing you doesn't usually work. It seems to work for getting people to buy a whole new wardrobe every season of every year, so what do I know? At any rate, women -- reasonably or unreasonably doesn't matter, 'cause its feelings -- see their collective discomfort and angst as being increased for the benefit of a handful of people -- people who were born male and now jump the line of victimhood ahead of women. Even if it will never personally affect them, it sticks in their craw. Not being careful here might mean pushing away a large group of potential allies by dismissing their concerns and calling them TERFs. Also: preventing actual physical assault is a pretty low bar. Women are concerned about all sorts of things. They're worried about assholes pretending to be trans to get their disgusting pervy selves into women's bathrooms. They're worried that they won't be able to taboo-shame them out of there anymore. They're worried that they'll feel less safe and they'll also be derided by a potential attacker that they know is only pretending to be trans for being anti-trans themselves. People are shitty. FDB seem to be temporarily ignoring how such social systems can be hacked. Just rounding up anyone with questions to TERFs is not productive, but you do you, Freddie. I personally think we should reduce contact with strangers when we're at our most vulnerable in public. I think we should stop peeing into drinking water. But I'm a weirdo. "I’ve never seen someone else’s penis because the way it works is, you go in, you keep your eyes trained at your feet, you pee in such a way as to minimize the chances of anyone else seeing your junk, you zip up, you wash your hands, and you walk out." You claim to be totally OK with it, but the way you've described the custom of public urination doesn't suggest anything comfortable about the experience. You're describing an inherently uncomfortable practice as if it's perfectly ok to feel mortified while micturating in public -- a screaming desire for privacy is hammered into a lot of us. The whole public-bathroom scene flies in the face of this. "This is where the TERFy element attacks me, a man, for talking about women’s spaces. But of course there are many millions of cisgender women who are trans-affirming and who welcome transwomen into women’s bathrooms, and I’m sure some of them will be very willing to express the same sentiments I’m expressing." Here's where I fear that FDB is discriminating based on intellect and ability to communicate. I'm hearing from him that anyone incapable of articulating their angst sufficiently eloquently and clearly for him is a TERF whose angst can be dismissed. I'm kind of surprised to see him come out this hard, but maybe I'm not getting what he's saying. It seems like he can't conceive of anyone having doubts without being full-on anti-trans. That's probably being ungenerous, but he's repeated himself several times now just in this essay, and that's what I'm hearing in all of these formulations. We can't possibly suddenly only care about trans feelings and not about ciswomen's feelings, can we? Or is anyone with the wrong misgivings an enemy who loses their right to speak on the topic because of those misgivings? Somehow, if you're not able to prove why you feel the way you do, you get ostracized rather than helped. Unless, of course, you're in one of the right minority groups whose completely justifiable feelings are what kicked this whole things off. Neat trick. Very progressive. It feels just like when society gets rid of jobs for the sake of progress, when no-one cares about helping those who will be affected to learn how to live in the brave new world. This is similar: let those dozens of millions of women who've kind of figured out public bathrooms -- let them figure out how to be enlightened on their own. If they can't? Fuck 'em. Backwoods hicks. I feel sometimes like FDB's brain is still in Brooklyn. Try thinking about the part of the country that isn't comfortable enough -- doesn't have enough free time -- to spend a ton of time getting their morals straight, who don't want change because it has historically almost always meant regress, not progress, for them. FBD is fighting the loud idiots online here. He's thinking of his friends in Brooklyn (I know he now lives somewhere that he almost certainly calls "upstate", but which can still see the glow of NYC on the horizon) and he's talking to idiots online. His comments section has a massive selection bias. I know we started off trying to help people, but God forbid you try to help anyone who gets in the way, even slightly, even temporarily, even unwittingly. I mean helping people who are not whatever fad-minority-of-the-moment it's popular to help. No-one got any likes online for trying to convince normal women to ease up a bit, it'll be OK, we'll get through this together. Trans people should be able to be just as uncomfortable in public as the rest of us. No more and no less. So maybe this is egalitarian? Distributing the extra discomfort that trans people have right now to the much-larger group that should pretty easily be able to accommodate it? But maybe pretending like you're asking for their help would ease the transition, I dunno. I know, I know, you shouldn't have to beg and cajole for rights! Being on the side of justice is one thing but, man, I wonder how just a little bit of sugar in some of these arguments might not go a long way. Some people are lost causes, of course, but you shouldn't just shitcan everyone else. You're only making things harder for yourself. "The question is whether we can protect the dignity and safety of trans people, the vast majority of whom simply want to live their lives, while we wait for them to do so." Absolutely, they should have as much dignity and comfort in public restrooms as I do, but that's a pretty low bar. I pretty much despise public restrooms. I despise the openness of urinals, but rue the waste of water that is peeing into a toilet. You're uncomfortable using what you think isn't the right bathroom for you? I'm uncomfortable using the only one I can reasonably claim as my own. And discomfort is often hindering to micturition. At least you have hope for change for the better. 🤷‍♀️ ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4935 2024-02-04T20:35:48+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

cites another article " The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic?" by Ian Bogost , which detailed what it was like using one of these tools to investigate your own paper, a paper which the author knows is beyond reproach. [How a plagiarism detector works] 💩 However dumb you might think the algorithm is, it's even dumber than that. The machine does an initial run and spits out a terrible score. Every document is plagiarized, by default. It's up to you to determine what to do with that score. If you're actually interested in detecting real plagiarism, then you'll analyze the results and tweak the input parameters. If you're just interested in getting a black-box result from a tool that you can claim is authoritative, which says that an enemy plagiarized their work, then you can stop right there. The machine has provided you with the F.U.D. that you require. Bogost used iThenticate -- which is, apparently, related to Turnitin -- to test. I have no familiarity with either of these tools. He took a closer look and noticed that the tool doesn't actually detect plagiarism. It detects similarities in text to other published texts. If you have written a popular paper that has been cited in other papers afterwards, then the tool will cheerily tell you that large sections of your paper is also contained in other papers and let the lazy -- or duplicitous -- user simply round that up to plagiarism. His initial analysis of his ~68k-word thesis yielded a result that 74% of the text was replicated in other documents. A facile interpretation would round that up to a shocking level of plagiarism. He had to manually filter out works that had been published after his, that were citing his paper -- because why should the tool do that automatically? The software knows all of the publication dates, doesn't it? It could do it, but it doesn't. There's a checkbox to "exclude bibliography", which causes the software to suddenly recognize that work copied from other works that have been referenced is OK and not plagiarism. A similar checkbox no longer flagged quoted material that had been footnoted, which, again, seems like a no-brainer to enable by default. The text "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission." was also flagged as having been found in other works. No kidding. 🫤 There were many other common phrases that it threw up as noise -- because having the phrase "to preserve the" can't in any sane world be considered to have been copied. It flagged proper names, titles, etc. It flagged phrases as having been copied from work that had absolutely nothing to do with the document being analyzed -- something a human would never, ever do. If you're writing a thesis on Shakespeare and there is a sentence or two that matches exactly two sentences found in an analysis of taxoplasmosis in Belgian cats, then no-one would imagine in their most feverish dreams that you'd stolen those two filler sentences from that paper. But this software cheerily flags it as "found in other works". Bravo. So, the software is doing no work to help you actually detect copies. It seems to filter nothing out, despite costing $300 to run against this one paper. That seems like a nice, lucrative business. It seems like the tool's default settings are to pump the possible plagiarisms as high as possible. Again, it's probably more lucrative that way. Whether there's a knock-on effect of insufficiently substantiated accusations of plagiarism doesn't matter to the company peddling the service. They've almost certainly excluded themselves from liability in a EULA. I imagine that most people will lend these tools far too much credence because there will be no downside to their doing so, and the upside is that they personally spend much less time checking for plagiarism. Whether there is plagiarism or not will soon be determined by the output of these tools. That is, with plagiarism being such a vague topic for most, they won't notice when the standard changes. That the standard changes because of laziness and corporate greed doesn't seem to matter, either. It will just change. Long story short: when someone says that they used a tool to detect plagiarism, it means essentially nothing on its own. Before you lend any weight to that "evidence", you have to find out more details. [Coming up with a good slogan is hard] I wish Norman had made his point that it's the politics of the slogan that's important. Briahna was right that you can't force a slogan down people's throats. But I wish she'd understood that he was saying that you can't force people to like your slogan and stop misinterpreting it, either. This would be an opportunity to say: what would be a better slogan? To collaborate with detractors to figure out what is wrong with the slogan. What is wrong with "from the river to the sea"? Is it that Palestinians should have rights at all? Or that it seems like there should be one state? Without Israelis? Without Jews? What does it mean? As Norman said, there is room for interpretation there. You can't not acknowledge that. Briahna's right that there are some people who will be offended no matter what, because those people's beef is with Palestinians having rights at all. But you also can't just ignore that a slogan has been made politically charged. Well, you can, but you do so at your own peril. At least be honest about what the drawbacks might be. The drawback might be that your opponents manage to pigeonhole your entire movement into insignificance by convincing a large part of the public that you're all terrorists. Talk to people who read the New York Times -- they definitely already think this. This tactic has worked before. Finkelstein is old enough to know. Briahna is frustrated and ready to say 'screw it'. It's hard to say who's right. Capitulation to relentless, unyielding, and perennially unreasonable opponents? Or resignation to possible irrelevance and a lost cause? I thought it was interesting when Finkelstein said that Martin Luther King didn't want Stokely Carmichael to push the "black power" slogan because he was quite certain that it would be interpreted by those in power as "we're taking away your power", which, in many ways, they definitely wanted to, right? They wanted to take away the white power that whites should never have been able to arrogate to themselves in the first place. But it's threatening and endangering to the project of equality. It's not exactly jettisoning allies, but it's making it much more difficult for people to become allies. It's going to make them wonder what they're actually advocating for. You want to be as clear as possible. "Equal rights for all" is a good slogan. [You can't win 'em all] She makes a good point that it's patronizing to tell people who've been chanting a slogan for 50 years that they don't understand what they mean by it. But she's slightly off again, in that Norman is saying that they know what they mean by it, but they should be explicitly aware of the political ramifications of continuing to use a slogan that can be used as a weapon against them. There is no easy answer: if you capitulate, then your opponents will smell blood in the water and outlaw any slogan you come up with. Meanwhile, people who continue to use a slogan that the movement has acknowledged is potentially problematic will immediately be upgraded to the status of terrorists advocating for the elimination of all Jews. They will point to the agreement to stop using the slogan as justification for this, arguing that no-one would use the slogan unless they really meant the bad thing that we grudgingly agreed it might mean in the most ungenerous possible interpretation. It is possible that there is no winning against opposition like this! I almost agree with Briahna that we should just say "fuck 'em" before investing a single second trying to appease opponents who will expressly never be appeased. But I think she argues inelegantly in that she jumps to the conclusion without once acknowledging Norman's argument that there are political drawbacks -- some quite severe and potentially movement-ending -- to doing so. They often talk past one another like this. They're so close to agreement, but neither is capable of fully formulating their argument in a way that the other would be able to accept the "yes, but" and be done with it, even after half-an-hour of discussion. At 2:13:30, she finally summarizes her position quite well, though, "[...] bad-faith actors -- people with an agenda -- are going to do and say what they got to do to press their agenda and at a certain point you cannot spend your entire life running away from the criticism of people who are never going to agree with you. If you're in a place where you're talking to good-faith people and they find a slogan so pernicious that someone who otherwise would be on your team isn't going to be on your team, fine, but the example that you raised with your friend: either she's down with the Zionist project or she isn't and if she isn't, that's fine, but she was never going to be on the 'From The River To The Sea, Palestine Must Be Free" team anyway." I think there's the problem, though. "From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free." doesn't mean "end the Zionist project" to everyone. It doesn't even mean that to people to most people actually chanting it. Right after that, she goes off quite eloquently (which is kind of awesome). "[...] it is a trap, in and of itself, it is a trap to thwart the momentum of a movement and to distract people from doing what they should be doing to advance righteous causes, to [instead] be stuck on a hamster wheel, trying to convince people who are being paid to disagree with you, whose incentive structure is set up to disagree with you, and I don't care anymore. I'm tired of tiptoeing around not saying that things that are blatantly racist are racist because some yokel [...] somewhere is going to think poorly of it. I have extended so much grace to these people and the returns on that investment are not worth it to me at this point." I do think that it's dangerous to have your political tactics and even strategy be a reaction to the worst people you hear from online. You don't have to engage with them. No-one is saying you have to engage with the most horrible people. You just have to be aware to what degree you're rounding up everyone who disagrees with you to the group of people who call you a monkey online. Don't let the din of malicious actors numb you into being completely impervious to all criticism -- even valid criticism. [Letting them get to you] That is the danger: that you become the kind of person who dismisses anyone who doesn't already agree with everything they have to say, including signing on to the interpretation of a slogan which, quite frankly, people only chose because it rhymes in English. If more than half of the people to whom you're directing the slogan -- the people you're trying to convince of the rightness of your cause, the people whom you're trying to convince to help you achieve justice -- are misunderstanding the implication and are afraid of being ostracized for using the slogan or for associating with people who do, then you have a problem that you have to look squarely in the face. If your reply is "I don't care," that may be the smartest reply given the situation. But it might also be too easy. Because you have to at least explicitly acknowledge that your cause may end with that slogan, that this will be the thing that your opponents use -- rightly or wrongly -- to torpedo your whole cause. And they won't care how unfair or shockingly meretricious they behaved in getting what they wanted. They will have won because they managed to make you and your movement inconsequential. You will have died on the hill of the slogan when your original goal was to gain freedom for a people. And also because -- even just a little bit -- it became about you. It became about you not giving in to trolls. And that's the shitty thing about trolls: they win either way, as long as you engage. Even by not engaging, by continuing to do what you were going to do, their influence over what others think about what you're doing and saying and advocating for might end up being what matters. You'll end up sitting there, staring at the shambles of your movement, wondering where it went wrong, how it is that you lost support. [People suckare difficult] What went wrong is that building movements is about convincing a bunch of ADHD adults to care, to be empathetic. And your opponents just have to appeal to the inner asshole in a bunch of anonymous people. It's an uphill climb, to say the least. [Perceived versus actual security] Right at the end, there was a segment of Krystal Ball's show with a cohost (who I didn't recognize). I think she (Joy) thought the segment would show that the Congressman being interviewed was no longer able to just push people into silence by implying that they're anti-semitic. What it looked like to me was that the Congressman was actually quite reasonably asking the host to have some empathy with the Israeli people, who fear for their lives. This is absolutely true! They 100% fear for their lives! I've spoken with some of them. They think that an attack on their country is imminent, not from Gaza, but from the north, from Lebanon. They're positively paranoid about Iran. Just because I empathize with the pain and fear they must be feeling doesn't mean I lend credence to their feeling that they're going to be invaded. They're deluded, but they're still in pain, is the point. They're not unlike Americans that way, who see danger in every corner, despite being some of the most secure people on the planet (at least from military attack). I thought that the Congressman said that quite well and quite eloquently, at least at first. Once the host badgered him more, he quickly fell back on the hoary tropes of a perennially persecuted people, of ghettos and pogroms. None of that has relevance today. The people in Israel have lived in safety for generations by now. They haven't had a single thing to legitimately fear for 60 years. They make up all of this shit so that they can bristle outwards and justify preemptive aggression in the service of colonialism and empire-building (if much more modest, of course, than papa bear's). Speaking of papa bear: this is the same thing that the US does. Talk to an American and you will hear of ludicrous fears that they legitimately feel. It's been like this for generations in that country, as well. They think the Russians are going to invade. I get stuff from my father-in-law with intricate plans of how the Chinese are going to make a pincer movement from the Canadian and Mexican borders. Their pain is real. We can empathize with it without believing in the things that cause it. So, no, I don't think that the clip showed what they thought it showed. It was more a kind of dunking on a guy who was actually trying to be reasonable. The guy said he empathizes with Palestinians. He said that he also empathizes with Israelis. Ask him what he means by that exactly rather than just assuming that he uses it as code for saying that he supports the extermination of Palestinians. Stop trying to go for a win for yourself and figure out if you can get the guy to hang himself. Imagine if you'd expressed empathy for the people of Israel, most of whom are just as trapped in the fear-spiral of bad foreign policy and a completely morally bankrupt leadership and media as Americans are. Imagine if you'd asked him what he thought they feared, exactly. What are we being asked to empathize with? The fear that Hezbollah will attack? Or the fear that they won't get a cheap home in a new settlement in Gaza? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4924 2024-01-07T20:49:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4871 2023-12-29T13:14:03+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4782 2023-12-28T13:33:02+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes, "According to a social worker's report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn't kick the child out, and wouldn't subject the child to conversion" ... ]]>

writes, "According to a social worker's report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn't kick the child out, and wouldn't subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don't reflect someone's biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the child to remain chaste. The social worker recommended approval of their application with conditions for LGBT and religious issues, but DCF's Licensing Review Team rejected the application." [image]Look, I feel that this article would have been written differently if the couple had been Muslim and had expressed the exact same opinions. We have to be honest about the fact that we're only getting annoyed about restrictions based on ideological grounds when those restrictions affect us. You know, ... white, upstanding Christians. People are getting butt-hurt because classically religious stances are being viewed as increasingly intolerant and as not fit for prospective adoptive parents. This is just one more case of people being incapable of understanding that norms change -- and sometimes those that benefited for a long time will all of a sudden find themselves on the wrong end of the stick. If the couple had said that they would beat their child if it misbehaved, almost no-one today would think it odd if they'd been rejected as adoptive parents. This would not have been a reason to reject those parents 60 years ago. Norms change. If we're being honest, it is perhaps not too much to ask that people who adopt a child agree to allow the child to develop in a normal, healthy way that works best for the child rather than a way that fits into the worldview of the parents. If a child is homosexual or trans, then it is preferable to have parents who would be understanding and flexible in that situation rather than just dropping the God-hammer. That was the original recommendation, if you read carefully. But there are some restrictions that certainly raise eyebrows. Like, making sure the child is "chaste", whatever the hell that means. I think everyone wants children to be chaste. Anything else is pedophilia. You don't have to mention that one explicitly. So, the prospective mother must have meant chaste beyond the age that most people would consider it normal for a person to become sexually active in this day and age. So for how much longer did Catherine expect chastity? Does the adopted child have to wait until it's married? Does it get to make its own choices about when or whether or whom it marries? Religious couples tend to be very cultish and they've enjoyed a tremendously long period during which no-one ever called them on their bullshit because they could hide behind a holier-than-thou screen. I think it's OK to be a bit more leery of this level of fanaticism -- seeing it for what it is. We don't want to let fanatics adopt if we can help it. As I noted above, if the couple had been Muslim, the article would never have been written because it would have been obvious to everyone that Islamic proscriptions on child-rearing are not compatible with a modern society [1], whereas it's only recently that secular societies have been calling Christians on the same kind of bullshit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Here I'm describing the accepted wisdom in Western countries, as it feels. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4821 2023-12-28T12:54:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4814 2023-12-28T12:19:43+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes, "Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable. "The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this" ... ]]>

writes, "Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable. "The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic." I wonder whether the author doesn't have have a completely different axe to grind here. [1] As I just covered in the article "What is your responsibility to the feelings of others?" , it's not at all as simple as he makes it out to be. He thinks it's simple because he's righteous about his representation of the oppressed. When he writes that "the things they had to say were not comfortable", it's entirely possible that people came into existing forums -- contexts -- and started calling everyone a white-supremacist, misogynist, homophobic Nazi who didn't match the speech patterns they'd learned to expect from other forums. If you're just pootling along, minding your own business and someone tells you you're a Nazi, it throws you off. You know you're not a Nazi, but now you're on the defensive, having to justify yourself to an extremely hostile and strongly opinionated stranger. I have no idea if that's what's happening in these forums, but tend to believe that calling it a "tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them" is probably the least-generous interpretation. He complains that his post was quickly moderated off of the front of Hacker News. Maybe it wasn't being censored, but just being judged appropriately. I'd read the post to be overly long and was also on a subject and with a voice that doesn't really match anything else on Hacker News. Maybe it should be! But it's not. It's like saying that Popular Mechanics banned an article about how to apply eyeliner. I guess they could have just let it get ignored out of existence, but instead it was banned. Sure, fine, maybe there's a problem. Or maybe the author has made enough of a pain-in-the-ass of himself that he just gets a-priori banned now. [image]There is a difference between defending free speech and defending a person's right to say what they want, no matter the context. If you're going to Thanksgiving dinner at you're aunt's house, then I'm not going to stand there and defend your right to say "cunt" throughout the meal, discomfiting everyone else and ruining the evening (or, most likely, afternoon). You're allowed to say the word, and you should legally allowed to say it in any public context, but be prepared for some pushback. You can even say it at Thanksgiving, in a private context, but expect to be thrown out of the house if you persist. There are consequences. You have to respect a person's right not to want to hear certain words or topics in private areas that they control. It's just like I can write the word "cunt" on my own personal blog and very rightly claim that anyone who doesn't like it, doesn't have to come here and read my blog. But when my mom says I use too many bad words, maybe I'll change how I write. [2] Look, it's not a terrible idea to consider your audience or the context. It may even help your improve your voice and make it more generally accessible. Don't change what you're saying, for God's sake! But maybe think about how your'e saying it. That goes for both the troglodytes inhabiting certain forums -- who maybe aren't even aware they're troglodytes! -- as well as those who invade those forums, bristling to tell everyone else what to do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I follow the author's blog and know that, even in his own world, he's considered very contentious. He has strong opinions. I'm not surprised that he's going to assume that everyone is less enlightened than he is. If I've misinterpreted, I apologize, but it doesn't really matter, because I'm just using this as a jumping-off point for my own opinion, anyway. Which is also strong and almost-certainly contentious. 🤷‍♀️ [1] This actually happened a long time ago, and I still think about it every time I write "fuck" for emphasis. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4824 2023-12-28T11:04:15+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4859 2023-12-28T10:30:26+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, we learn that, "Rep. Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who volunteered for the IDF, compared Palestinian civilians in Gaza to Nazis: “I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.”" This is a sitting U.S. Congressman, who volunteered for a foreign army in 2015 (Israel), five years after he'd had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He has a Bachelor's degree from the "Harvard University Extension School", which he somehow earned with only a year of effort after having been in the IDF. He must get up very early in the morning. He's now a Congressman. He thinks that the people in the concentration camps with the vastly inferior firepower are the Nazis. Incredible. It's like a mental illness. However! I recognize his right to say and do these things, just as I recognize my own right to condemn him for his hypocrisy and inhumanity. Which one of us should be allowed to express their opinion? Him? Me? Both? Neither? Nothing good comes of granting the right to censorship. Instead, we should combat bad ideas with better ideas. We should always try to determine why bad ideas are so appealing. We should think about who is promulgating these bad ideas. We should wonder why we think those are bad ideas. And then we have to put in the hard work of convincing people otherwise rather than hitting them over the head with a stick. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4800 2023-12-28T09:45:25+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4826 2023-12-27T22:09:46+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4899 2023-12-16T23:38:19+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4888 2023-12-10T15:53:22+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

for my analysis of another recent video. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4879 2023-12-10T15:45:41+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I know that this part seems utterly obvious to those of you who know us. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4813 2023-12-03T21:53:15+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4860 2023-11-12T15:04:47+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

or "Slavoj Žižek on Israel and Palestine (17.10.2023, Frankfurter Buchmesse" ) -- I find him intelligent and entertaining and almost always worth listening to. [A muddled take] I wanted to focus, though, on the conversation at around 01:03:00, where he talks about Ukraine. Ever since he began writing on about Ukraine/Russia, I have been having a really hard time reconciling his opinion on that war with pretty much any other opinion he's expressed since I started following him a couple of decades ago. I've written about this before -- most recently and at length in "Has Slavoj Žižek been taken hostage?" (22.06.2022) and "On Žižek and Russia" (04.12.2022) -- and have some more thoughts below. He begins by pointing out that we wouldn't be at the point of talking about a stalemate if NATO hadn't provided Ukraine with weapons. This is a point he's made before, as noted above, but I feel he still doesn't support it very well because he doesn't explain why he's ignoring a vast swath of history and background. [1] He can't help but view the Russians as an evil with which one cannot negotiate. He's damaged goods in that sense. He talks of Russia as the Israelis talk of Palestinians, as Americans talk of anyone non-American. Anyway, after several repetitions on Žižek's part and re-readings on mine, I'm starting to understand where he's coming from -- he sounded unhinged at first -- but I still feel he's deeply screwed up the analysis on this one, and is just doubling down, hoping he'll be borne out somehow. What I think he should be saying is that, given that we've already ignored Russia's concerns over the decades, given that we drove NATO right up to its borders, given that we organized a coup in Ukraine, given that we propped up a corrupt president in Ukraine and supported the worst elements of their society, given that we lied to Russia about adhering in any way to the Minsk accords, given that we did everything we possibly could to provoke Russia into committing a war crime, then, yes, we should actually put our money where our mouth is and now help defend the country that we fucked up/helped fuck up so badly that it's ended up where it is now. [Ignoring the historical context] It would be nice for him to at least once admit that none of this had to happen. I don't think I've once heard him say that Ukraine would have been far better off if the U.S. had never approached it. I don't think I've once heard him admit that Ukraine would have gotten a much better deal at the start of this war. He still says things like, "Are we aware that Ukraine at least didn't lose only because of our help? To have this position now -- kind of a WWI stalemate -- it's precisely because we were helping Ukraine. So, at least retroactively, all those who are pro-peace should acknowledge that we are in this position to say, at least Ukraine have a chance to survive only because we were helping Ukraine." Not once does he acknowledge how many people died for his being able to say something like that. And it's not even true. Ukraine is in a much-worse bargaining position than it was two years ago. He's ignoring so much history there. He just yells at pacifists, demanding that they admit that pacifism is a sham and that -- perhaps only sometimes, but his argument isn't clear here -- war is the only way of dealing with some people. [Channeling Dick Cheney] So, yes, I think he still sounds like a raving lunatic on this topic. I can't see any daylight between his position and that of any war-hawk American, other than an improved eloquence. He sounds like a neocon. Dick Cheney could have made the statement above, FFS. 🤦‍♂️ What he's actually saying is, given how badly we've fucked up Ukraine using them as the tip of NATO's spear, this is the best they can hope for. Not once does he consider that Ukraine might have been much better off had it never been used as NATO's spear in the first place. I've never heard him mention NATO's role in this. I can't imagine he's ignorant of it. He just doesn't seem to think it's relevant. Or he doesn't care because he's so busy doubling down on his original bad take from a year-and-a-half ago that was based on his knee-jerk Russophobia. He's never once talked about how bad it's been for any country, especially Ukraine, to be friends with NATO, as a proxy of the United States. [Is there any hope for Ukraine?] Aaron continues the discussion later, at 01:11:00, "Aaron: you mentioned Russia/Ukraine. What's the correct position for a leftist on Russia/Ukraine? I read an amazing piece in Time Magazine, the average person on the front line for Ukraine now is 43 years old. There's clearly a military stalemate. Žižek: It's extremely difficult, I think. [...] I think that Ukraine needs our support at least to maintain this stalemate. I think it's too risky to say okay it's a stalemate, let's stop supporting Ukraine. Aaron: But that's a permanent war. So it should be like Syria? Žižek: Yeah, but what is the alternative? If you simply stopped supporting Ukraine... Aaron: Oh, I'm not suggesting that. But you're saying, rather than a negotiated settlement -- which, I agree, wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on -- fine. But what you're proposing is a sort-of permanent, low-level war between Russia and Ukraine forever [sic]. Which is maybe the best you can hope for, I don't know. Žižek: That's what I am tempted to suggest. It's a very sad position." [image] [image] After this part, Žižek goes into how crazy it is that Ukraine is outlawing leftists because they suspect them of being pro-Russia, which he calls madness. It's not, though, not really. Actions like that are just bog-standard consolidations of power: outlawing critical voices by accusing them of something the public will be happy to crucify them for. It's just stupid, power-mongering propaganda, no different than when the Nazis used it by calling people Jew-lovers, no different than when U.S. presidential candidates call each other "soft on China" or "soft on Russia". It's an old story, and I'm surprised that Žižek doesn't see it for what it is. I would expect that he, of all people, would have provided some historical examples from Bolshevik or Stalinist Russia. It's great to see that they agree that any accord between Ukraine and Russia wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on -- but they think Russia is the one that wouldn't hold to it, because they're so steeped in propaganda about how duplicitous Russia is. But it's actually the U.S. and its proxy NATO that can't seem to honor signed agreements that they later find inconvenient. The best Žižek can hope for, for Ukraine, is a forever war that keeps eating up its male citizens until there are none left. A lack of fantasy, on his part, I think. Also, a shocking lack of empathy. [Ukraine as "Ship of Theseus"] Žižek simply can't acknowledge the obvious: that's it's only a temporary stalemate. Ukraine is running out of people. What's the next step? To continue to defend Ukraine long after there is no Ukraine? To replace soldiers with NATO soldiers from the U.S. and Europe in a sort of "Ship of Theseus" army? He, of all people, should appreciate the irony that his position is currently, "we will have to destroy Ukraine in order to save it." The country effectively doesn't exist now, but might be able to get back to somewhere reasonable, after several decades. They were doing poorly before the war, relative to neighbors. Now what? He says to just. Keep. Going. He sounds like a neocon. He's formulating it as "continue increasing support Ukraine up until boots on the ground for NATO" vs. "dropping Ukraine like a hot rock". What about "use our power for a negotiated settlement rather than supporting the pointless slaughter of the rest of the Ukrainian population?" People should really push back on him more -- although Aaron did try, I'll give him that. [What could the end of the war look like?] Of course, Ukraine will lose land in this negotiated settlement. That's reality. You can't make it go away by pursuing a fantasy outcome in which Russia suddenly loses because of a deus ex machina, like in a fucking movie (or "fil-im", as Žižek would say it). What's the end game? Nuke Russia to convince them to back off? What the fuck is the strategy here, Žižek? You're being ludicrously obstinate on this point because you don't want to accept what's right before your eyes. Some of us saw it almost two years ago, when this whole shitshow started. We predicted exactly this situation, at best. At worst, Russia would have taken more of Ukraine. There is no good solution, and certainly not one where Zelensky is a hero, saving the day at the end of the movie. The longer this goes on, the shittier Ukraine's position. You're just watching your guy get slaughtered in the ring. Throw in the towel. You can't win in the way you think you can. Cut your losses. This attitude of his is madness -- and maddening. He seems incapable of being realistic. [Immigration in Europe] They end by talking about immigration and how we need to stop it, but from the viewpoint of: We should be helping create environments on the planet from which people don't want to flee, rather than creating environments from the which they do. Žižek cites a more right-wing colleague from Germany who told Žižek that he thinks we shouldn't be spending money on ferries or accommodations in Germany, that we should spend that money in Tunisia, or wherever, to make their country worth living in. Of course, that this comes from a right-wing person is probably wildly hypocritical, as they probably also support God knows how many policies that lead directly to the enshitification of exactly the countries from which these people are moving, but that doesn't mean what he's saying there isn't correct. In this case, they are correct. If we can't stop ourselves from stealing the wealth of other countries, we should at least spend the money we do allocate on alleviating their suffering people by trying to fix some of the problems we causing by raping their countries. The West profits immensely from most of the countries that produce the most immigrants, either through arms sales to the dictators that they prop up there, by pillaging their natural resources, or from agricultural catastrophes engendered by the rapacious marketing policies of supranational global conglomerates whose profits flow directly to the west and its elites. Or all three. Aaron tells a story his father told him, My father's Iranian, [...] I remember saying to him, 'Oh, look at these Afghans, they're going to Iceland.' And he said, 'listen to me, son. No Afghan wants to go to Iceland. You're born in this naturally fertile country, amazing history, beautiful weather -- less so the last 40 or 50 years -- but historically, it was a very fertile, peaceful place. And you end up in a place -- not to besmirch Iceland -- you go to a place where you don't see the sun for three months. No Afghan grows up as a child and says, you know what? I don't wanna see the sun for three months and I wanna live in -10ºC for six months.' That's a really powerful point and I think that a lot of European liberals, progressives, don't understand that. There's this kind of strange -- it's not racism -- it's a European superiority where they say 'well of course they want to come here. We're better!' Many of them [immigrants] are coming because of war, sanctions, occupation, capitalist underdevelopment ... but that seems completely absent from that conversation. It's like the people who talk about the "volunteer homeless". Currently homeless people are choosing to be homeless only because being in a shelter is worse. They see being homeless as the best of the terribly shitty options that they have available right now. They don't "choose homelessness" because they're fulfilling some sort of childhood dream. At 01:33:00, Žižek concurs, saying, "I would totally agree with your father I. don't know how, but the problem should be solved there in those lands -- okay we shouldn't now invade Iran. but we should at least reflect on how we also screwed it up with our politics." We screwed it up with our piracy. We continue to do so. Empire has no principle preventing its raping and pillaging. Pure and simple. Sauber und glatt. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Maybe he's too close to it. I remember when Justin Smith-Ruiu was writing about Maidan after having visited Ukraine and seemed too close to that situation to be willing to examine NATO's role as Empire in the unfolding of events. In "Truthiness in Ukraine" , I wrote that, "[...] somehow the alternative, that a current imperial power increase its dominion, is assumed even by someone like Smith to be somehow preferable to anything that the Russians could offer. [...] The underlying benevolence of Western hegemony infects even Justin’s work these days. [...] I am almost astonished to note that Smith thinks he is describing only Putin's regime [...]" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4844 2023-11-01T22:25:09+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4843 2023-10-25T22:10:55+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

came across my feeds. It means "Ominous silence: Timmy (9) has still not spoken out about the situation in Israel." Indeed. Timmy is "sus" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4786 2023-09-09T22:39:32+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4769 2023-08-27T03:13:52+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses the idea of a language monoculture, playing with the idea that, if a language can be translated to any other language, what is the need for learning the target language? "In Europe, nine out of 10 students" ... ]]>

discusses the idea of a language monoculture, playing with the idea that, if a language can be translated to any other language, what is the need for learning the target language? "In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same. "At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology. "Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable." That's exactly the arrogance I expect from someone who has no respect for communicating with others, someone who doesn't consider at all the burden imposed on others by their own need to communicate in only a single language. Americans can often be[image] kind of bad at this. They have no respect for their own language, so they have no trouble at all considering a "serviceable" translation adequate for the vassals of their empire. I just cannot conceive of what life will be like for the poor empirical subjects who get to mediate their communications through shitty, inadequate apps -- and they will be shitty and inadequate, but most people won't notice -- even though they can speak English. I'm not sure what the play here is, though. Most people are barely capable of learning their native language -- and most fail miserably at that. What's the point of learning a second language even less well? Maybe knowing multiple languages is a form of snobbery. I would, of course, concur, but snobs never think that they're snobs. Instead, I think that learning languages teaches you how to learn other things better, it reveals connections between cultures, it allows you to empathize better. I'm not at all surprised to hear that Americans are trying to automate it because the members of this culture -- even the best exemplars of it -- seems to be congenitally incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves. They buy the myth that they can all have as much of what they happen to like -- and there is no need to consider any repercussions or consequences. If you can afford it, you can have it. I just had a conversation with very nice people who could only conceive of the concept of not using too much water in the shower if you, as in a camp shower, actually had to physically pay directly for it. Otherwise, if the boiler can pump it, it's yours. It appears magically. But I digress. Maybe with languages, it will be sufficient to have a machine write your intent and hope for the best. These people have long since given up on the notion of connecting with strangers, or even considering members of other countries to be human, so they're not giving up much. Right now, the machines mangle everything and will lead to more miscommunication, but when I see how Americans deal with their own culture in English, they're just exporting what they do to each other to the rest of the world. Perhaps it's up to the rest of the world to resist it better. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4767 2023-08-13T16:11:13+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes, "In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as" ... ]]>

writes, "In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as it had promoted its other series, like Hawkeye. She first posted this opinion on TikTok, and after people agreed with her, she brought the same video to Instagram. "“It went viral in a very bad way,” Dholakia says. Instead of support, or civil discussion, she was met with comments like “F*ck you you clout chasing b*tch.” "“It made me feel so self-conscious, that maybe I don’t need to say stuff,” she says. Dholakia, who is 31 years old and aspiring to a full-time career as a travel agent, had been sharing more on social media to build business opportunities, but the incident exposed the challenges of virality. “I try not to mess up, try not to stir the pot, and that’s probably why I’m not going to get anywhere on social media,” she concedes. “Because if you don’t stir the pot or you don’t put yourself out there in a very raw, authentic way, then why are people watching you?” "Dholakia grew up in an online environment that encourages users to share everything from their thoughts on politics to their takes on pop culture. But as the online landscape has grown into an all-encompassing digital town square, experiences like Dholakia’s have prompted her and other former social media power users to throw their hands up and admit “opinion fatigue.”" This is just incredible, really, a completely alien lifestyle -- almost another culture or species. The degree to which people don't understand how humanity works is astounding. They think that they have unfettered access to only positive feedback when they publish to the whole world at once on a very public platform. Just. Tell. Your. Friends. FFS. The Internet is not your friends. I suppose it starts with a 31-year-old who "aspires" to be a travel agent as the interview subject. That an actual online magazine thought to interview this obvious dodo is astounding. That she is offended that the world doesn't have overwhelmingly positive feedback for her opinions is icing on the cake. When she gets negative feedback, her answer is to "throw [her] hands up" and stop trying. That goes a long way to explaining why she's still "aspiring" to be something that is no longer relevant today (a travel agent), at 31 years old. "“People feel like they finally have a voice,” says Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab. “People want to feel validated. ‘Do you agree with me? What do you think?’ And just trying to keep up that engagement is a game in itself.”" Next is a Ph.D. from the "Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab". JFC. Do I even need to go on? "People want to feel validated." Of course they do. But is it useful for society to reward everyone for every goddamned thing that falls out of their undereducated heads? That's what you have friends for: to help you figure out which opinions are bone-headed and which ones aren't. Since they're your friends, they might let you down easier (depending on what kind of friends you have). The Internet is not obliged to treat your completely unknown and anonymous ass in the same way. For God's sake, this is not rocket science. If you want to post something, post it on your own private site and don't allow comments -- or only allow moderated comments, or ... whatever. Stop seeking the validation of strangers instead of people you know and love, is, I think, what I'm saying here. Blogs were already the correct solution at the beginning; they're the correct solution now. Stop trying to be viral and stop trying to figure out how to turn a single opinion of yours into a career. Just stop. Society doesn't need your bullshit. "[...] silence on a prominent political or social issue can be interpreted as complicity. It took Taylor Swift three years to disavow white supremacy after the Daily Stormer referred to her as “pure Aryan goddess,” revealing her status as an (unintentional) neo-Nazi idol. She told Rolling Stone in 2019 that she wasn’t aware of how her image had been co-opted and attributed her silence to a “sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won.” For much of the public, however, this explanation was too little, too late." This entire paragraph is utter nonsense. This is no way to run a society. Why in God's name are people so stupid and petty? Who cares what other people think? You have to officially come out against white supremacy now? Because if you don't, people will think you're totally for it. Fuck those people, then. They're just karma-whoring on your reputation (especially TV shows in the traditional media, BTW). Do not give in to them and allow them to control how to waste your time. Similarly, the excellent interview "Susan Neiman on Why Left ≠ Woke" by Yascha Mounk included a few prima facie declarations that seemed jarring to me. "The idea that there would be an African American intellectual sitting in the White House for eight years was just not something that anybody imagined at the time. Racism is too deep, long-lasting and, in some ways, systemic a phenomenon to be ended in one generation. But there was enormous progress." They just had to find a black man who would be a smiling, sadistic asshole like all the others. Which is why the question of class is much more important than race. Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas are what many would consider to be the right color, but they are members of an elite to which they pledge much stronger fealty than to members of the cohort defined by their shared skin color. That much should be utterly obvious. As Kanye West said, George Bush doesn't care about black people. Neither does Barack Obama. Barack Obama cares about himself and his rich friends. If they're all adequately cared for, then he might have some empathy left over for members outside of his class, but that's only a side-effect of the main thrust of his efforts, which aim to further enrich himself and the elite to which long aspired to belong, and to which he has belonged for decades. If he didn't do this thing, he would never have become president. "[...] if people agree with you on the main thesis of what you've been talking about, and they think of themselves as left-wing, and they’re in a milieu that is very left-wing, and they’re worried about making the points you just made to the friends and colleagues and so on, do you have any advice for how to speak up for those ideas without ceasing to be in good standing with your leftist social circle?" What the fuck is wrong with people? They seem obsessed with pleasing blinkered idiots who are in their "social circles". Why? Who cares what amoral fools think? Just say what you're going to say and let them digest it. If they can't? Reformulate. But don't give in on your principles unless you think you got something wrong. The opinions of strangers are more-or-less meaningless. If you know their credentials and respect their opinion, then go ahead and lend their opinion weight; otherwise, you can safely ignore the hysterical reactions of strangers online. It's all just fake Internet points anyway. And, maybe -- just maybe -- you could consider having discussions with a smaller circle than "the whole world", where you don't run such a large risk of reputational loss if an unrefined opinion should slip out of you. That's what private discussions are for -- to bounce ideas and opinions off of people you trust to give you the benefit of the doubt before you show the whole world. People are skipping that step and are mystified why it doesn't seem to be working for them. "[...] speak up. You will find that many more people agree with you and will say things like “I was going to say that but I was afraid.” That’s happened to me many, many times." Or, if you address too large and anonymous a group, you'll find out why those people were afraid to say anything. The larger a group you address, the more likely it is that you'll get feedback from hypersensitive lunatics or lulz-seeking trolls. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4723 2023-08-13T15:57:50+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes, "I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is" ... ]]>

writes, "I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is already pushing for Trump’s trial to be televised. So if you ever wondered what the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial would have been like if Depp became president at the end, well, now you might have a chance to find out." "[...] the idea of giving a tiny blue cartoon checkmark to 23-year-olds with open floor plan jobs that were paid salaries consisting entirely of granola bars, La Croix, and Sixpoint beer caused so much psychic damage to America’s ruling class that it would eventually cause the end of social media as we know it." America's ruling class is composed of fabulously over-educated and stupid-to-the-bone people who can't stop obsessing over Donald Trump because they've been ordered to obsess over him by the deep state. The deep state rejects anything and anyone that does not promulgate it. Donald Trump is an asshole and a liar and a con-man and a showman and a nearly pure creature of ego and vanity and narcissism. He has committed war crimes. He has ordered the deaths of innocents. None of that is why he is going down. He is going down because he doesn't fit. He is not chummy with the right people. You know how Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Joe Biden can sometimes all get along? Trump is not like that. He's not in that club. He doesn't understand which side his bread is buttered on because his number-one priority is getting attention for himself, no matter what. He has found that promising people stuff that they want gets their attention. Donald Trump is outside the circle. That's why they're charging him with 34 felony counts -- all stemming from a single payment. They're stacking charges like they do against poor minorities because this is how the justice system deals with people that it's going to punish no matter what, regardless of what it can prove that they've done. George Bush? Bill Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? No indictments. No talk of war crimes. No talk of treason. Fabulously wealthy. Famous. Accepted. Popular. All inside the circle. Donald Trump? Same crimes. Indictments. Uncontrolled. Outside the circle. Anyway, the people cheering loudest for Trump to go down are the most highly educated people in America. And they're all stupid. They allow themselves to be distracted by bullshit while ignoring a million other things that they could expend their effort and attention on. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The article "The Club of Rome's New Malthusianism-Lite Report" by Ronald Bailey writes, "What Malthus did not foresee was how modern science coupled with the dynamism of increasingly free markets would produce over the next two centuries what economist Deidre McCloskey has called the Great Enrichment. Entrepreneurial human ingenuity makes it possible to produce food at an exponential rate that outstrips population growth, resulting in more calories per person." The article starts out with "Malthusianism is just so damned tiresome." This line of reasoning that we're not using things up faster is also tiresome. This is extremely short-term thinking. The humus layer is being used up so quickly that the next generation won't be able to use it anymore. The massive boom was also enabled by hydrocarbon-based (read: fossil-fuel-based) fertilizers to which we and our awesome process are nearly hopelessly addicted. But, sure, Malthus was wrong. Just like peak oil was wrong, right? We found more fossil fuels, so fuck you. Of course, we're getting them with fracking and they're even more short-lived than previous sources and we're pouring more CO₂ into the air than we ever have before, but sure, peak-oilers were wrong. Just like Malthus was wrong. All of these seers that predict that humanity won't be able to fool itself into doing something medium- and long-term that is shockingly destructive just because it works in the short term -- and only incidentally helps people eat while further enriching a relative handful of people -- are ... wrong. All of this reasoning is based on Plato's Philosopher Kings argument where a handful of people know better than anyone else how to run things. We just have to trust that their plan -- which is to enrich themselves massively while executing an undemocratic plan to "help humanity" as a side-effect to their wealth -- will actually work. It never does. Now, we're left to watch as Antarctica slides into the ocean even faster than we'd thought it could. These people (like the author of the piece above) are the embodiment of the "this is fine" dog. [image] But I shouldn't be surprised. Ronald Bailey has proven, again and again, to be a dogmatic ideologue at a magazine that thankfully hosts more reasoned opinions and writing. It's hard not to escape the conclusion that his ethics amount to: "as long as he and his known cohort are doing fine under the current system, then everyone who isn't is a whiner and trying to be killjoy about how awesome everything is." In the same vein, "Roaming Charges: Broken Windows Theory of Political Crime" by Jeffrey St. Clair writes, "[...] globally new oil and gas projects either approved in 2022 or slated to be approved between 2023 and 2025 “could cause 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions,” an amount that is more than 30 times the United States’ total carbon dioxide emissions in 2021." Yeah, no problem. Humanity will tech their way out of this one. Look at all the beautiful technology! We have the most beautiful technology. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On AI, the interview "Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’" by Simon Hattenstone writes, "There’s a lot of cool stuff on the internet. I think TikTok is dangerous and should be banned yet I love dance culture on TikTok and it should be cherished.” Why should it be banned? “Because it’s controlled by the Chinese, and should there be difficult circumstances there are lots of horrible tactical uses it could be put to. I don’t think it’s an acceptable risk. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of kids love it for perfectly good reasons.”" This is the well-informed opinion of hyper-genius Jaron Lanier. Seriously. He sounds like Chuck Todd or Anderson Cooper or Alex Jones or any of myriad other talking heads in the mainstream media. How can these supposedly hyper-intelligent people live with knowing so little about the world that they inhabit that they end up sounding like the stupidest hyper-jingoistic state senator when they're asked about anything approaching public policy? "Because it's controlled by the Chinese." Jesus H. Christ, what a knee-jerk, dumb-fuck, American answer. And then "should there be difficult circumstances". Jesus jumped up, just be a man about it and say "should the U.S. start a war with China." But, no, he can't do that. Because he might be a hyper-genius, but he's an American first, steeped in that miasma of dogmatism, patriotism and vileness that passes for a culture there. It makes everyone stupid. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4724 2023-08-12T17:04:49+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

writes, "[...] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram" ... ]]>

writes, "[...] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram feeds of a major beverage syndicate and an indie skincare brand alike.”" [image]Oh, man, I am of a generation that got its pictures taken at Sears. Those were the family photos for years. We had one shot at a picture. It was what it was. They developed them, you paid for them, and you were happy with it. Of course it's nice to have more choice, to have instant feedback, but there is definitely something lost in modesty, in simply living with what the universe had to offer, in learning to love the picture that was so bad it's good, in appreciating the unforeseen and unforeseeable twists offered up by a universe with a bit of a perverse sense of humor, of being forced to learn the lesson that not everything is that important, that you can't expect perfection everywhere, and that, no matter how much money you had, we were all in the same boat, taking group portraits with our fingers crossed. It was a time of modesty and simplicity that kept us humble. We should think whether that might not be a better balance of time spent to imbue a moment with value. Or perhaps those are just nostalgic goggles that those who came before us wore, who had to sit for painted portraits, and thought our ability to pick up pictures the next day was remarkably snooty and utterly too modern. There was no salient difference in choice, though, between a painted portrait and a photograph whose output you could not immediately see. You took the photo and you lived with the results. If you thought you'd closed your eyes, you could ask for another one, but your ability to tweak was incredibly limited. Relative to today's ability to see the result immediately and to apply filters in real time, a Sears photo and a portrait were very much in the same category. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4673 2023-02-03T23:04:25+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which highlighted the picture shown below. [image] Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term "dream job", but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is. I thought antiwork was... ]]>

, which highlighted the picture shown below. [image] Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term "dream job", but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is. I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all. I understand that it's hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don't suck when you have a shitty job. But isn't that what "this forum" could help people imagine and then realize? Or am in the wrong meeting? I mean, the dream can't be just to mooch, can it? That's what the OP's caption says: travel and eat good food is all they can imagine, when the question was: what would you like to do to earn that lifestyle. I interpret the "dream job" question as: what would you like to provide society while others make it possible for you to travel and enjoy good food? Helping old people, making lunches for kids whose parents work, caring for a forest, building water pumps for the sewage-treatment plant, building cell-phone towers ... society needs a lot of stuff to get done in order for people to enjoy unlimited data, travel, and good food. Maybe not everyone needs to work anymore in order for everyone to get what they want -- but it's kind to arrogant to assume you're in that privileged class. Also, it gets boring real fast. So, where would you love to help? What's your dream job? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4650 2023-01-12T21:25:49+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

arguing against saying that both sides are just as bad because we have to look at the policies. Fair enough, fair enough. "Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for" ... ]]>

arguing against saying that both sides are just as bad because we have to look at the policies. Fair enough, fair enough. "Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for multi-family housing to be erected in traditionally residential zone. These provisions were vigorously resisted by Republicans, following the lead of Donald Trump, who used racist scaremongering to mobilise opposition." I will wait here while we see whether any of that multi-family housing will ever be built. The Democrats are great at grand gestures -- or failing to pass grand gestures -- while doing absolutely nothing that harms their funding. If Democratic donors can figure out how to make big money off of multi-family housing projects, then they will appear; otherwise, they will not. It's that simple. "Bothsidesists start from the meta-belief that a situation where half the population is systematically wrong is unthinkable." The author provides examples where Republicans only change their minds when the other side starts to believe it as well, but almost deliberately ignores examples where Democrats do the same, clinging to long-debunked ideas like "infection != vaccination" as far as protection is concerned. I don't think his line of argumentation about both-sidesers is right at all. I think that's straw-manning everyone who sees fundamental problems in Democrats as well as Republicans. It's ignoring the systemic deficits of your own team because they're your team and you can't conceive of a situation so hopeless that there is no team to root for. In which case, you would have to choose policies and goals and work toward building a new team to support them. The existing teams aren't going to reverse inequality, help the poor, get medical care for all, be sane. That's a scary world, so you denigrate anyone who's decided to live in it as a nutter who can't see how much better Democrats are than Republicans. Democrats tend to say friendlier things about poor people and working people that Republicans -- although that's been changing lately, too. If you're on a team without your own goals, then you just float along with whatever goals your team happens to choose. Democrats used to be for the working class; now they're for elites. If you just stuck to your team, then you are now much better-aligned with coastal elites than with working-class people. Republicans have swept in to pick up those pieces, not because their policies will seriously help working-class people -- trickle-down is still a myth -- but because the Republicans are at least willing to say they will. The Democrats have stopped doing even that and have instead told the poor and homeless to learn to code and join the tech boom! That's what sticking with a team gets you. You end up being an idiot spouting idiocy that has nothing to do with what you once believed was good and right. You end up no longer believing in free speech because poor/dumb people keep getting convinced of things that you consider to be detrimental to the proper working of society. Coincidentally, the proper working of society seems to be funneling money upward to you and your friends while not demanding much of you personally. Detrimental is when it's revealed that you've been suppressing speech in order to prevent people from finding out that you're funneling that money. The "both-sidesism" isn't about espoused policy, it's about results. It's about the system they both work on. Both parties are funded by oligarchs. Both parties will only do stuff that benefits oligarchs first. That other people might benefit is a potentially nice side-effect -- don't want them getting used to it, or God forbid, expecting it! -- but not a necessity. The Democrats and Republicans are a classic good-cop/bad-cop combination, with the added twist that, for half of the country R's are good and D's are bad, while it's reversed for the other half. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4617 2022-12-04T22:23:15+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is quite an interesting description of the state of philosophy vis à vis data science. [1] You can find the original, in Italian, at "Tutto_Misure n.4 - 2021" on pages 103 and 104. Or you can just "download a PDF of" ... ]]>

is quite an interesting description of the state of philosophy vis à vis data science. [1] You can find the original, in Italian, at "Tutto_Misure n.4 - 2021" on pages 103 and 104. Or you can just "download a PDF of that article here" . "Dataism, at least in its most radical position, sees the universe as a gigantic computation system, whose state transitions are in fact "embedded" computations, so that empirical phenomen are actually streams of data and living organisms are biochemical data processing systems [6]. Hence data are the objective representation of reality, or even the reality as such, and therefore all that is required to understand the empirical world and to make appropriate decisions on it." "A positive and constructive understanding of this position, that is not the trivially self-contradictory "everything is relative," might be devised from the consideration that no available evidence, however specific it is, provides a certain support to a unique theory. Rather, different and incompatible theories may account for the available data." "Starting from the acknowledgment that absolute truth is not accessible to us, post-truth advocates post-truth make the radical move to claim that there is no truth at all. According to them, opinions dominate on facts and emotions prevail on rationality. Or perhaps, even more radically, post-truth ideology assumes that there is nothing like facts free of interpretation, and that rationality is only a superstructure of a particular culture developed in a particular historical period: scientific knowledge would only be a contingent manifestation of a societal organization that has promoted competition through research." So deconstructionism is dispatched as an adjunct of fake news, and all of Quine's research and philosophy on qualia is swept away as relevant only for generating more conspiracy theories. The conclusion of to which considering cultural context inevitably leads -- according to this paper -- is that "scientific evidence is denied as such", which is making the strawman do a tremendous amount of work. "reliability is only a matter of goodness of data fitting. But for dataists this is a further reason of advancement: they would claim that causality is an unclear, unscientific concept [91, and removing it from technical endeavors should be considered a significant step forward." The dataist way lies madness, wherein we simply trust whatever output we get because the process couldn't be biased in any way that we can see. And, thus, we end up with candidate pools curiously bereft of women and POC, but we dare not wonder whether context or culture could have had anything to do with that, lest we be branded as heretical post-truthers, a mode of thought that used to be associated with those concerned about how we think we know what we know, like Quine (and his qualia), Derrida, or Foucault. Instead, they are are a lumped in with Trump and his coterie of self-obsessed hangers-on, who are more interested in attention and power than in getting at what is truth. Dataists glibly assume that there is a single truth that can be proven, irrespective of context, despite all evidence to the contrary. We just have to try harder, I suppose. Either try harder to shore up our modelsget more data (dataists no longer believe models are necessary...this would be admitting that their data expresses anything less than the absolute truth)...or try harder at ignoring the gaping holes in them. And definitely don't consider it unfair to elect Trump or any other information-poor ideologue -- of any political bent; they are not constrained only to the right wing -- as the leader of the post-truthers instead of dealing with their concerns honestly. "This is the role traditionally played by causal explanations, that are not only highly efficient data compression devices (compare the number of bits required to store a formula representing a physical law with the size of a dataset from which the same information provided by the formula can be inferred by regression), but also tools able to provide socially understandable and criticizable justifications for the decisions that are made." I find it interesting that this paper leads with such heavy-handed and extreme definitions of both dataism and so-called post-truth-ism. It's hard to believe that anyone seriously interested in improving our use of information holds these radical positions. I would not be surprised in the least to find that the most powerful people in the world, in charge of pulling the levers that govern billions of lives, are not all interested in what is actually true, but what is personally beneficial to them. Should their personal interest somehow overlap with what is societally beneficial, well, then, win-win. But it's not necessary. So, while yes, there are enough people in these extreme camps, and, yes, they are powerful, they are also not going to be reading this paper, nor are they likely to change their behavior when scientists point out to them that they're not behaving rationally or in the interests of either their constituents or the truth. "The distinction between data, information, and knowledge is crucial here: the "deluge of data" is now a fact, but it does not imply that there is also a deluge of information, and even less of knowledge." "[...] the Weaver's interpretation of Shannon's information theory, in which communication problems are understood as being constituted of three "levels" of subproblems:" * "Level A (the technical problem): how accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted? * Level B (the semantic problem): how precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning? * Level C (the effectiveness problem): how effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way?" "This interpretation may be applied and generalized to problems of data (and information, and knowledge) treatment, in terms of:" * a syntactic (i.e. "level A") problem: are data formally correct (and therefore, in particular, clean, not missing, ...)? This question focuses on data as syntactic entities, only able to be identified as different from each other (zeroes need only to remain different from ones); * a semantic (i.e., "level B") problem: is the information obtained from data representative? This question assumes that information is data that refer to something and therefore to which a meaning has been assigned; * a pragmatic (i.e., "level C") problem: is the knowledge obtained from information useful? This question assumes that knowledge is useful information in a context, provided that knowledge is justified true belief. "Indeed the position of the upper surface of the alcohol in the capillary has a value in metres (or millimeters), not in kelvins (or degrees Celsius). This position value (i.e., the data) is mapped to a temperature value (i.e., the information) by means of the instrument calibration: without the knowledge provided by the calibration (e.g., in the form of a calibration curve), indication values cannot be related to measurand values." "[...] metrologists are well aware that it is critical to decide when it is not valid anymore (and therefore, when the instrument needs to be recalibrated), a situation that in Data Science corresponds to assessing whether the data-generating process is not stationary anymore." "the metrological culture can foster the transition from an information society, characterized by pervasiveness of new technologies, to a knowledge society, in which information is a crucial factor of social development. While an information society only generates and disseminates raw data and information, a knowledge society transforms the widely available information in knowledge useful to support effective decision making and the improvement of human conditions." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I have the original PDF, but I'll be damned if I upload a 9MB file for four pages of text. IEEE have outdone themselves in producing a document that defies nearly all compression. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4624 2022-12-04T22:09:08+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, "Americans want nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it turns out to be only last week. Not to face now or the future, but to face backwards." [image]I don't know when Gil-Scott Heron wrote this, but it was probably around the time he wrote Whitey... ]]>

, "Americans want nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it turns out to be only last week. Not to face now or the future, but to face backwards." [image]I don't know when Gil-Scott Heron wrote this, but it was probably around the time he wrote Whitey on the Moon, The Revolution will not be Televised, or Home Is Where the Hatred Is. Whereas he wrote and spoke about his home country, I can't help but think that what he said resonates for people, in general. It doesn't seem to matter what country you come from, you just want things to stay the same -- even if they aren't great. Even for those severely disadvantaged by their society, the power of "the devil you know" is strong. We seek stasis. We even look back and seek that which we had, when things have changed against our advantage. We look away from the injustices that supported the advantages we enjoyed before, focusing laser-like only on ourselves. Those who manage to avoid this in themselves -- choosing, for example, to forgo some unnecessary pleasure or benefit so that they may live more justly -- utterly fail to do so when it comes, for example, to their children. Where someone might feel morally unjustified to support continued injustice that supports one's own advantage, that same person wavers and falls in the face of making the same decision that will disadvantage their progeny. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4626 2022-12-04T21:44:25+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

... ]]>

writes, "Whether spectators care or not is a different question, of course. But the signs are that most football fans would prefer that the World Cup was not taking place in a country with such a terrible human rights record." People don't care enough about human rights to have said anything if the World Cup would have been in the U.S. Qatar is an easy and acceptable target. Everyone can congratulate themselves on standing up now, when it's easy. No uproar when America hosts or takes part with a dozen active wars of aggression. Hell, I just found out today that the next "World Cup in 2026" will take place in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. [image]Nobody cares how many wars of aggression that U.S. has carried out, how many millions it has killed and starved, how it treats its own people, how it treats labor. None of that matters because the world doesn't have principles. It just does things that benefit itself. Hating whichever enemy the U.S. empire has selected to hate is what they do. It has nothing to do with principle. 2022 is a grand year for hypocritical and partisan virtue-signaling, starting with the collective west suddenly gaining a distaste for invasions, but, as with the World Cup, only if the perpetrator is an approved villain. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4603 2022-11-21T22:02:42+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4609 2022-11-13T22:38:19+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4527 2022-06-22T22:01:36+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4523 2022-06-21T22:44:01+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. It's not clear whether the story is true (it's the Internet, so it's all fake), but it's an extremely plausible hypothetical, at the very least. "I’ve been recently hired as an editor for a small, start up publishing house. I’ve worked on a few manuscripts so far, and my boss has liked my work/appreciated my input. A few days ago, she sent me her next unpublished book to edit. I know she has already published several, but I have yet to read them. Guys, the writing is AWFUL. She keeps switching back and forth between past and present tense for no reason, doesn’t know how to do a simple dialogue tag, apparently has never heard of a run on sentence… Not to mention, the story itself is just poorly told. The writing is incredibly juvenile. If this manuscript had passed over my desk, I honestly would have denied it after the first 3 pages. As a reader, I would have put it down after the first. I like my boss. I like how she operates, I like how she treats me, I like how she pays. How do I tell her that her writing is terrible?" The author of the comment is working as an editor for a self-published writer who very clearly can't write, but who probably self-promotes like an absolute angel, convincing people who can't read to buy their books. The person who can read and write and edit and work with the language ends up working for person who's able to connect to the masses much better. In the end, the content produced will be of no lasting value and will provide no great insight. It will be part of the micro-plasticization of culture, the floodwaters of inanity and mundanity under which the 21st-century will slip and drown without a trace. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4524 2022-06-21T22:32:25+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4522 2022-06-21T22:21:04+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4501 2022-05-29T22:04:40+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4493 2022-04-18T12:37:59+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

provides an example of an atrocity -- the bombing of a school -- that people would see the need to tell the world their opinion about. He writes of the hypothetical commentator, "It is a war crime and you name it as such[,] as an evil, criminal thing." ... ]]>

provides an example of an atrocity -- the bombing of a school -- that people would see the need to tell the world their opinion about. He writes of the hypothetical commentator, "It is a war crime and you name it as such[,] as an evil, criminal thing. Soon after the words leave your mouth, or get posted online, someone responds with something along these lines: yes, that’s all very well, but why just condemn that? What about..? They then name some other, maybe similar atrocity that you haven’t mentioned. " Of interest is that the person who "names it as such, as an evil" is considered to be an additional victim here, because they were just saying something that they -- and, supposedly, society -- view as an unalloyed good thing. They are annoyed that it might not be received as such. Anyone who rains on their parade of mutual adulation becomes the enemy. At that point, they will lash out and accuse anyone questioning the narrative of "what-aboutism" or of being on the side of those who bomb schools. That way, of course, lies madness. You can read the rest of Horner's analysis, but I felt that, despite his detour through Hegel, he missed the higher-level issue. He seems to be straw-manning what-aboutism in his essay. Horner's hypothetical commenter is a primitive, poorly expressed example of someone trying to open a dialogue. There are better ways of doing this. Many others would be, perhaps clumsily, trying to alert an empathic potential ally to other injustices, to draw them into a discussion of a bigger narrative than just a single bombing. Asking why someone is "reporting" on something and not on everything else is completely valid. Asking where they've gotten their information and how sure are they whether their information is even correct is perfectly valid. Alerting them that they're taking sides in a war -- even unknowingly -- can be a public service. Almost no-one has enough information to really know what to think. A lot of us have the luxury that we don't have to choose a side or make life decisions based on insufficient information. So why do it anyway? It has very often been the case that people repost information that they've read or heard somewhere without ever questioning whether they're being roped into a propaganda effort. Was a building even bombed? Does the town even exist? Was it bombed recently? Is there footage or images? Is the footage from months or years ago? Is it even the same war? Was the building actually a school? Was it being used as a school? Were there children there? Were there soldiers there? That's not what-aboutism; it's trying to figure out what's going on. And even what-aboutism can be useful, even though its possibly annoying for people who don't feel like thinking about what they're actually saying. They just want everyone to be on their side. They're not just saying that they support e.g. Ukraine. With their silence on everything else, they're either admitting wholesale ignorance or admitting they don't care about those other things. Maybe they have a good reason why this is the only issue worth caring about. It's good to make people think about why they're so emotionally invested in one thing and not at all invested in several other even more horrific situations. Are they being honest with themselves? Or are they being corralled into a propaganda effort that will benefit the same elite that always benefits while making things utterly worse for everyone else? Cheering on an extended war "until Ukraine wins" implies support for a lot of suffering with it, for everyone except the people doing the cheering. Are those cheering sure that what they're cheering on is good? That is will lead to better outcomes than other strategies? Africa will suffer from lack of food, Ukraine will be flattened, Russia's economy and people are being set back decades, Europe is painting itself into a corner with only the U.S. as a "friend", climate change has taken a back seat as countries ramp up their LNG, oil, and coal production. A single person's superficial cheering of a war effort isn't significant. Millions and millions of unthinking voices, though, help push things in the exact wrong direction. And that cheering of war is often implicit: when someone expresses horror at an atrocity, they usually leave implicit that they support the violence directed against the perpetrators of that atrocity. What we’re seeing in Ukraine is corporate warfare. Media companies, banks, energy companies, military contractors, all fighting over market share. What-aboutism is one of the few ways of making more people aware of this. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4409 2022-01-24T18:27:51+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4410 2022-01-24T15:37:50+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4254 2022-01-24T14:58:19+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, "Our default folk-theory of the sky and its objects, as a vestige of the closed world cosmology, is one in which distances between star systems is not significantly different from those between the planets of our own system." And even those distances we... ]]>

, "Our default folk-theory of the sky and its objects, as a vestige of the closed world cosmology, is one in which distances between star systems is not significantly different from those between the planets of our own system." And even those distances we grossly underestimate. The planets are light minutes if not light hours apart. [1] Months and years of even the most optimistic feasible journey time. But this lack suffuses most of how most humans -- most animals -- experience the world: in bewildered miscomprehension of the most basic mechanisms affecting our lives. Most of us don't know any more about how our world works -- what supports us and what we are breaking -- than the so-called brute animals. At the simplest level, we don't know how the things that we've become dependent on work, on any level. Cars? Phones? Constructions? Transportation? Any technology? We haven't the foggiest idea how anything works -- not even how it might work. We are woefully underequipped to reason about the world. Because we're not even aware of an alternative explanation, we don't even notice that we've actually made a choice to believe in our fantasies of how the world works -- with each of us at the smack-dab center, in the starring role -- with a religious fervor that we would never, ever lend to science or logic or even, heaven forbid, morality or ethics. We don't know how to deal with pandemics, we don't have a clue how to address climate change. We will go down without a fight, a look of uncomprehending ignorance on our dumb faces as the curtain goes down and the house lights come on. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4363 2021-11-14T11:51:59+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

[1] discusses the term "Dumm" (dumb, as in stupid). It's always been a bit difficult to nail down what it means to be "dumb", once you start to think about it. You can have smart people who act dumb. You can have... ]]>

[1] discusses the term "Dumm" (dumb, as in stupid). It's always been a bit difficult to nail down what it means to be "dumb", once you start to think about it. You can have smart people who act dumb. You can have smart people with no experience, so they're intelligent, but not wise. Then there's the difference between "book smart" and "street smart" -- they're both useful in certain situations. If you don't have both and you find yourself in a situation that requires the one that you don't have, well, then, ... you look dumb. You can have people who are intelligent, but woefully uninformed. Or maybe they're misinformed. Or maybe they're doing dumb things that hurt others, but they gain a lot personally. Is that person dumb or evil? Or both? It all quickly becomes difficult to nail down, really. People are quick to call others "dumb", which in no way will lead to that person becoming "not dumb" (if that's the goal, and it should be). I think the worst way of convincing someone to do what you want is to call them names. Diplomacy is about giving someone a ladder that they can use to climb down (or up). Anyway, here are some notes I took while I was reading the interview. I thought she had some good things to say, but some things seemed a bit superficial and rooted in what almost felt like a frustration with people who just refused to see how wrong they were -- no matter how many times you told them they were wrong. Don't they see how dumb they are? Can't they tell that their intellectual betters are only looking out for them? Do you see how that line of reasoning is kind of doomed to failure? But I'm getting ahead of myself. The interview is in German. I'm not going to translate. Throw the text into "Deepl" if you don't read any German and want to read it in your native language. "Heidi: Dumme Menschen verstehen sich nicht als Teil eines Gefüges, für sie kommen immer nur die eigenen Belange an erster Stelle." So she's equating "dumb" with "egoist" (someone who always thinks of their own needs first, and those of others either rarely or not at all). "Nadja: Ist Donald Trump dumm? Heidi: Nein, er ist das, was der Wirtschaftshistoriker Carlo Maria Cipolla einen Banditen oder einen Verbrecher nennen würde. Trump hat die Situation stringent analysiert und daraus die Schlussfolgerung gezogen, dass er mit einer gewissen Taktik höchstwahrscheinlich erfolgreich sein wird. Diese Taktik hat er dann effizient angewandt. Und damit eine grosse Schar von Anhängern gewinnen können. "So, Donald Trump is not "dumb". He's more of a "bandit". I agree with that. It would be hard to argue that someone who has climbed so high in the echelons of power is a complete moron. But her answer kind of contradicts her initial definition: that someone who is "dumb" is an "egoist". That's Donald Trump all over. He always thinks of his needs first. So, which is it? "Intelligenz muss nicht zwingend mit Moral verbunden sein. Trump hat wohl auch zum Schaden anderer konsequent im Sinne des eigenen Vorteils gehandelt." This almost seems like a truism, but I guess it has to be said. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you're a nice person. I would add that, just because you're rich doesn't mean you're a nice person, if we're dictating truisms that some people might be shaky on. "Gute Bildung ist offenbar kein Rezept. [...] Das zentrale Merkmal von dummen Leuten ist, dass sie ausschliesslich die eigene Position priorisieren und alles andere ignorieren. Das sieht man auch in dieser ganzen Corona-Pandemie, wo die Leute sagen: «Ich bleibe ganz bei mir.»" Gotcha: even people who are highly educated are not shielded from being "dumb". In fact, it's likely that their advanced education imparts on them a feeling of superiority and therefore nearly a duty of looking out for their own important needs first. She's definitely back on the dumb/egoist pairing here now, though. "Ich schaue nur für mich selbst und nicht für die anderen. Das kann nur funktionieren, wenn ich als Eremit irgendwo völlig isoliert in einer Höhle lebe. Dann – von mir aus – bin ich für mich verantwortlich und für keinen anderen. Aber sobald ich in einen grösseren sozialen Kontext eingebettet bin, ist dieses Unwort der Eigenverantwortung einfach ein völliger Blödsinn." Translation: we live in a society. Act accordingly. "Heidi: Da reisen Leute in exotische Länder in die Ferien und lassen sich Impfungen verabreichen, die durchaus mit Nebenwirkungen behaftet sind. Da denkt dann keiner daran, dass zum Beispiel die gängige Hepatitis-B-Impfung vor ihrer breit ausgerollten Anwendung an einem Bruchteil der Zahl von Personen getestet wurde, an denen aktuell die Covid-Impfungen überprüft wurden. Kein Mensch, der jetzt herumweint und gegen die Covid-Impfung wettert, hat sich kundig gemacht, auf welchen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen die übrigen Impfungen beruhen, die er längst bekommen hat. Nadja: Der Corona-Impfgegner ist also dumm? Heidi: Zu diesem Schluss muss man kommen." So now we've shifted a bit and are equating "hypocrisy" or "personally convenient intellectual inconsistency" with being "dumb". I wholeheartedly agree that this is not helpful. What I find unhelpful on her part is that she doesn't seem interested in why so many people are hypocritical in this way. Maybe they're so frustrated by the rest of their lives that they make this a red line over which they will not cross, perhaps in a desperate attempt to exact some control over their lives? Of course, it's a bad red line to choose, but they've chosen it. That makes them "dumb". But, if we want them to erase their red line and see what we, for lack of a better term, are going to call "reason", then we have to be more convincing than to just point out their hypocrisy and smugly lean back as if we've checkmated them. That will work for some -- who will be shamed into conceding their viewpoint is hypocritical -- but not nearly enough. No, most are going to see your stupid, smirking face and double down on defying you. You can call this childish (it is), but it's absolutely predictably going to happen. If you don't figure out how to avoid that outcome -- because you need something from them, in this case, a vaccination -- then you're going to lose. Going with a plan that you know isn't going to work is...dumb. "Heidi: Dialogbereitschaft ist zwar prinzipiell zu befürworten und eine gute Sache. Allerdings nur, wenn sie auf beiden Seiten vorhanden ist. Alles andere benennt man besser als das, was es ist. Nämlich eine zweckbefreite und absehbar ergebnislose Kombination zweier Monologe, und spart sich Mühe, Ärger und Zeit, mit Menschen zu diskutieren, die das Recht auf eine eigene Meinung mit dem Recht auf eigene Fakten verwechseln. Es ist blauäugig, zu glauben, man müsse den Dialog offen halten. Die Regierung muss einfach entscheiden – und zwar auf der Basis der aktuell verfügbaren wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse." But Heidi's going in the opposite direction: she thinks it's not worth talking to these people at all anymore. The government has to act. I picture it like just grabbing your kid's arm, pinning them down, and letting the doctor give them the injection over all of their protests. In this case, I suppose it means going to 2G (Geimpft/Genesen) for access to most places rather than 3G (includes Getestet), which makes it possible for the unvaccinated to participate in society (albeit at CHF25.- per test and with a good deal more inconvenience). I think this situation is at least partially due to so-called elites being horrified to finally be confronted with people outside of their social circles. These elites live in very elevated circumstances, relative to these "dumb" people, and they're shocked -- shocked -- to find that the hordes of drones that the elites were vaguely aware of keeping society going aren't all that good at processing information. How could they be? The upper echelons of society feed them bullshit all day long to keep them quiet and working. This is what it looks like when they stop following orders all the time. It's too bad the elites wasted all of their supposed goodwill on bullshit when they really need it now to get them to help save civilization. The same dynamic applies to the climate. In that case, though, it's mostly the elites who need to quit their bullshit. The "dumb" people's activity doesn't amount to a hill of beans in comparison. Elites like to talk about jet-skis when the real problem is private jets. If we take an even bigger step back, I'm even more skeptical. The analysis above assumes that we know who's dumb and who's elite and that there are no doubts or gray areas in between (there always are). Who decides which people are not worth talking to? Who decides when to stop talking? The person with the least patience? Who decides which side is being stubborn? Who decides who has science on their side? Who decides which people are in "that" group? I would imagine that any pogrom ends up like industrial fishing: 90% bycatch ... pushing people with mild misinformation and legitimate questions into a hardline stance. Granted, we don't have much time for nuance right now, with regard to the COVID measures, but the interview seems to be going in the direction of "shut up and listen to the adults." I can relate to that: I've expressed the same sentiment out of frustration myself on this very blog. Unfortunately, there aren't very many adults in the room -- in any direction. The conspiracy theorists, the Querdenker, the elected officials -- none of them have anything but a wobbly leg to stand on. The press?!? OMG, the press. They'll say and write anything for a click. Many of these institutions have lost every vestige of trust -- and the conversation should be about how to gain that trust back, not about calling anyone who doesn't have that trust "dumb". "Heidi: [...] besonders evident wurde es mit der Regierung Trump und diesem unsäglichen Schlagwort der alternativen Fakten. Es gibt keine alternativen Fakten. Es gibt Fakten und blöde Positionen, die die Fakten ignorieren. Früher hat man zumindest anerkannt, dass es Leute gibt, die etwas studiert haben, sich dort gut auskennen und wissen, wovon sie reden. Die anderen hielten entweder den Mund oder glaubten, was die Experten sagen. Mittlerweile ist es salonfähig geworden, zu sagen, die Experten seien verlogen. {...}" It did not "start with Trump". Politicians have always lied. For God's sake, the Bush administration said out loud that they "made reality." People remember. There are, of course, many so-called facts that can easily be disproven, but there are others that hit uncomfortably close to home. I wonder sometimes whether the whole "Q-Anon" and Querdenker (OMG They both start with "Q"!!!) thing is less of a direct reaction to what they call the lie of COVID, but more of a "straw that breaks the came's back" kind of thing, where they're just rebelling against the whole system being built on a lie. You're all losers unless you prove you're winners. Billionaires deserve their money. You could be a billionaire if you try hard enough. If you're poor, it's your own fault. That war was necessary. China is the enemy. So is Russia. Also, we need Russia's natural gas, cheap. Also, we need China's slave labor, cheap. TV shows are only about cops and rich people, the news is only about how you're not consuming enough and how those "others" are taking things away from you. Austerity is the only way. Time for everyone to tighten their belts. Except, of course, for those at the top, who are better than you. The economy is doing great even though no-one you know has a proper job. The gig economy is for "entrepreneurs" and self-starters. Climate change is real, but there's nothing to be done, except that we're totally doing something -- enough even! -- but not really, but don't worry, because...reasons. Into this atmosphere of lies that form the basis of our society and synaptic landscape, you throw COVID and it's basic unbelievability -- tiny, invisible creatures are making us sick -- but there's a vaccine that will fix everything for you. Yeah, sure, buddy. I'm onto you. Pull the other one. Right? People who don't believe things that are clearly true are not necessarily "dumb", they're just broken. Sure, some might be dumb, but others are just psychically beaten down by decades of lies, by a life spent swimming in a sea of lies that define and underpin our entire existence. How can you blame them for behaving in exactly the way we've trained them? People have been given precious little reason to trust anyone or anything -- it's a miracle that so many still do, that so many take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff (and are still able to do so). "Heidi: Ich habe neulich ein Internetvideo gesehen, in dem einer behauptet hat, mit der Impfung würden irgendwelche extraterrestrischen Spinneneier injiziert, die uns dann von innen auffressen. Da ist wirklich Fassungslosigkeit angebracht." Well, you can't believe everything you see online, either, Heidi. Maybe this person believed it. How many people do? 10? 20? 100? How many people are just watching it for the lolz because there's nothing else to do and they're bored? Maybe that person even published that video to troll people or just to make a joke or to ironically show how stupid other people are for saying similar things or people are for believing them. Without context, it's hard to know, but there is a whole world of people out there willing to publish videos like that for myriad reasons other than that they wholeheartedly believe in what they're saying. Most things online are fake or tell a fake story. It doesn't mean they're not entertaining, but it also doesn't mean that they were intended to be taken seriously. Hell, a lot of the news really is fake, in that they provide a false context, or take quotes out of context, or show the wrong picture at the wrong time (on purpose) to create a belief that they didn't explicitly express, but that they're hoping you'll take with you, anyway. Again, in this type of information environment, should we be surprised that people come away with the wrong ideas? That people fail to trust "official" sources that, when they're not spitting straight facts about important, science-based topics, are doing their absolute best to troll and trick you into sending your attention and money to their advertisers? Have you never heard of clickbait, Heidi? Nearly everything online is now clickbait or a "product placement". Hell, newscasts will report on how the latest war is necessary, followed by ads for Hensoldt or McDonnell Douglas (depending on the side of the pond you're on), but then the report on COVID and the importance and safety of vaccination is followed by ads for Pfizer or Roche or whatever. How the hell are you supposed to figure out which content is sponsored and which isn't? Isn't it believable, then, when the conspiracy theorist -- who's also in it just for the clicks, at this point, obviously -- says that it's all a lie? And then sells you a T-Shirt so that you can show the world that you're onto its scheme? The world long since stopped rewarding people for doing the right thing. And now our solution for when they do the wrong thing is to call them "dumb". Good luck with that. I understand you're frustrated, but writing off a good 30% of your fellow citizens is a non-starter. Germany wants to do it with their unvaccinated. The U.S. already did in 2016 with anyone who voted for Trump. It spent last summer doing it with "racists" (Germany does that too). Now, the U.S. is also on chastising the unvaccinated. Both countries are doing so without looking at themselves, to see how they may be responsible for the fact that so many people are "dumb". "Heidi: [...] man darf dummen Leuten nicht zu viel Raum und vor allem nicht zu viel Macht geben, sonst kann es gefährlich werden. Wenn sie sich selber schaden, ist das in einer freien Gesellschaft legitim. Aber wenn sie anderen schaden, ist das ein Thema, das man nicht mehr einfach völlig cool und gelassen hinnehmen kann." This is correct. There really is a right and wrong in many areas, where being wrong starts to cost lives and well-being for others. So society steps in and prevents that. Not just vaccines, which is the hot topic of the day. Think seatbelts, for example. I'm old enough to remember when the campaign was on TV to get people to wear their seatbelts and people were up in arms about it, about how the government shouldn't tell them what to do. Or bicycle helmets. Or driving drunk? In my lifetime, it went from something everyone did to something that the government tried very hard to prevent. People accepted that without writing libertarian screeds about Big Brother. Or maybe there was just no Internet, so we couldn't hear them complaining -- and they couldn't get together in vocal minorities to exert outsized influence (relative to their numbers). "Heidi: Es erstaunt mich immer wieder, in wie vielen Bereichen sich Menschen Wissen und Fähigkeiten zuschreiben, die sie gar nicht haben. Wenn die Waschmaschine kaputt ist, holt man mit grösster Selbstverständlichkeit einen Fachmann. Aber bei deutlich komplexeren Themen sprudeln manche Leute nur so von Gewissheiten." This is true, but these people are not dumb. They are, like Trump, scammers. Heidi seems to be mixing her message here a bit. The world is full of scammers because scammers are in charge doing the biggest scams of all. Even the latest Die Post (Swiss bank) ad shows a very young person laying on the couch while a voice-over says something like "lay around on the couch and let your money work for you," as if that's the social aspiration we should all have now. Work less, make more. That only really works, in the end, if you're scamming. Or if you're already rich. Or both. People pay attention and see that the more you scam, the better you do in this world. The most amoral, meanest people get ahead. Nice guys finish last. That's an expression I've known my whole life, but it's never been more true than today. Or its converse: assholes finish first. People see this and learn the lesson and, unfortunately, adjust accordingly. They become the assholes that society tells them they need to be in order to survive. If you've internalized the message that it's dog-eat-dog, kill or be killed, then you no longer care that you're "dumb" actions are hurting others. The goal is to benefit yourself. Everyone else is cannon fodder on the way to that esteemed goal. Maybe later when you're personal wealth is secured, you'll have be able to help others. "Heidi: Der Schriftsteller Charles Bukowski formulierte es so: «Das Problem ist, dass intelligente Menschen voller Zweifel sind, während die dummen voller Vertrauen sind.» Die Dummheit hat aufgehört, sich zu schämen." Good old Charles -- God bless him -- knew how to write succinctly. "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. [2]" Indeed. But the world, as we've built it, promotes confidence above being right, promotes appearance above substance. Is it -- I ask again -- any wonder that people can't tell what's up and down anymore and end up choosing the shiniest bauble? Why wouldn't you be "dumb" when everything is telling you that you can quit your boring, tiring, stupid job and make 10x as much hustling on Instagram? The world isn't going to tell you that that doesn't last, but why would it? It needs you to hustle. The other thing to remember is that we live in an extremely safe and coddled and cushy society. Now, ordinarily, this is a good thing, a great thing, a monumental achievement! People are safe to live out their lives without so many of the fears even our closer ancestors had. However, it also means that there's much less risk associated with believing shiny, pretty things that make you feel good rather than what you're almost certain are facts, but that are tough to live with. So, you believe in the fantasy and nothing bad happens! You're an Instagram/YouTube/Twitch/TikTok/WhateverTheNewHotnessIs star (for now)! Win-win, motherfuckers! We have built a world without consequences, so we shouldn't be surprised when people tend to choose the easiest, most comforting way out. Especially when the thousands of ads fired their way every day tell them that everyone else is doing it and that they're missing out on easy wealth and an easy lifestyle. Never mind that these ads are run by scammers who are also trying to get rich quick. Never mind that there are very negative, long-term effects associated with that kind of lifestyle -- but those effects are so far away, why worry about them? A short-term solution will present itself when needed and so on and so on until you fall into a grave. "Heidi: Es ist mittlerweile völlig aus der Mode gekommen, zuzugeben, dass man Dinge nicht weiss." I wonder how much this is due to people feeling like they're always being judged, that everything is being filmed and evaluated, and they don't want to fail. It's better to pretend to know than to admit that you don't know because there's a good chance that the other person is even dumber than you and will believe you. Also, as noted above, there is no downside, no risk to being wrong. We teach that you should try to answer rather than write nothing. Also, as noted above, people like to troll. A lot of these interviews I read are of high-minded people presenting evidence of people acting strangely and stupidly and never being open to the possibility that people might lie or deliberately just be fucking with you. How else do you think Greenpeace ended up with a ship named "Boaty McBoatface"? Or that Starlink's satellite dish is named "Dishy McFlatface"? In the face of bleakness and a nigh-nihilistic world, the last resort is bitter irony and trolling for amusement. I think the main thing missing from this interview -- but, hopefully, not her thesis in her book -- is that we don't talk about where this dumbness comes from. The media is terrible in these countries with suspiciously high numbers of ... misled ... people. It deliberately makes them dumb in order to keep them consuming and not asking questions. No-one in power wants the sheep to look up. And then there are the scammers -- who she also calls dumb [3] -- who are deliberately misinforming people for their personal profit. If you can get someone to pay $50 for a bottle of water that you made with five minutes of your time and $3 of your own money, then that's a business model, right? You just have to keep the consumer dumb enough to keep buying but, somehow, smart enough to keep earning enough money to keep you in business. Wait...did I just describe our entire economy? Our economy runs on "dumb"; it's just that "dumb" has gotten a bit out of control of the elites -- and they're worried. I have every confidence that they'll put all of their energy not into making people less "dumb", but in making them "dumb" and obedient (once again). It's not going to get us closer to the end of the pandemic and it's certainly not going to help us confront climate change, but it's a sure-fire way of making a handful of people very rich. And that's the important thing, surely. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The article is behind a paywall, but some kind soul would pasted the contents "here" [1] I think he wrote this well before Dunning and Kruger made "their experiment" . And even their findings are misinterpreted, "[...] the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good." [1] Sometimes! Remember, at the beginning, she called Trump a "bandit", not "dumb". I think this is correct, but she then went on to equate scamming with being dumb, because it's only looking out for one's own priorities. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4266 2021-05-20T22:51:48+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

He recently wrote a book called Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. I haven't read it, but I've read several essays of his. In one of his essays,... ]]>

He recently wrote a book called Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. I haven't read it, but I've read several essays of his. In one of his essays, he named "The Elect" as the keepers of a new religion online. The interview was illuminating, with a lot of it transcribed below. Gillespie is a good interviewer, preferring to get out of the way and let his guests talk. And McWhorter talks a lot -- at an incredibly fast clip. At 3:30, they're discussing George Carlin's seven dirty words -- shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits -- and how they're actually a bit "archaic" now. They used to be the official seven words that you couldn't say on television or radio, according to the American FCC. These days, though, "cunt" is probably the only one that remains wholly taboo, in the States at least. In much of the rest of the English-speaking world, it's become punctuation, like "fuck" has in America. "McWhorter: Have you ever called anybody a cocksucker? I am 55 years old and I don't think I've ever used that word. "Gillespie: Well, you've got that to look forward to. That's what the golden years are for." At ~20:00 "McWhorter: That word [cunt] is so poisonous that for the audio book of '9 nasty words', I had to adjust a bit. Especially because I'm black, I can say "Nigger" a certain amount, so I figured ... there you go. I could not say C-U-N-T over and over again. I thought, 'if I were a woman listening to a male voice saying that over and over again, it would just be ... noxious' and so I pulled back on it as much as I could." At 30:00 "The reason if a person that says something that isn't sufficiently anti-racist, they have to be chased out of the room or their job, is because it's about heresy. The idea that we can't even stand to have Andrew Sullivan in our midst in a Zoom call. [...] They thought of him as a heretic [...] so you have a clergy, you have writers who are looked to to say things over and over again, many of which are hard to square with reality. "But, frankly, people like Ta Nehesi Coates and Robin DiAngelo and now Ibram X. Kendi, they are priests of this religion. They don't think of themselves this way -- they're certainly not saying it -- but the way their writings are received is not as informational tracts, but as scriptural counsel. So it's a rather alarming movement because you can't reason with people who are working from religion rather than logic. "And that's not to say that religion is idiocy in itself, but a part of religion is that you sequester a part of your brain away from logic that goes from A to B to C. You have to suspend your disbelief. And the new wokeness that's "mean", "elective" as I'm calling it, is religious in that way and the people in question can't be reached. And that's scary, given how much power they're beginning to amass." At 39:00 "The truth is we have to understand that you cannot reason with people like this. And it's very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion. And this is a religion. And, so, to try to talk these people down, ... it doesn't work. All they know is that you're a racist and that's all you're gonna get. So the idea is not to have a dialogue on these sorts of issues. You just have to shut down. But I think we just have to start telling people like this "no." "And the question is not how do you stop them from calling you a racist on social media. You don't. That's what they're going to do. And it's time to start letting them do it, and going on about our business, and having our fellows and friends around us, and make these people realize that screaming that you're a racist isn't going to get them what they want. They've learned that that strategy works, and they're going to continue using it, and they're not going to consider that it might not be the most humane -- or even the most constructive -- way of doing things. "These are human beings and all of us have that element. There's a Lord of the Flies element in these people -- although they would never recognize it in themselves. So we need to start telling them "no."" At 43:30 "If you took a George Wallace or one of these Dixiecrats from back in the day, and you reanimated them now and had them watch a laptop for a couple of days, drive around...that kind of person would have to pull over and retch on the side of the highway, seeing how deeply black people and blackness have permeated all levels of this society. "Strom Thurmond would be nauseated at the America that we have achieved today. Even since his death, how much blacker the United States has gotten. And that matters. That very much matters. And no-one could possibly deny it. Anybody who says that all of the civil-rights victories were basically negated because of what happened to George Floyd (1) are not thinking about that the same thing happens to white people and we just don't hear about it and also that the country has come a very long way. "[...] There are people who are too young to understand what it used to be like -- and I wasn't alive when it was really like what it was like -- but, I remember the 80s! I remember how openly racism could be expressed by some people as late as the 80s. I remember not getting jobs openly in the summer because I was black and that was that. And yet, the 80s, compared to the 60s, was like the second reel of the Wizard of Oz. Even then, they'd already made immense progress. "The way it is now? The "browning" of the culture? The idea that everybody in the country is listening to young black men bragging as their favorite music and loving the music as poetry and loving it the way people used to love Walt Whitman and St. Vincent Millay. [...] These are unprecedented things. "And yet you have a certain kind of person who wants to tell you that nothing significant has changed since 1950 except manners and that what shows that is George Floyd. No. That's highly childish reasoning. And, unfortunately, the Elect have such beautiful, big words to express these things that it often sounds like they're saying something more sophisticated than they are." At 47:30 "The idea that America is all about despising black people and murdering our black bodies? That's fantasy. That's something from a comic book. And yet there are a great many brilliant people who are determined to make us think that we're supposed to base our whole lives on this cartoon vision designed for self-indulgence -- for both white and black people -- instead of actually creating change on the ground the way that people who made a life like mine possible [did and] do. I think we're dishonoring our ancestors at this point." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4216 2021-03-27T13:13:51+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

(the link is to a YouTube playlist of all 4 hours in 4 videos. The videos were published by "Adam Curtis Documentary" and were... ]]>

(the link is to a YouTube playlist of all 4 hours in 4 videos. The videos were published by "Adam Curtis Documentary" and were aired on the BBC, so there's a good change that they'll survive. [media] Curtis did another interview in "Can't Get You Out of My Head w/ Adam Curtis" by Red Scare that was just as good. The discussion were similar -- they interviewed Curtis about the same 4-hour series, so his talking points are similar -- but they're different enough to be worth listening to. At 19:30 "Adam: The real question is: can you have nationalism that doesn't just kind of inexorably lead to a kind of etho-racism or to fascism. I don't know. No-one's ever told me. We're terrified of it, because the last time it was tried, it led to horror. [...] In a way, you could argue that that's why we tried to live in a world without big stories -- and we're now paying the price for that. Because the left has sort of got itself frozen. It's terrified of embracing nationalism, but it's too frightened to try and imagine something new. And, therefore, what it tries to do is just tinker with the little bits. The voting pattern in your election of last year, just shows that millions and millions of people are angry, and want to vote, want to press that button that says "fuck off". Despite that Donald Trump did absolutely nothing of what he promised, and despite the fact that he handled the pandemic so atrociously. They still want to vote for him. That's real power. It's not going to go away. "Anna/Dasha: Well, I think the vast majority of people are not as invested in stability as the managerial technocratic class is -- because things have gotten so bad for them. "Adam: I just think that, if stability is all you've got to offer as your ideology -- and no story -- then you're in quite a weak place, given that history is a dynamic force. And the people outside your stable world don't really care whether things are stable or not -- and are quite happy to let it rip because they've got nothing to lose." At 1:19:30 "Adam: I think it's a generation who come out of that modernism of our time, that somehow thinks that you can reinvent the world and just cut that past off, that you can just do it. [...] The past haunts all of our societies. I know you're skeptical of Black Lives Matter, but it did something very similar as Brexit did in my home country. What it did was remind you that you're haunted by the past. [...] That past still preys upon you. And until the left and the liberals acknowledge that, they're going to always have problems, because it's inside their heads as well." At 1:40:00 "Adam: The question no-one has quite answered is whether mass democracy is possible in the age of hyper-individualism. [...] It was born out of mass democracy -- individualism -- but then it starts to eat away at it. And what you get are these strange figures who are powerful [...] but they corrode collectivism. And what we're waiting to see if whether the politicians of the future can somehow find a way of combining that very powerful force of individualism with the new force of collectivism. If they can, then mass democracy is going to flourish in a way that we can't possibly imagine -- and it will be fantastic. If they don't, then we might be heading toward a B.F. Skinner world where you just simply observe, get and gather the data, and give them the treats to get them to do what you want to. I don't know which. I hope it's the former." "Adam: What B.F. Skinner said was, in a way, sort of religious. He said that human beings are not liberated when they are controlled by their feelings. Human beings are actually imprisoned by their feelings. Because if what guides you is all that stuff that goes on in your head, minute by minute, then actually you're terrible prisoner -- of the strange, weird shit that goes on inside your head. [...] What I hope is that, really, individualism is just beginning. [...] How do we get that individualism to work together in a collective way without denying its individualistic nature? And I think that's the key thing of our time. But, quite frankly, worrying about whether Putin gave you Donald Trump is a blockage against thinking about those things. That's the problem. It's the distrust and the subconscious distrust that the liberals have at the moment. "Anna/Dasha: It's not only an abdication of freedom, it's also deeply undignified. "Adam: Yes, that's another way of putting it. Very good." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4152 2021-01-19T22:06:44+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, he jokes at the end: "Is this live? Oh my God, no. Then you cannot censor out all that I've said." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This is the same point made by Justin Smith in a recent article "An Exceptional Situation" [2]: "After all, what is Pascal’s wager but a recommendation to larp? Go through the motions, wear the decorations, and you will get points — that’s the history of religion in a nutshell." [1] Who, I believe, is no fan of Žižek. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4150 2021-01-18T22:20:32+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, people pay us 5$ a month Žižek: Really, that's wonderful, you get other idiots to exploit Anna: Yeah, were using you! Žižek: No, no, thats wonderful!" His last request to them was, of course, a joke, asking them to edit the whole interview to make him look less "stupid" with "benevolent censorship". "Don't make me appear too nervous and stupid. If you can do some benevolent censorship when I am looking stupid. Thanks for very much and go on, please (raises fists). Thanks. And let's hope that we will survive this feat, you know, [...] all the best to you and [raises fists again] survive!" Just an absolutely authentic guy, happy to spend 90 minutes talking about philosophy and current events and communism with intelligent people, not interested in remuneration, interesting in spreading knowledge, in learning more. Truly a global treasure. Don't let anyone tell you different. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] At almost $39,000 per month, the ladies seem to be doing just fine. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4148 2021-01-18T20:47:18+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses the idiotic-sounding question of whether it's OK to read books written by people without considering their identities. That is, the books should stand on their own. We can, of course, consider whether we've historically ignored some good... ]]>

discusses the idiotic-sounding question of whether it's OK to read books written by people without considering their identities. That is, the books should stand on their own. We can, of course, consider whether we've historically ignored some good books because of racism -- and dig these books back up. But there is no reason to discard existing books because they were written by white people (i.e. "switching the signs on the drinking fountains"). "Do readers have to “see themselves” in the writer or story to find it “relevant” to their life and, therefore, be interested and inspired? When you look in the mirror, do you see Hamlet, no matter who you are? Is your sole purpose in reading to find something to hate about literature?" For myself, the answer is no. Growing up, I never had any idea what authors looked like or who they were or to what clan they belonged. I consider myself lucky that I could enjoy books based on their content. Did it matter that I probably would have said the authors were white or that I'd picture characters as white when the author might have pictured them as black? It really didn't. I had no idea that Isaac Asimov was a Jewish Russian expat. I didn't even think to care. I only found out recently that one of my favorite authors growing up, Samuel R. Delany, is a gay black man. That's not how I'd pictured him, but nor had it never occurred to me to wonder or care. The same goes for Alexandre Dumas, whom I didn't even stop to think of as a foreigner much less a negro foreigner. Or Albert Camus, an Algerian French Jew.The same for Robert Louis Stevenson, who I'd actually thought was black until I just "looked him up" and he's a pasty Scot. More recently, there's N.K. Jemisin, who's won not just a MacArthur grant, but also the identity sweepstakes. Didn't care then. Still don't really care now. I like the books. People are, generally, idiots. They are sheep intent on analyzing the world into simple, concrete, bite-sized categories that their tiny brains can comprehend without undue strain. Anyone who tries to complicate things is the enemy. They are prepared to die on every hill because just having gotten up that intellectual (for lack of a better word) hill was a tremendous amount of work and they are loath to throw any fraction of it away. Simple wins every time. We are no better than the monkeys sitting around the monolith. "[...] we will become intellectually barren if we deny students great literature solely because it was written by some old white guy who lived in times we deem awful today." Yeah, I mean, obviously. But that's where we're headed. Because we'd rather just constantly re-learn lessons rather than make real progress. We're maybe not good at this lesson, but it's familiar. Our egos are assuaged by our learning it, which is all that matters to most people. We know how to climb this one little hill. Most of us are content to draw a tremendous amount of satisfaction in doing that. What we can't bear is when someone else climbs a larger, tougher hill. That makes us feel bad. Do people take up the challenge? Do they just ignore that other person's activity? No. They must be stopped. Conform, sheep. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4076 2020-10-29T22:53:26+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, coming to similar conclusions -- but Talisse expresses himself well and makes me quite curious about his book, Overdoing Democracy. The following ~50m interview is worth the time; if you don't have that kind of time, I've transcribed the parts I found the most interesting below. [media] Talisse describes the core problem as follows, "That’s what I mean by overdoing democracy. When we can’t even imagine a cooperative activity that is not itself the enactment or expression of our partisan identity, we’ve allowed politics to crowd out other kinds of social goods." This reductionist approach in social interaction echoes the parallel one where every action is reduced to how it plays on a market, essentially viewing everything through the restricted lens of zero-sum. He's arguing that we’ve not only financialized all interactions, but also politicized them. He does a good job of describing the justification for heading down a path of over-politicization -- the person's heart is in the right place. Or, at least, it can be argued that their heart is in the right place. Talisse's description is the most generous interpretation. "What do you say to somebody who says, ‘look, if I don’t give every possible moment of my waking life to fighting for justice, I’m complicit. Right? This is a more extreme version of the response [...of] The Resistance, of a certain kind of reader of Overdoing Democracy […] "That’s the thing: There’s so much injustice in the world that if I don’t give everything I’ve got, I’m being permissive, I’m complicit, I’m … taking undue advantage of my privilege, that these are not fights that I’m forced to be involved in. I don’t want to be inauthentic to my political self by taking a night off and playing Scrabble. I don’t want to do that. Because that’s just letting evil win. (laughs)." Just to be clear: he laughed, but not at these people. He's laughing at the dilemma posed by trying to be authentic to your cause and to yourself, at how following the nearly unassailable logic above to its logical conclusion has the opposite effect of the intended one. Instead of creating a warrior for justice, converting masses to the path of righteousness, it creates a person whose circle of influence contracts as unbelievers are jettisoned and even those who would pass muster run away in droves to avoid them. It's not an easy path to navigate -- you have to be able to realize that there are terrible ideas and mindsets to be conquered, while not hating the people who believe and have them. "My response is very simple. I understand that commitment, that concern with the authenticity of one’s political project and aspiration, and I share it. Part of my concern is that unless you recharge socially by engaging with others in activities that don’t have a political valence, you become less good at serving your own political ends because you become less capable of convincing people who are not already on board with you, because you become less able to hear their reasons and become less able to communicate productively with them." So that's it: the longer you stay in the warm nest populated only by fellow believers, the less effective you are in growing your movement. This is something that cults have known for a long time -- and it's hard to see the difference between a cult like Scientology and the Republican or Democratic parties (or the blue-check Twitterati of either camp). The communication problem he outlines above is amply evident in American culture -- in the mainstream and social media. [1] Talisse continues, describing the endgame that is ... purges. "And, one other feature of the belief-polarization phenomenon […] is [it] also undermines our political allegiances, our [identity?} becomes more intensely focused on our authenticity as committed members. We become more invested as a group, at detecting poseurs. And we when become more invested as a group in detecting poseurs … we find more poseurs. "Which is to say: the belief-polarization phenomenon shrinks our coalitions. If it’s unchecked […] we actually become less effective as political agents. Just like the workaholic becomes less good at their job, when we’re overdoing democracy, we become less good as democratic citizens, not merely in the fact that we’re less able to work together with our opposition, we become less able to work efficiently together as allies. That disserves justice, too." I really like the analogy with a workaholic: You think you're doing a great job, but you're too tired to notice that you're only half as efficient as you used to be. You barely even notice as your circle of associates shrinks, as one person after another fails to live up to your standards -- each is either dropped with a justification that made a lot of sense at the time or they just flee. Good riddance to bad garbage, you think. The end effect, though, is that even your echo chamber is emptying out. And that's only one facet. Another enormous problem is that you become more unquestioning of dogma that comes from accepted sources. It makes you more stupid because you've not only stunted your ability to convince non-believers -- you've become a believer yourself. What might have once been a healthy skepticism has atrophied with respect to certain sources and certain targets. [2] This isn't a dig on "one side" or "the other"; the problem affects literally anyone who's encysting their mind, shielding it from potentially offensive thoughts or ideas -- or people. It's actually quite an egotistical thing to do; instead of sharing your supposedly more-enlightened attitude with those less fortunate, you hoard it to yourself and those who are already in-the-know. You do this because it's easier. It's a lot of work convincing people to change their minds -- especially if they're just as encysted as you are. Some people, like "Daryl Davis" -- who befriends KKK members and convinces them to leave the group -- go above and beyond the call of duty. We don't all have to go that far -- it can be quite dangerous, for one thing -- but keeping an open mind and realizing that nearly no-one is literally the devil is a good start in trying to save people instead of condemning them. Who knows? You might learn something from them, too. [3] You never know -- stranger things have happened. [4] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] "Matt Taibbi" reports extensively on this, as well; see, for example, "The Post-Objectivity Era (Summary of "Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another")" . [1] One side will believe absolutely anything they hear about Hillary Clinton (e.g. the more lurid parts of Q-Anon, like her international pedophile ring) and the other will believe anything they hear about Donald Trump (e.g. the more lurid parts of Russiagate, like the Steele Dossier). [1] Hell, I just learned the other day from such a friend that China has ground troops in Canada and Mexico and is positively poised to attack the U.S. sooner rather than later. We are, apparently, going to have to nuke ourselves in order to eradicate the little cockroaches. But that's a story for another day. [1] For anyone wondering what such a conversation might look like, check out this 3-hour interview/conversation between Joe Rogan and Alex Jones. Trust me, I've watched almost an hour and it's well-worth it. They're learning from each other and they're unlearning things, too. Their conversation on energy and nuclear ends up landing in the right spot, despite a few odd tangents. The discussion at 01:35:00 is quite interesting as well, with Joe Rogan sounding incredibly reasonable and refreshing intelligent. Especially over the second half, Rogan remains reasonable and reins in Jones and Dillon as they go slowly more and more off the rails, lending too much credence to fringe issues. He pulls them back to the more salient core of the problems, regardless of the often-unprovable minor details raised by his co-hosts. [media] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4029 2020-07-12T21:24:57+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

publishes Andrew Napolitano and Patrick Buchanan, who both have some very troubling opinions, but who can both be very reasonable authors. I wouldn't watch them on an interview show, but their written content is decent and often thought-provoking. The site "reason.com" leans libertarian, but also has a stable of writers who are rational and reasonable, for the most part. Foreign Policy, the Economist, and so on -- they all have some value. Even the NY Times can provide information although their faux-progressive/neo-liberal slant is more difficult to purge -- it infuses everything they write. Even Fox News sometimes publishes factual articles, when they think no-one's looking. If you're more wary of a source, then you should also be wary of material they publish from individuals you trust ... their work has likely been edited to at least lean closer to the acceptable ideology of the source. [Different Styles and Intents] It's also good to remember that shows and interviews will have different focuses: * Is it meant to be serious news? * Is it meant to be opinion? * Is it reality TV? * Is it "based on" TV? Basically, are you reading or watching something that's explicitly an opinion? Or does it purport to have journalistic character? The likelihood that it is slanted is the same, but it will affect how you view and consume and store the information in it. 1. Do the people presenting the information have any qualifications related to the subject? 2. Do they have any journalistic, scientific, or logical qualifications at all? 3. Are they prepared to treat the material or interview subject seriously? 4. Have they familiarized themselves with material relevant to the topic so that they can ask insightful questions? 5. Or do they simply amplify knee-jerk reactions, perhaps ping-ponging with co-hosts? A show like The View is in this category, but so is something like Joe Rogan. Be aware of the type of media and how it was produced and adjust your judgment and expectations accordingly. Remember that very few things are Freudian slips that show an individual's true self, despite literally ever other thing they've ever said or written. Repeated slips, though, may indicate a true opinion. 1. An essay in a major magazine is likely to have actually been edited from its original form. 2. The title of an article has likely been changed from the original that the author suggested, especially on mainstream sources. 3. For books, this is less the case, but still something to think about. 4. Don't judge too harshly for knee-jerk statements that seem at odds with a rational, cautious approach. E.g. I just heard Chuck Mertz from This is Hell! say to a guest that it was "good that he didn't raise a prosecutor" when a guest mentioned that his daughter was a PD in Miami. Is it truly Chuck's opinion that all prosecutors are monsters? Did his guest's chuckling agreement express his actual opinion? Probably not. They were just bantering. Maybe they should have been more careful, but the ensuing discussion put the lie to the likelihood that either of them actually holds such an extreme position. 5. Live interviews are not everyone's thing. Some individuals are much more at home with more time to think about answers. They might agree with something an interview subject or interviewer says because that's how interviews work. Just because they didn't yell RACIST! immediately doesn't mean that they agree with the other sentiment. 6. If you're reading an interview, was it live? Or it based on an email exchange? Email exchanges generally allow more time for thought and consideration before replying. If the interview was live, has the transcript been "edited for length and clarity"? 7. Has the interview been edited? Was it edited to make the subject look better? Or worse? 8. How scripted is the situation? [Evaluating an individual] The following questions and procedures apply to both new individuals and to individuals whom you've already evaluated and in whom you've perhaps placed a modicum of trust. There are standard tropes about "always remaining vigilant", but you don't have to overdo it. Once an individual has proven themselves, you can lower your guard a bit or you'll both drive yourself crazy and also waste a lot of your time on unwarranted hyper-vigilance and suspicion. Also remember that individuals exist over time. They may be quite interesting and rational for a time before they dive into a deep, dark place from which they never emerge. For example, David Cay Johnston is an excellent accountant/journalist and has written a lot about Trump's finances that makes sense. However, he's gone over the edge on Russiagate to an alarming degree and, even now, won't acknowledge that not only is it dead in the water, but that it was a chimera from the very beginning. He's totally invested in it and there's no going back. This should perhaps make you a bit more wary about other things he's written, but it doesn't completely obviate it. On the other hand, someone may start off their career unreasonably and then slowly grow -- reëvaluating an individual means giving that individual another chance. Sometimes, you can leave it to another individual you trust to given that other person another chance. Remember, thought, that it should take time to learn to trust an individual. 1. Do they sound reasonable? 2. Are they rational in their argumentation? 3. Do they use valid reasoning techniques? 4. Do they link references? 5. Do the mix hyperbole with facts? 6. Do they even cite facts? 7. Have they published anything? A book? Essays? Are they just tweeting? 8. Does what they write jibe with the reality you both experience? 9. How consistent are they? 10. Do they ever admit error? 11. Are they reporting before anyone could know any facts? Or did they wait to see what the situation really is? 12. Are they being careful about anecdotes vs. statistics? 13. Do they sound reasonable in interviews? 14. Are they writing about something that they might know about? (E.g. a classic example is journalists writing about countries they've never visited, whose languages and cultures they don't know and whose histories they haven't bothered to learn.) 15. Are they able to discuss various topics with people who do not share (all of or any of) their views? 16. How militant/viable are their proposed solutions? I.e. if the natural consequence of believing what they say is that we have to eradicate 30% of mankind, then they better be very convincing that there is no alternative 17. To what degree might they be personally invested in promulgating the viewpoint that they have? It’s not that they they're not allowed to make money from it, but does what they say seem to be primarily based on what their employers, their shareholders, or their donors seem to want them to say? 18. Finally, does what they say gibe with other information you've curated? [Categorizing Individuals and Sources] It's also important to help people distinguish where on a sliding scale to place individuals. Each individual gets a checklist. The checks they have determines whether you read, watch, or listen to them at all -- and what you do with the information they provide. 1. Rational 2. Strong writing 3. Entertaining 4. Reliable facts 5. Rational 6. Consistency 7. Empathetic 8. Non-hypocritical 9. Reasonable 10. Not obviously contradictory to reality 11. Reliable reading of history 12. Empathy to non-tribe members (E.g. seeing things from other countries' or groups' viewpoints) 13. Holistic solutions (E.g. solutions and ideas are scalable and don't require believing in artificial cohorts. For example, someone whose ideas only seem to work for millionaires isn't a good source for society-level solutions because almost everyone will be disadvantaged, by definition. Similarly, anyone who militantly thinks that a certain race should be privileged above others suffers from the same deficit.) I read and use information from people all along the scale, being careful who to cite or what to use it for. Some people are good to read to keep your finger on the pulse of the broad spectrum of what passes for thought in the intellectual desert of America. [Poor Criteria] What are bad reasons for accepting someone's opinion? 1. They're good-looking. 2. They flatter me. 3. They have a sexy voice. 4. They write wonderfully. 5. They're on the right network. 6. They work for the right source. 7. They're gay. 8. They're female. 9. They're black. 10. They have the right identity. 11. They agree with me. (I.e. this can't be the only reason you accept their opinion. You still have to fact-check and evaluate their reasoning.) What are bad reasons for not listening to someone? 1. They're ugly. 2. They annoy me. 3. They have an annoying voice. 4. They're terrible writers. (There is a limit to this. If their writing is so bad that you can't elicit the point or it puts the onus of information extrication purely on the reader, then you can ignore them and move on.) 5. They're on the wrong network. 6. They work for the wrong source. 7. They're gay. 8. They're female. 9. They're black. 10. They have the wrong identity. 11. They disagree with me. [Reading Between the Lines] Sometimes information will make an effort to seem unbiased, but you still have to be careful. Sometimes the bias is in what is not said, or what is assumed by the writer or speaker. There is a lot of this in the mainstream media. For example, the NY Times will rarely, if ever, even consider that there is any alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that the U.S. has adopted, despite ample evidence to the contrary in the rest of the world. They also have an official enemies list: their journalistic standards for article targeting those enemies are negligible. That is, they will simply assume that everyone else also hates Russia without really asking any questions. The cartoon "Whatever Happened to Basic Standards at Newspapers?" by Ted Rall sums up the latest broadside against Russia: "It’s just like the Ukraine story that failed to impeach Donald Trump. Anonymous sources tell major newspapers that second hand or thirdhand source is based in the intelligence community, which is tasked with lying, that Russia may be paying bounties to the Taliban in order to kill United States troops in occupied Afghanistan. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but why pay attention to a story that has no evidence or sourcing?" [Honing Your Skills] Read stuff that you don't agree with, as well. See if you can find writers who explain bad points-of-view eloquently or with rational argumentation. Train to figure out the hole in the argument. A good practice with individuals you've got in your "stable" is to find a topic on which you disagree with them. Unless the topic is a true deal-breaker (e.g. they promote anthropophagy), you'll probably want to keep listening to them but know that they are human, just like the rest of us, and will not always be rational or reasonable. Exercises: * Take someone whose writing or ideas you admire and find something that you would criticize about them (e.g. Chomsky's lesser-evilism). * Do the same for someone whose ideas you generally loathe (e.g. Trump's squashing of the TPP or Betsy Devos's realignment of Title IX enforcement with realistic notions of justice and due process). [Good 'ol Correlation vs. Causation] A good number of people seem to know something about correlation and causation and are able to detect the coarser transgressions of failing to properly distinguish between them. As with nearly everything else, there are gradations, subtle variations that can trap you into believing that certain information leads inevitably to a given conclusion. A good way to combat this trap is to constantly play devil's advocate. Always ask whether there might be another reason than the one given to explain a particular event or fact or quote from an individual. Empathy is quite helpful in more easily finding alternative explanations. This will help you figure out how something can be technically true, but still misleading. For example, looking at the data in early June, COVID cases in the U.S. are climbing, but deaths are proportionately decreasing. 1. Conclusion: COVID is not as deadly as we thought. Proof? 2. Conclusion: COVID death numbers are being suppressed. Too Harsh? 3. Conclusion: COVID deaths are being counted differently. Getting there... 4. Hypothesis: COVID deaths is not a very precise measure. Is there another number worth more? Excess mortality does the trick. If excess mortality is higher, then you have to account for why. COVID fills the bill as the only thing on the radar this year. So, if official COVID deaths are down, but pneumonia numbers are up 500% (see Florida), then you've found propaganda ... someone is manipulating real data to lead you to a conclusion not supported by that data. 5. Hypothesis: Mark Twain was right about statistics. There are many ways to group data. The U.S. is huge and taking averages over 330m people is not a good way of examining data about a disease the spreads in flare-ups. See the article "The trillion dollar question: why are COVID cases increasing in the US. while deaths seem to be decreasing? The answer is simple: “Simpson’s paradox”" by Gregory Bufithis , which warns that "If you pool data without regard to the underlying causality, you’ll get erroneous results." and concludes that "[w]e are about to have dozens of NYCs around the country." You can use this trick with unemployment, inflation, financial news. The facts are often technically correct (e.g. the stock market did go up) but the conclusion is bogus (it was a reaction to recent job numbers). It's perfectly valid to accept facts from an author without accepting the conclusions they draw. [Determining Plausibility] For example, in episode "~298~ The TRUTH About Epstein, & How Corporations Take Lives" by Redacted Tonight (from 2:00--08:30), Lee Camp discusses the Jeffrey Epstein documentary on Netflix. The documentary concedes that Epstein was a terrible person, but acts to keep you focused on his having been a bad apple, a local maximum -- it covers up information at the same time it's convinced you that is revealing information. Camp goes on to discuss that the laser-like focus on Epstein's badness covers up the further revelations that Epstein was working very closely with Israeli military intelligence and that his perversions were therefore very likely part of a scheme to amass blackmail data on high-level leaders from around the world. That the mainstream media would focus on the more salacious and easily understood part is not surprising. That they would avoid discussing the possibility that America's very close ally Israel was engaged in nefarious machinations to leverage power through blackmail is also not surprising. Is it true? Unknown. Is it plausible? Absolutely. One can't dismiss it out of hand, especially considering the available information and sources. In the next segment in the same show, Camp reports that PG&E has pled guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in the "Camp Fire Case" in California. Once again, the mainstream media claims that it's the highest number of counts that a company has "copped to". They reported the case and seem to be admonishing corporate America, but they're actually protecting it by claiming it to be the "worst", a bad apple, a local maximum. In reality, there are giant corporations whose only reason for existence is to produce weapons that kill millions per year. That's literally their job. Raytheon, McDonnel Douglass, Lockheed Martin, etc. Pharmaceutical companies started and continue the opioid epidemic, killing hundreds of thousands. DuPont made Napalm and Agent Orange. Union Carbide killed thousands in Bhopal. Chevron eradicated vast swaths of the rainforest, along with its denizens. Companies pollute water and air all the time, killing millions per year. Many of these companies advertise relentlessly on American media, right alongside the news purporting to bring companies to justice. As Camp says, "it's like having 60-second spots telling the nation what a great gardener John Wayne Gacy was." But PG&E has now seen some form of justice and they were the worst. The facts presented the case against PG&E are true, but the conclusion -- that we've seen justice in any realistic way whatsoever and can now relax -- is the propaganda. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As the banner at "earthli News" proclaims: "Paving the road to hell since 1999". [1] Citing the article "Greg’s List" by Scott H. Greenfield . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3957 2020-04-21T23:00:32+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. The video is 75 minutes, but well-worth the time. [media] The following citation/transcript is from about 55 minutes,... ]]>

. The video is 75 minutes, but well-worth the time. [media] The following citation/transcript is from about 55 minutes, when the interviewer asked him what he thought of Biden vs. Trump.. "Biden is better than Trump, that seems clear to me. But, it's almost meaningless because that's such a low bar that the statement is, sort of, boring. Almost anybody would have been better than Trump. "Any one of the 20 people who at one time or another wanted to be the Democratic candidate would have been better than Trump. "Who Cares?" is better than Trump. And when it comes to voting, yes, I suppose we'll vote for Biden because no-one's going to vote for Trump for 20 different reasons. "But for the left: Mr. Biden is a zero. There's nothing there. He's what we call an empty suit. This is an old, probably senile, representative of an old, certainly senile establishment of the Democratic party. This is the Clintons, this is Obama, this is all of the old apparatchiks of the Democratic Party, who are terrified by Bernie, who make money from the corporate elite, who are the center-left in a game with the center-right. "For me, the job of the left is what it was before. I appreciate Bernie because he strengthened us. He did two things: One, he taught millions of Americans that they are not alone and that they are not isolated. He taught them and he taught the whole world that there's a tremendous constituency for anti-capitalism and for socialism, whatever the vague understanding of those terms. But he taught the world that the United States is not the place where there can't be socialism. That is an enormous step forward for us. "He also made the daily conversation about socialism acceptable. [...] He built a foundation on which we should be building right now." He continues with a discussion of how to build: those who want to build within the Democratic Party and those who want to build a socialist party that stands on its own. He will be working on the second option, but he welcomes people to try to move the Democratic Party. He also welcomes any of those who eventually give up -- they shouldn't be shunned for having tried. It's all important. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3872 2019-12-28T12:06:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

that is full of screen captures showing the contortions the media takes in order to ignore Bernie's leading presence in the race for nomination. For example, [image] If you're interested, there's a whole "subreddit" dedicated to tracking the phenomenon. It's an absolute scandal, but it's unsurprising given the history of media in the United States. Take a look at "Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi" for much more detail on that. Bernie is very clearly being railroaded off of the Democratic nomination. This has already happened once, in 2016. At that time, Bernie pledged his support for Hillary. That was a mistake. He should not do anything of the sort again. [Democrats and Republicans] The only advantage to him running as a Democrat now is the paltry coverage he gets and it gives the Democratic party a chance to cement its reputation as just as duplicitous and self-serving and anti-democratic as the Republican Party. The Republicans are all-in with Trump. There's no going back for them. They've made their deal with the devil and are too far down that dead-end to turn back. Sunken costs and a blindness of their own has sealed their fate. To be sure, it is still very likely that their fate will include having a two-term impeached president. But I really feel that it's Bernie's office to give away. The amount of duplicitous effort required to torpedo his strong reputation would almost certainly break parts of the national spirit that haven't already been shattered by previous idiocy like Russiagate or the pathetic charade of the impeachment. [1] The best-case scenario is for the Democratic party to torpedo itself along with the Republicans and for something stronger to rise from the ashes. Bernie is not a radical: he wants what Americans have wanted for decades and decades. He wants what other people have in other, similar -- better -- countries. [Workers of the World, Unite] Just by way of example, the following is a call to action for German workers to shake off the shackles being imposed on them by an upsurge of American-style capitalism cloaked in the mantle of "startup" companies. [image] It is a message from "Martin Bucketmaker" (almost certainly not his real name) that states, "The worker's movement didn't let themselves be shot in the streets in the 19th century just so you can subjugate yourself at a startup, where you don't even have representation on the Board, for 80 hours per week, and you think it's super-cool because you get to call your boss by his first name when you play ping pong with him." The "Betriebsrat" is something that Bernie Sanders is pushing for the U.S. as well: it's a legal requirement for worker representation on the Board of Directors for companies over a certain size. Germany's had it for a long, long time. [Richard Wolff is a National Treasure] Speaking of Germany, there's Karl Marx (who, you'll learn in the video below, actually spent most of his career in England). And the best introduction to Karl Marx that you could possibly get is from Marxist Economist Richard Wolff. Like Bernie, he's been singing the same tune for decades and people are finally starting to listen. The following is a nearly 2-hour video, every minute of which is worth watching. I know that's a tremendous ask in a day and age where you can binge-watch 10 hours of Netflix until the wee hours of the morning, but educational videos have to be under 5 minutes or boredom sets in. If you want to feel like you're "skipping ahead", then jump to "about 52 minutes in" to hear Wolff's long answer to the question "how does Marxism relate to farmers today?" [media] ...after which you can go back and watch the rest of the video, because it's really good. If there's no way you can get behind Wolff's mesmerizing didactic stylings for two hours [2], then maybe this next video is more to your taste: It's Killer Mike (originally of the Hip Hop group "Run The Jewels") delivering a tremendous 2-minute introduction for Bernie Sanders. [media] It's only two minutes. You can power through. I think it's a pretty inspiring intro. If Sanders actually makes it to the Democratic Convention with a chance of being nominated, he should definitely get Killer Mike to introduce him. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I didn't watch a single second of the process. I only read the charges and the articles of impeachment, after it was over. I tend to agree with "The Articles of Impeachment Should Have Been These Instead" by Ted Rall , where he writes: "Donald Trump deserved to be impeached. He deserves to be convicted in the Senate. "Every president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors that could justify impeachment. "But not on these charges. Not for threatening to withhold $400 million in aid that we shouldn’t have been sending to Ukraine in the first place, not as long as 38 million Americans are poor. Not for trying to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden; American voters have the right to know that the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and his son are on the take. "Certainly not on the nonsensical count of contempt of Congress, which punished the president for the crime of using the legal system to defend himself." The Rall article continues with an extensively detailed list of reasons for which Trump should have been impeached instead. He concludes with, "Instead, Democrats have indulged in a pro forma charade that will set an awful precedent, tempting the House of Representatives to impeach every president of the opposite party over every little thing. They’ve trivialized an only-in-case-of-emergency process into a rushed lark, ignored what really matters and squandered the opportunity to hold the president to account for his many crimes and sins." [1] And I'm dead serious here: you should. You will not regret it. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3694 2019-02-03T14:01:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses some of the techniques people use to try to learn a language -- none of which work reliably. The only one that works is immersion -- a language is something that you can't just purchase. That's what seems to irritate so many people -- especially those in cultures like the U.S., which assume that a sufficient quantity of money should suffice to purchase anything the heart wants. If you "want" to know French, then your obscene pile of money should be able to purchase a shortcut for you. If it can't, then that means that no-one's trying hard enough for you and your money. But proficiency in most things requires an investment of time and dedication. There is no shortcut. Do you want to be a programmer? You have to spend years honing your craft. Can you get a job as a programmer without doing so? Sure, you can. Use your money and influence to get a job as a programmer. You're employed as a programmer, but you are not a programmer. You can get away with it as long as your primary audience is in a worse position to judge your proficiency than you are. You can convince people that you know French if no-one knows what French sounds like -- you're still going to look like an idiot in France. If nobody above you in your company knows anything about programming, then you're fine with your lie -- until someone with actual skills shows up. And, even then, you're most likely more adept at office politics and can get their meddling ass fired before your job is endangered. Sports very much fall into this category. To be proficient, you have to invest time and dedication. You can't just buy the skill. Back to languages, though. The author declares "immersion is a dead-end" when immersion is clearly the only viable solution. It's only a dead-end if you're looking for a nearly risk- or work-free and foolproof way of padding your resume with an extra language for which you have no pressing need other than to get to the next rung in the corporate ladder. Why would that help? Because the idiots who decide who goes up the ladder have decided that knowing another language is a sign of sophistication and intelligence and mental flexibility and possibly cultural openness, all of which may be true, but you want to acquire the benefit without the exhausting process of actual becoming more sophisticated or intelligent -- because you're already perfect and/or deserving of promotion just for being you, obviously. In a last-ditch attempt, the article suggests a strategy: "For example, why not take the experience of learning your first language and apply it to learning a second one? Everybody, after all, speaks at least one language that is at least somewhat difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Why might learning a new language not just be a repetition of whatever you did when you learned your first language?" Because, you pathetic fool, you learned your first language by immersion and you just declared immersion a dead-end one sentence earlier. The author wraps up by steering people to his homepage where he's selling ideas for how to really learn another language. Sigh. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I picked up the term "vassal" from Vladimir Putin, as he used it many times in the Putin Interviews (directed by Oliver Stone). He noted that the U.S. wants its allies to act like vassals. That is, it doesn't want equals -- it wants vassals, but it wants to be viewed as having allies so that its actions don't appear unilateral, which they are, in reality. [1] The oil price has been artificially low -- artificial because the fracking boom is a heavily-subsidized bubble that is already deflating rapidly -- for years, to the unfortunate (wink) detriment of both Venezuela and Russia, another country with a lot of resources. [1] The lovely German word I'd rather have used is "Spassbremse", which translates literally to "fun brake". ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3573 2019-01-08T22:45:57+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3597 2019-01-08T22:29:40+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, someone cited Michael Moore as follows, "In my first film, Roger & Me, a white woman on social security clubs a rabbit to death so that she can sell him as "meat" instead of as a pet. I wish I had a nickel for every time in the past 10 years that someone has come up to me and" ... ]]>

, someone cited Michael Moore as follows, "In my first film, Roger & Me, a white woman on social security clubs a rabbit to death so that she can sell him as "meat" instead of as a pet. I wish I had a nickel for every time in the past 10 years that someone has come up to me and told me how "horrified" they were when they saw that "poor little cute bunny" bonked on the head. The scene, they say, made them physically sick. The Motion Picture Association of America gave Roger & Me an R [18] rating in response to that rabbit killing. Teachers write to me and say they have to edit that part out of the film, if they want to show it to their students. "But less than two minutes after the bunny lady does her deed, I included footage of a scene in which police in Flint, Michigan, shot a black man who was wearing a Superman cape and holding a plastic toy gun. Not once - not ever - has anyone said to me, "I can't believe you showed a black man being shot in your movie! How horrible! How disgusting! I couldn't sleep for weeks." After all, he was just a black man, not a cute, cuddly bunny. The ratings board saw absolutely nothing wrong with that scene. Why? Because it's normal, natural. We've become so accustomed to seeing black men killed - in the movies and on the evening news - that we now accept it as standard operating procedure. No big deal! That's what blacks do - kill and die. Ho-hum. Pass the butter. [1]" I responded as follows, We tend to focus on direct and simplistic violence (slaughtering a rabbit or shooting a man) and almost completely ignore the violence of a modern society that leaves its elderly to fend for themselves as if it were still the 1850s. We feel immediate empathy for a fluffy bunny rabbit, but have been trained to loathe the violent poor person who kills it. We eat chicken and beef by the truckload, but still feel vaguely that the factory farmer who kills them for us is somewhat of a backwoods hick, less morally fit than we are. Most will viscerally react to the killing of a rabbit. Some are just as repulsed by the shooting of an unarmed man. Very few can condemn those who support or promulgate the violent system that creates these moments. It's too abstract. Bill Clinton is documented as having largely dismantled what was once welfare and having grown the U.S. prison system four-fold, but those acts of violence -- with much more far-reaching effects than a single bunny rabbit's death -- are barely ever mentioned and certainly not with anything approaching the visceral condemnation we reserve for someone who kills an animal. The violence of larger societal currents is difficult to comprehend, so it is ignored by people, the media and society. Fish don't know they're wet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I was unable to corroborate this quote with a quick search, but whether or not he said it is irrelevant to my discussion. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3635 2018-12-30T22:55:34+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3617 2018-12-25T11:05:47+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3583 2018-09-18T15:17:55+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3398 2017-03-26T22:35:21+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

: "It’s one of those books that can’t help but make you feel smarter for having read it. Barack Obama and Bill Gates have undergone that experience, as" ... ]]>

: "It’s one of those books that can’t help but make you feel smarter for having read it. Barack Obama and Bill Gates have undergone that experience, as have many others in the Davos crowd and Silicon Valley. The irony, perhaps, is that one of the book’s warnings is that we are in danger of becoming an elite-dominated global society." Ugh. This in no way makes me want to scurry to Amazon and order this book. I'd already read another review of it -- "The Future of Humans? One Forecaster Calls for Obsolescence" by Siddhartha Mukherjee -- which admitted that the author Yuval Noah Hariri is extrapolating considerably in his presentation. In the middle, Mukherjee writes that "Harari has, for my taste, a tendency to overstate the reach of such technological “fixes.”", which goes a long way toward explaining why Bill Gates and Silicon Valley like it (Obama as well, who is a technocrat above all else). Celebrity endorsements are never a good reason to read a book. This doesn't make the book a bad thing, but ... ugh, I can't stand this adulation of the rich and powerful. Is the book any good? Does it stand on its own? That is, what if I don't care what Bill Gates and Barack Obama think -- at all -- can you give me other reasons to read it? Well, I read that his prose is "grippingly lucid", he is "dazzlingly bold". He tells his tale "marvelously" with "breezy prose". Is this an actually, honest review or is it marketing? Where is the dividing line? My suspicions increase when I read that a personage no less intellectual than Arianna Huffington posed questions to the author in the same review. I feel like this book will be a futurist vision akin to good science fiction. But in that case, why are we supposed to be so excited about it? There are thousands of similar visions of the future -- written by masters of the genre -- -that I could read. Why should I read this one? Are all of the people so excited about this book -- most of whom are names I don't recognize -- just people who have never read any good science fiction before? The obsolescence of humanity in the near term isn't exactly a giant leap in deductive reasoning. There is a strong trend around discussing the singularity (when humans can extend their lives more quickly than they age) or the takeover of AI. Silicon Valley -- our intellectual and moral betters in every way, if you believe their press agents -- adores all of this. This obsession with eschatology strikes me as a way for the elites to absolve themselves of fixing a world strongly plagued by problems engendered by them, that their position in society has engendered. They're all rich as Gods and want a pat on the back when they give back a crumb or two. Naturally, they're going to want to tell us just how to run things in exchange for those crumbs -- but why shouldn't they? Didn't you hear that they're smarter than all of the rest of us put together? That's why they "won", isn't it? The argument goes: Well, things are pretty shitty for everyone now -- and things look to get a lot shittier -- but we're not going to be around for that long anyway, so let's just enjoy the ride, right? No-one need get upset, we'll all be dead and replaced with an improved version soon enough. And, above all, we don't need to fix anything -- or redistribute anything -- because ... why bother? I personally don't see how a great evolutionary leap forward will happen with climate change and possible nuclear holocaust rearing its ugly head, but that's the way these prognostications by so-called "sages" work: they ignore the inconvenient stuff and tell us what we want to hear. I read "The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman" a few years back -- also touted as a game-changing book that predicted the new 100 years -- and it was bullshit. It just flat-out ignored obvious trends, making them disappear without even a puff of smoke. I don't doubt that this is a good book, but wonder for whom is it good? Is it actually science-based? Or is it mumbo-jumbo written to soothe rich, elitist liberal souls? I admit to a certain curiosity. But I'm highly skeptical despite the glowing reviews. Humanity has shown -- especially in its current ultra-capitalistic incarnation, which Harari says will consolidate as the only ideology soon (hat-tip to Fukuyama) -- that it will sully and cheapen everything it touches. Maybe the ones that come after will be better, but I don't see any evidence of that. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3347 2017-02-19T22:09:47+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

with interest. I'd never heard of Jordan Peterson. He was eminently quotable and I highlighted the following passages. "Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity]" ... ]]>

with interest. I'd never heard of Jordan Peterson. He was eminently quotable and I highlighted the following passages. "Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads. (Emphasis added.)" [Marxism is the root of all evil] OK, so the sentiment is interesting and well-intentioned, but upon rereading Peterson, we see that he goes from a standpoint of "be careful what you wish for"/"be careful that you don't end up being what you're fighting" to bundling any request to veer from the current social and prejudicial paradigms we have right now with Marxism/Socialism/Communism/Totalitarianism, consigning them all to the "ultimate evil" trashbin, wiping his hands and walking off into the sunset with a smug look on his face and his spurs jingling. Too often, I feel that he's done learning. He already knows everything. This is unfortunately a not-uncommon attitude. The world of reason divides itself into those smart people who think they can solve everything with reason, analyzing every new concept into components to which they already have answers -- and those who admit their increasing unsurety with each increase in knowledge. It's not binary, of course, but those two groups are well-represented when painting in broad strokes (which I admittedly am). And it's not an accusation I feel I'm making: Peterson makes it himself. Listen to his "interview with Joe Rogan" (3hrs). Several times, he draws a direct line from the misguided stridency of SJWs to the killing fields of Cambodia (Pol Pot) and Ukraine (Stalin) with no apparent awareness or admission of hyperbole. His overarching concern stems from the kowtowing of school administrations to SJW browbeating to remove mens rea from offensive language. Peterson again, "Are you suggesting they’ve altered the rule of law as we traditionally understand it? They have. They say ‘what you said hurt my feelings’ – and this is part of the assault on the objective world – your intent is irrelevant. My subjective response is the determining factor. The idea that they would dare to undermine the doctrine of intent is beyond belief." This is, of course, a great concern, as it opens up the legal playing field to anyone with a new set of terms and concepts to be offended about. But it's not vastly different than things were before: it's just a different group being privileged by law, a group that does not include well-educated and tenured middle-aged white males. His otherwise intelligent reaction to the affair seems to ignore this blind spot: he doesn't once address the concerns of the "Marxists" as stemming from legitimate grievances, which they of course do. The grievance is legitimate, but the solution is lunatic. Failing to acknowledge that makes Peterson dig in against a world-girdling Marxist movement that exists largely only in his own mind. On one level, I wholly understand Peterson's position: it's hugely annoying when people who fail to put any rigor into their argumentation waste your time -- or when they force you to pay attention to them because they've altered the legal constructs that affect us all. As a hopefully related example, it's similar to the frustration we first-world elites feel when we're forced to take our shoes off, put our arms over heads and place our liquids in little bags when we travel by airplane. We all know it's bullshit and a waste of time and that the laws stem from the weakest, dumbest instincts -- but we're powerless to do anything about them. The frustration is real and those who rail against it are factually correct, but could perhaps spend their time in better ways. [1] [Intermezzo: A Rant about the Dumb] This is an unedited note I found on my phone from about year ago. I'm honestly no longer sure what inspired my ire, but the last paragraph suggests I was reading about some unfathomably irritating and inconsequential SJW spectacle. It's like when a mentally handicapped person asks you to stop doing something perfectly innocuous. You have no idea why, but you also suspect that neither do they. There is probably no rhyme or reason other than habit or acquired behavior or neuronal impulse, and yet it will govern your interaction. And woe betide you should you ignore what is for you an ad-hoc and nonsensical rule. Children do this, too. They make up rules in order to exert a modicum of control over a bewildering world around them. This control is, of course, superficial, based as it is on a nearly utter lack of understanding, but it is very real nonetheless. It will govern interactions with those more intelligent or wise or learned, subverting that power. Does it deserve to do so? Is something gained for either party or for society? The imposer gains short-term and likely fleeting satisfaction. The wise have their time wasted, and society gains nothing. Who does this? Children, the mentally handicapped, the stupid, the uneducated, the otherwise ignorant. And now we have hordes of fools both attending and having already completed degrees in institutions of supposedly higher learning, wasting time with what they clearly consider to be worthwhile and at least quasi- intellectual pursuits: hunting and killing micro-aggression and carrying what they call political correctness to a place so ludicrous that even the irredeemable idiots of the eighties and nineties would gasp at their audacity and utter lack of any form of nuance. [Is your identity wholly yours?] So I can understand where Peterson is coming from. Let's read some more of his interview. "Your identity isn’t just how you feel about yourself. It’s also how you think about yourself, it’s what you know about yourself, it’s your educated judgement about yourself. It’s negotiated with other people if you’re even vaguely civilized because otherwise no one can stand you. If your identity isn’t a hybrid of what you are and what other people expect, then you’re like the kid on the playground with whom no one can play." This is, I feel, a good and indisputable point. It is, however, perhaps slaying a dragon that doesn't exist -- making it a straw man. I feel Peterson takes the easy way out by locking horns with the most unreasonable of his opponents -- and then pretending that the perfectly reasonable concerns and difficult ideas have also been eliminated. "There’s also this idea that you shouldn’t say things that hurt people’s feelings – that’s the philosophy of the compassionate left. It’s so childish it’s beyond comprehension. What did Nietzsche say: ‘you can judge a man’s spirit by the amount of truth he can tolerate.’ I tell my students this too, you can tell when you’re being educated because you’re horrified." This is another sentiment that I can agree with wholeheartedly, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop now. I'm just waiting for Peterson to now jump to a conclusion that I don't feel he's justified in doing. I wonder how much of Peterson's opponents actually believe what he says they believe. I mean, I leave open the possibility that he's seeing a societal trend that will lead to to an intellectual evisceration of North America in short time -- but it feels much more like he's really deep into the argument now and can't see out of the local minimum in his isolated world of Canadian academia. "But they put a restriction on me: at the debate, I’m not allowed to repeat the statement that I won’t use these preferred pronouns. It’s a little absurd that we’re going to go forward with a debate about freedom of speech, and I can’t repeat the central claim that initiated the debate." "looked at the policies on the Ontario Human Rights website because I think those are the people that are behind all this. The writing on that website is appalling from a technical perspective – it’s incoherent. They’re the semi-literate, philosophically ignorant, malevolent little coterie who are behind it. You would expect better than that from quasi-judiciaries." This is exactly my point: Peterson is intelligent, well-read and eminently coherent. His is a scientist in a world that doesn't generally work much with logical chains of reasoning. This is a good thing, I think. But he seems to, time and again, willfully ignore that he is fighting the dumbest and most "incoherent" of his opponents. It's low-hanging fruit. [Talking to everyone at once] He goes on to make good points about human communication -- in the first world, another point he fails to make at any time -- and the ephemerality and speed of it. "For the first time in human history, the spoken word has the same reach and longevity as the written word. Not only that, the space between the utterance and the publication is zero." This is an interesting topic but a carefully considered opinion would admit to both the pros and cons of this age. On the positive side, historically silent parties can now participate in universal conversations. That's the negative side as well. If you re-read my rant from above, it describes the negative side. The newcomers are unschooled in debate and logic and rhetoric and they can drag the whole conversation either down into the useless minutiae or they constantly revisit already-settled topics. A constant need to reaffirm terminology leads to an inability by those more advanced to build on existing knowledge. On the other, other hand it's always good to have new, intelligent people reexamine supposedly rock-solid and factual and axiomatic premises. They often find that these axioms are based less on fact than on subconscious prejudices. It takes a long time and a lot of patience to be rational and scientific about concepts like these -- and the farther we move from STEM concepts, the more labile we must be. That's just how philosophy is. But an increase in participants can crowd the space with the frankly incapable. That's the other, other, other hand. It seems endless. It can be very frustrating, especially for people like Peterson (or like Sam Harris, his intellectual compatriot) to want to just nail things down once and for all . When new people show up and start poking around the age-old foundations, it's hard to keep an open mind about it. Add in the stridency of the ignorant and the overarching desire to win and it's understandable how even the ostensibly wise can be ground down by it. [Swerving into the infomercial] I hadn't noticed when I originally included the following citation from my original reading, but in light of the Joe Rogan interview, it's now clear that Peterson cannot help but guide the conversation onto the topic of his for-pay YouTube video courses on "sorting yourself out". Good advice but, given how closed he seems to be to certain paths of thought, I wouldn't want his help in getting there. "Three months ago, I had some research assistants writing out the transcripts of my lectures so people could watch my lectures with the subtitles because its easier for people to follow and I was looking at my growth in terms of subscribers, and I half-jokingly thought I could soon have more subscribers to my YouTube channel than U of T has students. I don’t know what the significance of that is." He's also not particularly humble, unfortunately. There's another strain to his personality that rears its (possibly ugly, depending on your point of view) head later on. But let's examine the point that Peterson makes about what can even be taught at a university these days. "It might be that the university is already dying. It wouldn’t surprise me. I mean, I think huge swaths of the university are irrevocably corrupted: sociology, gone; anthropology, gone; history, big chunks of it are gone, the classics, literature, social work, political science in many places, and that doesn’t cover women’s studies, ethnic studies. They probably started lost, and it’s gotten far worse. I believe now, with the exception of the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) branch, that universities do more harm than good. I think they produce indentured servants in the United States because tuition fees have gone up so much and you can’t declare bankruptcy on your student loans. We’re teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive." That's a lot to take in all at once -- and it mixes up a bunch of at-best distantly related topics: how the humanities has lost its way, that only STEM can possibly save the world from itself and then the failure of the financing model. For the first point, he seems to ignore how the capitalist underpinnings of our societies have ideologically hollowed out any form of learning or intellectual exploration that can't be proven to directly lead to a short-term gain. Everyone loves to hammer on the women's studies/interpretive dance/poetry majors -- probably with good reason. But again, this is low-hanging fruit. There is plenty to save in the older, core humanities that have also been ignored because of their lack of easy measurability and their often contra-ideological narratives -- history, economy, sociology. So many of these topics become corrupted by the often capitalist requirements of the grant-based research system and by the strict ideologies of the think-tanks, universities and government posts that are the only foreseeable jobs for those graduates, useful as their knowledge is. It should be acknowledged that it wasn't the SJWs who broke higher-level learning in North America. The second point is that STEM is doing just fine and is the only thing worth concentrating on. Here I fear that Peterson outs himself as a technocrat, like all the other otherwise-intelligent pseudo-philosophers who are seemingly so easily seduced into believing the Silicon Valley billionaires achieved what they achieved because they somehow see more clearly than anyone else. That the fact that they clearly won at the money game behooves us to listen to everything else they have to say. It ignores the strong likelihood that the rest of their philosophical underpinnings -- such as they can even be called that -- are designed to support their continued position at the top of the capitalist food chain. The third point is utterly unrelated to philosophy and as an offhand comment about financing education seems utterly at-odds with Peterson's otherwise libertarian (or, at the very least, anti-socialist) capitalist approach. [On Patriarchy] Peterson continues, this time focusing on the "ingratitude" of the "PC authoritarian types" for the institutions that even allow the to be ungrateful. "Do you view social justice culture as a threat to democracy, and why? Absolutely. There’s nothing about the PC authoritarian types that has any gratitude for any institutions. They have a term – patriarchy. It’s all-encompassing. It means that everything our society is, is corrupt. There’s no line, they mean everything. Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say ‘western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it." It's a bit of a contortion, but I see what he's saying. That line of argument in no way addresses whether those people are wrong. If they're wrong, they're wrong regardless of their level of gratitude. As soon as you pull their rudeness into the argument, you're in a sense admitting that they might have a point, but that you're going to avoid addressing it. Of course the characterization that Western civilization is irredeemable is hyperbolic -- clearly there's a lot worth saving. But smashing that argument to the side without even considering how large the kernel of truth is at the center of it is not constructive. As I noted above, we might just be hearing from someone who remained open at first, but talked to too many close-minded people and is now irrevocably broken. I leave that possibility open: the bastards really can grind you down. I'm just evaluating Peterson in light of what I think I can learn from him. His next step was the first one that made me suspicious when I read the first interview with him. The following citation is from near the end of the relatively long interview. "Why do you think the feminists would go after Ayaan Hirsi Ali? She’s a hero, that woman. She’s from Somalia. She grew up in a very oppressive patriarchy – a real one. She escaped from an arranged marriage, and moved to Holland and she fell in love with Holland. Two things really struck her initially before she went to university and become a student of the Enlightenment. Number one – she would stand where there was public transport, and a digital sign would say when the public transport was going to arrive, and it would arrive exactly when it said it was going to. It was unbelievable to her. And the other thing she couldn’t believe was that police would help you. You know you’re in a civilized country when the police don’t just rape you and steal everything you have. The radical left people don’t give a damn about any of that." I think that's pretty specious and anecdotal reasoning. I'm not even sure what point he was trying to make about feminists. That they're antifeminist because they don't immediately side with every woman in the public sphere? [Final notes from interview with Joe Rogan] Although Peterson seems to be quite strong in reasoning, and he makes some strong points, he's just as susceptible to propaganda as his purported enemies. The more I read and view of him, the more I feel like he's another Sam Harris: very intelligent, but utterly incapable of seeing how biased he himself is. He rails against the ridiculousness of his opponents, but then starts off an interview with Joe Rogan by crowing about how he'd just re-tweeted "news" about what a big monster Castro was because he "sold enemies' blood for $50", which sounds utterly laughable and has a very small chance of being true. He probably also believes that Saddam Hussein killed babies in Iraqi hospitals in the 90s. Those are all propagandistic rumors floated by the war hawks to inspire patriotic/belligerent fervor. And he buys into it unquestioningly. Joe Rogan did too, by the way. When Peterson then named a number in the multiple tens of thousands for number of dissidents killed in Cuba, I was very skeptical. A web search of both theories turns up only right-wing blogs for the former rumor and really no information on the second one. And yet he faults his opponents relentlessly for their lack of rigor. Although sometimes very erudite and well-reasoned, at other times he sounds like a libertarian or a conspiracy nut. He wants to kill funding for the universities so that they get rid of anything he doesn't like, leaving only STEM. At heart, he seems an unalloyed technocrat. He repeats again and again that the humanities are worth nothing because his enemies seek refuge there. But at times he sounds like the anti-intellectual Marxist he decries. He doesn't exactly want to squash a line of thought, but to remove it from all power. In the end, though, he's very capitalistically motivated -- he always ends by up-selling his video courses for "cleaner thinking". So he's basically a guy who thinks he's smart because he spends so much time fighting against people who are really stupid. I think it's a good thing that he spends time pointing out the idiocy/unconstitutionality/logical fallacy of his opponents' arguments, but he could try a bit harder to avoid falling into the exact same traps himself. As I listened to more of his talk on Joe Rogan (Joe can't get a word in edgewise), he weaves a picture of the world that feels strongly warped by his experiences at the university. He seems to ascribe a lot more power to women's studies movements and Marxists than anyone else does. As far as I can tell, women and Marxists aren't winning much of anything and certainly don't have much control over the major levers of power -- yet in Peterson's view, they've very near to toppling everything that Western civilization has wrought. I feel like he pigeonholes people's arguments into Marxism, then straw-mans them as part and parcel of the worst of Stalinism. It makes it really difficult to side with him because he runs to extremes himself at such a blistering pace. It feels like if you don't agree with everything he says -- or you concede that some of his sworn enemies have a point, but go about it supporting it poorly -- he will just call you a conciliatory Marxist who doesn't care about dead people. And I don't think he's seeing something that we're all missing about the power and evil of women's studies/GLBSA/etc. They have power in universities where the next generations are trained, but only in Canada and America. I'm not seeing similar trends in Switzerland and Europe, but I admit I don't have my finger on the pulse of the higher-education systems in any country. He talks about how awful Marxism is and how we absolutely don't need to go there again, when we have a very destructive system right now. The reason people turn back toward other systems is because they recognize such harm coming from their own system. The killing fields in Cambodia were filled with millions of dead intellectuals. Our society doesn't kill bodies; it kills minds. One way is quicker, granted. But it's dishonest not to at least acknowledge the impetuses that might be driving the admittedly misguided reaction of social justice warriors. You have to be able to separate the cause from the reaction. If you don't understand -- and possibly address -- the cause, then you'll end up fighting the same battle over and over again. Maybe Peterson's OK with that, because he gets to prove himself right again and again without putting in too much more effort. Now that's validation! The common thread I see is the love of the straw-man. He seems to love to cite the biggest idiots in opposition, as if there is literally no-one who disagrees with him who is making a worthwhile point. Sure, some of these people are professors, and it's embarrassing that they've risen to where they are with clearly retrograde logical skills, but still avoid basing his arguments on opposition to these people. I think he's shell-shocked. I also feel like he's misrepresenting what's legal and not -- and he certainly doesn't point out what's legal in which countries. Whenever someone is as mystified by the world as he is, I'm forced to wonder when he last checked whether he might be mistaken. He's similar to Sam Harris in this: he makes what looks for the all world to be a reductio ad absurdum argument about his opponent's line of reasoning and then, instead of backing off of the absurd conclusion, he doubles down. This may also be the reason why he sounds so disappointed when something he talks about is less than appalling. He is the guy who would let the all-powerful anti-Marxists/capitalists win while keeping the powerless Marxists at bay. He invokes the Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge pogroms as the literal end-station of all of these movements he rails against. He shows no evidence of understanding where they're coming from -- even if they deal with their problems badly. He just sees the Marxist bogeyman everywhere, with the only logical conclusion of even thinking about taking a step on that path being the outright incarceration or slaughter of anyone who thinks differently. His critique does not once extend to the current way of running things. I fail to see the huge difference between 20th-century Marxist anti-intellectualism and the Capitalist flavor we're currently enjoying. Peterson blames the first for everything, but doesn't acknowledge the second in any way. I'm almost certain that he would hate labor unions. The logic would be the same. They have tended to corruption in the past, so there is no way to ever do them right, so forget them. He would utterly fail to acknowledge the need that a labor union fills in order to focus on how poorly that need has historically been filled by them. It's as if you tried to drink water three or four times and each time caught dysentery. Would you then decide that you didn't ever need to drink anything again because drinking is stupid and dangerous? That since you've satisfied the need poorly several times, the need no longer exists? Or would you try to figure out how to satisfy the need in a better way? The need is still there. There is massive inequality. The students he rails against are probably being given too much power given their emotional and political immaturity. But their hearts are, in some cases, in the right place. They may have veered far off course, but they aren't anywhere near the Killing Fields. I agree that the examples of their issues that he cites are silly -- and dangerous to anchor in law -- but I don't agree that there is absolutely nothing behind the ideas. They're just poorly thought-through. These ideas' proponents grasp for simple solutions that are just as unjust as existing systems, but this time its the historical winners who suffer. It's hard to join their pity party. But straw-manning the whole school of thought without once acknowledging that there is something of philosophical value -- even if it's only a kernel from which more mature minds could build something -- is just as immature. Just seeing how eagerly Peterson glommed onto any false factoid about Castro -- regardless of the source, which was the right-wing blogosphere, well-known for vetting information -- shows that he is intellectually unsound and has himself veered too far from the path he initially set out on. I just saw a snippet of a video by Keith Olbermann going completely off the rails against "Russian scum!" in his weekly reports for GQ. Peterson seems more restrained but is in the same category of hyperbolic, unquestioning and blinkered thinking about the new evil of communism. They are utterly blind to any history but the one of a century ago, under Stalin, and utterly ignorant -- or oblivious -- of U.S. history and the alternative that capitalism offers. They don't care about evidence, about truth, about the history of lying. Peterson says that "it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city." He says that people should "sort themselves out properly" first before they try to save the world. This is a decent point, but I feel he is the wrong person to make it. I think it probably makes him less judgmental of society when he constantly thinks that people themselves are broken. Second-guessing yourself is good, and it makes sense to shut up while the grown-ups are talking, but he doesn't strike me as too grown-up in his own arguments. In too many cases, he's just too self-satisfied and looking for a win. Not only that, but he's totally trying to sell his video series, which sounds like a ludicrous pseudo-science "self-authoring" suite, which sounds verrrrrry woo-ey. "You're trapped in the past.", he says. This sounds logical, but he doesn't seem to practice what he preaches. He spent 2 hours railing against fundamentalism on one side ... in a very fundamentalist and selective way. Then he tries to sell a program about becoming a better person -- that it sounds like he himself doesn't even prescribe to. At the end of the Rogan interview, we get a strong clue as to why he seems so intolerant, why he sees everything in terms of black and white. He doesn't ask what "better" means, just claims that people have a "deeply held idea of what's better". He was raised a fundamentalist Christian and hasn't shaken that. He's quite well-read, but he jumps to conclusions that I feel aren't justified by the evidentiary basis that he provides. He quotes a ton of children's stories and shows how J.K. Rowling got the paradigm right with Harry Potter: because it's a classic, religious story -- which is right, according to him. "A properly balanced story." He's a control freak. And he's a pro-capitalist and unquestioning know-it-all. Once he gets rolling, he claims that it's not possible to take part in modern society and be anti-capitalist, telling anyone who does that, "[y]ou're deeply confused." Capitalism and 2000-year--old stories are the only way to structure human society. Ever. Give up everything else. Grow up. Release your past (don't be trapped in it). He has the typically overarching need to nail everything down and explain everything according to his one or two maxims. The curse of the almost-brilliant. He says "that only God knows everything" but then goes on to claim that everyone but him is wrong. Should you even toy with ideas that he's already told you are stupid -- well, that makes you stupid, too. "A human being in the ultimate in complexity in the universe." So he's also neatly put an end-cap on complexity. He redefines the universe in terms of what he understands. Anyone who claims anything else is wrong, because he's super-smart. Then Rogan agrees with him and says that the we are more advanced than Liberia, where he saw a VICE video about eating human flesh, Peterson just agrees and plows onward. I suppose that's the pinnacle of scientific rationalism and rigor he's promulgating? His final advice is to "sort yourself out" (by taking his "Future Authoring" exercise) "before you try to figure out the world", " marshal your arguments and put yourself in order". That's fine. Agreed. Physician heal thyself. At the time I read some of his essays and listened to some of his interviews, I was reading Dostoyevsky's excellent Notes from Underground. The narrator writes skeptically of God, "But if you saw how proud is that mighty spirit who created this colossal setting and how proudly convinced this spirit is of its victory and of its triumph, then you would shudder for its pride, obstinacy, and blindness, but you would shudder also for those over whom this proud spirit hovers and reigns." Unlike Peterson, I am more likely to reject religion than to try to reconcile it as intrinsic to the human condition. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I'll be the first to admit that I'm absolutely terrible at taking this advice whenever I travel by air. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3328 2016-12-31T06:28:16+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3122 2015-03-02T23:11:15+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. I can't claim to understand even half of what she's talking about, but understanding is tantalizing enough that I feel... ]]>

. I can't claim to understand even half of what she's talking about, but understanding is tantalizing enough that I feel it might be worth something. I've included some citations from the transcript below. "Yet it also has a radically different perspective on things because, as I said, in the prevailing conception, the fundamental objects are the laws of motion and the initial conditions of our universe. In constructor theory, on the other hand, the fundamental objects are transformations that are possible/impossible, and the explanation of why they are possible/impossible. It turns out that, under our laws of physics, in order for any transformation to be achieved, knowledge must be brought about in order to make a certain transformation performable to higher and higher accuracy. Knowledge, which is a 'causal' kind of information—information with a causal power that has the ability of remaining instantiated in physical systems—is a highly emergent object and it cannot be handled in the prevailing conception of fundamental physics, while in constructor theory it becomes one of the central objects." It seems that constructor theory posits abstractions that allow us to reason about the world in a more powerful way, that avoids getting lost in the all the fiddly bits of modern physics, with its infinitude of possibility. I'm sure it's solidly anchored in mathematics but feel no closer to grasping its essence yet. She attacks the line of reasoning given above a couple of times and each time it feels kind of circular. I still don't think she's adequately explained what constructor theory actually is...although it does seem admittedly like a very non-intuitive way of describing events and reality and comparing information, so I may have just missed it. "One of the ideas that will be dropped if constructor theory turns out to be effective is that the only fundamental entities in physics are laws of motion and initial conditions. In order for physics to accommodate more of physical reality, there needs to be a switch to this new mode of explanation, which accepts that scientific explanation is more than just predictions. Predictions will be supplemented with statements about what tasks are possible, what are impossible and why." My initial reaction, even on re-reading is: but what is the new mode of explanation? What is possible and what is impossible? I fully acknowledge that I may not be well-trained enough to be able to discern between this kind of talk and magic. I need examples, but fear that those might be beyond me as well. Is this how people feel when confronted with modern technology? "Probabilities have been a hard concept to pin down and they are fundamental to a certain way of looking at quantum physics. Yet, quantum physics is, fundamentally, a deterministic theory. One question is how does one connect the testing of quantum theory, which one way or another relies on the idea of probabilities, with the fundamentally deterministic structure of quantum theory? This question has been tackled in different ways but there is still a controversy about that, and we are hoping to apply constructor theory to this issue in order to sort it out." I'm looking forward to it. Make of it what you will. I will note that constructor theory exists and tackle it again some other time. The next article in the vein of world-changing ways of thinking about thinking is "The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence" by Tim Urban . I felt utterly able to grasp what he was getting at, but felt that he was letting the idea run away from him. His optimism is appreciated and even understandable, but he's ignoring a lot of history and hand-waving that away by claiming that history will not apply because of the geometric level of increasing awesomeness. Here he nicely describes how awesome our world would be for a traveller from just a few centuries ago. "When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery." While he's superficially right, I'm not so sure how continually rocked this person would be -- especially if you managed to grab someone with a reasonably analytical head on his or her shoulders. If you grabbed a moron who didn't understand even the technology of his own day -- the way most zombies wander around in our age unable to distinguish their world's technology from magic -- then that person would have their mind utterly blown. But their mind was already blown by their own world, so that's not too surprising. Here's where he gets a bit excited: "So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?" Wouldn't it be more appropriate to talk about change, rather than advancement? And these futurists think only in terms of technology, whereas socially, politically and morally we haven't moved much at all. What does this so-called law of accelerating returns mean for Palestine? Will things get amazingly awesome there? Or will the amazing awesomeness be restricted to the Israeli ability for subjugation? Or am I just not getting how amazingly awesome the future will be? "All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century." Fucking Kurzweil: he says it so it's a law rather than a theory. He's extrapolating an exponential curve based on a few data points while ignoring the fact that with increased power to make gadgets comes also the increased power to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. And given our lack of improvement on the social front, an increased likelihood that we might actually do so, Stephen Pinker's documentation of a decrease in violence in our world notwithstanding. "Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult." It's not about easy or difficult -- it's about complexity. It's not easy to build a calculator, but it is objectively less complex to do so than to build a visual-recognition system. Here he discussed the capacity for thought in AIs: "This doesn’t sound like much until you remember that we were at about a trillionth of human level in 1985, a billionth in 1995, and a millionth in 2005. Being at a thousandth in 2015 puts us right on pace to get to an affordable computer by 2025 that rivals the power of the brain." Wait, where'd the geometric progression go? Now we have a linear progression...or is it possible that some problems get asymptotically harder? Why is the argument of "it's always been like this, so let's extrapolate into the future with the same curve" so attractive? We don't think this way for other situations. For example, if my friend has 1000 1-dollar bills in a messy pile, I can steal one and he will not notice. I can do this for a few days, probably weeks, and he will probably not notice. No-one you ask would expect him to never notice. At the very latest, this progression stops when there is no more money left. Couldn't our "improvement" in technology follow this kind of curve? Why should we believe Kurzweil's extrapolation? There is also the small problem of where all the energy and material for these amazing advancements are going to come from. This energy-ignorant approach to futurism is also present in the article "Scorched Earth, 2200AD" by Linda Marsa , in which she writes of a medium-term future in which the human population has been reduced to 6% of the current levels, the temperature is 180ºF and, "[a]s far as the eye can see, what’s left of civilised society is sheathed in glass – the ribbons of highways ferrying the bullet trains." My question is: who builds and maintains these trains and buildings? Who mines the material? From where? Also in enclosures? How big are these things? Do we use robots? Drones? Where I have a hard time following Kurzweil and Co. is that we are supposedly accelerating faster but we don't even have the relatively mundane stuff we dreamed up fifty years ago. What we can imagine today is not even remotely achievable not because of limited IQ but physical limitations. Instead of making the predicted quantum leaps, we make incremental, asymptotic change. Worst of all for these predictions, where we are not constrained by physics, we shackle our ideas to the profit motive. What is not short-term profitable is abandoned. Agencies and organizations capable of long-term change are dismantled and defanged. This is what I meant before: the exponential rate at which our gadgets get fancier doesn't matter if the society in which those gadgets are created doesn't develop at a similar rate. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2920 2014-01-15T22:02:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2727 2012-12-02T13:11:35+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2700 2012-11-04T16:28:29+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is generally softball and sycophantic. It wouldn't be worth of noting except that it included a supposed broadside by Barack Obama against Ayn Rand. As usual, those with their panties in a bunch cited it completely out of context. This is a shame, because the... ]]>

is generally softball and sycophantic. It wouldn't be worth of noting except that it included a supposed broadside by Barack Obama against Ayn Rand. As usual, those with their panties in a bunch cited it completely out of context. This is a shame, because the broader point is more interesting. It's not like Obama just slammed Ayn Rand for the hell of it; he actual gave a relatively good justification for why it's a bad idea to put pure objectivists in charge of public policy. Here's the question, as posed. "What do you think Paul Ryan's obsession with [Ayn Rand's] work would mean if he were vice president?" As you can see, Brinkley is 100% in Obama's camp, designating Ryan's self-proclaimed adherence to objectivist principles as "an obsession". The first thing Obama does is to diplomatically deflect the part of the question where he's asked to interpret Ryan's beliefs. "Well, you’d have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him." Obama does, however, go on to express his own opinion of Objectivism. "Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party." This is a pretty objective answer (pardon the pun) and one that I'm sure many people could stand behind. The philosophy is quite primitive, especially as presented by Ayn Rand, who spent thousands of pages shoehorning her egotistical philosophy into every possible life situation. The most painful parts are the literally hundreds of pages of musing on how all altruism can be stripped out of love and transmogrified to an expression of egotism. Even ignoring all of the parts that are patently ridiculous, the parts about the giants of industry being plagued by moochers also glosses over a lot of detail in order to make her case more cut-and-dried than it really is. It's all pretty ham-handed. Obama went on to explain that the Republican party of today has changed considerably from the party that it once was -- and that it still tries to claim to be. "[...] You look at Abraham Lincoln: He very much believed in self-sufficiency and self-reliance. [...] But he also understood that there’s some things we do better together. That we make investments in our infrastructure and railroads and canals and land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences, because that provides us all with an opportunity to fulfill our potential, and we’ll all be better off as a consequence. [...] That view of life – as one in which we’re all connected, as opposed to all isolated and looking out only for ourselves – that’s a view that has made America great [...]" This is not an opinion that should raise any hackles. If Mitt Romney gave exactly this answer -- to be honest, he probably has, at one time or another -- no-one in the Republican party would think twice in gushing their undying support for a leader with such a measured vision. So what's the big deal? Obama's opinion of Ayn Rand is the kind of measured opinion one should have. She is lauded and heralded by people who've really only ever read her thesis -- and no others. And let's be honest: most of those proudly waving their objectivist flags never in a million years made it through any of her books. And certainly not the John Galt speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged. Not without nodding off several dozen times. I warrant most simply take it on faith that her books are good and leave it at that. If she's the only philosopher you've ever read and understood, then your world-view will naturally be a bit lopsided. I've read three of her books: Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (listed in order or publication and I read them in the reverse order, actually), but it was quite a long time ago. I was quite a fan at the time I read them and devoured them. I can remember them relatively well, and, in fairness, detractors tend to misrepresent the plot and characters of the books -- especially Atlas Shrugged. The typical description of Objectivism is as follows: "The Lunatics Who Made a Religion Out of Greed and Wrecked the Economy" by Matt Taibbi "On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealized heroes, the saviors of society. "In the Randian ethos, called Objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (i.e. the rich) and the "parasites" and "moochers" who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics." This is a description of how current Randians -- the people I referred to above who have likely not even read her books -- think Objectivism applies to the 21st-century U.S. It is a fair characterization of that quite-pervasive attitude but not a fair description of the books. Even a cursory reading of Atlas Shrugged must surely reveal the loathing and contempt that Rand had for the faux-industrialists like Dagny Taggart's brother, James. This means that those who champion all the rich as Hank-Reardon--like heroes are utterly deluded. In fact, proponents of the novels who actually understood them should be shouting for prosecution of the financial industry from every mountaintop. A pure financier and private-equity guy like Mitt Romney is a James Taggart much more than he is a Roark, a Reardon or a Galt. My enchantment with Rand wore off after a few years of trying to solve every problem in the world with the hammer of Objectivism. I was helped by a few patient friends in this regard and I am grateful to them for it. For a so-called philosophy that claims rationality as its basis, its proponents and arguments are remarkably resistant to facts and reality. Many of its proponents are also deeply offended because, after they've spent all of this time slogging through Rand's enormous volumes -- finally applying themselves to learning something -- they are extremely loath to question it and throw it all over board simply because it doesn't apply to any kind of life worth living. That would mean that they had wasted their time, in their view. This is, of course, not true in any sense of the word for those who understand that learning and understanding involves many cul de sacs. That is, I believe, what Obama is saying. He slipped and forgot that he is running for President in a deeply anti-intellectual country, the inhabitants of which do not realize that Rand's egoistic fairy-tales are just that -- and nothing more. They are no more a plan for society than The Lord of the Rings. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2576 2011-11-30T20:38:26+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

uses comments that Žižek made about "capitalism with Asian values" as a springboard from which to launch an entirely-too-long and under-researched article... ]]>

uses comments that Žižek made about "capitalism with Asian values" as a springboard from which to launch an entirely-too-long and under-researched article against Orientalism. A noble cause, no doubt, but using Žižek's name as a modern-day proponent of Orientalism is laughable. The man is many things, but an Orientalist he is not. He often goes on and on and on and ties a thousand ideas together under one roof and won't sit still and loves tangents, but he's not an Orientalist. He takes a semantic shortcut in an interview and this guy jumps all over him. Žižek has made his views abundantly [1] clear: 1. The phrase is not his; it is rather that of the detractors of that form of capitalism and one he uses as a shorthand instead of reiterating the pages of argument it would take to describe. The phrase is perhaps unfortunate but Žižek has never been one to care about using unfortunate labels. 2. Asian capitalism is opposed to Western capitalism as a form that does not make an effort to fake its way into a moral high ground. It is top-down, totalitarian and it seems to be beating the fake touchy-feely version at its own game. Perhaps Chinese capitalism would be a better label, but Singapore has a similar system. Sino-Singo-capitalism, perhaps? Until someone else joins the club? 3. Žižek does not prefer one form of capitalism over the other. Even in the citation, it's clear that no love is lost for either. Everything else he's written in the last ten years makes it abundantly clear that while he does not disavow capitalism in toto, the forms with which we are familiar are doomed to be too undemocratic and he prefers something more socialist. [2] He is one of the last people to romanticize Western capitalism, as is alluded in the article. Kudos to Mr. Dabashi for scaring up a few extra page views by featuring Žižek's name, but his argument rings hollow. Not everyone who is indiscriminate with an epithet is actually a racist -- and it would be nice if the preponderance of his work would weigh more heavily than one off-the-cuff remark in one interview. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] To those willing to fight their way through his sometimes-quite-dense tomes. [1] Again, my shorthand representation of his argumentation is likely laughable, but I hope you get the gist, at least. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2413 2010-06-20T14:35:59+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, reminded me of some notes I scribbled down and never posted, because I was actually doing something else at the time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Does our capacity for learning grow or shrink as we age? Some things seem easier to grasp with distance: E.g. in school certain... ]]>

, reminded me of some notes I scribbled down and never posted, because I was actually doing something else at the time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Does our capacity for learning grow or shrink as we age? Some things seem easier to grasp with distance: E.g. in school certain concepts just needed to be learned, but didn't necessarily fit in with anything else -- with age, these concepts are more evidently revolutionary. The light is a wave/particle experiment, for example. In college, it seemed to be just something else to learn. Now, it is clear just how important proving that light is a particle was. Age in this case seems to help understanding. Is that perhaps what the wise call wisdom? Or is does context (or degree of inebriation or alteration, no matter the substance) perhaps have something to do with it? Or is it just the brain fooling itself? It's all subjective, isn't it? How can you really tell whether you're actually objectively smarter or wiser than you once were -- and do you really want to find out? What if you're actually learning less, but happier with it than before and thinking you're smarter than you actually are? Does that matter? Does even asking these questions make me more philosophical and superior to my younger self, to whom these questions would never have occurred? If there is a decline instead of improvement, is there any way to avoid it? Can someone even hope to notice such a decline in themselves? That is, if the decline is engendered not by a drastic disease but by age. Is there any way to remain vigilant enough to get better every day? To be not just subjectively, but also objectively better? To become that which would be envied by a younger self? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2338 2010-02-23T22:58:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is a debate between Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe (for the Church) and Christoper Hitchens and Stephen Fry (against the Church). The link has all of the videos linked in from YouTube [1] and it's worth watching all of it, especially since... ]]>

is a debate between Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe (for the Church) and Christoper Hitchens and Stephen Fry (against the Church). The link has all of the videos linked in from YouTube [1] and it's worth watching all of it, especially since the audience gets to vote twice: once at the beginning and once at the end. [2] It is interesting not because those supporting the Church actually argued well, but because those against the church did. Stephen Fry (video below), in particular, was absolutely brilliant in his writing, his diction and his conviction. The Archbishop is flat-out terrible, if not completely embarrassing. His argument is, essentially, "if the Catholic Church were not a force for good, he would not have devoted his entire life to serving it." That was the sum total of the Archbishop's nuance; essentially arguing that people should simply take on faith that the Church is good. Objective evidence from throughout history doesn't enter into it if you just believe that the Church is good. Ann Widdecombe was more forceful, but hardly stronger. She was very spiteful and lit into Hitchens ad hominem rather than actually addressing any points either he or Fry made. She niggled about Fry's definition of purgatory -- like, who gives a shit exactly what kind of fairy dust they use there? -- but completely ignored his taking offense that it considers him an abomination because he's gay. In a similar vein, she attempts to countermand certain points (the Pope hid Jews in the Vatican during WWII) without addressing the overall trend that history suggests (the Church did not take an official stance against Nazi Germany out of fear). In a nutshell: "Widdecombe insists that the actions of the Catholic Church in the past should be judged with a degree of historical relativism; they were not the only people to murder and torture those deemed guilty of wrongdoing." Fry counteracts this whole line of reasoning wonderfully in the debate portion: "Well, if the Church can't be better than the rest of the human race at a given point in time, then what in heaven's name are they good for? (Emphasis in original. [3])" If you don't watch the whole thing, at least invest twenty minutes to watch the two videos below, if not for his arguments, then simply to watch a master of the English language at work. [media] [media] The debate is best summed up with a citation from the debate portion, in which Fry responds to Wittecombe's derisive defense of Church policy. "I make no apology for apparently not understanding the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustus of Hippo ... or the council of Trent or the other extraordinary conventions and rules of Limbo. Don't tell me that there's some magisterial and mystical reason behind Limbo that I'm too stupid to understand. That's not good enough; it really isn't." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] High definition versions are also available at Daily Motion: "Hitchens (20')" and "Stephen Fry (19')" [1] The initial vote was 678 For, 1102 Against, Undecided 346; the final vote was 268 For, 1876 Against, Undecided 34. Though Fry and Hitchens clearly did good work, the massive change is wholly attributable to (A) how indefensible the Church's basic argument is and (B) what a bad job the Archbishop and Madame Widdecombe did of muddying those waters. Instead, they went balls out and mocked people for not understanding their fairy tales precisely enough or not simply taking the Church's goodness on faith. Well done. [1] This portion is cited from memory because the author was too lazy to scrub his way through the video looking for the relevant citation. It's not like he didn't try; and the author is quite sure that the paraphrase is quite close enough. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2330 2010-01-31T21:45:51+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

anthropomorphizes the Mars lander that was meant to operate for 90 days and has now been in operation instead for 2274 Mars days. Because it has been unable to unstick itself from an impediment since May of 2009, it has been deemed a "stationary research station". The winds and sand will... ]]>

anthropomorphizes the Mars lander that was meant to operate for 90 days and has now been in operation instead for 2274 Mars days. Because it has been unable to unstick itself from an impediment since May of 2009, it has been deemed a "stationary research station". The winds and sand will eventually corrode its solar panels to such a degree that it will lose contact with NASA. The cartoon evokes a feeling of pity for the robot because we are convinced that it thinks and feels -- like us. The film "Wall-E" evokes similar feelings, as we watch a robot diligently clean up the Earth for centuries, all the while collecting tschochkes that remind it of people. The robot can't speak -- except for its own name and that of its "girlfriend" -- but still we anthropomorphize it. The mini-cartoon Burn-E -- available on the Wall-E DVD -- similarly convinces us to feel a little maintenance robot's frustration as it tries to complete its job. A few years ago, Ikea ran a commercial about a little, forlorn lamp (similar, in fact, to the anthropomorphized mascot of Pixar, Luxo) abandoned by its owner at the curbside (shown below). At the end of the advert, when the music and camera angles nearly had you in tears, commiserating with the plight of the poor lamp, a narrator steps into the frame and declaims: "Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you are crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one is much better." [media] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2307 2010-01-08T22:43:18+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, in which the poor author is beside himself watching one of the largest US networks consult a former playmate & MTV reality star for her medical opinion. Jenny McCarthy became famous for being spectacularly stupid. She may have been acting to some degree, but she has no formal training whatsoever. But she has an opinion and is strident. Check and check. She also has a great rack and blond hair. Check mate. So, Americans convinced that their gut feelings are infallible are happy to ignore thousands of tests and trials and actual scientific study and turn instead to their goddess/starlet instead for the gospel. Regardless of the amount of research, the true believers simply respond that they still believe in their hearts that they are right and the scientists are ideologically opposed, that the scientists didn't try hard enough. And the point is, that they are not. That's why they do experiments. When the experiments are inconclusive, they do not choose to no longer believe in that which could not be proven, they no longer believe it to be true because to do so would be ignorant and illogical. If you don't change your mind when reality fails to agree with you, it is not the rest of the world that needs to adjust. Or as the excellent beat poem cited at the end puts it: "Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed; Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." This utter travesty in reporting -- it's not even worth it to call what ABC does "journalism" -- has many progenitors: A general anti-intellectualism in America actively engendered by a power structure that likes ignorant sheep, an educational system nearly completely bereft of basic building blocks like analysis, coping with the firehose of media, rhetoric or basic concepts like the difference between correlation (seductive she-beast that it is), which is coincidental and causation, which can be proven and a society much more interested in gut feelings than knowledge. Learning is, as they say, hard...and not everyone can do it. Since learning is quite clearly prejudiced against the stupid or lazy, we've settled on much lower standards as a society and have ended up getting not only the government we deserve (as the other saying goes) but the intelligentsia we deserve. [1] If ever there was a time when the phrase "opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one" applied, this is most certainly it. On a very related note, "Tim Minchin's Storm (Lyrics)" is a beat poem by the (in)famous Tim Minchin, in which he confronts a Jenny McCarthy-like creature at a dinner party. Near the beginning of their encounter, he has not yet imbibed enough to actually pose the following question: "Whether knowledge is so loose-weave Of a morning When deciding whether to leave Her apartment by the front door Or a window on the second floor." That is, certain things -- like gravity -- are taken for granted and internalized by even the most ridiculously illogical -- dare I say, deliberately stupid? -- of our coddled society's denizens. Previous societies had far fewer of these highly vocal wastes-of-Oxygen because the harshness of life tended to take care very quickly of people that didn't look both ways before crossing the road, as it were. The Minchin video is linked below for your viewing pleasure. [2] [media] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Consider why we hear much more often from a boil on the ass of humanity like Thomas Friedman than from a careful and unbiased thinker like Noam Chomsky. [1] Other choice citations are: "By definition, I begin 'Alternative Medicine', I continue Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. You know what they call 'alternative medicine' That’s been proved to work? Medicine.""Your faith in Science and Tests Is just as blind As the faith of any fundamentalist "Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit. Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved. If you show me That, say, homeopathy works, Then I will change my mind I’ll spin on a fucking dime I’ll be embarrassed as hell, But I will run through the streets yelling It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it! Water has memory! And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2280 2009-12-23T22:01:12+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

(cited in the original French as well as the English translation from Harper's because the English is a bit stodgy): "Le monde juge bien des choses, car il est dans l’ignorance naturelle qui est le vrai siège de l’homme. Les sciences ont deux extrémités qui se touchent, la première est la pure ignorance naturelle où se trouvent tous les hommes en naissant, l’autre extrémité est celle où arrivent les grandes âmes qui ayant parcouru tout ce que les hommes peuvent savoir trouvent qu’ils ne savent rien et se rencontrent en cette même ignorance d’où ils étaient partis, mais c’est une ignorance savante qui se connaît. Ceux d’entre deux qui sont sortis de l’ignorance naturelle et n’ont pu arriver à l’autre, ont quelque teinture de cette science suffisante, et font les entendus. Ceux-là troublent le monde et jugent mal de tout. "The world judges things well, because it is in that state of natural ignorance which is the true place of the human. The sciences have two extremities, which converge: the first is that state of pure ignorance, in which we are left by nature; the other extremity is that at which great minds arrive, which, having traversed everything which man can know, discover that they know nothing, and recognize once more the point from which they set out. But this is a learned ignorance, which knows itself. Those who have set out from the stage of natural ignorance, and have not yet been able to arrive at the other, have but a hint of that real and adequate knowledge; and these are the assumers and pretenders to reason. These disquiet the world: and judge everything worse than the others." It's especially with the description of our modern-day pundits -- "Ceux d’entre deux qui sont sortis de l’ignorance naturelle et n’ont pu arriver à l’autre, ont quelque teinture de cette science suffisante, et font les entendus" -- that makes you realize just how non-unique we are in how we communicate, despite our satellites and twitter pages and iPhones. We use different media, but we spout the same, unfounded, unconsidered kind of crap as Pascal's contemporaries. Learning history often involves this feeling that history is a wheel in which all bad things return; at these times, life seems solely a struggle against the unavoidable sink of cynicism. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2239 2009-11-10T09:56:00+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2159 2009-04-28T21:48:44+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco