Thought Dump

chrondog wrote:Cryptic

I don't know if it is just a feature of getting a little older but I just feel totally removed from the zeitgeist. If you'd have asked me about five years ago, I could have given you a confident description of the political/social/cultural mainstream and I would have given you some general prediction of where I thought things were headed. I haven't the faintest fucking idea anymore. It's so disorienting.

How are we going to account for the last year? What is the narrative? It was a profoundly collective event that was experienced very privately. It seems like we have all turned inwards. It seems like this weird social trauma that nobody wants to confront because we don't have the language for it.

Everything just feels exhausted and stale and I don't know what to do about it...

WP64 wrote:It is the only way to explain some of Lindsay Graham's behavior.

He plays no small part in my thoughts about this.

Fear of blackmail is not THE reason I will never go into politics but I know it's really far up there.

oops

I used to be an "environmentalist." But now I drive my car 30 miles a day and generate tons of garbage at work, preposterous amounts of plastic that goes straight into a landfill. I recycle my waste at home, in spite of how I've learned that MOST of the plastic I recycle actually goes straight into the dump.

I walk down my street and see tons and tons of litter everywhere. Plastic bottles, big styrofoam packing chunks, plastic bags as far as the eye can see. I'm always thinking about cleaning all of this up, going to a walk with a big trash bag that I can collect it in. I think about this every day and I've kind of turned it into a story about myself that makes me feel good. In this story, I really do care about the environment and I do my part to help keep my neighborhood beautiful. This story is as real to me as anything that I've ever actually done! It's quite insane, really.

Keeping plastic litter out of the soil is important, I really do believe that. But unfortunately, litter is nowhere near as big of a problem as air pollution and there's absolutely nothing I can do about that except for quitting my job and going to work at a store that I can walk to from home. And of course, someone else would take my vacant job and commute X amount of miles in their gas-guzzling SUV in my place, so what would be accomplished from that?

My wife cannot sleep and loses her mind if it's not cold at night, so the air conditioner is run CONSTANTLY during the summer. We take lots of showers, very long ones. They seem like the very definition of modest, simple pleasures, they are incredibly easy to justify and enjoy. We eat lots of meat. Actually, we are the problem!

I do purchase my electricity from renewable resources (some contractual agreement that makes me pay a higher rate every month), but as I've come to understand it this just causes electricity generated by coal to be "burned off" per regulations when demand is not high enough. Is any energy actually saved in this process?

I suppose I really have let the despair of climate change get to me, I've kind of stopped trying to make a difference in any way because the futility of it will just break your mind if you don't detach from it. The ease at which industries have confused the public and controlled legislation is just too much to bear! This leaves you with little options other than resorting to eco-terrorism, but that only feeds into a counter-productive narrative that will be incredibly easy to sell to the public the moment that anyone actually completes the puzzle by providing the sort of violent act that hasn't yet happened. The day any of these people really get what's coming to them is the day that environmentalism becomes a scary word and a culture issue that the right will seize upon and amass even more power under.

What can you do?

I'm really not trying to bring anyone down, sorry if I've done so!

Convincing individuals that pollution is actually their fault is one of the greatest pieces of trickery big business ever pulled.

Pushing the responsibility for the endless waste generated by companies producing packed goods onto the individual consumer was a brilliant bit of psychology, absolutely.

WP64 wrote:

chrondog wrote:Cryptic

If you'd have asked me about five years ago, I could have given you a confident description of the political/social/cultural mainstream and I would have given you some general prediction of where I thought things were headed. I haven't the faintest fucking idea anymore. It's so disorienting.

How are we going to account for the last year? What is the narrative? It was a profoundly collective event that was experienced very privately. It seems like we have all turned inwards. It seems like this weird social trauma that nobody wants to confront because we don't have the language for it.

Everything just feels exhausted and stale and I don't know what to do about it...

Might be time for a reorientation if not being "connected to the zeitgeist" is so disorienting. What value was there in being able to describe that narrative? It clearly gave you a sense of calm, but what was the practical application?

Finding personal value in life decoupled from the meaningless flow of modern news media is essential, I think.

chrondog wrote:Might be time for a reorientation if not being "connected to the zeitgeist" is so disorienting. What value was there in being able to describe that narrative? It clearly gave you a sense of calm, but what was the practical application?

Finding personal value in life decoupled from the meaningless flow of modern news media is essential, I think.

Absolutely. To be clear, I was never interested in being 'plugged in' so that I could supply fresh hot takes. My intellectual curiosity has mostly been channeled into social theory. That is basically my one true interest. Being able to develop concepts to describe some social phenomena is actually an incredibly rewarding, creative, and collaborative intellectual process. I just enjoy doing that and it seems like the linkages that enable it are breaking down, which is very sad for me...

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/29/1050454729/gop-rep-adam-kinzinger-who-voted-to-impeach-trump-wont-run-for-reelection

Total cowardice

Abhors extremism and tribalism, so he's stepping aside to completely gift his seat to a candidate who will most certainly embody everything he says he doesn't stand for.

I cannot WAIT for Kinzinger to die. Might be a while, but I'm in this motherfucker for the long haul, let me tell you!

I never once literally thought that Vladimir Putin was "controlling" Donald Trump like a puppet or that Russia tried to get him elected because they thought they were going to be able to control him. I was extremely online from 2015 to 2020 and I never once saw this idea seriously put forward anywhere aside from clickbait journalism or random speculation.

Seems like one of the big takeaways from people doing Trump Presidency post-mortems is that both the left and the right were equally deranged. That people who supported Trump were obviously fooled by his birtherism accusations towards Obama and were just as obviously fooled by his "false claims" that the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen from him. But a huge chunk of the left were actually just as eager to buy into conspiracy theories, apparently believing that Putin was speaking into Trump's ear and telling him everything to do, aiming to control America from the shadows or something.

I first encountered this or a variation of it in the final episode of Adam Curtis's Can't Get You Out of My Head (airing less than a year before the election, so obviously that was not addressed in it but he seemed very adamant that Both Sides were equally detached from reality and just as culpable when it comes to sharing the blame of what is wrong with this country. (IF I AM REMEMBERING THIS WRONG, PLEASE CORRECT ME). It has also come up on multiple occasions in the 10 or so episodes of Chapo that I've listened to over the past couple months.

Am I just completely out of touch? Do I have a very selective memory of what actually happened over the last five years? Am I total moron for believing that it was good to investigate Trump and his staff's meetings/correspondence with Russian agents, or believing that was worth taking seriously? Because it seems like now everyone is like "if you ever cared about that, then you gave into hysteria and your emotions and you're obviously an idiot."

There were individuals in the media and randos on social media saying that Putin was controlling Trump, sure. But now it seems like it's been decided that those people can represent all of the "resistance" and that's proof that anti-Trumpers are just as bad as MAGA devotees.

Have you ever encountered these ideas? Am I misreading them or blowing one aspect or another out of proportion? Drives me up the wall I tell you

Like I think there's some exaggeration out there about the Trump/Putin relationship but it comes from an actual place: 1) Russia helped Trump, Trump's campaign was at least open to receiving that help, and Trump was oddly and alarmingly deferential to Russia on multiple occasions 2) Trump and his allies were always so defensive and secretive about the relationship leaving a lot of room for speculation. Pretending that's on par or even in the same ballpark as Q or Pizzagate is beyond silly and pure opportunism from the right (and weird factions of the left).

It is very similar line to that one taken with Russian interference with the referendum to leave the EU here Undo. Where Russia making a nuisance of themselves? Yes, it's what they do. Are there some dodgy indiviuals around the various Leave campigns with ties to dodgy Russian money - also yes.

I don't think that means Brexit was a Russian plot or that shadowy figures control people or anything like that. In the same way I don't think Facebook adverts are the reason that Trump and Brexit won out.

There are some on the left who probably do fall into the trap of blaming Russia for a lot of things that have happened 2015-2020 that they didn't like and maybe they find it comforting to go all in on Putin the puppet master and to believe everything Carole Cadwalladr says about Brexit, Trump and Facebook algorithms as that's easy than any serious analysis of how the fuck the Remain and Clinton campaigns were so dreadful they didn't win against ridiculous opponents.

The looks I still get from my liberal family members or friends when I suggest HRC was a terrible candidate that lots of people despise over Facebook bots radicalizing our aunts and uncles as the reason behind that particular election is something!

Gee I’m Glad It’s Raining from the 1987 feature film Ernest Goes to Camp is an uncredited Kristofferson song, and that is in my head cannon forever.

Jesus Christ has this board really been here since 2014 or earlier?

Christmas 2012!

Wild...

My wife is a jew. But I still get my kids xmas gifts despite not really caring about the holiday. I just like the passive 'fuck you' in a certain sense.

I'll always love to troll.

I wish lightening would strike every jerkass sonofabitch who has both a fascist thin blue line flag bumper sticker and a “don’t tread on me” license plate.

Did Al Franken ever have a chance of becoming president?

The bench is completely fuckin empty, right now I see no one and I mean no one with a shred of charisma and potential who could potentially spar with even the dumbest assholes on the right who can sleepwalk into power because grievance and emotion and lies trump facts and reality and compassion at least 90% of the time, and they know this.

I'm a stupid fucking borderline aspie who loses his ability to think straight whenever someone is about to take my picture. You could cut out half of my brain and I'd still know not to do that.

Maybe this dude always sucked and I'm indulging in fantasies of alternate futures because there's a comfort in that that's nowhere to be found in anticipation of what's to come. Lay it on me if that's the case!

Most of the people I've known in my life who could be called "talented musicians" had absolutely terrible and boring taste in music.

This bothered me for a long time but the thing is a lot of terrible music is just really fun and instantly rewarding to play. Or it confirms lessons about the "right" way to play music that more interesting/unpredictable music usually does not, and that just creates a feedback loop that never ends.

A dump of a thought if there ever was one

The answer to this may be different depending on where you live.

Is it legal to insult strangers in public? Just walk up to someone and say, "wow, you're ugly!"

Is this protected speech?