Bradbury and the Great Saving

Part I began as a tweet storm responding to some folly.  It is lightly edited.

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Part I

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The folly as prompt:

But avoid, if at all possible, reading Fahrenheit 451. . .  That's [high school] about the right stage of emotional maturity for enjoying it. Reread it recently and was mortified.  

My reply:

There should be books for different phases on one's life.  If you're going to read a book out of phase, then you have to adjust how you read, and provide that caveat -- not tell people to avoid reading if at all possible.

Fahrenheit 451 is one of the best books to give someone young at heart to show them that there are things worth saving, and that a society unaware of this can run amok.

Though the long speeches are clunky (ironic in a book with so much other prose experimentation) they provide tools to figure out what quality is.

Don't just look in books, it says, look in older art (it cites old phonographs and motion pictures, but the context of a society that has wiped up other art), old friends, in Nature, and yourself. . .

It is a book written by a man who grew up in small-town America, who would never own a car, writing at the beginning of the television -- when he wrote the short stories the book would grow out of, around 10% of US families had TV, by the time of the book, 65% did.

He looked at these rapid changes with his own eyes, not with the symbols and slogans of Progress, and saw that car culture and TV were things to be wary of, if not feared --things that would get in the way of the Great Saving which is each generation's duty.

These are just fine messages for the young, young at heart, or someone able to read in the romantic mode, a mode which requires a suspension of jaded filters (and few have more jaded filters than me. . . I can only suspend them, myself, when I read authors who gush).

For the older set -- or young people able to read in an older mode -- there is still Ivan Illich (the Catholic social critic, though the Tolstoy book of similar name will do some good), Postman, Gatto, Chesterton, Christopher Alexander, James C Scott.

But let the young have their books.

(And don't you dare make a comment about the length of this least you expose yourself completely as the philistine I already suspect you are).

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Part II

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Conservatism isn't really an ideology, it is an emotional stance.  This in itself is not a criticism -- it is perfectly fine to have some attachments to what is good and beautiful.  First, however, we should strive to follow Aristotle's idea of being angry in proportion to the offence.  Instead, American conservatives are well trained to seek out their hit of Two Minutes Hate daily, at least.  Though they've now been joined by Democrats on Twitter, that doesn't make either side one bit less unhinged.  Secondly, we should first figure out what is good and beautiful.  In other words, the principled conservative needs to carefully figure out what he or she is trying to conserve.

Bradbury was trying to conserve the small town Midwest of the 1920s.  Features of what he was aiming for included extended families who frequently see each other, people of different economic means living in close proximity, walkablity in general, and wild areas to explore.

Contrast this with those who wanted to Make America Great Again in 2016.  They were by and large trying to recreate the 1950s.  But it was the 1950s that Bradbury was writing against!  The 50s was the destruction of community values to feed economic growth.

I want to emphasis this fact: you can't conserve disruption.  You cannot do so because eventually all sources of value are totally pilfered.  This leaves the right wing fantasy  --  enacting a restoration to times of value destruction -- a completely absurd project.  There are many men who want to be the head of a nuclear family, but not the key wage earner for an extended family, where grandparents move in for old age, sharing opinions on child-rearing and other issues.  Those men wouldn't want to be co-equal owners of a family enterprise with brothers and cousins.  They wouldn't want to have their social life organized around visiting that family, sitting on porches or playing dominoes; instead, they would rather watch their shows and purchase status symbols to show off to people they only superficial know.

There is a nostalgia for the heady days when there were decades of additional exploitation and using up ahead, when everything unhurried and pure could still be thrown into the fires that feed GDP.  These people don't miss the old ways; if they did, they could start practicing them.  They miss what they could get from burning those things up for profits.

I think it is appropriate to give Bradbury the last word, from his masterpiece:

Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches. 

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Another similar conversation on similar themes was held here.

Determinism Doesn't Mean What You Think

Lapace's Demon:

According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics

This notion makes sense in terms of the intellectual victories classical mechanics had won in Lapace's day.  Also, it is probably intuitive in terms of the materialistic worldview held by those who wants to be able to say respectable things at parties [1].  Lapace's Demon, however, is not the consensus of mathematicians and physicists.  In the book Infinite Powers Strogatz writes

When a system is nonlinear, its behavior can be impossible to forecast with formulas, even though that behavior is completely determined.  In other words, determinism does not imply predictability. pg 280

[Update: it has come to my attention that the above reads as those I am dismissing determinism.  That was not my intention.  Instead, I am arguing against Lapace's Demon.  I imagine the universe is deterministic.  The emergent properties of it, however, are not all predictable even with complete information.]

I thought about giving this piece the title " Determinism Doesn't Mean What They Want You to Think."  I have noticed that those most desirous to push the notion of determinism, whether they be Marxists or Scott Adams (aka "the Dilbert guy") or the like, are trying to pull a bait-and-switch, or, if challenged, a motte and bailey. The goal is to use the idea of Lapace's Demon (which isn't even true!) as the stronghold/ motte, and then switch out to the bailey of their pet idea, some simplistic, usually mono-variable, understanding of social reality.  Dilbert guy's mono-variable was con artistry.  Humans are just "moist robots" and you just need to figure out the who are the master con artists; they will always win.

This pushing of a mono-variable might work in the world of selling ideas in the short run, but it doesn't jive with actual rigor.  Again, from Strogatz

. . . all of biology is nonlinear; so is sociology.  That's why the soft sciences are hard -- and the last to be mathematized.  Because of nonlinearity, there's nothing soft about them. pg 280

Huge swathes of reality are irreducibly complex [2] --  even more things that cannot be understood at a human level of IQ.  On the bright side, that leaves always more to explore, to wonder at, and be surprised by.

But always be suspicious of those who argue for determinism.  They probably just want to trip on power.  Certainly don't be in a vulnerable position around such people. . .  Just because we agree there isn't free will doesn't mean THEY can predict what is going to happen.  In any remotely free social set up, I have functional free will from the perspective of outside human observers.


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[1] I know that reads sarcastic, but I'm not saying there is anything wrong with respectability per se -- I actually try to be respectable enough in social settings -- but it is a psycho-social motivation that shapes beliefs more than a deep investigation of the subjects.  Cp. Crony Beliefs.  If you believe in materialism, your reasons probably have not been deeply investigated.  That does not mean the belief is incorrect, rather it has not been examined.

[2] Ie absent some computer working in another dimension, using more computing power than our entire plane of reality could provide.  So yeah, someone in Silicon Valley is working on it.

Dread, Resentment, Health and Dignity

As I say below in my response to this piece, I guess I have Dutch muse.  Lot's of topics, from media dosages, political madness, the nature of dignity, whether gold and silver should be in an investment portfolio.

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First time I've been back in since I last commented. I'm glad I've reduced my frequency. More on that in the second paragraph, but I might just put an entry in my calendar to catch up every two weeks or so. I value the way our anonymous Dutch writer shows where the emperor has no clothes, and when I think he's wrong, I think he's wrong in ways I find interesting -- interesting enough that I feel inspired to write replies. (I guess I have a Dutch muse. Who knew?)

Today, I am not here to disagree with much. As is the message in the first part of the piece, people need to know what they can handle, and how much good they are actually doing with the time they spend on an issue. I once wasted an entire sabbatical by being on r/collapse too much. Yes, the information itself was a drag, but the real thing to avoid is misanthropes who are sack-of-shitting through life. Once you get the message, hang up the phone. Our Dutch friend, while better than them, is still somewhere on the spectrum enough that I need to put the writing away on focus on my stuff, rather than left is disgust and dread, whether at the world or the writer.

To our current political discussions in our culture. A plague on both your houses. It's all just resentment-ball. And, yes, people who have their shit together by definition know how to cut it off in their heads and move to other, productive things. Obviously, the Twitter left is bound and determined to crowd out any attempts at personal improvement and personal responsibility. The Unabomber Manifesto pointed this out, and it's more true today. On the other hand people, usually on the right, make the mistake of thinking that just because they defend their favorite billionaires they are not resentful. But thinking people on the lowered ends of society are getting more they deserve is just as much resentment as thinking the same thought about those at higher up the pyramid. Either way, the resentment can at best blind a person, and at worse, eat them alive if it is left unchecked. Watch what people are doing to improve themselves, not what they are signaling.

New topic:

I invest with a friend, he grew up effectively in the opposite manner, in excessive luxury. It’s important to meet people who are different from you, they help cure you of your own irrationalities. At this point in time, I’m in the process of learning to treat myself with dignity.

Dignity finally clicks when it is a moment of grace. You don't deserve dignity because you are fit, because your carbon footprint is X, or because your bank balance is Y. Keep playing the differed dignity game and you'll never get there. This is one of the rare Big Truths where Christianity does the best explaining compared to its peers-- and why it's not a coincidence that it was Christendom that came up with liberal democracy and top-notch contract law. And that as we start eroding dignity -- pretending it is in the pursuit of truth, but really to serve consumption imperative better -- we endanger our liberty.

Nietzsche is right about when God died. The foundation of dignity has to be found in something other than Sky God. I think it can be constructed out of a deep understanding of what care is (to some extent I mean the warm fuzzies, like holding a baby, but really I mean more of the sense of "to care about" something). If you can actually care about something, then you are enough of a piece of god-shatter to matter. But. . . so is everyone else.

To sum up all of this: there is a lot of things wrong in the world, but we should try to handle it all gracefully. The real problem with both misanthropes and the overly political is they lack grace.

Two quibbles:

1) Give Direct charities are probably better than UNICEF. When I get back to making money, that's where I am going to tithe. (I'm trying to use that as motivation to get a business off the ground).

2) Precious metals can have a place in a portfolio. Say 10%, up to 20% if you are a paranoid fuck trying to price in big-ass disruptions. Yes, the expected value of a precious metals is 0% growth, but all short-term bonds and many long-term bonds in the wealthy world are either at negative rates or hovering right at the zero-bound. Secondly, since precious metals do not correlate with stocks or bonds, they provide opportunities to buy low and sale high each time you do a portfolio rebalance.  

Ultimate Money Quote about Being Around Liberals

From the piece Grass Roots:

She needed solutions. She needed to be part of a Better World. She asked me why I was even at this event if I didn’t think we were going to change anything. I said I enjoy being around all the smart, kind, thoughtful, and competent people. I like showing up with a bottle of wine and a tray of food and spending time in a beautiful space. And the subject matter is genuinely interesting. I need to know how things really work so I can step out of the way when shit goes south. We’re due for a market crash. We’re due for an earthquake. The nature of the conversation will change completely on the other side of these events and I want to be ahead of the curve. She politely stepped away from my negative energy.

It is always good to have a kindred spirit out there, and Johnny S brings up something I've been wanting to get off my chest.

I don't hang around liberals because I think my actions will lead to change for the better.  I hang out with them because they are usually more enjoyable than my alternatives. With the conservatives I know the conversation follows the structure of one of two sandwiches:

Sandwich 1 -- the more common one.

I'm great.  Hierarchy is great.  I'm great.  

Sandwich 2

Hierarchy is great.  I'm great.  Hierarchy is great.  

Conservatism isn't a philosophy.  It's a mindset.  I once saw a Ran Prieur quote that applies:

 in practice, conservatism is an emotional state, and people in that state don't care what's traditional or radical for humans in general -- they only care what's traditional or radical for them personally. So you can make the most untested and wildly maladapted society in history, and after a couple generations, all the traditionalists will angrily defend it and attack the ways of the previous hundred thousand generations.

To be conservative about this society, the one that did its darndest to destroy all values, is an absurdity.  Not that that stops them from trying.

Don't get me wrong; liberals who have nice stuff believe in hierarchy, too.  They just don't talk about it as much. There can be other stories, other facts, and conversation doesn't have to go back to some very narrow grooves.  My kind of eclectic explorations are allowed to be a fun side-show, and sometimes, when my wit is flowing, I can even be the life of a liberal party.

The center-left would like to keep their power and wealth hidden behind bougie norms such as politeness and proceduralism.  They know it is vulgar to tell, and much more proper to show.  When you go past that to speak plainly about unpleasant realities, the fangs certainly can come out.  NIMBY indeed.   Heck, not in my house.  Do not question progress.  Do not question the vital equation

destruction - carbon = sustainability.  

Absolutely do not question whether the good guys are always the good guys.  And don't go over the real history.

Eh, that's easy enough.  Like Johhny S above, I'm here for the wine, snacks, and good conversation -- at least I was before the time of quarantines.   I like the smiling faces, and I need to do better at not being the person who makes them stop.

A Vote for a Third-Party Candidate is . . .

I just want to jot down my responses to idea that "a vote for the Green Party is a vote for Trump." (All of the arguments can apply to any discussion of third parties as a "wasted vote.")

Either a) a vote is symbolic expression and one I have a right to interpret as I please,
 OR
b) its value is only derived from whether or not it leads to a win.

If b, then

* Every vote for Biden in Oklahoma is a vote for Trump.  With 0.00% of the votes counted, I am calling Oklahoma's 7 electoral votes for Donald Trump.  There is no way for people in red states to avoid this moral censure.

* We can actually go further -- if you fully believe b, then last election a vote for Hilary was a vote for Trump. Simply look at the result!

Oh, you want to get out of that somehow, perhaps talking about probability?  (You can't talk about intent; otherwise I get to simply vote how I want -- willing that my one vote would be the maxim that other voters would follow, as it were, not the kind of pathetic, bungled attempts at compromise we kept getting) [1].  Once you start thinking about probability, however, you have a very complicated terrain, not simple slogans for simple moral intuitions.

For one, thanks to the electoral college, in at least 80% of states, people can vote Green with total impunity. If the Party got 5% of the national vote, it would lead to greater ballot access, federal funding for the party, and a structural force to make Democrats have to move left if they want to keep voters.  If that's valuable to someone who lives in a non-swing state, which ground do you want to use to say they shouldn't?

Secondly, people who live in swing states who like the Green Party could involve themselves in a kind of vote swap with someone in non-swing state.  Even better, the Green Party voter in a swing state should seek to leverage several votes for their one vote.

Also, this world of probabilism with a mandate of maximizing the chance of winning means every vote in the primary for a candidate who has high unfavorables with marginal voting groups in the primary (like Biden's problem with young people) is a partial vote for Trump [2]. This is conditional on your ability to convert them into voters, and in this instance doing so in spite of not offering them anything.

So, why not just lie and say Biden will offer things? A lot of this has to do with the mental habits of his online supporters. Remember, the mandate of middle management is to try to extract loyal behavior from people to organizations that will not give loyalty [3].  When you are at work, you cannot explicitly offer people benefits you don't get them for fear of legal action. Staying in that habit of mind leads management class Democrats to try other tricks. Since Biden is such a bad candidate, they are left with shaming and deflection.



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[1] In reality, what happens for candidates like Kerry, Romney, Biden is a kind of cascade effect. Kerry looked invincible in the primaries.  Turned out, he had only convinced Democratic primary voters in a few early states that he was electable and then his winning elections in Democratic primaries was taken as proof of concept.

[2] The correct answer was probably Warren -- she offered populist policies filtered in a way bougie people can listen to.  This would lead to grumbling on both sides, sure, but the marginalized would get what they care about, policy proposals, and the bougie would get what they want, style. She misplayed her hand very badly, but was punished for it in ways far above the causes.  I mean, look at Biden. . . Some of you can't right now, but I take great comfort in knowing the day is soon when people will see him for who he is, either after defeat or after his one term.  For now, there are those who are trying to construct a God-Emperor and cannot see the lack of clothes. Deflection is a hell of a drug.

[3] This is a big reason the "vote swap" idea really doesn't work.  They want your vote for free.  The people the highest up want to destroy your capacity for political imagination, and middle management is used to doing what they are told and then getting extremely irked at people punching up.

Quick Guide to American Politics

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

Dan Hodges 

This was posted on Twitter, and the replies help to answer the question of how Americans can find even the most horrible of things bearable.  The whole discussion of "gun rights" is a template for how Americans are capable of ignoring just about anything that happens . . . to other people.

Basically, Americans have been trained to come up with an argument instead of seek a solution.  Most people, especially on the internet, seem to think they work in Public Relations.  Once they have "scored points," their job is done.  No need for any of the tools of the competent, such as focus on an issue, building models by making predictions and experiments, or follow-up.

The tactics most used in the replies to the Hodges tweet are deflection and ad hominem.  Also, to the former citizen, now turned PR worker, words are either warm and fuzzy or cold and prickly (credit JMG for the concept).  If we can associate our brand with enough warm fuzzies and throw enough cold pricklies at the other brand we can expand market share.  This is the real game.  Principles, on the other hand, are just another consumer good, to be used when and how the buyer wishes.

Our politics make for a team-sport, allowing for a group-level reworking of a Narcissist's Prayer

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not [our] fault.
And if it was, [we] didn't mean it.
And if [we] did...
You deserved it.

And this is the toolbox that makes America the wealthiest failed state in history, a point made in this article by Umair Haque in 2018.  There is no social problem that can embarrass the average American voter; instead, they will just consume a scapegoat narrative and deflect the issue entirely).   The real  pain they try to avoid is that of political loss.  As someone once said, "Narcissists don't feel guilt, only shame." [1]  Because of this, I go back to the Haque article:

American[s] appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

You want to think the Democrats are better than this?  1) Their politicians aren't and 2) not even a working majority of their primary voters are.  All sorts of Americans are comfortable with the notion that bad things can happen to others as long as "I've got mine."

We'll see if a politics of problem solving develops over the next decade or two. I have my doubts, but would love to be surprised.

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[1] Read this better TLP piece on what I call Standard American Narcissism  (STan).

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Postscript: I see this as an instance of the broader pattern described here.

Bernie and the Bourgeois

The bougie world order is under siege.  It might be more accurate to call it the world order of middle management.  Middle management was paid off to perform what (in the long run) was an impossible task: inspiring loyalty in organizations that increasingly gave no loyalty.  Many tricks were . . . employed (pun accepted):

* positivity
* awards and goals -- which is the positive side of . . .
* surveillance and evaluation
* charisma, coolness, attractiveness
* credentialism

* the language (but not the reality) of innovation and entrepreneurialism.
* promoting the culture of fear for the world outside [1]
* bureaucratese
* political correctness (as policy and trainings)
* levels of irony and meta-irony

* smarm

It worked just well enough to hold together an empire through the Great Cultural Suicide -- they did try to kill all weirdness, but the owners of capital were even more interested in sales. . . Ah, the internal contradictions upon which systems fall. . . eventually.

The Trump thing was a crack in this order, confusing and then infuriating to some, refreshing to others. He a) showed the futility of all of those sensitivity trainings, b) decoupled charisma from keeping ones cool, and c) was decidedly not invested in positivity.  His ascent in the primary showed that rank-and-file Republicans preferred their hierarchy raw and aggressively stated, rather than hidden behind some bougie tricks [2].  Note that #neverTrump Republicans by and large based their critique on presentation and competence, not on policy, with the fantastically telling exception of Trump's challenging globalization.

Though Bernie has been neutralized, his movement represented the stand of a) the young and b) care workers against a) the old and b) management. Before the South Carolina Primary and the seismic move of voters  that lead to the Biden landslide on Super Tuesday, the critiques I saw of Bernie were by and large personality based.  I heard Bernie is "cranky" and "always yelling."  Hilary Clinton needed to let us know "no one likes him."  (See how much everything turns into a "popularity contest" with these people? There are very formal, though hidden, rules of who gets to say what in middle-management world).

I would contend that the pressure to find "anybody but Bernie" -- and yes, though it was desperate, it was more or less hidden pressure, but that is the way of middle management -- was not just that Bernie would raise taxes on the comfortable or that he self-identified as a socialist (which did turn out to be a problem for people over 65 who have a more extensive Cold War context), it is that he violated bougie norms, such as positivity and coolness.  You are never supposed to show anger in Bureaucrat World, at least not on a "punch up" basis.  Everyone must calmly accept that the technocrats are doing the best they can -- nay, the best anyone can.

Well, people under 45 aren't buying it, and that cohort probably never will.  But it turns out they are (still) not where the votes are among Democratic primary voters.  So, the siege continues, and the political appetite to prop up the paper pushers' world lessens.  I am very interested to see how it plays out for them, but I wouldn't put my money on their economic survival. 

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Also, for posterity, a twitter thread from the night of Super Tuesday.
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[1] I'm making a nuanced argument here.  While, yes, I think there is more out-and-out bullies and tyrants in management than nearly anyone is willing to admit, I think it is more common to use all the scary things outside the office to promote general fear and anxiety.  We need to "take precautions" . . . "better safe than sorry" as a way of life.  This makes the day-to-day work place seem better by comparison and makes losing one's job seem to be a more dreadful prospect.

[2] That's how Trump won the primary; he won in the general election because enough people in the Rust Belt who would lean Democratic decided to stay home for a whole portfolio of reasons -- an important one being that another Clinton signed NAFTA.

Our Politics Won't Have Peace Until . . .

I responded to this Degringolade post with the following:

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Maybe free college or UBI can't be sustained, but something still has to give on healthcare, wealth destruction or not. I am starting to gel a thesis that both left and right might be coming together to figure out that bureaucrats and paper work can get the ax. The managerial class should be shitting their pants right now, and many of them are.

I wrote this aphorism recently:

The real cruelty of America to its young is not that it is denying them the American Dream. It is denying them the Human Dream of starting a family that they can keep healthy and free from deprivation.

The thing is, it's one thing to be personally screwed on healthcare by the opacity, price gouging, and red-tape. It's possible for me, for example, to be a philosopher about dying from something my society could have treated, but didn't (you know, our healthcare is still better than it was for the richest person 100 years ago or so) but when I think of a child [especially a child of mine] trapped in that . . . killed by something that was easily within the grasp of a society better run than ours . . .

Millenials have been denied the basic security of home and hearth it takes to pivot into the conservatism that comes so naturally to the middle-aged. And they aren't being subtle about their willingness to upset apple carts over it.

Point taken about stair-step collapse in the JMG model, but we won't be hitting any equilibrium point until we stop eating our young, and young families.

Bucky's Idea

Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was in many ways ahead of his time.  Of particular interest to me, in light of seemingly ubiquitous online discussions of universal basic income, is how much more effective his way of selling the concept would be.  Keep in mind that Bucky was born in 1895.  But you could say he had a fuller understanding of the idea than most (pun accepted. In fact, I revel in it).

Bucky spoke of UBI as offering research grants . . . to everyone.  And, yeah, maybe we should put "research grants" in quotes, but Bucky contended in all earnestness that even a minute fraction of productive grants would more than pay for the other grants.

This is a perfectly defensible claim, and perhaps one day I will organize research and quotations in order to make that case.  That doesn't sound particularly fun, however, so for now I leave you with topics and authors to look into: David Graeber (esp Bullshit Jobs), Bob Black's Abolition of Work, Bertrand Russell In Praise of Idleness, the story of how Linux came to be, Alfie Kohn (esp Punished by Rewards).  Also, I'm sure that out all of the contemporary authors writing about UBI, someone has probably done some great work on this claim, but only if they understand that  people can be freed up when they are out of our current systems, and conversely, these systems don't lead many individuals to their best work.

It seems, instead, that the dominate rhetorical thrust of current UBI advocates is that most jobs can be automated away, either now or in the near future, and that those displaced workers will be in need of handouts.  You can call it a "freedom dividend" but that doesn't make it more palatable to a Republican, unless an alpha enough Republican leader says it first -- look what Trump did for Russia's image amongst the Grand Old Party of liberty and other timeless principles  (CP Don't Break My Stuff, also this).

It is my bold thesis that if the mistake isn't made of having a Democrat say it first Republicans by and large could much more easily accept a system of "grants"/"loans"/or "investments" than "universal basic income".  Let's break that phrase down into it's parts. "Income" is a handout, "basic" isn't champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and "universal" acts like all lives have equal value, which just sounds communist.  But a grant could let you say you are going to do one thing, then burn the money on living expenses.  It could be a way to trick the government!  While Republicans aren't alone in their love of tricking the government, there is not much evidence of some principles against it.  And it makes some intuitive sense that they might find it extra sweet. [1]

The aftermath of the passage of medical marijuana here in Oklahoma made me glad I don't vote.  If I had voted, I probably could have been convinced to vote for medical marijuana based on the stories of people who have legitimate, you know, medical needs.  My wife knew of at least one child that fit that category, with some medicinal off-shot of cannibals being the only thing that didn't cause sever side effects.  All well and good, but I somehow didn't foresee that there would be more dispensaries than liquor stores, selling such valuable medicine as THC-infused gummy bears, lemon drops, and chocolates.  Next time I need an antibiotic, I'll see if I can buy it in gummy form from some shady store with a drug pun in its name.  It's just the right thing to do, and we do the right thing here in the heartland.

That's not to say in some world where I didn't refuse to validate our sham democracy [2] I wouldn't vote for straight-up legalized (or decriminalized) marijuana -- after all, weed and alcohol seem to be on similar levels as silly, overpriced vices.  It appears that I am in an extremely small minority of people bothered by medical fraud and a system that winks at it.  Though I cannot relocate the quote, I believe Charlie Munger once said something along the lines of "there is a special place in hell for those who make easily gameable systems."  But as social cohesion melts and anything goes (lol!), more and more people are looking for those gameable systems.

So just imagine an Agency of Government Grants which offered a form to say what business you were going to start or what you were going to research, and no matter how poorly you filled that form out, you'd get enough money to be above the poverty line.  The standards would be so low that you could write "$ biznes" in crayon, and you would get your checks.  Sharing live streams of progress in a video game would be a worthy enough enterprise for a grant, and there is ample evidence such streams promote utility.  The romantic set could write "research on mating rituals."  And to bring this all full circle, grants cloud be provided for "longitudinal studies of marijuana consumption."  No one will check on you, but you'll be "encouraged" to share results.  People would love it.

In order to make this work, I am pretty sure you can't advertise how low the grant standards in fact are.  Instead, my experience as a teacher tells me it is much better to maintain a level of plausible deniability that you expect more.  For people who are competent enough to get online and fill out forms, there should be options to go into extreme detail.  Someone like my wife who likes to do the "right thing" would be greatly helped by the appearance of high expectations, and frankly some way to receive praise.  Finally, I would have argued that there should be a place to share the data sets and research results, but that sounds like the internet, or at least what it was before the era of anti-social media.

If you thought the purpose of this essay was to a call action to adopt Bucky's rhetoric, you are mistaken.  I just wanted to write something interesting and bash the moral vacuity of a particular class of blow-hards.  Unlike nearly everyone else, I try to think how likely events are, not rather or not I'd enjoy them.  I think the odds of Bucky-style grants are about nil.  Though it sounds a bit like humor, I am serious that a Democrat cannot present any of this ("only Nixon could go to China" says Spock).  Also, I think we can count on the super-wealthy to pull the strings and exploit divisions in order to prevent redistribution.  We can also count on ivy league educated "thought leaders" to be horribly, off-puttingly elitist in their rhetoric, as lastly we can count  on Democratic politicians to be completely ineffective.

No, there will be no Bucky bucks.

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[1]  I've many times heard things along the lines of "it's time to get mine" from those dead set against redistribution, with no apparent concern for the performative contradiction.

[2]  I know how disturbing it is for some people to read that, and I am sorry to cause offence.  Voting is part of a civic religion where we all have a duty to "make" our voices heard.  I would explain my reasons for refraining, but so many of them are obvious if someone were in a frame of mind to understand them.  Instead, I know "the importance of voting" is a belief held for psycho-social reasons, what Simler calls a crony belief.  Much like the vegetarian around meat eaters who isn't trying to convince anyone, I don't care if you vote. But I know that lack of emotional labor can sometimes raise the level of offence.

Also, I reserve the right to vote in local elections if I ever see the point.

Notes on New Hampshire

This from an email I sent to a friend:

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You've been interested in the election, so I will add my take from last night: if the media had the same contempt for either Klob or Butti they have for Bernie they would sit on the fact that they cost each other the win.  As it is, contempt brain is stupid brain, so instead it is back to ignoring Bernie, trying to make 3rd the real winner, 2nd the next story, and 1st an after-thought.  This is part of the reason people hate them, but they really can't stop themselves. They are too clever by half, and then ready to gaslight when called out.

Actual political competence would include a call to winnow the field down, at least by Super Tuesday.  If we are looking at Klob, Butti, Money-berg, with the possibility of Uncle Joe resuscitated by South Carolina, then they are giving Bernie a free-roll -- he may have a lower chance of getting a majority of delegates, but he'll be the only one with any chance.  And do party elites really want to screw with a convention battle?  See what I mean about incompetence?

A three-steps ahead, bold take on the conditional: if they take it away from Bernie at the convention they damn well better give it to someone isn't running. [1]  John Kerry could be an option.  Al Gore would be interesting, though I'm not sure he would want to do it.  Fun fact: Butti won last night among voters who said climate change was the most important issue.  There is a huge appetite in the party to deal with climate but not deal income inequality.

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[1] Do they realize this?  It's basic psychology involving resentment and loss aversion.  So no, they probably don't get this, preferring to protect their own sunk costs.  So much for #resistance.

Thoughts on the Iowa Fiasco

First, what do I think the DNC should do?

• Admit that they have a problem hiring cronies and grifters.
• Commit to paper ballots
• Step down
• Vow to only work on local issues where they plan on relocating, since they are, in point of fact, incompetent at the level of governance they are operating.

The fact this is inconceivable only means that "career over country" is fully entrenched among the elites.

Second, we can probably expect the elites to double-down, and I think this brings up a very pessimistic understanding, the kind I would like to be wrong about.

DNC-style Dems don't want government to work any more than the GOP, and so they get to pull the same trick: make government suck so much that no one (really no swing voter) believes in it.  What happened in Iowa was a down-payment on what they can do to stop the visions of the Left. We really can't have nice things, and it once again shows.

Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Fine, but I remember Venkatesh Rao once pointing out that you can be stupid and malicious at once.  DNC-Dems/ the GOP, together they make up our elites, and check out the game plan: 

Flail out, create chaos, in the chaos cheat, fail upward. Use those who failed upward to help create more chaos and pull more failures upward. All hail the Maze!

Incompetence is not a conspiracy, first-order.  But it can be bailed out with a second-order conspiracy, especially by people who think they are Philosopher-Kings.

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Appendix

This is an email I wrote to a friend on the matter after he had responded to the piece above:

[Update 4/8/2020.  Wow.  I sure was wrong about some things.  I was wrong about me being done with the horse race.  I was also wrong about how the primary would play out.  I think I learned some things in the process.]
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Greetings from Norman, Oklahoma, where we are having our first (and perhaps only) snow of the year.  I keep looking out the window because it looks like a postcard from another land, the kind television tells me is the heartland -- at least with my view of trees and the ground out of one window, and single family houses out the other.  We can't have one of those urban Christmases, or urban, cold loneliness, can we? . . .I just saw a neighbor take her dog out to see her first snow, and play in it.

Tying this together with your main topic, I am reminded of the Chesterton quote " . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them."  Not voting is a great way to not get sucked into what is unworthy about life, and then make room for what constitutes the real joy in being alive.  I just like having the peace of mind.  The waves of history are bigger than anything I can control.

With that said, I had [messed] up.  I had allowed myself to engage with politics a lot the last few weeks, watching videos,reading all I could and even getting into arguments on twitter and reddit.  I justified this all as a kind of festival.  And I was going to cap it with watching the election results as they came in, going from website to website for analysis, checking in from time to time see ABC's take.  I had even had a serious conversation with my wife about going to Iowa to do some political tourism, but decided to keep my finances on lock-down until I get a teaching gig again.

But what happened kept me up until something like 2 am, and the next day I stayed in a funk.  If this is how other people feel when they scroll through feeds all day, then I am frankly surprised our society hasn't fallen apart more than it already has. 

I'm done with the horse race this year.  Looks like either Bernie wins, Bloomberg white-knights, or Bernie will be cheated.  I now see how bizarro-world that cheating can get (and again, I'm not saying anyone set out for Iowa to go this way, but rather there will second-order exploitation of the disasters created by one's own incompetence), but this is something best watched from afar.  Same goes for the general election.

On to creative work, and other interesting things.  

Two Money Quotes from "The Center Blows Itself Up"

I highly recommend this piece by David Graeber which touches many subjects, but is held together by an attempt to explain Labour's loss in the recent U.K. election. Here are two quotes of particular interest, with some quick annotations scribbled out.

1/

Instead of uncritically accepting the narrative of the "service economy," Graeber clarifies

The real story is the spectacular growth, on the one hand, of clerical, administrative, and supervisory work, and, on the other, of what might broadly be termed “care work”: medical, educational, maintenance, social care, and so forth. While productivity in the manufacturing sector has skyrocketed, productivity in this caring sector has actually decreased across the developed world (largely due to the weight of bureaucratization imposed by the burgeoning numbers of administrators).

When I think of the 1%/ 19%/ 80% tranches outlined in this piece, the managers are that 19% I was poking fun at and wondering how to model their future.  The care workers fall into the 80%.  Even though many of them have a chance to earn decent money (at least to my perspective, as a career teacher), they still fall in with the class tensions of the rest of the 80% tranche.  The next quote explains why.

2/

Whereas the core value of the caring classes is, precisely, care, the core value of the professional-managerials might best be described as proceduralism. The rules and regulations, flow charts, quality reviews, audits and PowerPoints that form the main substance of their working life inevitably color their view of politics or even morality . These are people who tend to genuinely believe in the rules. They may well be the only significant stratum of the population who do so. If it is possible to generalize about class sensibilities, one might say that members of this class see society less as a web of human relationships, of love, hate, or enthusiasm, than, precisely, as a set of rules and institutional procedures, just as they see democracy, and rule of law, as effectively the same thing.

To be blunt: care workers are on the side of humans and how humans operate.  The managers are on the side of systems and what Zvi calls "immoral mazes."  The 1%, delightfully enough (for them), get to float above it all, but sadly (for them) often get sucked back in.  One place this happens is when they seek political power.  Another is when they want to get likes on the internet.

While the Clintons are above all a transnational consulting and lobbying brand, the brand is around promoting the proceduralism of the 19%.  And, yes, Trump is also a transnational brand, one that was first about a campy glorification of wealth, and then morphed into being about absurd white male privilege, including the privilege -- some (not me) would say "god given right" -- to be vulgar and openly cruel [1].

Humans hate being "managed," but managers love management, and the 1% benefit from 1) the levels of insulation and 2) the ensuing division.

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[1] Obama/McCain was the first election (to my knowledge) featuring two candidates who up and left where they were raised and picked where they would make their life as adults.  It was an interesting result of car culture.  That Obama/Romney was a repeat of this shows how much mobility had become the norm.   Trump/Clinton was our first (and hopefully last) election between two transnational brands.

Degringolade Responds Re Darren Allen

Degringolade had a response to last week's post. Some highlights:

 . . . I studied, I attempted understanding, I followed the rules and accepted the role assigned me.  But looking around me now, I realized that the truth of the matter is that the passion and the anger and the effort that I put into watching and understanding and discussing things that I had no effect on was truly a waste of my time and my life.  

And

I do like to keep up, I do try to read the updates on the world once a week.  I miss the days when The Economist wasn't a shameless shill and apologist for every rich bastard in the world.  In the 80's and 90's when they were my go to, a once a week read followed by some drill-down on specific issues kept me pretty aware of my surroundings.  But those days are gone, and to keep up and keep out of the clutches of the mass-media hysteria machine, I have to refine the extremely low-grade ore that is the internet.  

Finishing with

Nope, Ran's decision to drop out, play video games, and get mellow aren't necessarily invalid, the positions advocated by Mr. Allen are equally ambiguous.  I think that one derives from a desire to be right, the other derives from a desire to be left alone.  I think I know which one I would prefer to hang out with. 

Darren Allen, Purity Politics, and the Time Remaining

I recently had an interesting exchange on Reddit with Darren Allen (his website, though it's been frequently down).  The topic was his critique of Ran Prieur, whom Allen had lumped in with other people he called "unofficial socialists."

The piece was well-written, but a bit on the long side.  In essence, Allen is accusing all seven people and groups of not being anarchist enough for him.  In our conversation, I provided the connection that he was describing different incentive traps which no one has the incentive to get out -- i.e. Scott Alexander's use of Moloch.

Anarchism, like the rest of politics, is something I only allow myself the indulgence of finding meta-interesting, especially in its meta-politics.   Anarchism is absolutely an example of wandist, if not godist, thinking.  So, once you admit it's never going to happen, as Darren Allen does in our exchange, what do you do next?  One option is to try to implement your ideas on a small scale.  Another is to continue on in a wandist mode and accuse others of not taking pure enough symbolic stances. If an anarchist keeps going it is usually out of the joy of perceiving that they are correct. (Libertarianism is like this but usually in practice also includes an identification with, and thus a fetish for, our captains of industry).

But life isn't just about winning political arguments. Ran Prieur has very much understood this in his post-doomer / post-back-to-the-land phase.  And I'll speak for myself: I'm no longer going to waste my limited life feeling horror, dread, or debilitating depression about things I cannot control.  I have tried to remove these from my information diet and habits of thought and instead seek out beauty. And though there have been alterations to how I go about it,  that's the current project of my life: trying to live well in the face of an inevitable death, one that might be hastened by forces around me.

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Hopefully the above gives enough context for my last post in the thread, which Mr. Allen has at this point not responded to.  It begins with a quote from him:

As i say, I still like him as a private bod, but as a public intellectual (thinker / teacher / writer / etc) he has nothing to say any more, and it is my duty to point that out and why

That might be as good as a place as any to examine, assuming we are wanting to find common ground. What does a private/public divide mean to you? Why is the binary useful in this context?

Or, really, why should anyone have "obligations" to the public side when we have so little ability to move any needle at all? And surely that is a fair summary of our last exchange. It looks like the impediments to your preferred world are 1) political inaction, which means corporations and the security state continue unabetted 2) the entire political right 3) capture of the official left 4) the subtle capture of the unofficial socialists you outline.

Though there are more people who understand collapse, I'll agree with your figure of 1,000 to 100,000 who understand that the best state for humanity is anarcho-primitivism in an area with human activity below ecological carrying capacity. And if I could magic wand it, I'd probably will into existence something close to what you would as well. I buy that we made a wrong turn at agriculture and the bad situation became increasingly worse with institutions seeking legibility.

But I have no position in a meaningful res publica, let alone a polis, let alone king of the world. The real position for us who see through is to drop out or semi-drop out. And then what?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you are saying people need to dedicate themselves to a purity politics that you know won't work. But why?

I think it is noble enough to look for what is beautiful and interesting, and share what you find. It's being a private person and sharing the overflow.

The last few months of Ran's blog have

• Turned me on to Miles Davis's later psychedelic/funk work
• interrogated American chore habits
• had open-minded essays (attempts, not proclamations) about confidence, panpsychism, and the like.

It's a good read. Those who want to perceive even more beauty can take to making their own art, or go on a reverential nature walk. And that's where I'm at, filling my time well while I wait to see where the waves of history, the ones I know I cannot control, take us.

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I also used Reddit as the comments section.  Ran even responded.

Don't Break My Stuff

I)

I would say that I am meta-interested in politics; ie, I am interested in the fact that people are interested in politics, and the ways they are.   However, I like to position myself as an outsider as much as possible.  For one thing, following it is too darn painful.  Just because I said (meta-)politics is (meta-)interesting does not mean I find it endlessly interesting all the time, and that I am willing to sacrifice my mental health for every nugget of information I can acquire.  It's one of many hobbies, not a sacred quest.

I really think American politics have digressed into co-dependencies very much trapped in the cycle of abuse.  If that is too extreme, then consider this argument, that the dynamics of a movement work best (in terms of recruitment, fundraising, influence for leaders) when they don't achieve results.  The movement can get close, it can look like it's very close to winning, and the stakes should be raised to existential dimensions, but the invisible hand will find a way for the true believers to be left unsatisfied.  And then it's on to the next round of gathering resources for the next fight.  When you can think of examples of this for both parties, you have started down the path to meta-politics.  Remove enough garbage from your information diet, and you might one day find that you are only meta-interested.

II)

To get over the parts of politics that disgust me, I have taken the prudent course of action and stopping posting on Twitter.  I went one step further, and deleted several years of tweets, ported things of particular value over to this blog.  Results here, and here, and here.

I have a tweet thread I want to develop a little more.  It started with this Wrath of Gnon post:

“Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created.” Roger Scruton pic.twitter.com/CE2Ex5j1sw

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) April 11, 2016

As I said, I have deleted my responses on the twitter platform.  But here is what I wrote in response:

Certainly worth turning over in one's mind.  We need spaces where this is true, even if not political. 

I wonder what a properly constituted Venn diagram of this and the sentiment "don't break my shit" would look like. . .  or really "don't break MY shit."

I cannot locate the video where I heard David Heinemeier Hansson say that "don't break my shit.  I have nice shit" is the core of all conservatism, but I do believe in credit where it's due when possible.

My addition is to emphasize the "MY."  After all, every strand of conservatism I can think of has been perfectly fine with other people's stuff getting broken.  That is the creative destruction that has been at the heart of the American Way.

For my taste, conservatism can be respectable when it shifts to "don't break our stuff," but realize that 1) this is often merely a rhetorical ploy 2) while communities can create value, it does not follow that outsiders can access that value.  Furthermore, the shift to protecting "our stuff" is not all that effective rhetoric to audiences trained to be individualists and consumers. In modern times it has been more effective for the political right to define what freaks they say should not belong than it has been to give a concrete articulation of what is sacred -- institutions, rituals, places -- irrespective of who would defile them.  And yes, I am accusing conservatives of being relativists, nearly absolute relativists [1].

Another interesting thing about "don't break my shit" is once you establish it as your goal, you can never achieve it once and for all.  It is not a S.M.A.R.T goal, and thus your purveyor of fear and indignation can always dangle some enemy in front of you as a threat to what is yours.  And thus you can always be captured in a mass group.


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[1] The issue of abortion is the biggest exception I can think of.  From A Thing of Things article:

Pro-life advocacy is similar to effective altruism in many ways: its advocates believe that they’re fighting against an ongoing moral atrocity and it involves expanding the circle of concern.

 I can only say that I wish those animated about the issue were as interested in being pro-life after birth.  And I don't mean that flippantly.  I would like to see an expansion of community goods in the United States, and religious conviction seems to be one of the only ways to get there.  Modernity is a disaster for ethics and psychological well-being.