Safely Distanced

/rant on

New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.

Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.

A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.

/rant off

Everyday Heroes

This blog has never been obliged to observe every passing holiday or comment on celebrity deaths or public events via press release, public statement, command performance, ritual oversharing, or other characterization more closely associated with institutions and public figures who cannot keep from thrusting themselves wantonly onto the public despite having nothing of value to say. The chattering class maintains noise levels handily, so no need to add my voice to that cacophonous chorus. To wit, the recent Thanksgiving holiday prompts each of us every year to take stock anew and identify some area(s) of contentedness and gratitude, which can be challenging considering many Americans feel abandoned, betrayed, or worse as human history and civilization lurch despotically toward their end states. However, one overheard statement of gratitude this year made a strong impression on me, and as is my wont, I couldn’t help but to connect a variety of disparate ideas. Let me digress, starting with music.

Decades ago, the London Philharmonic under Jorge Mester recorded a collection of fanfares commissioned during WWII. American composers represented include (in no particular order) Henry Cowell, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Morton Gould, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston. None of their respective fanfares has entered the standard repertoire. However, the sole composer whose stirring fanfare has become legitimate and instantly recognizable Americana is Aaron Copland. His fanfare celebrates no famous figure or fighting force but rather the common man. Copland’s choice to valorize the common man was a masterstroke and the music possesses appealing directness and simplicity that are unexpectedly difficult to capture in music. Far more, um, common is elaborate, noisy, surface detail that fails to please the ear nearly so well as Copland’s stately fanfare. Indeed, the album is called Twenty Fanfares for the Common Man even though that title only applies to Copland’s entry.

The holiday comment that stuck with me was a son’s gratitude for the enduring example set by his father, a common man. Whether one is disposed to embrace or repudiate the patriarchy, there can be no doubt that a father’s role within a family and community is unique. (So, too, is the mother’s. Relax, it’s not a competition; both are important and necessary.) The father-protector and father-knows-best phase of early childhood is echoed in the humorous observation that a dog sees its master as a god. Sadly, the my-dad-can-beat-up-your-dad taunt lives on, transmuted in … superhero flicks. As most of us enter adulthood, coming to terms with the shortcomings of one or both parents (nobody’s perfect …) is part of the maturation process: establishing one’s own life and identity independent yet somehow continuous from those of one’s parents. So it’s not unusual to find young men in particular striking out on their own, distancing from and disapproving of their fathers (sometimes sharply) but later circling back to reflect and reconcile. How many of us can honestly express unalloyed admiration for our fathers and their character examples? I suspect frustration when feet of clay are revealed is more typical.

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Lingua Nova 03

Arranged from short to long.

A collective noun not in use but probably should be: a harassment of technologies. Needs no explanation.

From the Episcopal Church: the church key. A euphemism for a bottle opener for alcoholic beverages with bottle caps.

From various YouTube channels offering cinema reviews: memberberries. A cheap form of fan service, typically citing familiar nostalgic bit, lines, or characters to trigger a pleasing memory of previous TV shows and films. Generally used derogatorily.

Not new but new to me at least: ramekin. A small dish in which food can be baked and served. Reminded me of the far less commonplace hottle, which is a single-serving glass carafe for hot water, tea, or coffee. Here are representative pics:

From nowhere in particular: the poverty draft. An open secret (arguably, not really lingua nova) that recruitment into the U.S. military is aided substantially by the poverty of potential recruits. Thus, joining a branch of the armed services is not necessarily because of ideological agreement with its functions or an earnest desire to serve but instead — at the risk of life and limb — to get education and training not otherwise available or to expunge debt from more traditional educational institutions.

From Thomas Chatterton Williams (whom I might criticize for a number of reasons, but I’ll abjure): the Age of Theory. The modern age (pick a start date) has been called many things. I tend to call it the Age of Abundance since that quintessential characteristic is now decidedly on the wane. (Age of Oil and Fossil Fuel Era are essentially the same thing.) Age of Theory refers to PoMo reliance on theory and abstraction as a means of understanding and interpreting nearly everything. I’ve blogged quite a bit about living in our heads as distinguished from living in our bodies (i.e., being embodied). My book blogging through Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is most on point (see the McGilchrist tag).

From Peruvian writer and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa: the truth in the lies (translations vary — sometimes given as the truth of lies). Although Vargas Llosa is referencing fiction (writers writing about writing), the notion that a lie can reveal a more significant truth is at the heart of communications. Whether through advertising, public relations, entertainment, politicking, or propaganda, shaping opinion with use of subtle-to-obvious (mis-)framing or with straight-up lies and falsehoods is the contemporary information landscape, though many attempt to adhere rigorously to truth and reality. Separating malefactors from truth-tellers is the warrant and responsibility of any sovereign intellect — a formidable and ongoing task in an increasingly deranging public sphere.

Wordplay

The comic below struck a chord and reminded me of Gary Larson’s clumsily drawn but often trenchant The Far Side comics on scientific subjects.

This one masquerades as science but is merely wordplay, i.e., puns, double entendres, and unexpectedly funny malapropisms (made famous by Yogi Berra, among others). Wordplay is also found in various cultural realms, including comic strips and stand-up comedy, advertising and branding, politics, and now Wokedom (a subset of grassroots politics, some might argue). Playing with words has gone from being a clever, sometimes enjoyable diversion (e.g., crossword puzzles) to fully deranging, weaponized language. Some might be inclined to waive away the seriousness of that contention using the childhood retort “sticks and stones ….” Indeed, I’m far less convinced of the psychological power of verbal nastiness than those who insist words are violence. But it’s equally wrong to say that words don’t matter (much) or have no effect whatsoever. Otherwise, why would those acting in bad faith work so tirelessly to control the narrative, often by restricting free speech (as though writing or out-loud speech were necessary for thoughts to form)?

It’s with some exasperation that I observe words no longer retain their meanings. Yeah, yeah … language is dynamic. But semantic shifts usually occur slowly as language evolves. Moreover, for communication to occur effectively, senders and receivers must be aligned in their understandings of words. If you and I have divergent understandings of, say, yellow, we won’t get very far in discussions of egg yolks and sunsets. The same is true of words such as liberal, fascist, freedom, and violence. A lack of shared understanding of terms, perhaps borne out of ignorance, bias, or agenda, leads to communications breakdown. But it’s gotten far worse than that. The meanings of words have been thrown wide open to PoMo reinterpretation that often invert their meanings in precisely the way George Orwell observed in his novel 1984 (published 1949): “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Thus, earnest discussion of limitations on free speech and actual restriction on social media platforms, often via algorithmic identification of keywords that fail to account for irony, sarcasm, or context, fail to register that implementation of restrictive kludges already means free speech is essentially gone. The usual exceptions (obscenity, defamation, incitement, gag orders, secrecy, deceptive advertising, student speech, etc.) are not nearly as problematic because they have been adjudicated for several generations and accepted as established practice. Indeed, many exceptions have been relaxed considerably (e.g., obscenity that has become standard patois now fails to shock or offend), and slimy workarounds are now commonplace (e.g., using “people are saying …” to say something horrible yet shielding oneself while saying it). Another gray area includes fighting words and offensive words, which are being expanded (out of a misguided campaign to sanitize?) to include many words with origins as clinical and scientific terms, and faux offense used to stifle speech.

Restrictions on free speech are working in many respects, as many choose to self-censor to avoid running afoul of various self-appointed watchdogs or roving Internet thought police (another Orwell prophecy come true) ready to pounce on some unapproved utterance. One can argue whether self-censorship is cowardly or judicious, I suppose. However, silence and the pretense of agreement only conceal thoughts harbored privately and left unexpressed, which is why restrictions on public speech are fool’s errands and strategic blunders. Maybe the genie can be bottled for a time, but that only produces resentment (not agreement), which boils over into seething rage (and worse) at some point.

At this particular moment in U.S. culture, however, restrictions are not my greatest concern. Rather, it’s the wholesale control of information gathering and reporting that misrepresent or remove from the public sphere ingredients needed to form coherent thoughts and opinions. It’s not happening only to the hoi polloi; those in positions of power and control are manipulated, too. (How many lobbyists per member of Congress, industry after industry, whispering in their ears like so many Wormtongues?) And in extreme cases of fame and cult of personality, a leader or despot unwittingly surrounds him- or herself by a coterie of yes-men frankly afraid to tell the truth out of careerist self-interest or because of shoot-the-messenger syndrome. It’s lonely at the top, right?

Addendum: Mere minutes after publishing this post, I wandered over to Bracing Views (on my blogroll) and found this post saying some of the same things, namely, that choking information off at the source results in a degraded information landscape. Worth a read.

Proxy Tyranny

In the sense that all news is local and all learning is individual, meaning that it’s only when something is individualized and particularized that it takes on context and meaning, I may finally understand (some doubt still) Sheldon Wolin’s term “inverted totalitarianism,” part of the subtitle of his 2006 book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Regrettably, this book is among the (many) dozens that await my attention, so I can’t yet claim to have done the work. (I did catch a long YouTube interview of Wolin conducted by Chris Hedges, but that’s a poor substitute for reading the book.) My process is to percolate on a topic and its ancillary ideas over time until they come together satisfactorily, and my provisional understanding of the issues is closer to “proxy tyranny” than “inverted totalitarianism.”

I daresay most of us conceptualize tyranny and totalitarianism in the bootheel versions that manifested in several 20th-century despotic regimes (and survives in several others in the 21st century, names and locations withheld) where population management is characterized by stomping people down, grinding them into dust, and treating them as an undifferentiated mass. Administrators (e.g., secret police) paid close attention to anyone who might pose a problem for the regimes, and neighbors and family members were incentivized to betray inform on anyone who might be on officialdom’s radar. The 21st-century manifestation is different in that computers do most information gathering — a dragnet thrown over everyone — and we inform on ourselves by oversharing online. Close attention is still paid, but human eyes may never see extensive dossiers (forever records?) kept on each of us until something prompts attention. A further distinction is that in bootheel totalitarianism, intense scrutiny and punishment were ubiquitous, whereas at least in 21st-century America, a sizeable portion of the population can be handily ignored, abandoned, and/or forgotten. They’re powerless, harmless, and inconsequential, not drawing attention. Additionally, there is also no bottom to how low they can sink, as the burgeoning homeless population demonstrates.

If tyranny is normally understood as emanating from the top down, it’s inversion is bottom up. Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism is not a grassroots phenomenon but rather corporate capture of government. While Wolin’s formulation may be true (especially at the time his book was published), government has relinquished none of its power so much as realigned its objectives to fit corporate profit motives, and in doing so, shifted administrative burdens to proxies. Silicon Valley corporations (of the big data type especially) are the principal water carriers, practicing surveillance capitalism and as private entities exercising censorious cancellation of dissenting opinion that no formal government could countenance. Similarly, an entire generation of miseducated social justice warriors scours social media for evidence of noncomforming behavior, usually some offense of the meme of the moment a/k/a “I support the current thing” (though racism is the perennial accusation — an original sin that can never be forgiven or assuaged), waiting to pounce in indignation and destroy lives and livelihoods. Cancel culture is a true bottom-up phenomenon, with self-appointed emissaries doing the work that the government is only too happy to hand off to compliant, brainwashed ideologues.

In the Covid era, nonconforming individuals (e.g., those who refuse the jab(s) or call bullshit on continuously shifting narratives announced by various agencies that lack legal standing to compel anything) are disenfranchised in numerous ways even while the wider culture accepts that the pandemic is indeed endemic and simply gets on with life. Yet every brick-and-mortar establishment has been authorized, deputized, and indeed required to enforce unlawful policies of the moment as proxies for government application of force. Under threat of extended closure, every restaurant, retailer, arts organization, and sports venue demanded the literal or figurative equivalent of “papers please” to enter and assemble. Like the airlines, people are increasingly regarded as dehumanized cargo, treated roughly like the famous luggage ape (and not always without good reason). In most places, restrictions have been lifted; in others they persist. But make no mistake, this instantiation of proxy tyranny — compelling others to do the dirty work so that governments can not so plausibly deny direct responsibility — is the blueprint for future mistreatment. Personally, I’m rather ashamed that fewer Americans stood up for what is right and true (according to me, obviously), echoing this famous admission of moral failure. For my own part, I’ve resisted (and paid the price for that resistance) in several instances.

Thomas Sowell the Closer

In sales and marketing (as I understand them), one of the principal techniques to close a sale is to generate momentum by getting the prospective mark buyer to agree to a series of minor statements (small sells) leading to the eventual purchasing decision (the big sell or final sale). It’s narrow to broad, the reverse of the broad-to-narrow paragraph form many of us were taught in school. Both organizational forms proceed through assertions that are easy to swallow before getting to the intended conclusion. That conclusion could be either an automotive purchase or adoption of some argument or ideology. When the product, service, argument, or ideology is sold effectively by a skilled salesman or spin doctor narrative manager, that person may be recognized as a closer, as in sealing the deal.

Many learn to recognize the techniques of the presumptive closer and resist being drawn in too easily. One of those techniques is to reframe the additional price of something as equivalent to, say, one’s daily cup of coffee purchased at some overpriced coffee house. The presumption is that if one has the spare discretionary income to buy coffee every day, then one can put that coffee money instead toward a higher monthly payment. Suckers might fall for it — even if they don’t drink coffee — because the false equivalence is an easily recognized though bogus substitution. The canonical too-slick salesman no one trusts is the dude on the used car lot wearing some awful plaid jacket and sporting a pornstache. That stereotype, borne out of the 1970s, barely exists anymore but is kept alive by repetitive reinforcement in TV and movies set in that decade or at least citing the stereotype for cheap effect (just as I have). But how does one spot a skilled rhetorician, spewing social and political hot takes to drive custom narratives? Let me identify a few markers.

Thomas Sowell penned a brief article entitled “Point of No Return.” I surmise (admitting my lack of familiarity) that creators.com is a conservative website, which all by itself does not raise any flags. Indeed, in heterodox fashion, I want to read well reasoned arguments with which I may not always agree. My previous disappointment that Sowell fails in that regard was only reinforced by the linked article. Take note that the entire article uses paragraphs that are reduced to bite-sized chunks of only one or two sentences. Those are small sells, inviting closure with every paragraph break.

Worse yet, only five (small) paragraphs in, Sowell succumbs to Godwin’s Law and cites Nazis recklessly to put the U.S. on a slippery slope toward tyranny. The obvious learned function of mentioning Nazis is to trigger a reaction, much like baseless accusations of racism, sexual misconduct, or baby eating. It puts everyone on the defensive without having to demonstrate the assertion responsibly, which is why the first mention of Nazis in argument is usually sufficient to disregard anything else written or said by the person in question. I might have agreed with Sowell in his more general statements, just as conservatism (as in conservation) appeals as more and more slips away while history wears on, but after writing “Nazi,” he lost me entirely (again).

Sowell also raises several straw men just to knock them down, assessing (correctly or incorrectly, who can say?) what the public believes as though there were monolithic consensus. I won’t defend the general public’s grasp of history, ideological placeholders, legal maneuvers, or cultural touchstones. Plenty of comedy bits demonstrate the deplorable level of awareness of individual members of society like they were fully representative of the whole. Yet plenty of people pay attention and accordingly don’t make the cut when offering up idiocy for entertainment. (What fun, ridiculing fools!) The full range of opinion on any given topic is not best characterized by however many idiots and ignoramuses can be found by walking down the street and shoving a camera and mic in their astonishingly unembarrassed faces.

So in closing, let me suggest that, in defiance of the title of this blog post, Thomas Sowell is in fact not a closer. Although he drops crumbs and morsels gobbled up credulously by those unable to recognize they’re being sold a line of BS, they do not make a meal. Nor should Sowell’s main point, i.e., the titular point of no return, be accepted when his burden of proof has not been met. That does not necessary mean Sowell is wrong in the sense that even a stopped close tells the time correctly twice a day. The danger is that even if he’s partially correction some of the time, his perspective and program (nonpartisan freedom! whatever that may mean) must be considered with circumspection and disdain. Be highly suspicious before buying what Sowell is selling. Fundamentally, he’s a bullshit artist.

Nothing Beats Stupid

/rant on

One of my personal favorites among my own blog posts is my remapping of the familiar Rock, Paper, Scissors contest to Strong, Stupid, and Smart, respectively. In that post, I concluded (among other things) that, despite a supposedly equal three-way power dynamic, in the long run, nothing beats stupid. I’ve been puzzling recently over this weird dynamic in anticipation of a mass exodus of boomers from the labor force as they age into retirement (or simply die off). (Digression about the ruling gerontocracy withheld.) It’s not by any stretch clear that their younger cohorts divided into not-so-cleverly named demographics are prepared to bring competence or work ethic to bear on labor needs, which includes job descriptions ranging across the spectrum from blue collar to white collar to bona fide expert.

Before being accused of ageism and boomerism, I don’t regard the issue as primarily a function of age but rather as a result of gradual erosion of educational standards that has now reached such a startling level of degradation that many American institutions are frankly unable to accomplish their basic missions for lack of qualified, competent, engaged workers and managers. See, for example, this Gallup poll showing how confidence in U.S. institutions is ebbing. Curious that the U.S. Congress is at the very bottom, followed closely and unsurprisingly by the TV news. Although the poll only shows year-over-year decline, it’s probably fair to say that overall consensus is that institutions simply cannot be relied upon anymore to do their jobs effectively. I’ve believed that for some time about Cabinet-level agencies that, administration after administration, never manage to improve worsening conditions that are the very reason for their existence. Some of those failures are arguably because solutions to issues simply do not exist (such as with the renewed energy crisis or the climate emergency). But when addressing concerns below the level of global civilization, my suspicion is that failure is the result of a combination of corruption (including careerism) and sheer incompetence.

The quintessential example came to my attention in the embedded YouTube video, which spells out in gruesome detail how schools of education are wickedly distorted by ideologues pushing agendas that don’t produce either better educational results or social justice. Typically, it’s quite the reverse.

In short, school administrators and curriculum designers are incompetent boobs (much like many elected government officials) possessed of decision-making authority who have managed to quell dissent among the ranks precisely because many who know better are invested in careers and pension programs that would be sacrificed in order to call bullshit on insane things now being forced on everyone within those institutions. Those of us who attended college often witnessed how, over the course of several decades, faculties have essentially caved repeatedly on issues where administrators acted in contravention of respectable educational goals and policies. Fortitude to resist is not in abundance for reasons quite easy to understand. Here’s one cry from the wilderness by a college professor retiring early to escape the madness. One surmises that whoever is hired as a replacement will check a number of boxes, including compliance with administrative diktats.

Viewpoint diversity may well be the central value being jettisoned, along with the ability to think clearly. If cultism is truly the correct characterization, administrators have adopted an open agenda of social reform and appear to believe that they, uniquely, have arrived at the correct answers (final solutions?) to be brainwashed into both teachers and students as doctrine. Of course, revolutions are launched on the strength of such misguided convictions, often purging resistance violently and revealing that best intentions matter little in the hellscapes that follow. But on the short term, the basic program is to silent dissent, as though banishing disallowed thinking from the public sphere collapses viewpoint diversity. Nope, sorry. That’s not how cognition works except in totalitarian regimes that remove all awareness of options and interpretations we in open societies currently take for granted. It’s barking mad, for instance, to think that all the propaganda flung at the American public about, say, the proxy war in Ukraine is truly capable of buffaloing the entire population into believing we (the U.S. and NATO) are the good guys in the conflict. (There are no goods guys.) Even the Chinese government, with its restricted Internet and social credit system, can’t squelch entirely the yearning to think and breathe freely. Instead, that’s the domain of North Korea, which only despots hold up as a salutary model.

My point, which bears reiteration, is that poorly educated, miseducated, and uneducated ignoramuses (the ignorati, whose numbers have swelled) in positions of power and influence embody precisely the unmovable, unreachable, slow, grinding stupidity that can’t be overcome by knowledge, understanding, expertise, or appeals to reason and good faith. Stupid people don’t know just how stupid they are but sally forth with blind confidence in themselves, and their abject stupidity becomes like kryptonite used to weaken others. One can use smarts (scissors) once in a while to cut through stupidity (paper), but in the end, nothing beats stupid.

/rant off

Offered Without Comment 18

From Joseph Bernstein’s article “Bad News” in the Sept. 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Compared with other, more literally toxic corporate giants, those in the tech industry have been rather quick to concede the role they played in corrupting the allegedly pure stream of American reality. Only five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said. “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.” A year later, suddenly chastened, he apologized for being glib and pledged to do his part to thwart those who “spread misinformation.”

Denial was always untenable, for Zuckerberg in particular. The so-called techlash, a season of belatedly brutal media coverage and political pressure in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s win, made it difficult. But Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its [political] content?

Mad World Preamble (redux)

I use the tag redux to signal that the topic of a previous blog post is being revisited, reinforced, and repurposed. The choice of title for this one could easily have gone instead to Your Brain on Postmodernism, Coping with the Post-Truth World, or numerous others. The one chosen, however, is probably the best fit given than compounding crises continue pushing along the path of self-annihilation. Once one crisis grows stale — at least in terms of novelty — another is rotated in to keep us shivering in fear, year after year. The date of civilizational collapse is still unknown, which is really more process anyway, also of an unknown duration. Before reading what I’ve got to offer, perhaps wander over to Clusterfuck Nation and read James Howard Kunstler’s latest take on our current madness.

/rant on

So yeah, various cultures and subcultures are either in the process of going mad or have already achieved that sorry state. Because madness is inherently irrational and unrestrained, specific manifestations are unpredictable. However, the usual trigger for entire societies to lose their tether to reality is relatively clear: existential threat. And boy howdy are those threats multiplying and gaining intensity. Pick which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with whom to ride to the grave, I guess. Any one will do; all four are galloping simultaneously, plus a few other demonic riders not identified in that mythological taxonomy. Kunstler’s focus du jour is censorship and misinformation (faux disambiguation: disinformation, malinformation, dishonesty, gaslighting, propaganda, fake news, falsehood, lying, cozenage, confidence games, fraud, conspiracy theories, psyops, personal facts), about which I’ve blogged repeatedly under the tag epistemology. Although major concerns, censorship and misinformation are outgrowths of spreading madness, not the things that will kill anyone directly. Indeed, humans have shown a remarkable capacity to hold in mind crazy belief systems or stuff down discomfiting and disapproved thoughts even without significant threat. Now that significant threats spark the intuition that time is running perilously short, no wonder so many have fled reality into the false safety of ideation. Inability to think and express oneself freely or to detect and divine truth does, however, block what few solutions to problems remain to be discovered.

Among recent developments I find unsettling and dispiriting is news that U.S. officials, in their effort to — what? — defeat the Russians in a war we’re not officially fighting, are just making shit up and issuing statements to their dutiful stenographers in the legacy press to report. As I understand it, there isn’t even any pretense about it. So to fight phantoms, U.S. leaders conjure out of nothingness justifications for involvements, strategies, and actions that are the stuff of pure fantasy. This is a fully, recognizably insane: to fight monsters, we must become monsters. It’s also maniacally stupid. Further, it’s never been clear to me that Russians are categorically baddies. They have dealt with state propaganda and existential threats (e.g., the Bolshevik Revolution, WWII, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, being hemmed in by NATO countries) far more regularly than most Americans and know better than to believe blindly what they’re told. On a human level, who can’t empathize with their plights? (Don’t answer that question.)

In other denial-of-reality news, demand for housing in Sun Belt cities has driven rent increases ranging between approximately 30% and 60% over the past two years compared to many northern cities well under 10%. Americans are migrating to the Sun Belt despite, for instance, catastrophic drought and wild fires. Lake Powell sits at an historically low level, threatening reductions in water and electrical power. What happens when desert cities in CA, AZ, NV, and NM become uninhabitable? Texas isn’t far behind. This trend has been visible for decades, yet many Americans (and immigrants, too) are positioning themselves directly in harm’s way.

I’ve been a doomsayer for over a decade now, reminding my two or three readers (on and off) that the civilization humans built for ourselves cannot stand much longer. Lots of people know this yet act as though concerns are overstated or irrelevant. It’s madness, no? Or is it one last, great hurrah before things crack up apocalyptically? On balance, what’s a person to do but to keep trudging on? No doubt the Absurdists got something correct.

/rant off