politics

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

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Oblivion is cold comfort, but it’s all the comfort I have to offer

Well, it’s Monday.  Meet the new week‒same as the old week.  There is nothing new or interesting happening, as far as I can see.  Nothing is new in my personal interactions with the world, and nothing is new in the world at large.  There may seem to be new things, and there are probably some details that are unique.  But then again, every snowflake is supposedly unique, but they’re all just flakes of snow, airborne ice crystals, and the overall behavior is nothing different despite all the trivially new specific flakes.  The phenomenon of snowfall is still just overall the same.

“So in the world,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said.  “‘Tis furnished well with men.  And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.”  He goes on the claim that he is unique in the next sentence, but immediately thereafter, Brutus, Cassius, et al, demonstrate that he too is merely flesh and blood like all the rest.

All the heroes, all the villains, all the ordinary people‒they are all functionally identical, despite all their trivial differences.  What percentage of the people who have ever lived are remembered at all?  A smattering, a handful, if that‒not even a rounding error compared to the total of all people who have lived.  And many of those we do remember are probably highly fictionalized and may not have actually existed at all.

What are the odds that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were real people?  How about Achilles and Hector?  For crying out loud, we know that even Richard III, presented as Shakespeare’s most thoroughgoing villain (perhaps matched by Iago) and deformed as well, was pretty much nothing of either sort in real life (or that’s what the historical evidence suggests).  He was simply defeated and then vilified by those who had defeated him, presumably to help justify their own actions.

And, by the way, who remembers them?

This sort of fact is part of why I sometimes refer to people (and other lifeforms) as virtual particles.  They pop into existence, persist for an infinitesimal period of time, and then literally vanish again, without a proverbial trace.

Well, actually, as with all virtual particles (which are not actually a thing but are merely mathematical and pedagogical tools) the collective effects of us virtual particles‒aka living things‒can have impacts on the world as a whole.  It’s even conceivable that, in just the right circumstances, as with the “real” virtual particles*, a virtual personicle can become actual.  I’m not sure what that would mean in the real world, though, and I’m not convinced that it has ever yet happened.

All this is part of why I have no patience for people who become fanatical about their particular ideologies and such.  They’re all just equivalent to some fanciful imaginary imaginings by a group of photons or neutrinos or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to approach their current affairs and ideas as “important” in their local** transient bailiwick, for some things to be important to them.  But it would be silly in a pronounced (but unfortunately not funny) sense for anyone to imagine that they had access to some final, consequential knowledge about the nature of the world and particularly about how people should behave.  If someone had such knowledge, I suspect it would be obvious to any intellectually honest person, including intelligent but disinterested aliens.

Humans and their dogmas are transient and transitory and ephemeral (and other synonyms as well) as are all other specific forms of life and ways of life.  Life overall is transient; as far as we can tell, it cannot even in principle go on forever.  That’s not just referring to individual lives, but to life as a phenomenon.  We could be wrong about this; there is much we don’t know, and in principle, our descendants could discover ways around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  But that’s quite a big “if”, as it were.

Sorry to be such a downer; it’s just my nature, apparently.  Look not for comfort from me, as the ghost of Marley said.  It comes from other regions and is delivered by other ministers to other sorts of people.  Though, in this case, I’m not sure about what sorts of ministers and people would be involved, let alone what “regions” might produce such comfort.

In any case, I have no comfort, so I can offer none to anyone else; I cannot give what I do not have and what I do not even hope to have.  The best I can offer is to say that, well, oblivion seems to be the only viable alternative to discomfort offered by this universe.  It’s not much to offer, I admit, but it’s the best I have.  And, as pointed out above, as far as we can tell, it’s waiting for us all, eventually.

I won’t say that I look forward to it, because that really doesn’t make much sense.  But I am tired of trying to continue despite having almost no good reason to do so.

I hope you, the average reader, feel better than I do.  Batman help you if you feel worse.

*There’s an oxymoron.

**That “local” can, in principle, include the entire planet.  The point is merely that it is quite finite and limited.

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I well believe thou wilt not blog what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee.

Hello and, of course, good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you may have savvily guessed‒you are a clever one‒from the fact that I started the post with a variation of “Hello and good morning”.  Also, you’ve probably seen that the title above is some modified Shakespearean quote, though as I write this, I have no idea what that quote will be, other than that it will, with very high probability, be a quote from Shakespeare.

Not much new has happened since yesterday’s post‒not for me, anyway.  There’s plenty of material out there for those who wish to comment on what’s happening in the naked house ape world (said apes sometimes imagine that their “world” is of cosmic importance, but it’s actually not even a flash in the pan as far as the universe is concerned) but I try to avoid commenting on such things here, except to note that, boy, humans can be remarkably stupid.

There was a recent-ish Doctor Who episode in which the bad guy made every human on Earth feel absolutely convinced that they were right, about whatever opinions they might hold.  Predictably, this led to global chaos and destruction.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the opposite, or roughly so, to the whole of humanity?  I’m not talking about making people all believe they are wrong about everything; I don’t even know quite how that would manifest itself.  I just mean removing or strongly blunting the sense of feeling right about things.

It’s a reasonably well-attested fact* that people prone to depression, for instance, are not prone to rate their own skills and abilities as worse than they really are but instead are more realistic about them.  This is as opposed to the more “typical” people, not prone to depression, who overestimate their own capabilities, e.g., the notion that, say, ninety percent of people think their driving skills are above the median**.  So, though people who are prone to depression are, well, prone to depression, they are at least less prone to start wars and commit atrocities based on half-baked ideologies.

Oh, and by the way:  to a good first approximation, all ideologies are half-baked.  This isn’t to say that they all are completely wrong.  It’s merely to say that not one of them actually contains “everything you need to know about” whatever.  If they did, it would be painfully obvious to every intellectually honest person.  Intelligent, well-meaning, non-delusional people would be convinced by the ideas as soon as they understood them.  People prone to depression might find consolation and some degree of peace in them.  Atheists would be “converted”.

The notion that any self-contained set of ideas could hold the answers to “life, the universe, and everything” flies in the face of all logic (and few things are more annoying than flies in one’s face).  For crying out loud, it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to explain rigorously the nature and implications of classical motion, as in Newton’s “laws”, with subsequent improvements by Laplace and Lagrange and Hamilton and so on, and all that is only an approximation, at macroscopic scales, to our best understanding (which is known to be incomplete) of the physical nature of reality.  And that’s not counting electrodynamics and gravity, let alone getting into the strong force and the weak force and so on.

It’s a distressing tendency, this human desire to feel right, to want to think that they know the answers and so don’t have to think about things anymore.  It leads to so much more of the trouble in the world than “simple” evil does.

Psychopaths, I suspect, do far less harm overall than people with normal moral capacities‒good people, so to speak‒who believe that they are right.  “For the greater good” is the kind of sophistry that can, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, fumigate any atrocity, including the slaughter of a continent.

Of course, Rand-sensei fell prey to her own self-created dogma and the personality cult that had grown up around her, leading her to get stuck in some quite dubious conclusions.  This is despite her commendable starting points (i.e., metaphysics:  objective reality, and epistemology:  rational thought).  If only she hadn’t been so dead-set against humility.

Humility****, after all, is not really the belief that you are fundamentally worthless (though that may indeed be true on any sort of cosmic scale), but just the recognition that you are subject to error, like every finite being (and probably most “conceivable” infinite ones), and that, it being error, you will not necessarily know where it lies.  It is, after all, the place in which you are mistaken; if it were glaringly obvious, you might be expected to have noticed it already.  Being wrong feels the same as being right, at least until you realize that you are wrong.

There, I did some broad level commentary on the nature of at least some of the world’s problems.  Let this be my open warning against certainty, especially in the realm of morals, especially when you’re assessing other people.  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which you feel that the suffering and even death of other people is tolerable, or even desirable, in order to achieve some presumed better future world, you should stop and maybe induce a seizure so you can reset your brain.

On the other hand, if you just believe something so much that you’re willing to suffer and/or die yourself, and only yourself, well, that’s on you.  Knock yourself out.

TTFN

*I think this data has withstood the reproducibility crisis in psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong.

**I say median instead of “average” because the average is usually meant to refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is in principle entirely possible for ninety percent of people to be above the mean, but not for any more than fifty percent of people to be above the median, by definition***.

***This is one of those rare cases where it’s fully appropriate to say “by definition”, because it is not merely rhetoric but literally applies, the median being a mathematical term with rigorous meaning.

****I just recognized, while editing, that this is the subject/topic/trigger for what is to be my next song.

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Though all things foul would wear the blogs of grace, yet grace must still look so.

Hello and good morning.

Yes, yes, I know—I got your hopes all up yesterday by letting you think that I might not be writing a blog post today, and yet, here I am writing a blog post.  And I’m doing it today.

I’m sorry.  It seems my compulsive behavior patterns are stronger than my depression, at least in this regard.  I suppose that could be considered a strength in some cases, though as someone said somewhere, obsessions and compulsions are good servants but bad masters.  I take that to mean that it’s good to use them to get things done that you want or need to get done, but if they take control, they can become an apparent end in themselves and get in the way of things that would be more beneficial.

You probably know this.  Maybe you’ve not thought of it consciously, deliberately, but it’s probably pretty clear and obvious once you think about it.  I’m not really good at delivering deep and life-changing secrets; if I knew such things, surely my life would be in far better shape.

Anyway, I don’t really have a subject about which to write today—though there is much in the world that is worthy of commentary, let there be no doubt about that—so I’ll just meander a bit.

I’m in a slightly better mood than I was in yesterday.  I suspect that’s partly because I made it a point not to curtail or suppress my caffeine intake.  It’s not that I had abstained from caffeine the day before; Batman forbid.  But I kind of pushed it yesterday, and didn’t stop even in the afternoon.

Weirdly enough, that tends to improve if not the duration of my sleep, then the quality of it.  Perhaps it has to do with enhancing the muscle tone in my nasopharynx and oropharynx, making them less prone to flop about and cause possible apneic episodes.  It’s well known that caffeine increases cyclic AMP inside cells, and in particular muscle cells, and that improves their activity and tone.

This is part of why, for instance, a quick and dirty, temporizing measure in the case of someone having an asthma attack without their usual medicine available, can be a strong cup of coffee (not too hot, because it’s good to get it in quickly).  It’s not ideal, and cannot replace albuterol and other similar bronchodilators, but it can buy some time.

All that aside—and it is an aside—I wouldn’t say that I’m feeling upbeat today, but I am at least a bit energetic.  Caffeine is the most popular drug in the world (by far) for strong reasons, after all.  Even most strict religions that ban alcohol and other euphoriants rarely ban caffeine (though I’m led to understand that Mormonism is an exception).

Even many anti-drug fanatics tend to take in caffeine in one form or another; some of them should probably cut back, actually.  But the joke is certainly on them a bit, especially if they are among the benighted masses who see drug use (and abuse) in pseudo-moralizing terms, for they are often quite dependent on their drug of choice, as are so many of the rest of us.

Oh, well.  Most people are clueless most of the time, which is why it can be so heartbreakingly easy for con artists to fool so many into stupid things like avoiding vaccines or thinking that someone who has only ever engaged in self-service and self-aggrandizement is going to look out for them once such a person gains real political power.

This is all strictly hypothetical, of course.

On to other matters.  Today is Independence Eve, if you will, and tomorrow is Independence Day (in the United States of America).  Some people here don’t want even to celebrate the occasion because they are so frustrated with the situation in America, and I can understand their sentiments, but I think they are mistaken.

I think, more than ever, it’s important to review and renew the ideas and ideals on which the USA was founded, to go back to the startup and the operating system—to try to reboot, perhaps, with some bugs patched if possible, and with some malware removed.  The notions are straightforward in many cases, such as that governments are instituted, in principle, to protect and preserve the rights of the people of the country.  They are not the source of such rights; they are merely charged with their protection.  It is a duty, not a privilege, and they are certainly not an “authority”.

The Declaration of Independence is not a long document.  It’s only about 1400 words long, including signatures.  I’ve written blog posts longer than that.  And even the Constitution, with amendments, is only about 7000 words long.  That’s shorter than every short story I’ve ever written—even Solitaire is twice that long—and it’s not particularly difficult language.  The ideas aren’t all that difficult, either, though they are probably deeper than many people realize at first glance.

So, for tomorrow’s pre-programmed post, I have prepared to share the text of the Declaration of Independence.  Of course, one can go and read it at the government archives site, but I don’t feel as confident that it will remain available there indefinitely as I felt in the past.  So, I’m putting it up here, on the 4th of July, Independence Day.  I encourage you to copy and download it, and if you want, to share it.  Let’s make sure it’s out there in the world as much as possible.

Even the section that relates the grievances that led to the declaration are pertinent, though they can seem tedious, because some of them are being recapitulated (and worsened) by the present government.  And it doesn’t make things any better that our own government is the one acting in ways prone to “reduce them under absolute Despotism”; it makes it even more important to remember the point of founding the US in the first place.

No, we have never quite lived up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration—never fully, never as deeply or as rigorously as we ought to have done—but that is a failure in our attempts, not in the ideals themselves.  So, please, do read the post tomorrow, share it, make it go viral if you can (the Declaration, not my blog, though I guess I wouldn’t complain about the blog doing so).

Later on, I can start sharing the US Constitution, perhaps, and the Bill of Rights and other Amendments.  It’s important that we pay renewed attention to such things, for so many seem to have forgotten them (or more likely never to have learned them).

I hope those of you in the US have a good holiday tomorrow and a good holiday weekend.  Enjoy time with your families if you can.  But do try to remember what you’re celebrating, and why.

TTFN

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“There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know…”

Since yesterday was Monday, the 30th of June, it’s almost inevitable that today would be Tuesday, the 1st of July.  And, in fact, that is the case, unless I am wildly mistaken.

If I were to be wildly mistaken about such a thing, it’s rather interesting to consider just how I could come to be so wildly mistaken about something so prosaic and so reliably consistent.  It is from such speculations that—sometimes—ideas for stories begin.

This is not one of those times, however.  I’m not thinking about any kind of story related to that notion at all, though at times I might consider it an interesting takeoff for some supernatural horror tale.  If any of you find yourselves inspired to write a story—of any kind—based on my opening “question”, you should feel free to write that story.  I, at least, will give you no trouble.

These sorts of thoughts also remind me of a post that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, and which also appeared as a section in his book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  I won’t try to recapitulate his entire argument, since he does it quite well, but it was basically a response to someone who had said or written that, while they considered it reasonable to have an open mind, they couldn’t even imagine the sort of argument or situation that could convince them that 2 + 2 for instance was not 4 but was instead, say, 3.

Yudkowsky, however, said that it was quite straightforward what sort of evidence could make him believe that 2 + 2 = 3; it would be the same kind of evidence that had convinced him that 2 + 2 = 4.  In other words, if it began to be the case that, whenever he had two of a thing and added two more, and then he subsequently counted, and the total was always three, well, though he might be puzzled at first, after a while, assuming the change and all its consequences were consistent and consistent with all other forms of counting, he would eventually just internalize it.  He might wonder how he had been so obviously mistaken for so long with the whole “4” thing, but that would do it.

This argument makes sense, and it raises an important point related to what I said last week about dogmatic thinking.  One should always, at least in principle, be open to reexamining one’s conclusions, and even one’s convictions, if new evidence and/or reasoning comes to bear.

That doesn’t mean that all ideas are equally up for grabs.  As Jefferson pointed out about governments in the Declaration of Independence, things that are well established and which have endured successfully shouldn’t be cast aside for light or frivolous reasons.

So, for instance, if you’ve come to the moral conclusion that it’s not right to steal from other people, and you’re pretty comfortable with that conclusion, you don’t need to doubt yourself significantly anytime anyone tries to justify their own personal malfeasance.  Most such justifications will be little more than excuse making.  However, if one should  encounter a new argument or new data or what have you* that really seems to contradict your conclusion, it would be unreasonable not to examine one’s conclusions at least, and to try to do so rigorously and honestly.

There are certain purely logical conclusions that will be definitively true given the axioms of a particular system, such as “If A = B and B = C then A = C”, and these can be considered reasonably unassailable.  But it still wouldn’t be foolish to give ear if some reasonable and intelligent and appropriately skilled person says they think they have a disproof of even that.  They may be wrong, but as John Stuart Mill pointed out, listening to arguments against your beliefs is a good way to sharpen your own understanding of those beliefs.

For instance, how certain are you that the Earth is round, not flat?  How well do you know why the evidence is so conclusive?  Could you explain why even the ancient Greeks and their contemporaries all could already tell that the Earth was round?

How sure are you that your political “opponents” are incorrect in their ideas and ideals?  Have you considered their points of view in any form other than sound bites and tweets and memes shared on social media, usually by people with whom you already agree?  Can you consider your opponents’ points of view not merely with an eye to puncturing them, but with an eye to understanding them?

Even if there’s no real chance that you’ll agree with them, it’s fair to recognize that almost no one comes to their personal convictions for no reason whatsoever, or purely out of perversity or malice.  At the very least, compassion (which I also wrote a little bit about last week) should dictate at least trying to recognize and consider why other people think the way they do.

Sometimes, if for no other reasons, it is through understanding how someone comes to their personal beliefs that one can best see how to persuade them to change those beliefs (assuming you are not swayed by their point of view).

This is a high bar to set when it comes to public reasonableness, I know, but I think it’s worth seeking that level.  Why aim to be anything less than the best we can strive to be, as individuals and as societies?  We may never quite reach our ideals, but we may at least be able to approach them asymptotically.  It seems worth the effort.

But I could be wrong.

*I don’t have any idea what such an argument or such evidence would be, but that’s part of the point.  Presumably, if I were being intellectually honest, and someone raised such a new argument, I would recognize it for what it was.

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.

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That one might read the blog of fate, and see the revolution of the times

Hello and good morning.  This is my Thursday blog post.  There are many other blogs out there, but this one is mine.

That’s about all I have to say about that, honestly.  I don’t have any other clue.  If anyone has seen a stylized cartoon paw print anywhere, please let me know*.

I don’t know.  What should I write?  I don’t really want to deal with politics right now‒not even political philosophy, which I sometimes find quite interesting.  But watching the world now, it just seems clear that humans are pathetic and, at least when two or more are gathered together in the name of something, their net IQ seems to be the lowest one of all those present divided by the number of people present.

That’s probably harsher than reality‒by that measure, two people each with an IQ of 150 would together have an IQ of 75.  But I don’t have the patience to work out some more likely formula, which would probably involve natural logarithms and the like.  And how would one test such a thing?  The point is, as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men In Black pointed out, a person can be smart, but people are stupid.

If humans destroy themselves (whether or not they take the rest of the world with them) it will be a well and truly earned destruction.  It will be a shame, of course, since there is also great potential there.  But then again, in all the hydrogen atoms of the universe there lies the potential for fusion into larger elements and then the creation of beings and civilizations and technology and art and love and even the capacity to produce civilizations that could not only last well into the livable duration of the cosmos but could possibly even alter or steer the fate of the universe itself, doing cosmic engineering.

But of course, almost no hydrogen atoms will ever be part of such a thing.  Perhaps none of them will be.  Certainly, if humans survive and eventually become cosmically relevant, it will be entirely because of luck.  It will not be deserved.

Actually, I’m not even sure what “deserve” really means most of the time.  When people say things like “you deserve love” or “you deserve to be happy” I don’t see the logic**.  How does one come to deserve love or happiness?  Does one come to deserve them just by being born?

That may be a nice idea, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  How can one earn some reward by doing nothing?  One can have rights of course, but most real rights are rights not to have others interfere with you.  If you can be said to have a right to something that is in limited supply and to which there is no possible guarantee, then that “right” is pointless.  I might as well say that each person has a right to two unicorns and a wyvern.

All that aside, I suspect that the vast majority of humans are literally no more likely to make any significant contribution to becoming a cosmically relevant civilization than are typical nematodes.  The current (and past) political climate of the world provides strong evidence for that much.

And now that we have thoroughly unqualified public appointees calling for registries of the disabled‒very much like the governments of certain well known and rightly despised 20th century regimes did‒I return to thoughts that “neurodivergent” people should take a Magneto/brotherhood of mutants approach to things and rise up and throw off the control of the so-called neurotypical people.

Neurodivergent people are far less likely‒or so it certainly seems‒to succumb to mob mentality and populism.  I suspect they (we) are far more likely to make a cosmically relevant civilization than the troglodytes are.

As I’ve said before‒in some recent post on this blog, I think‒neurodivergent people are more like Vulcans, and the rest of humanity is like the Romulans.  Whom would you rather have guiding the future of your civilization?

Well, that’s all extremely nerdy and probably silly, but it’s nevertheless probably not wrong.  Maybe we can convince most of the morons to refuse to be vaccinated, and then encourage them all to live close together so they’re not “contaminated” by people who have been vaccinated, and then let the viruses fall where they may.

Whatever.  This is all stupid.  Everything is stupid.  Everyone is uncountably infinitely stupid.  And I am surely among the stupidest of all for even bothering, for even trying to do anything.

TTFN

*This is a reference to the kids’ show Blue’s Clues, which my kids (and I) really enjoyed when they were little.

**Probably because there is none.

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The paragraph indentations below are not merely done on a whim

     Wow, okay, yesterday was one heckuva day, and not in a good sense for the most part; it was a real cluster-fudge*, so to speak.  This is not meant to imply that yesterday was all bad or anything; that would be absurd.  I may be a madman (without a box, alas), but I am not so irrational as to think that there were no positive things in any given twenty-four hour period, even if I restrict the universe being evaluated down to only things that happen to me.

     I have never been one of those depressed people who interprets himself or his life as “all bad”.  That would make things easier, probably‒I would either have destroyed myself long ago or I would have embraced my identity as a pure villain**.  But I am capable of nuance, an attribute that seems often to be missing in our political discourse.

     Mind you, that latter happens largely because it’s what people seem to want to consume, or at least what enough people want, and to which enough people respond, that it becomes a stable and often successful strategy for politicians to use.  So, at least some of the “blame” for the vacuity of news and politics is that humans tend to run toward misleading simplicities rather than dealing with a complex world in which even people with whom they disagree can have good points and do good things and have their own pain and loss and fear and love and memory and dreams.  And even people with whom they agree on most things can nevertheless sometimes behave like complete assholes.

     The world is complicated.  How could it not be?  Almost everything of which we are aware and of which our reality consists is constructed from incomprehensibly vast numbers of interactions between quantum fields on tiny, tiny scales, with causality propagating at the speed of light, with behaviors and properties requiring complex numbers*** to describe mathematically.  If you’re an electrical engineer, you might use complex numbers in real life, because they are very useful for modeling cyclical processes like alternating current, but most macroscopic, emergent processes don’t require complex numbers to describe.

     Or maybe they would be best described, mathematically at least, using complex numbers, but most macroscopic, emergent phenomena have too many things going on‒too many moving parts, if you will‒to be efficiently described by any remotely practical mathematical formalism.  Even computer algorithms might be inadequate to describe the functioning of large scale matters in sufficient detail.

     It may be that natural language really is the best tool for describing such aspects of reality, since it allows one to vary one’s level of intricacy and complexity to suit the needs of any given situation.  But of course, to do so requires one to be rigorous to the point of being a martinet about one’s language usage.  If a word or term can have more than one meaning, it is crucial to specify which meaning one intends so as to avoid apparent disagreements that actually just come down to semantic confusion.

     I don’t necessarily mind semantic discussions‒I like words and language and logic and poetry and puns and all that stuff‒but if one is trying to share an explanation for something, and really to share understanding, precise word meaning is going to be necessary.  You can’t use html to write a program that runs in Pascal.  Okay that’s not a great analogy.  Let’s say…you can’t win a game of Texas hold ’em poker by following the strategy you would use for euchre.  It’s not just that you won’t win; your moves won’t even make sense.

     Okay, well, that’s probably enough for today.  I’ve been trying not to be as negative as I was yesterday, and I think I’ve succeeded reasonably well.  I do this sort of back and forth thing so often that some people have said they wonder if I am literally bipolar with a rapid cycling rate.  I can only respond by saying that this possibility has been considered by me and by several different mental health professionals, and it is thought not to be the case.  Of course, I’ve never been tried on a course of, say, lithium****, nor really on any of the other, less tricky mood stabilizers (other than as would-be adjuncts for chronic pain treatment).  But if I were occasionally waxing manic, I would imagine that sometimes I would feel really good about myself, and I rarely do.  Also, antidepressants have never triggered a manic or hypomanic event for me, and I’ve taken many different ones at different times.

     All right, well, there was a whole paragraph after I’d already said I’d written enough.  My apologies.  I do go on, don’t I?  Have a good day, if you can.

*If no one has used that euphemism as the name of a brand of candy, I’ll be even more disappointed in humanity than I was already.

**Knowing me, I would probably accidentally do good for the world every time I tried to do evil.  At least it would be funny.

***Complex numbers are numbers with one “real” part, i.e., some number on the usual, continuous number line, and one “imaginary” part, which is a real number multiplied by i, the square root of -1, which is no more truly imaginary than is any other number.

****I like the song a lot, though.

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Eddies in the flow of reality (but that’s not his sofa)

It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.

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“But more when envy breeds unkind division: There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”

Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you could have guessed from my salutation if you’re familiar with my ways.

I’m sorry I’ve been such a downer lately (though anyone who reads my stuff regularly should not be surprised).  I started the week on a relatively optimistic note, or at least on an energetic one.  I suspect that was because I basically sedated myself on Friday night and Saturday night, and thereby got as much as five or so hours of uninterrupted sleep on those nights.  I also pretty much vegetated during the day on the weekend (other than doing my laundry) which was made all but obligatory by the residual effects of the sedation.  But the benefits didn’t last long.

I don’t know what to write, today.  I feel rudderless and with very little wind in my sails (to combine pleasingly nautical metaphors).  Maybe I’ll discuss a little bit about current events.  It’s been another weird week, as has almost every week since the beginning of the year.

Of course, the weirdness didn’t start there.  In the US at least, a lot of the weirdness really got going after 9-11, when everyone became overly paranoid about potential terrorism (especially involving planes) and security theater made everyone feel more afraid rather than less*.  Yet, as far as we know, most of it has saved no lives and it has immiserated countless people.

As part of the consequences of our neurotic response to the 9-11 attacks, what had been the longest unpatrolled border in the world (between the US and Canada, which did not even require passports to go between the two countries) became less amicable, marking the beginning of a feeling of separateness between what had been possibly the two closest allies and friendliest neighbors in the world.

Newt Gingrich helped with the radicalization of the Republican Party even before that, and through his slimy, slippery, poikilothermic mentality, he took what had been a party with principles down the beginning of its road to being the mockery of its former self that it has become.  Don’t get me wrong, the Democrats have responded in kind, in their own way, though their approaches are different**.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses that has led to the decline of global politics and especially of politics in the US is the indulgence of the tendency to demonize those who disagree with one, especially about anything that comprises a tenet of one’s political (and other) faith.  Speaking as a non-human, this is one of the attributes that makes humans so mutually self-destructive, and it is a tragedy.

This is the process that leads to the dehumanization of the “other”, which frees one to commit atrocities, because one does not see the other as having the same rights, or even the same consciousness, the same “soul”, as oneself.

It’s a particularly pathetic, utterly blinkered and myopic view, since all humans are infinitely ignorant and impotent in the final analysis.  While I do agree with Ayn Rand that humility—in the sense of presuming oneself inherently and inescapably worthless and valueless—is not a virtue, intellectual humility is always appropriate, because every person, every mind, no matter how brilliant, is as far from being infinite—and thus as far being incapable of error—as is the simplest flatworm, or indeed, the crudest virus.

One can only work on self-improvement if one actually recognizes and owns the fact that one has room for it.  This is one of the best lessons taught by Jesus in the Gospels (which I have read often, though I am no Christian).  It’s the one where he says, “Why lookest thou to the mote in thy neighbor’s eye, but considerest not the beam in thine own?  Thou hypocrite.  First take out the beam from out thine own eye, and then thou wilt see clearly to help thy neighbor with the mote in his eye.”  It goes something like that, anyway; I’m paraphrasing, but then again, so was King James’s editorial staff, since the original writing is, I think, in Greek, and if Jesus was a real person, he probably spoke Aramaic or something along those lines.

Anyway, his message was good.  If it were told in the modern world, it would probably be something like “the parable of the airplane oxygen masks”, i.e., make sure to secure your own mask before helping those who have difficulty securing theirs, because if you pass out and are incapacitated because you were focused only on others’ failings, then you’re no use to anyone.

This is plainly nothing new—after all, even though all the words attributed to Jesus were written decades to centuries after his crucifixion (if even that happened) and he may be entirely fictional, this message was considered important at least two millennia ago.

And warnings of the dangers of nationalism and blind loyalty to an “ethos” based largely on xenophobia and other rather pathetic fears have not been heeded by modern humans, though there were ample and terrible lessons about it throughout the last century.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch and his spawn helped spur this deterioration of discourse along—not out of any apparent sense of even misplaced idealism, but rather out of a seeming desire for ever greater profit and power.

Barnum’s Law still applies:  There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

This would seem to imply twice as many “takers” as “suckers”, but the two categories are not mutually exclusive (and of course, we have no word on the nature and character of all the other people born every minute).  Suckers can also be grifters; humans (and other people) don’t come neatly sorted and compartmentalized.  Even truly great people can have terrible flaws, but that doesn’t erase their greatness.  And seemingly unremarkable people can be (and do deeds that are) utterly inspiring.

The only time anyone goes beyond potential improvement or redemption is when they die.  That’s also the only time anyone becomes free of error.  It’s all very unsatisfactory, of course, but then, the Buddha long ago recognized that such is the nature of life itself.

All suffering is born of desire—but then again, so is all action.

I don’t know what my final point is; perhaps there can never be any single ultimate point, no “terminal goal” to use AI/decision theory terminology, not in minds that evolved with many, often competing, drives.  But at least I’ve been able to avoid just talking about my pain and depression and desire for self-erasure today.  You’re welcome.

TTFN

*Congratulations, Osama bin Laden and the rest of Al Qaeda.  You won.

**For instance, those on the “left” are big proponents of (and self-congratulators about their own) empathy.  For the most part empathy is useful, though Paul Bloom has quite reasonably pointed out some of its shortcomings.  Still, one place where the “left’s” empathy conspicuously and consistently fails them is in trying to empathize with or even to consider the points of view of those on the “right”, of “conservatives”.  It’s worth a bit of reflection.