Arts & Letters #1
Here’s all the interesting stuff I read or interacted with last week and some half-baked responses.
What I’m getting at emotionally though is that I sense a lot of numbness to the idea of Trump winning another term….But nobody seems to be acting as though Trump is an existential threat to democracy or anything else. People might think that, and perhaps they are quite rational to think that. But they aren’t acting like it.
I’ve been catching this vibe too. Like, this election season feels very low energy, Double Plus Orange Hitler is literally being Banned by the Deep State and will Die In Jail…and no one cares. Like, that’s weird, right?
And part of this is definitely deep partisan entrenchment. Like, to riff on Scott Adams, we’re not just watching different TV shows, we’re 8 seasons in. There’s so much history, so little common ground and understanding.
But, gun to my head…I think part of it is that all the cross-party relationships, both real relationships and parasocial relationships, are burned away at this point.
I’m thinking of Gamergate here. Yes, I know, I know. Anyway, a lot of the driving force behind that, a lot of the kindling, was a lot of nerdy liberal white guys, the kind of guys who loved John Stewart and the Daily Show, suddenly becoming the outgroup for the gaming mags and journalists and…liberals let large. A lot of the anger and chaos was, well, people torching their relationships over this stuff.
And that’s the thing: nothing sells like drama and there’s no drama like ending relationships and the best relationships to end or call into question are parasocial ones. It’s pathetic but…man, a lot of nerds really liked Stephen Colbert and then he invited Anita Sarkeesian on and it hurt their feelings. I don’t know everything about Gamergate but I know that.
And now I look at this numbness around Trump 2.0 and part of it feels like there’s no drama to be mined because nobody has even the most minor cross-party parasocial relationships. Not even hate. I remember the “look what outgroup did today!” blog posts and youtube takedowns and “reporting on Fox News” or “uncovering the NYT’s lies” and…I mean it’s still there but the juice has gone out because there’s no fire to stoke because all the kindling is gone. What more is there to be said about Fox News? The people who hate it hate it and don’t even care anymore what it reports. Same with the NYT…it just kinda lies about stuff. Is there any point to “owning” or “debunking” the NYT anymore?
I don’t know, it just feels like the rhetorical ground is so nuked that there’s no drama to be mined anymore. News=drama and drama requires relationships, real or imagined, to be at risk. And they’re all gone.
Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.
Little to comment on but…it’s bothered me that a lot of effective self-help stuff is right-tinged…and often very libertarian. Like, if you’re learning to code or getting into tech, those guys are generally not libertarian but…they all have a soft spot for libertarians, they all have libertarian friends, they know the books, that sort of thing. And physical fitness is…I mean, Joe Rogan seems like the poster child for Right Wing Progressivism. And dating advice for men, and social advice in general is…pretty reactionary.
I dunno, I think Lyons is grappling with something here that he doesn’t quite have yet but he points to the clear dividing line between “new left” and “new right” being hierarchy, being able to say “X is better than Y”. And the hierarchy thing feels like a stretch but I can’t think of any left-wing self-help or self-improvement book/podcast/content in the past decade and the edge cases are very clear responses to specific right-wing content. That part, the way that, at least for men, self-improvement has become…not synonymous with the right wing, there’s still centrist-ish people, but definitely anti-left. That rings very, very true.
At this stage, the problem is that we've tried it all. It's been 50 years since the establishment of strong Civil Rights regulations in the early 70s with things like Affirmative Action. We have had half a century, and billions (more likely trillions) of dollars poured into the effort to get comparable racial outcomes. And NOTHING has worked.
At this stage, short of some grand conspiracy of white people “to keep the black man down” (the Woke explanation) the cause of group disparities must come down to some combination of the following sources:
-Genetic group differences stemming from human bio-diversity, as attested to by a growing mountain of evidence,
-Deep historically situated cultural differences that are almost impossible to change,
-Recently developed behavioral differences that cannot be modified with tools we consider "liberal" and acceptable in the modern world.
Frankly, it doesn't matter which cause, or combination of causes, is ultimately driving the racial achievement gap because the only relevant fact in this political moment is that, short of a cultural revolution or a black swan event), large noticeable differences in the outcomes between racial groups are here to stay.
This feels way too…Twitter-y. Like Dave isn’t writing something generally, he is very specifically trying to “pwn” certain people. I don’t know why the dissident right has a raging hate boner for James Lindsay but they do.
Having said that, there’s something very real here. Like, go back to Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s and tell anyone, anyone, that after removing segregation we would still have many of the same issues 60 years and 2+ generations later and they would have thought you were nuts. Much less busing, racial quotas and preferences in college and hiring, etc.
Like, I don’t want to denigrate Obama, not his fault, but there’s this weird thing where America achieved the highest aspirations of the 1960s reformers, a black president, without fixing many of the socio-economic issues of African Americans. That’s…weird.
Continuing down the same path is not, as Dave paints it here, gross intellectual incompetence but…man, I don’t see anybody reflecting on it, other than the woke. And if you don’t like the woke and you don’t like reactionaries, I think this needs to be grappled with. Like, we Civil Right-ed super hard and Baltimore still sucks, what’s the plan? Keep doing the same thing but harder?
Augusto Pinchete’s memoirs, A Journey Through a Life, WERE translated into English. Around the mid-90s however when Spanish and Chilean socialists and the European international courts conspired to undo the peaceful transition to democracy, (and ensure no dictator will ever hold a democracy referendum or peaceably step down again)… Suddenly all of his works started becoming impossible to find. They have been so completely disappeared that I cannot even find a Jpeg of the first volume. They do not exist on Archive, Zlibrary, libgen, or torrent sites.
If you are one of the old right-wing intellectuals who has an English language copy, putting a scan of the works online would earn you a place in Right Wing Heaven.
…
Ian Smith’s The Great Betrayal (1997) and Bitter Harvest (as far as I know the latter is just an expanded edition of the first?) recount the fall of Rhodesia and the aftermath as retold by the one and only head of the Rhodesia and politician in the subsequent Zimbabwean Legislature.
…
Freedom Betrayed, 31st US President Herbert Hoover’s scathing attack on FDR and the Allied handling of WW2 was, for the most part, finished and edited, casting blame for tens of millions of deaths on US and British bad faith and mismanagement of the crisis… then was sat upon out of political concern (Hoover was involved in several large projects and government functions during the 30s, 40s, and 50s after leaving the oval office) until his death in 1964…at which point it just lay buried!
It was only published in a state where people could read it in 2012! An American president’s largely finished Magnum Opus buried for 50 years.
So, let me warn you before you dive in, that the internet has absolutely eaten Kulak’s brain. I remember him from SSC/the Motte/Datasecretslox and, as far as I can tell, he’s a middle-aged Canadian man pretending to be a radical libertarian e-whore using a Rhodesian propaganda picture overlaid with DALL-E and cat-ears. He’s that online.
Having said that, Kulak is consistently fascinating and this is a smorgasbord of different rare books, ranging from prohibitively expensive to actually banned to…probably actually illegal to own. And props to him, there are at least 3 books listed above that I would either be fascinated to read directly or (honestly preferably) read a review of.
A clever little concept, executed well. Joyous metal, pop metal…I dunno.
Credit to Andrew, this has stuck in my head.
Kill Six Billion Demons,
https://killsixbilliondemons.com/
Continues to be epic. One of the few ”good” woke pieces of art I can think of, by which I mean the setting is fantastically original and not focused on woke politics but they suffuse the story. The White Chain-Solomon story arc remains my favorite and glad to see them return to it, although I hope Solomon does not get a happy ending, he deserves better.
Cold showers are legit. I’m not sure if I’m ready to start doing everything Huberman tells me to but cold showers are…man that feels good. Will say that a lot of the ice bath stuff seems…for the gram, as the kids would say. Maybe I’m doing it wrong but getting into the shower at room temperature water, adjusting, and then getting it as cold as I can reasonably stand is pretty effective.
I am really struggling with ChatGPT and I’m starting to get a…newspaper headline/flashy dashboard vibe. A friend talked me into paying the $20 a month for ChatGPT 4 and the custom models are really, really intriguing. So I spent about 3 hours yesterday morning trying to get a simple scheduler bot to function. All I really want is ChatGPT to do the following:
“Hi. Could you please make a list of events by date and time from the resources shown below. Please only include events occurring between tomorrow, 1/21/2024, and the end of the month, 1/31/2024. Please use the specific links attached. Please list all events by day like this:
December 1st
Hypothetical soccer game at location at time
Hypothetical museum event as location at time
Below are all the event calendars to check.
All performances by the Catastrophic Theater and Dirt Dogs Theatre Company. You can see their schedule at: https://matchouston.org/calendar
All events at the Ion District in Houston after 5:00 PM on a weekday or any time on a weekend, You can see their schedule at: https://iondistrict.com/events/
All FC Dynamo games at Shell Energy Stadium. You can see their schedule at: https://www.houstondynamofc.com/schedule/“
Yes, I use “please” with ChatGPT 4, it never hurts to be polite to your future overlord. Anyway…this failed and ChatGPT seems really bad with “go to this site or page and summarize”. Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong?
Because I keep getting this vibe of…non-actionable results. Like, I see something, it looks cool, but every time I try to get ChatGPT to drill in and make something functional, something I’d actually take action on…it fails.