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"To the carnival is what she said
A hundred dollars makes it dark inside"
-Tom Waits, Jockey Full of Bourbon
January 30. Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Teilhard de Chardin wrote that all human progress is converging toward a point. They both got it backwards. I would say it like this: If you go down the path of right action, you eventually end up doing your own thing that no one has even imagined. If you go down the path of wrong action, you tend to slide into a deep groove of doing the same predictable stuff that others have done before you.
Examples of the former include Vincent Van Gogh and Mr. Rogers. Examples of the latter include drug addiction and wrongly running a country. Anyone who's not a Trump cultist can easily recognize what path he's on. How far he gets is anyone's guess. Two depressing Reddit threads, Those who currently work in US federal government, what's the is current mood like? And What do you make of President Trump sending illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay?
I don't want to dwell on that, so here are some Reddit threads on lighter subjects:
Does anyone else feel like f-it, I'm going to quit going to the doctor? A key comment: "Have you ever noticed that both doctors and lawyers go to school and get degrees in their specialty, but everyone says 'Listen to your doctor! Do whatever your doctor tells you!' and nobody says 'Listen to your lawyer! Do whatever your lawyer tells you!'"
What's a time you've said "f*ck it" and made a huge change in your life?
What saved you from your deep dark depression?
Has anyone experienced telepathy while tripping with a friend?
And the best and smallest thread, What has a Kid once told you that made you rethink life? My favorite: "Who decides what's a job?"
January 27. This year I want to start taking psychism more seriously, and one place you can see the difference between physicalism and psychism, is in how vs why. Under physicalism, the whole vast universe is how, and why is something that only appears on the tiny island of consciousness. Under psychism, it's exactly the opposite: Consciousness is fundamental, the whole universe is made of why, and "how" is something that only appears when you want to get something done in a mechanistic sub-universe.
One question a psychist can ask, that a physicalist can't ask, or doesn't have to, is why are there humans? If we're not a meaningless accident, if we're all the finger puppets of the One Mind, then what is the appeal of being a member of this strange, disconnected, long-suffering species?
One thing I've noticed about humans is the massive size of our learning curve. How long does it take a dog to become fully competent at being a dog? A year? How long does it take a gnat? An hour? I'm 57 years old, and just a couple years ago I was walking wrong, breathing wrong, and drinking water wrong. These are basic biological actions. A bug couldn't do them wrong, and it would be hard to train a dog to do them in a way that its ancestors haven't done for a million years.
Humans are an extremely soft-wired species. We have so little behavior set in stone, that we can build whole cultures of doing stuff wrong, and go very deeply into mistakes. Just look around. But it also allows us to try cool things that haven't been tried yet. Maybe God is getting bored and we're about to go extinct. But I like to think we're just getting started, and as soon as we burn through this age of the whole world trying the same flashy bullshit, we'll diverge into hundreds of lower energy but more enjoyable cultures.
January 23. Four threads from Ask Old People, all removed by mods for being too interesting. From today, Is this what the 1960s felt like? "In the 1960s, I felt as if things were getting better. This decade feels like the opposite."
What's the most positive trend you see in the young adults of today?
You can hoard a footlocker's worth of something for trading after the impending apocalypse. What is it?
Anyone else looking forward to death?
A deleted thread from Ask Reddit, What stops you from killing yourself?
And Chris sends this nice blog post, The Duty to Escape, about "escapist" fiction and why it's good to imagine different worlds.
January 20. The most important thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he's chaotic neutral. He plays the role of a lawful evil politician, and will do some lawful evil things, but his real mission in this world is to destroy institutions and inspire individuals to say fuck it.
I think he's actually going to tell the military to invade Greenland. One of two things will happen. They'll refuse, thus driving a wedge between the military and the presidency. Or they'll do it, driving a wedge into NATO. That's what Trump is, a driver of wedges, an arch-divider, an agent of the ongoing atomization of humanity. That's not necessarily bad. There's a general feeling that a lot of things need to be broken down right now.
The "deep state" is a propaganda term for a clunky bureaucracy that Trump wants to replace with old-fashioned corruption, defined as public officials using the office for personal gain. Not that that doesn't happen now, but it will surely get worse under a movement with so many grifters and easy marks. The rule of law will be replaced by "I know a guy". A more neutral way to say it is that the formal is being replaced by the informal, which sounds like a good idea, but remember the words of Bob Dylan, "To live outside the law you must be honest."
I posted this a few months back, a detailed argument that Trump is the Antichrist. I find it more helpful to think of him as the anti-Lincoln. Lincoln greatly strengthened the federal government relative to the states, and Trump is reversing that. Lincoln turned the Republicans from a third party to the dominant party, and Trump will reverse that. His charisma is the only thing holding together a coalition of billionaires and the working class, of authoritarians and people who crave chaos. Meanwhile the Democrats are a coalition of foreign policy hawks and cultural leftists, of plodding business as usual and forlorn hope for change, held together by fear of something that has now actually happened. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Make some popcorn and assume crash position. The enemy is within!
January 16. Stray links, starting with Inconvenient truths about the L.A. fires. They're not wildfires that swallowed the city. They're classic urban fires caused by extreme hot winds combined with buildings and landscaping that are not fire-resistant.
Why has it been so hard to arrest South Korea's impeached president? Because his private security officers are loyal to him and not to the constitution. This is something I learned from David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything: that ancient "kings" were not like modern heads of state. They were warlords who only had power within a few hundred yards of wherever they actually were. As modern political systems break down, we're going to move back in that direction.
A thread in Ask Old People, Have you had family or friends who chose not to "fight" cancer?
Great stuff in this 1979 Al Pacino interview. My favorite bit:
When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back. When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It's an extraordinary thing. It's wild turf up there. The time I was doing Pavlo Hummel in Boston, I made connection with a pair of eyes in the audience and I thought, This is incredible, these eyes are penetrating me. I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. I couldn't wait at curtain to see who it was. When curtain call finally came, I looked in the direction of those eyes and it was a seeing eye dog. Belonged to a blind girl. I couldn't get over it - the compassion and intensity and the understanding in those eyes... and it was a dog. What a profession!
Finally, Big Blood have a really interesting new album, Electric Voyeur. It's all played on handmade electronics that they've been building and practicing on for ten years. At the same time, it still sounds like Big Blood, with a clear evolutionary thread from recent albums, and from two older songs, "But I Studied" and "Sidewalk-Walk/Un-Nole". There's also an instrumental version, which almost sounds like a different album. My favorite track, from the main album, is Who Lives. This is my giant Big Blood page.
January 13. Long article in the Atlantic, The Anti-Social Century. It's about how we've been getting more isolated and how it's bad for our mental health. Smart phones and Covid have made it worse, but the trend started more than 50 years ago with TV and cars.
Related, another thread removed from Ask Reddit, containing many good answers to the question, Why do you think so many people are depressed?
And a quote from a book I'm rereading, and still my favorite book of social philosophy, Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich:
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Enveloped in a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and that only persons can work toward them. Machines only operate ruthlessly to reduce people to the role of impotent allies in their destructive progress.
January 8. I'm starting to like January. October is still the best month, but January is when everyone hibernates after the holidays, and if your job isn't too taxing, you can get into some personal obsessions. I've been playing lots of solo games of Spirit Island. Anyway, a few more happy links, starting with another about the new year, Kakizome, Japanese way of new-years resolution. Instead of setting exact goals, you set a theme. "New Year's resolution feels like a path set on a map, and the theme feels like a compass."
Seattle Piano Recycling gives unwanted pianos new life. Basically, when they're hired to take pianos to the dump, they store them, make minor repairs, and then sell them for the price of delivery.
China has confirmed that solar panels in the desert are good for desert ecology.
Living proof that you can spend money on the poor: Utopia comes to Mexico City. "Utopia" is an acronym for putting nice public facilities in the poorest neighborhoods. This could never happen in the USA because the second poorest people demand that the poorest people be worse off.
January 5. After three negative posts in a row, here are some positive links for the new year. Quiet Mind is a nice explanation of mindfulness/meditation. "This is not rocket science. It is our own mind! The abilities to walk upright and to use symbolic language were attained by proto-humans with effort over many generations. Learning to use the mind well will occur in the space between thoughts."
From The Whippet, The Animal Crossing / Stardew Valley model for NY goals. The idea is to gamify personal improvement, but do it in a low-stress way.
Related, a sub-thread in a Reddit thread about health tips, Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly
From the Psychonaut subreddit, Shrooms showed me my "pipes were clean"
The "pipe" in this analogy represents our capacity to let emotions flow. If your pipes are clogged - if you have unresolved issues, repressed feelings, or mental blockages - those emotions can come out muddy or overwhelming when shrooms turn on the tap. But if you've been doing inner work and clearing out old debris, the flow can be more crystalline and uplifting.
And two more Reddit threads. I don't know what's up with the Ask Reddit mods, that they consistently remove the most interesting threads. What's the most meaningful expression of love you've ever seen or experienced? And What's the one random genetic trait you lucked out on? This is the one I most envy:
Got the joie de vivre. Life fuckin rules, even when it doesn't. My dad has it, his parents had it, their parents had it, etc. Honestly feels like a superpower to find joy in things every day, especially in the world we live in now.
January 1, 2025. It's possible that the next few years will be good for me personally. But in the realm of public events, every happy prediction I can think of is completely off the wall. Might RFK Jr legalize shrooms? Might AIs, while still arguably nonsentient, declare themselves gods and push progressive policies? Might enough competent people fall into homelessness that there's a homeless renaissance? Might the white working class finally support redistribution of wealth? Might Trump give us a UBI, just to have his name on it?
December 30. There's a lot of sympathy for Luigi Mangione, which I share. But I want to go darker, and sympathize with someone whose crime was unjustifiable, but not meaningless, Abundant Life school shooter Natalie "Samantha" Rupnow. I imagine that school shooters share my sense of the wrongness of this world, and the role of school in breaking our spirits to make us part of it. But they usually don't explain themselves. The best thing I've read on the subject is this 2004 essay, Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere.
"The simplest Surrealist action," wrote the leader of the Surrealists in 1930, "is to go out on the street with two revolvers in one's fists and blindly shoot down as many as possible in the crowd."
Rupnow, a rare girl shooter, also left a rare explanation, a "manifesto" titled War Against Humanity. You can see screenshots in this Twitter thread, and I don't see anyone saying anything nice about it. At worst, it reminds me of incel shooter Elliot Rodger, a troubled person trying too hard to be evil. While insisting she's different, she falls into negativity in a normal way.
But it also contains some nuggets and some honesty. I love this sentence: "This situation and the situation of a lifetime is a get the fuck out moment and don't come back." And surely we've all felt like this: "I hate looking at some of the people in the society, and seeing what they are and what they do with their lives." This bit is pure comedy: "If only some days we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn't mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged." Admit it, did you smile?
At the end is some teenage Nietzsche: "The wolf hunts its prey and continues life with no other bruises or scars. There is no predator and prey anymore, it is all filth walking. There's nothing more with filth, it simply can't die or make hunts real if all they want is value."
Wolves get bruises and scars of course. "Other" means non-physical, and it's true, being human is a decades long ordeal of emotional and psychic bruises and scars, a far outlier among all life on Earth. If you replace "filth" with "industrial society" or "disenchanted modernity", and add "quantitative" to value, you can see that she's only lacking clever words.
This couldn't be said better: "Death is something most people need to embrace and accept instead of running away from it." And this is poetry, and if you understand it, the motive:
I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole
I once had this time when I was young
You made me dig for so long and now I can't leave it
December 26. This is our apartment on Christmas. We have two fake fires, and they're fake in completely different ways. In fact, this photo contains only three things not made in a factory: a small houseplant, a heavily pruned dead tree, and on top of the tree, a handmade Santa ornament passed down from people born in the 1910s. My life is good, but I wonder how long humans can continue to live at this level of artificiality, before we crack.
December 23. Keeping it light for the holidays, more music, starting with one more Christmas song (thanks Eric) with a great video, Poly Styrene - Black Christmas.
Freaky Wilderness is a band with a sound ranging from stoner rock to 70s rock, and this is their first full length album, released just this month on Bandcamp, Immeasurable Heaven
And I have a new Spotify playlist, Classic Rock 100. That's 100 songs, and I love working with limits and making hard choices about which songs make the cut. This is my only playlist that's slanted toward popularity. Mostly these are overplayed songs that I'm still not tired of.
I also decided not to have any songs in common between Classic Rock and my other playlists. So it ate one of my 70s playlists, and I renamed the other two, more accurately, as Soft 70s, and renamed my two 80s playlists as Early 80s. Links to all playlists are on my songs page.
December 20. A few links. The Whippet #183 has a cool video about babies who are not afraid of snakes, and a helpful bit about how to tell the difference between intuition and anxiety:
Anxiety tends to feel one or more of: rushed, urgent, and in the form of questions rather than facts ("did I lock the door??" not "I forgot to lock the door")
It often skips between objects to worry about ("is there someone behind that car? or in the alley up ahead? or behind me? what was that sound?" - that's free-floating anxiety looking for something to attach to).
Intuition tends to come as a calm, settled certainty - calm even about objectively terrifying things - and focused on a single, specific piece of information.
Noah sends an essay he wrote about the modern loss of community, which he correctly blames on the built environment and especially cars. See also Ivan Illich on Cars.
A thread in the Reality Shifting subreddit, Does anyone else feel like something's off? Personally I don't get those kinds of feelings, but my intellectual curiosity about weird stuff leads me to expect a lot more of it. Related: Peak sunspot activity expected in 2025
And some music. I keep putting off my own Christmas playlist for another year, but here's a great one, Christmas Apocalypse 2024.
December 14. Quick note on the mystery drones. They are a manifestation of a level of reality that we don't understand. Like all UFO flaps, the sightings will stop and will mostly never be explained. The phenomenon always appears through the cultural filters of the time. See the Mystery airships of the 1890s.
December 12. Quick loose end from last week. Alex wonders what kind of shoes I wear to encourage walking on the balls of my feet. You don't have to go all the way to articulated toes. My favorite shoes lately are Camper Peu Cami, which have a good wide toe box and a minimal sole. They're expensive new but affordable on eBay. And a few links:
China Completes Massive Green Belt Around Taklamakan Desert
An interesting article on Colour in the Middle Ages
A thread from the Psychonaut subreddit, For those who hung up the phone: What was the message?
Related: a YouTube interview, Exploring Nonduality with Rupert Spira. It's long and he repeats himself a lot, so I just read the transcript, which has some good stuff. Edited excerpt:
It's like the space in this room. Once it knows itself, it doesn't feel separate from the space outside the room, or indeed the space in your kitchen. From the point of view of the space there's one space so likewise from the point of view of awareness there's just itself, infinite without borders and without divisions. There's no separation, there's no otherness in it, and this absence of otherness is the experience that we refer to as as love. That's why love is sometimes said to be the nature of reality.
December 10. Yesterday I posted a new instructional video, Piano Polyrhythms and Phasing. I don't know how prolific YouTubers do it, or for that matter, teachers. It took me hours and hours to work out how to present the material, and then a bunch of takes of the video before I got one that was adequate. Polyrhythms are my piano obsession, and the one place where I might have something to teach an actual good player.