Tuesday, July 28, 2020
find:replace
oscar wilde might have once said "the bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." given that most of his life took place in the gilded age, and the last 150 years of economic trajectory, the present author contends that the more apt quote would have been "the capital is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding capital." jeff bezos' net worth jumped $13 billion in a single day. no bureaucracy could ever even dream to expand like that.
Monday, July 27, 2020
what we owe each other when we owe each other the entire world
at the end of The Good Place, the main characters effectively make the choice that what they owe each other in their time of relative immortality is suicide. within the bounds of a limited lifespan their suicide does not reside - as they could choose to exist forever - but within the bounds of all the things we do as humans; eat, laugh, sleep, love, read, etc., it does still reside. it is a suggestion that in many ways runs counter to both what the show has long suggested, and what the book they so heavily display, What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon, suggests. and if you're willing to go really meta and include that the characters of a fictional show owe to the audience what they owe each other in the context of the show - after all, fictional characters don't feel emotions, but actors and viewers do - then the argument breaks down more completely. for the record, it is an entirely good show otherwise.
two days before lockdown i walked into a Target store at 9am. the shelves had been picked over. i kept my distance from the patrons, none in masks, as at the time we didn't have any consideration towards wearing them really, all eyeing each other like we were going to pounce, as if the unknowable was worse than the knowable, as if any sudden movement might catapult a biological weapon upon their bodies. back then we feared touching things others had touched. we now know the virus has been entirely worse than we could have ever imagined, ravaging a country that has consistently, repeatedly blown by worst case scenarios. the suspicion is gone when i go in the store now. people crowd for meat and produce. what we know now can't hurt us. it makes sense, in retrospect. this is a country whose social niceties are built on some assumed, unknowable providence affecting only those whose skin is darker, whose taste in intimacy is a little different. there lies the fear. they are something we can't understand. they will hurt. but the things we do know about other people? well, he's not 'a racist,' he's not 'a sexist,' he's my neighbor. he's a nice guy.
the first time i went to Meijer i watched as a patron walked out, a single item in his hands as he passed through the front door. his body a potential vessel, all for an 8 dollar pack of beer. i watched as another patron picked up a makeup kit, turned it over, looked at it, and put it back, then grabbed another, and repeated the ritual. i thought about how we owe each other the end of such rituals, the end of quick trips, of potentially sickening my wife for some flowers, some beer, some snacks. of the employees who worked their, of those who still had to shop with the kinds of things that make this virus much more dangerous. the justification of everything we did was suddenly fed through a much more stringent and demanding system. do you really need this? don't we owe each other not going out? i thought of all the times i didn't even realize i probably did something that some health expert would grimace at. i approached life with the kind of mindset of trying to be conscientious of everything, on guard of everything, prepared for anything. "that is exhausting," some might say, but in a way it almost came easy to me. it is already my own ritual, thanks to perpetual anxiety and self-doubt. i was asked less of than most anyone else.
i think about how often i washed my hands before all this; easily 15+ times a day, and how that has only increased. i think about my germaphobe mother and my decent memory allowing me to track all places i touched before i washed my hands when i would come back with takeout in the days of lockdown; the doorknob, the fridge handle, the faucet handle, the phone, the wallet, the keys. it could all be wiped down. unlike the makeup kit. then a month into it, the cdc revised their data and suggested transmission via surfaces is very difficult.
there has been no attempt at any philosophical cohesion or kindness from authorities, of course. it was to be expected. at no point has anyone in charge spent a single second lingering on the thought of what they owe the 335 million lives they are in charge of. no book, from scanlon to stephenie meyer to r.l. stein has ever been picked up to perhaps inspire some sort of morality in them. their existence lies entirely in a realm that they get to define, free from any responsibility to others. the justification is whatever they want it to be; its flexibility (trump, et al) bends contractualism to a point where it is almost meaningless. yes, they are seeking to justify themselves, but how they do so, or the ways in which they do so, are so selfishly anarchic that there is no reasonable response or summation to take from it. they simply justify to exist. and to say that is justification just boils down this whole thing to a circular argument to end all circular arguments. its justification is itself. it is really contractarianism; an attempt to simply justify to get what they want, a strategic blunder into selfish narcissism and cruelty, honed by years of wielding it. kant would cry, perhaps. rawls is left even worse off; at no point do they consider themselves to possibly be anyone else.
that is also us. 60+ years ago the first evidence of global warming came to light. massive, unendingly powerful corporations and political parties have done their part to cover it up, hide it, insinuate its dishonesty. if there's one thing i know, it's that we are all relatively powerless in the face of massive institutions, whether when combating a pandemic, climate change, or just the day-to-day grind of life. and yet i sit at a traffic light surrounded on all sides by pickup trucks and wonder if maybe america's complete lack of shared sacrifice and community has made this worse, institutions or not. i wonder if we are all contractarianists, justifying our consumption, our travel, our habits simply as a matter of existence, pushing a terrible externality off into a future we can't really grasp, willing to destroy a planet not just our kids will inherit, but that we are inheriting right this second, every second.
i think of what that means. the sheer weight of probability, of safety, of moral goodness, seems as if it would crush any soul. should i put a mask on in a drive through? i make sure to turn my head towards the interior of my car when i say thank you, so that i never talk to the worker. but then do they not hear me? am i rude? does that even matter right now? before covid it seemed that drug overdoses and suicide and other deaths of despair having a seemingly exponential increase was already entirely impossible for any single person to comprehend or seek to help. now we have... this. maybe there is too much to ask of us all. i guess i am lucky, still. imagine waking up in 1940 and wondering; what if Germany actually wins? imagine waking up in 1918, in the midst of a global war and pandemic. imagine waking up during the bubonic plague, or when pol pot's troops came knocking, or genghis khan's, or european colonizers, or, or, or. we wake up now, though, with a planet on the precipice of nearly unfathomable damage and neglect. our only planet.
i will ask of myself more. because scanlon was wrong to say we owe each other right action, right principles, on reasonable ground. reasonableness is simply the qualifying of status quo, a way to try to frame things that aren't as things that are, a sort of comfort pill that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. reasonableness reflects an unknowing and morphing quality of majority. many terrible things are done out of common sense, out of what a large group of people accepts. that supposed reasonableness is constantly morphing and shifting, revealing a startling weakness in argument. it's so undefinable you can not criticize it. you can not muster a framework to forever understand and evaluate, precisely at any given moment, such things as; reasonableness, averageness, majoritarian acceptance. the goalposts are always moving. there is a global pandemic right now masking a global climate catastrophe. it is exhausting, unfair, and unrelenting. how long must we give up our rituals? how long must we live like this? and, as seemingly unimportant and privileged as it is; god would i love to travel again some day, if only to escape the pickup trucks surrounding me at a traffic light. yet it feels as if nothing can be done. as if this is our reality. and yet it has to be. see, scanlon was ultimately wrong, not out of any misplaced sense of human morality, but because we do not have time to owe each other reasonableness, when we are running out of time to owe each the other the entire world.
two days before lockdown i walked into a Target store at 9am. the shelves had been picked over. i kept my distance from the patrons, none in masks, as at the time we didn't have any consideration towards wearing them really, all eyeing each other like we were going to pounce, as if the unknowable was worse than the knowable, as if any sudden movement might catapult a biological weapon upon their bodies. back then we feared touching things others had touched. we now know the virus has been entirely worse than we could have ever imagined, ravaging a country that has consistently, repeatedly blown by worst case scenarios. the suspicion is gone when i go in the store now. people crowd for meat and produce. what we know now can't hurt us. it makes sense, in retrospect. this is a country whose social niceties are built on some assumed, unknowable providence affecting only those whose skin is darker, whose taste in intimacy is a little different. there lies the fear. they are something we can't understand. they will hurt. but the things we do know about other people? well, he's not 'a racist,' he's not 'a sexist,' he's my neighbor. he's a nice guy.
the first time i went to Meijer i watched as a patron walked out, a single item in his hands as he passed through the front door. his body a potential vessel, all for an 8 dollar pack of beer. i watched as another patron picked up a makeup kit, turned it over, looked at it, and put it back, then grabbed another, and repeated the ritual. i thought about how we owe each other the end of such rituals, the end of quick trips, of potentially sickening my wife for some flowers, some beer, some snacks. of the employees who worked their, of those who still had to shop with the kinds of things that make this virus much more dangerous. the justification of everything we did was suddenly fed through a much more stringent and demanding system. do you really need this? don't we owe each other not going out? i thought of all the times i didn't even realize i probably did something that some health expert would grimace at. i approached life with the kind of mindset of trying to be conscientious of everything, on guard of everything, prepared for anything. "that is exhausting," some might say, but in a way it almost came easy to me. it is already my own ritual, thanks to perpetual anxiety and self-doubt. i was asked less of than most anyone else.
i think about how often i washed my hands before all this; easily 15+ times a day, and how that has only increased. i think about my germaphobe mother and my decent memory allowing me to track all places i touched before i washed my hands when i would come back with takeout in the days of lockdown; the doorknob, the fridge handle, the faucet handle, the phone, the wallet, the keys. it could all be wiped down. unlike the makeup kit. then a month into it, the cdc revised their data and suggested transmission via surfaces is very difficult.
there has been no attempt at any philosophical cohesion or kindness from authorities, of course. it was to be expected. at no point has anyone in charge spent a single second lingering on the thought of what they owe the 335 million lives they are in charge of. no book, from scanlon to stephenie meyer to r.l. stein has ever been picked up to perhaps inspire some sort of morality in them. their existence lies entirely in a realm that they get to define, free from any responsibility to others. the justification is whatever they want it to be; its flexibility (trump, et al) bends contractualism to a point where it is almost meaningless. yes, they are seeking to justify themselves, but how they do so, or the ways in which they do so, are so selfishly anarchic that there is no reasonable response or summation to take from it. they simply justify to exist. and to say that is justification just boils down this whole thing to a circular argument to end all circular arguments. its justification is itself. it is really contractarianism; an attempt to simply justify to get what they want, a strategic blunder into selfish narcissism and cruelty, honed by years of wielding it. kant would cry, perhaps. rawls is left even worse off; at no point do they consider themselves to possibly be anyone else.
that is also us. 60+ years ago the first evidence of global warming came to light. massive, unendingly powerful corporations and political parties have done their part to cover it up, hide it, insinuate its dishonesty. if there's one thing i know, it's that we are all relatively powerless in the face of massive institutions, whether when combating a pandemic, climate change, or just the day-to-day grind of life. and yet i sit at a traffic light surrounded on all sides by pickup trucks and wonder if maybe america's complete lack of shared sacrifice and community has made this worse, institutions or not. i wonder if we are all contractarianists, justifying our consumption, our travel, our habits simply as a matter of existence, pushing a terrible externality off into a future we can't really grasp, willing to destroy a planet not just our kids will inherit, but that we are inheriting right this second, every second.
i think of what that means. the sheer weight of probability, of safety, of moral goodness, seems as if it would crush any soul. should i put a mask on in a drive through? i make sure to turn my head towards the interior of my car when i say thank you, so that i never talk to the worker. but then do they not hear me? am i rude? does that even matter right now? before covid it seemed that drug overdoses and suicide and other deaths of despair having a seemingly exponential increase was already entirely impossible for any single person to comprehend or seek to help. now we have... this. maybe there is too much to ask of us all. i guess i am lucky, still. imagine waking up in 1940 and wondering; what if Germany actually wins? imagine waking up in 1918, in the midst of a global war and pandemic. imagine waking up during the bubonic plague, or when pol pot's troops came knocking, or genghis khan's, or european colonizers, or, or, or. we wake up now, though, with a planet on the precipice of nearly unfathomable damage and neglect. our only planet.
i will ask of myself more. because scanlon was wrong to say we owe each other right action, right principles, on reasonable ground. reasonableness is simply the qualifying of status quo, a way to try to frame things that aren't as things that are, a sort of comfort pill that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. reasonableness reflects an unknowing and morphing quality of majority. many terrible things are done out of common sense, out of what a large group of people accepts. that supposed reasonableness is constantly morphing and shifting, revealing a startling weakness in argument. it's so undefinable you can not criticize it. you can not muster a framework to forever understand and evaluate, precisely at any given moment, such things as; reasonableness, averageness, majoritarian acceptance. the goalposts are always moving. there is a global pandemic right now masking a global climate catastrophe. it is exhausting, unfair, and unrelenting. how long must we give up our rituals? how long must we live like this? and, as seemingly unimportant and privileged as it is; god would i love to travel again some day, if only to escape the pickup trucks surrounding me at a traffic light. yet it feels as if nothing can be done. as if this is our reality. and yet it has to be. see, scanlon was ultimately wrong, not out of any misplaced sense of human morality, but because we do not have time to owe each other reasonableness, when we are running out of time to owe each the other the entire world.
Friday, July 24, 2020
schrodinger's results
it has, at various times, and by various people - including a shamanistic mandrill - that "change is good." it has, at various times, and by various people - including a literary celebrity whose parents summoned her by clapping her hands - that "all things come to those who wait." the latter was originally intended to suggest hard work, but, as is the way language seems to do what it wants, is now often used to imply that having patience is key to accomplishment. the end result is a common phrase that suggests you should always be changing or moving, and another that suggests that you should be patient and wait for things to come. given the apparent conflict between the two, the latter will always win, as it's easy to simply then freeze up and do nothing at the lack of a cohesive, simple guide. alas, perhaps if frozen long enough, all things will truly come.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
what we use
it's a common and falsely held belief that humans only use 10% of our brains, popularized most recently by bradley cooper and jake mcdorman, who, if the present author were to use only 10% of their brain, might assume is the same person. said belief explains that some magical, medicinal, or otherwise pseudoscientific item could unlock the remaining 90% of our brain, turning us all into an amazing human/genius. said belief persists even though it is frequently the target of debunking, with unassailable evidence having proven for a very long time that humans, actually, use all of their brain.
however, perhaps in looking to pure data and brain imaging, the world has been going about proving this false belief the wrong way, for, much like many other common sense beliefs (like the belief that you can get a common cold from being cold, even though it's a virus), it continues to persist commonly and frequently, cited and referenced by creators, journalists, and "bradlake mcdooper" type people, a name this author has invented to combine two white dudes in similar media together. perhaps, instead of using physical evidence, we should have been using inference based evidence. from there perhaps, the greatest argument that we only use 10% of our brains does not come from CAT or CT scans, or evolutionary biology, but from the reality that many continue to say, with 100% confidence, that we use only 10% of our brain. this would, at the very least, explain much of the present author's condition.
however, perhaps in looking to pure data and brain imaging, the world has been going about proving this false belief the wrong way, for, much like many other common sense beliefs (like the belief that you can get a common cold from being cold, even though it's a virus), it continues to persist commonly and frequently, cited and referenced by creators, journalists, and "bradlake mcdooper" type people, a name this author has invented to combine two white dudes in similar media together. perhaps, instead of using physical evidence, we should have been using inference based evidence. from there perhaps, the greatest argument that we only use 10% of our brains does not come from CAT or CT scans, or evolutionary biology, but from the reality that many continue to say, with 100% confidence, that we use only 10% of our brain. this would, at the very least, explain much of the present author's condition.
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