[1195] Not Like Us

If I were to lay claim to a sort of “super power,” it would be in pattern recognition. Specifically, linguistic ones. I only do marginally better than average at “official” tests for that sort of thing that might get you into Mensa. I, without having to think particularly hard, can recognize how someone is using words. I can tell when they’re batshit. I can tell when they’re “too smart.” I can tell when they’re scared or insecure. I can tell when they’re lying, most especially when they would deny they are doing so. I know people patterns. I know word patterns. I know how they work together.

This is a pretty big, bold, and vague claim on its face. My grandma was 9 for 10 in guessing who was on the phone before picking up the call. It’s a little like if she were arguing the “intellectual” place where her intuition came from. Arguably, she was only getting called by the usual amount of people at their handful of times they might usually call. There was a pattern, but to anyone watching, it might look like a kind of voodoo. I think whatever pattern she was privy to is one we could all see, and any ones I claim to notice, you could too.

Smart people. Smart people are the worst. Smart people have a habit of thinking they are the only one who is smart. They use this instinct to think it grants them license to engage in any number of unwise behaviors. I have a kid in my YMCA program who scored off the charts on some IQ test. I clocked him early in him trying to respond to my new direction for the space in a proactive way. Ultimately, he’s still a child, so he’s also been the one to steal from another child and get caught, is bossy and mean to younger kids who might annoy him, and wholly embodies the word “cringe” when you consider a 5th or 6th grade boy in the abstract.

As a smart kid, he acts as highlighter for what I might observe in smart adults. Which smart adults am I taking in? It’s political podcasts. It’s debates. It’s intellectuals interviewing Ph.D.s from the bowels of academic departments. So many, so smart, particularly in their realms, and then they invariably step over the line to draw broader inferences. Often said, it’s a very specific tone of confidence, that always makes me go “eeeehhhhhh.”

When I listen to smart people, I look for “wise” qualifiers. There’s a class of by-the-numbers Youtube personalities that will give you incredible breakdowns of some social or political phenomenon. They read the bills, site their sources, and are as accurate or relevant as any “expert” you might conceive of in an old-world framework. I’ll think to follow them or subscribe when my instinct about what I hope they’ll say at some point shows up by surprise. One recently detailed Tesla’s magnificent fall and towards the end of the video, wisely, said, “Now now, you’re not the first one who thought it’s time to short the fuck out of Tesla stock, and it’d take one tweet to wipe out your investment.”

I appreciate when someone can fluidly and matter-of-factly arrive at appropriate levels of caution. He wasn’t trying to contribute to a frenzy, he was trying to inform.

Contrast someone like him with what I’ll call “convoluted” or “masquerading” people. These people, desperately, want to be smart. They might have an aggressive ADD or anxious condition. They might have too good of memories. Their brains work, too well, and they find ways to exercise them that have absolutely nothing to do with being smart or wise. This is the pundit or apologist. What they long for is to belong, so their capacity for “reason” is shaped by whatever tribe they most identify with at the time. A lot of incredibly weird people like your Stephen Millers or Ben Shapiros occupy this world. The popularity of levying “cuck” and “simp” are the ironic lashing out of their resented scarlet letters.

What I think is the most prominent pattern of both types above is the utter denial of and then reshapping of words. A smart person can get away with providing a nuanced, bullshit, way of describing their circumstances or responsibility to something. A convoluted person will employ 6 logical fallacies in 5 sentences alongside a complete dismissal of the concept of a shared definition or coherent through-line of causation.

It gets exhausting to listen to conversations that go something like this:

“There’s bloat in the federal government, and people are concerned about wasteful spending.”

“Which departments are wasting and on what? Which survey says how many people are concerned, and about what?

“Only an asshole like you would just disregard the waste and defend DEI while these grifters and entitled others destroy the fabric of our nation and routinely piss on our Judeo-Christian Values; I, for one, believe in freedom and lower costs and bringing back manufacturing, unlike the liberals with their open border policy and men competing in girls sports.”

A convoluted person is perfectly ambivalent about numbers. A smart person might weaponize them in a way that serves their interests. In either iteration, you’re getting someone concerned with themselves, their emotional satiation, more than any concern for reality or the truth. Further, convoluted and/or smart people will jump on their numbers or “arguments” to conclude that, no, *they are in fact speaking in good faith!* And there’s much to be learned in an “honest debate” with them. At which point I dutifully give up and write another blog.

I consider these patterns because I hear them on both right and left media. Bari Weiss is as circularly reasoned in abstract solidarity simping with Batya Ungar-Sargon as the Pod Save America guys are in their smug self-righteousness in brushing against anything Bill Maher says. I’ve listened to uber-nerds absolutely spiral when provoked by Michael Shermer or Coleman Hughes to expand beyond their expertise. Everyone mentioned routinely slips into “There there, I’m kind of above it all” pretentious space and utilize vague smart-sounding generalized sentiments to get away with pretending neutrality or that “we’re all friends here.”

What starts to become clear is that there are no shared “values” beyond the ones loosely associated with being “in the conversation” or popular enough to stay in the public eye. The people concerned with the actual truth of whatever the matter are out studying it, or organizing it, or living it - they’re not arguing it. A segment from Jon Stewart talking about being glib and ignorant about distinguishing that from what he does will always stick out to me. It dawned on him after fighting with 9/11 responders to get healthcare. That’s, primarily, why we’re suffering the fallout of people who truly do live within their horrible value systems and those opposed don’t understand the “resistance” doesn’t even value doing so.

Wrapping your head around smart and convoluted people patterns is one thing, but then you also just have people acting as animals do. Those are the kinds of patterns any social worker, counselor, or busy-body could tell you about. We have reliable statistics on how long it takes to get out of spousal abuse dynamics. We know the reported versus suspected rates of violence, sexual or otherwise. We watch the consequences of in-group/out-group thinking play out at every friendly competition.

Many get dismissive and condescending wishing to write this off as “dumb” people. It’s certainly not someone like them who would behave in such ghastly ways. What’s seemingly always missing from a discussion of class warfare or inequality is the genuine opinions anyone holds about the ones beneath them. Those opinions gets churned through the convoluted pundits and weaponized by the smart people because, wouldn’t you agree it’s their fault, they’re lazy, and they’re motivated to self-destruction? The smart thing to do is avoid the subject and not pretend you can help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Vibes. You want to feel smart. You want to feel like you belong. You want to convince yourself that you’re worthy, contributing, or otherwise inherently meaningful to whatever you’re involved in. Any and all means of finding and maintaining that vibe is the pattern you will succumb to. That might mean staying too cozy against a wholly catastrophic family or partner dynamic. That might mean swallow every spoonful of shit your job hands you. That might be engrossing yourself in some hobby or community at 6th-grade boy level of intensity indefinitely. I think it’s your tailored propaganda soup you become a glutton for. Bitch, don’t kill my vibe.

For the myriad patterns I claim to see, important ones in myself are in how I destroy or utilize them. I’m perfectly aware I have zero capacity to “convince” anyone of anything. Convoluteds are keen to hear “arguments” where none are being made, but I assure you, I’m attempting to articulate and explain for myself. It’s been, not precisely a preoccupation, but a soft goal of mine to figure out ways to ride a vibe without exploiting it. I feel my house parties did this. I feel creating the coffee shop did to. The freedom and comforts I pursue as a result of my living situation I’m trying to extend to my working one. I was looking forward to seeing where I could go with it at the Y before the power to do so quit.

I used to routinely kill vibes. I’d be “too smart” in a situation that needed no words. I’d argue like a pundit for something fundamentally abstract or less true than I insisted. I was masquerading as someone more concerned or knowledgeable than I was. That’s a hard thing to notice and break because it’s not insincere, it just doesn’t know how to be more honest. That’s perhaps the extent of the grace I might extend to the Batyas and Dinesh D’Souzas of the world. My Y kids have no idea what they’re saying or where it’s coming from, full stop. They just talk, too loud, or dance, or run, and play with the noises we call words. You can’t tell me merely surviving a few decades longer magically grants you the ability to escape their pattern and make any sense.

I mean, these writings kill the reddit vibe, indeed the very infinite-scroll nature of the internet and social media altogether. This isn’t a place to genuinely introspect or connect with other thoughtful people. It also can’t be, you’ll argue to, certainly not me, but no one in particular. And you’ll invite a pattern of inane internet banter and depending on my mood I will devolve along with you. But that’s only if you break the pattern of fundamental silence.

[1168] All Aboard

I'm really struggling to believe in anything. This is a fairly longstanding tradition, but it manifests as anxious butterflies during what I perceive to be key inflection points. I’m familiar with being constantly, chronically, fucked with. I am intimately aware of what it feels like to feel absolutely helpless indefinitely. It taught me how to become a bully. It showed me I can functionally black out and numb all pain during a violent reaction. It rendered everything worthwhile and good about me as something to pick at, ridicule, or resent. I’ve teetered on the edge of ending up in prison or hospital before I figured out how to put words to what was happening in me.

None of us can predict the future. I don’t think anything is predetermined, nor do I believe in fate or karma. I might invoke them jokingly or colloquially, but I think at bottom, so much of the best and worst things that happen to any of us are a direct result of choices. They might be choices made under duress. They’re almost certainly choices made with so little information it’s hard to conceive how it’s appropriate to invoke “choice” at all. A choice, by definition, is going to be a binary proposition. You affirm, or you deny. You bring into your awareness, or you eschew further contextualizing. Our brain automatically shortcuts most information in service to this process.

I can tell an extremely damming and deliberate story about how I’m in a decadent 2024. I can point to instances from history that kicked off the degradation of “the middle class,” our education systems, our sense of civic duty, etc. I can point the finger at the internet and the technologies we can’t wrap our ape brains around. I can cite heart-wrenching story after story of the consequences of being intellectually lazy, personally indignant, and in denial about the depth of hatred and fear. I can blame. I can explain away. I can hedge. I can intellectualize and attempt to stomach how all of the stuff “out there” isn’t really what we are or who I am.

And it would all be a lie. It would be a lie that others around me would be eager to celebrate and expand upon. It would be the kind of lie that would keep me divorced from the nature of how I utilize my hatred and my exhaustion in service to taking less accountability than I could. Because my shock and horror are too intense or morally righteous, when I condemn, when I seek to destroy, it would be okay. This is the mind of a fascist.

It’s 12:30 AM on Wednesday after election day. Again, millions of people have sat out. Millions of people have celebrated rape, racism, greed, pride, indefinite 4chan-esc detached irony, and the wholesale lack of accountability. It’s the rot everywhere. It’s the one thing that truly unifies us all. We’re all correct. We’re all entitled to our tears, our hatred, our means of acquiring whatever we want in whatever way we discover. Steal? Why not, I’m just smarter. Kill? Negligently ignoring something is soooo many syllables.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have already died from the abortion rollback. It’s peak insanity. It’s peak Christo-fascist power and control. The smartest, most empathetic and best-equipped people and healthcare tools sit idle as those in power threaten prison and fines for helping. It doesn’t get worse. It just gets more frequent. That’s something I don’t think really sets in for people who wish to point at any individual tale of woe or absurdity. It’s already, right now, as bad as it can get mentally, in how we talk about it, and how we aren’t approaching fixing it.

I remind myself regularly to not be a reactionary. I don’t want to just sit in my fear and pain and speculation. That’s what was happening as I watched the country maps turn red. As I watch the numbers in support of detached yet vigorously hateful and spiteful ignorance march its way forward once again. Pride comes before the fall, and I can think of no one more proud than the people who apologize for belief systems and representatives that mask and hide the broader reality of consequences.

Van Jones famously said Trump was a “white lash.” I think he was dead wrong. The whole country was denying the story of how their needs weren’t being met, denying themselves a chance to own their complicity, laziness, hatred, and insecurities. You’ll hear often about “the extremes” of “either side.” I would put to you that you exist as an extreme of what those people put into action. You can be extremely lazy and feeling intellectually inferior. You can be extremely entitled to your “small town” views that don’t concern themselves with anyone but you and yours. You can be extremely angry and indignant that something didn’t go your way. The story of how your extremes manifest are as individual as it gets.

If we need a heuristic, you can look at voting. I’m the kind of person that can literally never justify endorsing Trump. Him as a person is antithetical to everything I try to be. I don’t want to be “rich” like him, slap my name on everything, sexually abuse women, fuck my family, lie with every breath, provoke and incite violence, pretend to be ambiguous about my relationship to explicit hate groups, cozy up to dictators, find myself getting supported by people like Ben Shapiro or any sycophant building their brand on the right. The “reasons” people use to vote for him are overwhelmingly incoherent lies. He is their representative.

I mention Shapiro because he’s the fanciest dancer claiming to support Trump’s policy independent of everything he’s ever said or done otherwise. This, again, is how fascists, apologists, extremists pretend to think. Provided there’s something “bigger” or “practical” or “the real goal,” everything, your death and ruin included, gets sublimated in service to it. Why protect the planet when Jesus is on his way back? Why quibble over poor people having rape babies or women controlling their bodies when we’re gonna return to the ways of God? Why trust the science of vaccines when I have a right to kill you when I’m in power? This is the conclusion, the unyielding ambivalence in service to selfishness.

We get Trump because we deserve Trump. We’ve been trying to have a mythical future that refuses to directly combat the forces that broke our government. We’re suffering the fissures of recycled propaganda. We don’t teach in compelling ways. We don’t hold people accountable. We don’t model behavior. We don’t reign in our worst impulses. It’s all wish-fulfillment. What was Kamala going to do with a broken Senate and wholly corrupt Supreme Court? Trump faced no consequences for encouraging people to kill people. What do you think is really and actually going on in your country? You haven’t conceded what’s really been lost anymore than Trump did the last election.

Hope is fickle. Change is arbitrary. We’ve only demanded the performances of each other, not the work. We’re all addicts at the group meeting carrying on like its fun and games and our lives are going so smooth since we found each other. 5 seconds after we leave we’re screaming at the people in our lives, crying over our circumstances, and building more chronic conditions for which to seek an addictive fix.

You hate as deeply as any fascist Trump supporter, as any “Christian,” as any “religious” nut job talking a million miles an hour like Shapiro constantly justifying justifying justifying because the fact of their limited, scared, irrational beast at the heart of their behavior can’t be contended with. They don’t own it anymore than you do, it’s just their time to be attaching language to the nature of the self-destruction. What did the Left do? Reacted with DEI, defund the police, and trigger warnings. They didn’t figure out how to get Bernie in charge, they looked for the next coolest victim narrative to attach their identity to.

It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it. We deserve to keep dying for no reason. We deserve to keep talking in circles with fanatics. We deserve to eat the scraps of oligarchs and submit to wage slavery. We are addicted to the grind, consumption, excuses. We want to hear the same story every day and feel proud and confident in each recitation and share. We want the awkward, evil, rich bullies to win, because those are our gods. That is who we wish to be in a world that’s treated us so unfairly by asking for anything accountable.

I’m not giving myself to the fear, ignorance, and hatred no matter how often it’s on offer. I own the hatred I have for fascists of any stripe and era. I will never be okay with the patterns of thought and behavior, so, so smug, and confident that bring nothing but shame and embarrassment and death. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand or feel like they do. I’m going to take what I feel, and choose to operate like someone knows his power and responsibility, even in the maddest of worlds. Maybe in a generation or two, if I last that long, my example will mean enough to be of better consequences than the ones I’m suffering.

[1133] Fog Of War

You're born into a fog. It's little droplets of absolutely mystifying information sometimes cooling your face, sometimes collecting so thick you can't see and feel like you're drowning.

I find one of the defining factors of what I consider a "great" or superb-to-perfect piece of media is definition. The characters, good or bad, actually sit within the consequences of their strengths and flaws. They aren't randomly inserted at choice times because "the plot must go on." They aren't apologized for. They aren't treated like a schizophrenic episode manically punctuating a moment because a substantive idea couldn't be had. Things like "over acting" fall into this category, or the too-humbled place someone falls in being made an example of in your message-piece.

The analogy holds for the difference between a great and superb life. You can do a fair amount of "good" or "fair" things, and die without scandal or offense. But the people who lean into their characters seem to define precisely what we don't wish to be, or explicitly could. I think this is where ideas about "celebrity" versus "influencer" really diverge. A celebrity depicted timeless tropes and stories that have sustained us since we started telling them. We're drawn in. An influencer is trying to trap your attention. They're selling easy and accessible in a way someone pretending to be Hercules isn't.

Why should you want to be your character? I think about this a lot. My head echoes with the guy at a beerfest years ago who said, "You have celebrity energy." I feel like I know exactly what he's referring to, but have done next to nothing with it. I don't even know if he's actually met any celebrities, or if he's just unfamiliar with extroverts on a good day, but I'd be lying if I haven't, for years, rehearsed what I'd say on talk shows. But, what business would I have being there?

Famous chefs and political figures get their time in the sun without needing acting credits. If you spike in popularity for some viral moment, occasionally you can sucker well-known people into entertaining you for another 15 minutes when they're struggling for material. It's not something I really aspire to, but has always felt like it'd be something I should be prepared for. It may be one of the most irrational persistent thoughts I ever entertain. Bert Kreischer got mini-famous for partying. There was a couple years in college where people were shouting my name across campus still-enthused about one of mine.

Arguably, I'm more "blunt answer on the news" kind of "potential famous" at this point. I want to be known "in my world" whether it comes to social work things or if I manage to develop anything on the land. I listen to famous-enough people talk about how it's nice to not get mobbed, but it's never a bad day to have a stranger smile at you and tell you what an impact you've had on them. Garnering a certain notoriety tied to a creative approach or genuinely helpful fix to something is what I'd like most to lend my energy towards more than "look at me" or "let me sell you."

It's only exhausting to be the "life of the party" if you don't enjoy the party. If you're there out of obligation or desperation, it doesn't feel important or wise to invest in your character while you're there. If you're an appeaser who smiles and laughs at everything that doesn't earn it, or frame your existence as the thing other people need to enjoy themselves, I don't know how you refrain from resenting that immediately.

It's been about 2 days since I left off, and I've noticed another pattern that informs my foggy thoughts.

I look for people smarter than me to listen to. I like listening to nerds who specialize in some area to give me the details and history of topics I'll never have the patience or sustained interest in to research too deeply on my own. The thing about nerds, they usually only really know about that one thing. Even when they're talking about the logical fallacies or lapses in wisdom that "smart" people succumb to, breathlessly they'll mindlessly and unapologetically engage in said behavior if you give them 5 extra minutes to talk.

This makes me wonder what would happen if these people I enjoy listening to could get together and identify how to put a stop to that.

After 100 hours of Peter Boghossian interviews and videos, I can identify somewhere around 10 things he consistently does that feel like expressly poor framing, straw-manning, or frustration stoking that impede his ability to understand more about what upsets him.

The If Books Could Kill guys will matter-of-factly relay what they believe to be someone's, say Steven Pinker's, political opinions and conclusions to be and poo-poo qualifiers and context to endlessly insist there's a more insidious misstep occurring. Because they'll do so back-to-back with a genuine fact check that refutes bad research, it feels more right of a behavior and posture than it is. I think you get to score a point for calling out a bad, old, or piddling example used in service to the broader argument. You don't get to mind-read.

The amount of times Jordan Peterson is invoked as a kind of shorthand for alt-right nonsense is such a cliche lazy thing to do, he feels like the next Ayn Rand in the mind of a liberal who thinks reading or listening to him will make their head holes leak. He's become a king for speaking outside of his lane and religious apologetics, but he didn't start that way, and still sometimes recognizes when he's fallen off certain cliffs. That should matter. He's couched in so much stupid, but he's not Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or even the most manipulative religious dicks he gobbles like Jonathan Pageau.

The religiosity of Chris Hedges and Cornel West keeps them perfectly blind to what you'll hear argued from Sam Harris and the guests like John Spencer who specialize in the history of urban warfare. Masih Alinejad, Yasmine Mohammed, and Maajid Nawaz are functionally silenced when it comes to an honest discussion about the practical and moral consequences of cultural ::ehem:: differences. Noam Chomsky will talk out of one side of his mouth about American imperialism, and downplay what funded his early career with biting defensiveness.

I think Coleman Hughes does a decent job of bothering to engage people on different topics while being less adept, than say Sam Harris, at knowing enough particulars of a given subject matter to undermine his fastest-talking guests. Coleman can get a side-stepping apologist or defensive Ph.D. to get caught in their errant missing-the-point loop which can be interesting in shedding light on how hollow the basis for many popular and too-many-books-about ideas really are.

I just listened to Yanis Varoufakis refer to what's happening in Palestine as a "genocide," after detailing a historical picture of how France and Germany have played out politically and economically. His penchant for insightful financial analysis or digestible conceptual frames stalls outside his lane like so many on the left who think this is the first time in history war has killed or starved children and continually forget who started the whole fucking thing.

Seth Meyers, who've I've gathered has cared about real shit, has a segment where he does corrections on what he's broadcast on his main show. John Oliver will do similarly, but you can feel him routinely skirt and downplay the brunt of a critical conclusion about the position he's explaining, and pawns off deeper responsibility like Jon Stewart used to do before his return on a sensibility that, "It's comedy first, after all."

I guess I want to know, what is it that makes the ability to reason, and reason so strongly, simply, and concretely just stop at a certain point?
Is there a mechanism in the brain that gets overwhelmed or hijacked?
Is there something we can measure at the level of emotion that prevents new or conflicting information to take hold?
Why does it feel impossible and unrealistic to get a standard for discerning and discussing information to as good as it ever can get, and then strike a dissonant note so simultaneously fluidly, and weirdly consistently in that extra bit of time you give someone to talk?

At a certain point in my "learn everything" behavior, it sank into my bones the futility of the effort. Whether I was trying to record every animal name in notebooks as a child, read/watch every book, lecture, debate, or online fight related to religion versus science, or do ALL THE THINGS when it comes to home projects, playing instruments, playing video games, listening to bands or podcasts, or seeing shows. You either learn to enjoy the ride, or you suffer the infinitely incomplete indefinitely.

It feels like the project of being a "public intellectual," is to professionally create a fog around yourself as you detail out someone else's. Are you both united by reason? Occasionally? Certainly more than you're united by a god concept, but a god complex instead? I'm not sure.

In my naming different people, I feel I should shout out to Naill Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. For the amount of subjects they can (or did) opine on, I've gotten the most consistent sense of that general respect for reason and its process. That Naill and Ayann Hirsi-Ali are married suggests to me your heart is clearly the most irrational thing, thus invoking "passion" for your position is always a loser. My pithy grievances with Sam Harris and "free will" I'll probably take to the grave like Dan Dennett.

We'll "believe" in "science" until it threatens our "identity." Our statistics are the one true statistics and not something to contextualize with dozens more at all times. I see another in road for why people adopt the perpetual high-horse-ery of a religious system. Is there any greater power than feeling no obligation to even state plainly what it means to butt-fuck your little boys or bag your women?

The intellectual wants to feel powerful too. I think they fuck up when they wish to cling to a certain "truth," like any religious apologist, instead of the truth of a process. You'll never lift the fog just by blowing your hot air.

[1125] 10 Paces

What's the argument you wish to have?

I find myself exasperated. Incidentally, it's not regarding any one thing or because I've come off some nonsense exchange online. I'll start just discussing the variables feeding my thoughtful moment.

I watched a documentary called "Uncharitable" about the hole nonprofit organizations got dug into after bad reporting and mischaracterizations about how funds are used. Macklemore released a song about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I had a session with a client yesterday in which she reported being more or less cured of the reason she was referred to me. I've been helping a friend navigate how and what to communicate with herself and her partner. I've began the CASA training and am about a month away from maybe starting groups funded through the health department.

It's a series of seemingly disparate sources of influence that at least provoked the opening line wondering what the argument you wish to be having really is.

I find a sickening reassurance when someone with maybe an advanced medical degree says something I do, or have said, in one of my analytically complaining blogs. For all of their brains, time invested, and connections or resources I haven't discovered, they're fucked by the exact same forces, at a larger scale, and are as flabbergasted as I am that this is how it works. Their funding runs out. They're criticized for budgets no one is interested in genuinely scrutinizing until years later. Bureaucratic or capitalistic entities with even minor stakes in your given mission find ways to obstruct.

What's been clear for decades is that we have the technology. We have the money. We have the manpower. We look at the totalitarian things China can accomplish in a decade as an antagonistic ongoing proof if we could only be persuaded to forgo a chunk of our individualistic pathology to manifest destiny.

The nonprofit person is arguing for something broadly conceived of as "obviously good." It's self-evident when you watch a child drink literally shitty water, if you can install a well for less than your coffee budget that month, everyone could have fresh water. It's not a thought experiment, for your average genuine do-gooder or resident of The West, whether or not veterans should have health care. Most people grasp immediately the consequences of pollution, threats to food supplies, and mass migration when you draw the seemingly stupid-proof arrows of what's been happening as a result of climate change.

The kind of person described above lives in an entirely different universe from the naked "capitalist." It's several worlds away from the malicious psychopaths and narcissists we know tend to rise to power across influential realms. They don't know, until it smacks them soundly, the nature of "the problem" that interrupts their ability to do obviously good things. Until relatively recent history, most might be forgiven for this as levers of government have previously demonstrated a capacity to actually demonstrate the will of the demos, if only briefly.

When you give a TED talk, what's your goal? If you think it's to "convince" the random asshole like me who's going to watch 200 TV episodes for every TED talk, you're probably at a TEDx event and don't understand the assignment. You're there to talk to all of the richest and most influential people in the room. You want them to engage in trickle-down propaganda. You want to ignite an evangelical belief system around your cause and perspective. You're a culture warrior, and you fight with words and compelling mildly enlightening and chuckle-inducing stats and facts served as sermons.

I get "comfortable" the more I contemplate my "real enemies." I have an almost-zero desire to argue with anyone regarding Israel/Hamas. Why? Don't I have the will, brain power, or basic human empathy to listen to their "points?" No. They don't have points, and it's not an exercise for your brain.

The mismatch begs to run again. There's people who wish to genuinely fix things against people who've never figured out how to fix things. People who fix things are hungry to learn, grow, and change. People who never figure our how to fix things scream, chant, and share empty anecdotes. You can't pretend to have a reasonable perspective on something you're unwilling to break open and contextualize. You can't claim to concern yourself about "human rights" when you pick the popular thing that flares up every few years, but have no regard or concern for the ongoing atrocities anywhere else.

It's co-opting and peacocking versus doing the work. You could be getting aggressively aggrieved by the actual forces that perpetuate the kind of violence you pretend to be incensed by. You know what fuels violence? Magic sky-daddy beliefs. You know what fuels violence? Cultures that bag their women. Your language, in the right setting, causes things to escalate. Your resistance to other forms of power causes friction. You, using your energy to fight and argue with the wrong things makes the entire exercise a parody and performance. It fuels the worst habits of attention-seeking media, and your ego, and the hopelessness that ushers in fascist "fixes."

My enemy is the willfully indignant, impatient, irrational, and imprecise. It's not been my worst bosses in ambivalent or capitalistic machines. It's not the power any one police force exerts sometimes disingenuously or disproportionally. The idiots chanting Jew-hating mantras aren't my enemy, necessarily, nor are the most liberal women and children positioned as bullet barriers Gaza has to offer.

When the in-crowd chanter attacks me for telling them where the saying came from, now they're the enemy. Now, the argument shifts from direct confrontation to an internal one about whether or what's worth it in service to the asymmetric influence on culture. I'll keep writing, sure. It doesn't cost anything but time well spent and it makes me feel better. When a religious fanatic (who certainly doesn't feel fanatical) asserts "There is no debate!" Hello, new enemy, who's actually just a weak approximation of the behaviors I wish to holistically influence through other practices than continuing to talk past or inflame further.

Gang violence gets better when you get kids enrolled in after school programs and provide support to their parents at home. Illiberal children screaming about issues they don't understand need to be surrounded by educated, patient, and persistent people. Institutions used to stand for something they no longer seem to. Debate and conversation are literally the only option if you care about the inevitable violence that will follow otherwise.

My enemies are timeless. The sin-system bores them out fairly well. I don't want my misdirected pride going viral. I don't want to be high on my own supply of mod-approved opinions. I can't figure out how explicitly not conservative I am, and yet, it's the crazy anger-inducing people "on the other side" that are bothering to entertain new information. They proceed to shit all over it in the forms of Kellyanne Conways, Ben Shapiros, and Candice Owens', but the remotely reasonable thing will slip out of their mouth that were you more patient with those types than me, might genuinely help you construct your argument or behavior. I wish I lived in a world where those idiots could speak and I trusted 95% of all who heard them would know explicitly how batshit they were. My argument includes striving for that kind of world.

You're under a spell. You have to be to function. It's not necessarily a malicious spell. I still think very highly of myself no matter how many days I spend mostly watching TV. I'm not installing the next shit-free well somewhere in the world. I'm not flooded with needy families I'm doling out sagely advice to. I'm not doing something akin to "training in the off season" so that when I get lucky "one day" i'll neatly fit into the mold of some dreamlike opportunity I always believed was coming if Just…prayed? enough. That's not the kind of spell I'm under anymore. I can fix very little, ever, especially if it's beyond my current level of awareness or concern. I can scratch the itch on my arm. I can talk to a friend in need. I can budget, if never really afford, potential steps for a later date. I can enjoy the last of my port wine.

What is my argument? Every day you're alive is a gift. Of all the things available calling for your attention, are you aware of what you're using for inspiration and why? I think you should figure out what you actually want to fight and why. I think we're all cliches who rhyme with patterns that either build or destroy. You can build your self conception and capacity to meaningfully speak or work across topics. You can crash like a drunken elephant into town after town you barely registered where even there and certainly didn't care who they consisted of. My enemy is "religious fervor" and "deeply held personal beliefs" that make it impossible, at specific points of contention when you try, to fix anything.

A volunteer is getting paid. Maybe they only know how to spend the currency, but it's not because they're especially moral or better or less blind to their motivations. Maybe it feels good. Maybe it looks good. Maybe it gives you a chance to formulate your asymmetric attack on a problem you couldn't begin to fix other ways. You're volunteering yourself to all sorts of shit at all times. In my experience, it's in service to getting taken advantage of. It's in service to someone else's pathological allegiance to their insecurity and immaturity. It's to the "hive mind" of the attention for its own sake and internet clout. The ones who can use that energy and misdirection will keep you spinning forever.

[1101] Resistance Is Futile

I want to do something a little different and muse a bit about social media, and one comment I've received in response to my writing in particular. It follows:

"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too.

Have you gotten enough out?

I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though, seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process.

Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again.

For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace.

Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."

This feels like a masterpiece. It strikes me as convoluted. It feels embarrassed. It succinctly captured the energy I feel one must anticipate in trying to do anything creatively or self-constructively and put it online. He's trying to detach himself, but also seems to feel provoked. I have to go over it line by line.

"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too."

I hear Daniel Stern's voice in Wonder Years. Almost like he's trying to add a bit of whimsy to the idea of him bothering to speak at all. I imagine some version of him is either actively patting my head or desperately resisting the urge to. This is the initial distance creating sentiment. Eeewww, dude, look icky guts. Now we're all a party to your gross guts! But maybe you couldn't help yourself, so take a seat and listen up.

"Have you gotten enough out?"

This isn't a sincere question. This is whomever failed to guide this person mocking them, now channeled at me. The blog he's responding to I state several times over is the 1,100th I've written over 20 years. He's existentially exhausted by the idea of being this thoughtful regarding anything. Incidentally, if you scroll through his posts, he's offering old-guy wisdom after having seen it all himself. He's cooked, in his mind. It's time to dole out advice in the last place anyone's willing to listen, but then what else is probably new for him?

"I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though…"

This part is the most telling, not about this guy, but what the internet does to you. Philosophize This does a good job of explaining Byung Chul-Han's description of our narcissism bred from our internet circumstances. Who can even flirt with saying a sentence like this if they're not compulsively self-involved? I don't know who anyone is that responds to anything I say. They're a disembodied voice from either the vague hate or vague mildly-encouraging camps that pop up. Charitably, this could just be a really poor phrasing of, "I don't understand what I was to take away from this." But, I put this to every reader of anything someone has written, figure out why you bothered in the first place. Don't throw that the writing exists in the writer's face and act like something's been done to you.

"seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process."

So, yes, obviously, and this is also stated in the blog. I'm literally, every time, showing what complicated introspection to keep my head straight and values expressed looks like. Maybe you don't need to do all that. I'm jealous. Sometimes, in fact only ever drunk and in years-apart fashion, I get told how much I help someone else think about their own circumstances. It's unnatural to spend as much time as we do up our own asses and not just be mindlessly pumping out TikTok videos or craving sad music in response.

"Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again."

I hear versions of this a lot. I'm called "interesting" a lot. It's less pain-inducing than when someone wishes me luck, but they're in the same spirit. I'm some "thing" that the person engaging it shouldn't really be handling but for it's quaint novelty and clear struggle with itself. They don't know how to help me release my head from the proverbial fence or bucket, so they have to still say something right? So, interesting you had all those…*thoughts* ::shudder:: Why don't we put them in their own special place waaaaay far away from what all us normals are doing over here.

"For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace."

Here's where the crack in the ironic armor shows up. A person who was simply and merely in touch with their own perspective, struggles and incompleteness and all, would just say this. It wouldn't have to be qualified and buried in all of the other inanity. This is the decent person who connected with something in the writing he's too tired or down on himself about exploring any further. People read thinking things out in this way as some kind of outsized effort. And it is, for them. Most of us are thinking ourselves in circles, getting paralyzed, and then doubling down on our crippling depression and anxiety, addictions, or fucking meme speak. If he'd just said this, this blog wouldn't exist.

"Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."

Now here's the internal rejection and reaction to doing or saying something nice and even the remote idea that I would recognize, respond, and try to connect. Can you think of anything more distasteful in the modern environment than to say or discover something *real* being said and exchanged? Let's strangle that baby in the crib, allude once again to "just how many words there are, gosh." And pretend like we didn't enter the arena of a "social network" where the rules are to crash your siloed thinking into someone else's and pretend there's no consequences and no real person on the other side.

After all, he's "just saying." 

All of that said and explored, I posted my living arrangements online. I played by the internet rules and was handsomely rewarded in internet points. The overwhelming sentiments were, "This is why I come here." I, robustly and unambiguously a male, have created a living space unlike many others. The novelty was enjoyed and reviled. It was judged as both dangerous and about to burst into flames, and as paradise. Both a genius hacker and musical prodigy live here as likely as a serial killer basement dwelling end of the world prepping troll. The only things that really made it through were one or two genuinely sincere people willing to explain in more depth the hazards of extension cords, and the people who recognized how much my inner-child never died.

That post got some 1,500 upvotes, and 645 comments. None of those comments warranted their own blog. Those people weren't engaging with me in the same way someone who reads what I'm thinking about how and why I create the things I do. They weren't engaging with me at all. They were nicely surprised by their niche subreddit delivering at continued just-enough intervals. A few were worth some fun exchanges. It started to get redundant and lazy with people who weren't reading what others had said before.

And in a day and a half, it's on to the next thing. I can't even say "I" liked or didn't the attention because I wasn't the star of the show. All I did was get a little bit more inside my head about how soon and what it's going to cost me to get normal outlets. But, ultimately, it could be argued I "did the internet right." I let a superficial glance at my circumstances field superficial engagement to everyone's "delight." It didn't garner enough attention to make the news. It didn't prompt any of them to think, "What else has this guy posted?" If I'd taken slightly better pictures and added more with an ability to read the titles on my books, video games, or band stickers, I bet I would have driven just a touch more engagement lol.

I think the internet has made my experience of people even worse. That is, the ironic detachment craving the next thing, fake performative relationships protecting informal "rules" to conform to, and the airs people take on in trying to politely belittle you for "not getting it" were exhausting before we built that brand of nihilism into how we understand the zeitgeist. We're not serious thinkers or actors on the world. It's always a qualified and calculated performance.

If you can talk real fast and make influential people feel validated, they'll platform your Ben Shapiro stick-up-my-ass charade and you'll be celebrated and rewarded with money. If you can tie yourself in knots justifying every nakedly stupid fascist comment and move your Nazi wanna-be dictator or insurrectionist "representative" makes, you'll get to feel like you're a part of history and doing something religion-level righteous enabling them. And then somehow again in defying them every time the bare minimum leaks out of you! This is how you can listen to people genuinely be flabbergasted that their actions resulted in pain or death. They were just performing. None of this was meant to be taken seriously.

For better or worse, in the fairyland you might occupy that suggests you should interpret me with some kind of flattering filter or wisened birdseye distance, I aspire to be a serious person. Not self conscious, but to act like what I do and say has consequences. I want to be consistent. I want to have reasons. I want to really connect and really create and really change the things that piss me off, confuse me, or seem to feel as perfectly avoidable catastrophes if we pay closer attention and talk and think better. Welcome to the process. Resist the urge to blame me for stapling your eyes open and forcing you to recite it.