Category: culture

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On the Election Loss

It’s been a long day. With respect to the feelings of many people I care about, Trump is not a win for America. You may not think so, but I’ve been listening to you all along. I’ve been listening, but you haven’t fulfilled your end of the bargain—you’ve neither listened, nor had anything much to say.

There’s been no “smear campaign:” We’ve only taken Trump at his true, in-context, and utterly un-American word. You “feel” that the economy was better under him, while the numbers call it a wash. You believe that crime is rising where it’s falling. The border is such a major issue for you, but when Republicans killed the bill that was everything you wanted because Trump wanted to, quote, “run on immigration,” you didn’t bat an eyelash. You fail to hold Trump to any standards, and while you’ll privately oppose many of his and his cronies’ policies (tax cuts for the rich, money in politics, unfettered corporate power, healthcare, contraception, Ukraine, etc.) you don’t speak out. You won’t speak out. And it’s only going to get harder.

If the last decade has taught us all nothing else, it’s that all expectations are off. The guardrails do not hold. Polling doesn’t work anymore. Reporting doesn’t work anymore. Only bold repetition seems to break through, and that is an idea whose master we do not wish to acknowledge. 

We treat America’s democracy as a thing carved in stone, rather than a gentle flower we must guard. Democracy is a burden, which is why it’s been allowed to fail in so many places, already, in this young century. It’s our burden. But when we allow the information space to, as Steve Bannon recommended, “fill with shit,” we shirk our duties as citizens. And no amount of projection and finger-pointing can overcome the tarnish on your intellectual honor from believing only what you want to believe.

Trump can’t stop lying. He’s in too deep. But whatever of his policies you support, you must not play along. That way lies nothing of honor, value, bravery, or love.

***

These were my thoughts Wednesday, the day after Donald Trump was elected to a second term as U.S. President. They’re messy, but they’re honest.

There is something important I left out, though. I won’t waste your time with paragraph after paragraph. It’s this: Social progress is not zero-sum. Putting in “the leaf” doesn’t make your place at the table any smaller. (And the good man must then ask: What if it even did? What would that change?) Populists have been leading flocks astray with this dead meme for well over a century, that being concerned for someone who isn’t you means not being concerned for you. I have to wonder how small their hearts are. Whatever can be used to “other” one’s fellow man and pretend that they, uniquely, don’t matter, is fair game.

When shamed out, as they always are, they invert the play. They steal the language of those they’d marginalize. It’s the same premise. It’s childish. That someone else has suffered doesn’t imply that you haven’t. That your and your neighbor’s positions are precarious doesn’t mean that you need to find a way to fuck him out of whatever he’s got left.

We’re supposed to be One Nation, and we’ve elected a divider–a man whose chief talents are projection and insults. This is not baseball. Enjoy your truimph, but look forward to the hangover. Whoever won this election, America lost.

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The Day I Cancelled Netflix

Wow. 2011. That’s a long commitment. It was a DVD service then. My computer had a slotloader drive. They’d get just about anything you asked for, if you waited long enough.

Then they added streaming. That was fun.

Then they tried to split discs and streaming, and had to do a desperate volte-face.

Eventually, they dropped discs anyway.

Original productions. Some bad. Some great. Most average. Most expensive, until they weren’t. Three seasons of Dark, but 1899 only survived one. The streaming wars peaked. No one could burn money like they used to.

But they were profitable.

And, although profitable, they wanted more.

We all dropped cable, because it cost too much, and was full of loud ads and cheap garbage shows. Then the streamers all… wanted to make cable again.

But this time it’d be 100% vertically integrated. Watch it here, or don’t watch it at all. We hated that, but the suits loved it. Dark again… Dark had the best soundtrack of any tv show to date, but you couldn’t buy it. You had to build it your own damn self.

Rubbish.

Buy a great show, so you could watch it without internet? Forget it.

Rubbish.

And that’s the world–that’s the market Netflix gave us.

They make more per customer if they show us ads. So why not jack the prices up? Again, and again, and again… Finally, they were going to switch us automatically to an ads plan. Or charge more for the same thing. No, not worth it.

2011. Damn. But, money only understands money. Getting it, or losing it.

FAFO.

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Umberto Eco on Fascism

It’s worth now revisiting 1995 when Umberto Eco–child of Italian Fascism–explained to us the 14 hallmarks of fascism, be it Italian, German, Spanish, Russian or otherwise: Ur-Fascism. Here’s a gloss in reverse order; ellipses mine, emphasis his.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak… All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights… For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will… Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction… There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People… Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death… The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler…

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare…

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies… However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak…

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia…

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups…

5. …Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism… The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden)… The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition… As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message….

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The New iPhone Doesn’t Have a Floppy Drive

Let me tell you a story. It begins with a confession.

I can’t wear earbuds. It feels like my ears are being sexually violated. I tried to make myself get used to them  when I moved to LA, because I had them, and my headphones broke, and I was broke, and moving to LA has a lot to do with putting up with the feeling of sexual violation. It didn’t take.

After that sad chapter in my life, I settled on a range of small over-the-ear phones that were a thing at the time from a few manufacturers–speakers that clipped over the ears, with an under the chin cord but no band between them, and a nifty little spring-loaded reel that retracted the cord into the right-hand earphone when not in use. I wore a pair until the cord worked loose from the headphone jack (as usual), then another manufacturer’s pair until the same happened.

By then the world had moved on. Over-the-ear separates were out. They couldn’t be found. Not even on closeout.

I ended up sinking $65 into a set of Japanese imports from an Amazon shop. They came in a surprisingly garish Japanese white, in a garishly Japanese box.

Within a week of arriving, the cord snagged on a door handle in the Harvard CoOp and snapped right off the headphone jack. Have you ever tried to disassemble a stereo mini jack in hopes of re-soldering five hair-thin wires (stereo R +-, L +- and ground, I assume)? I have.

After that, I determined never to go back to wires. I got a cheap pair of behind-the-head Bluetooth headphones and wore them until the left speaker died–a good three years. With some research, I chose to drop some cash on a decent pair, and now live in a pair of Marshall Major II Bluetooth headphones.

Are there tradeoffs to going wireless? Sure. I have to recharge my headphones–once a week with the Marshalls, every day or two with the cheap pair. SUVs and their particularly overpowered Bluetooth systems tend to make the audio drop out now and then. That’s… honestly it. Any but the lowest-end pairs even let you plug a mini jack in and use them as wired headphones when you want.

So yes, Apple dropped the mini jack from the new iPhone, to free up space for an optically-stabilized camera and a better antenna, and make the phone waterproof down to about a meter beneath the surface. (Not to bury the lede.)

I’m never sure how much is really behind a large surge of indignation on the internet. Being basically an attention sucking machine, the public mouths and faces of those we encounter here are not only constructed, but constructed as economically as possible. (Economically from the standpoint of the internet’s real currency: Attention. Again, not to bury the lede.) Everyone is Dilbert in his underwear holding a business-suited puppet of himself up to the webcam for a teleconference.

I’m old enough to remember when Genesis did and Nintendo didn’t, when Facebook was MySpace for college students right down to the dorm room whiteboard skeuomorph, when the MCP was just a chess program, and when Apple released the original iMac–without a floppy drive.

I remember the gnashing, the whining, even from people who should have known better. USB flash drives barely existed and cost way too much–small hard drives ruled their niche then. Everyone doing serious work still had a Zip Drive (or even a Jaz Drive). Yes, the floppy was old, but it was venerable! It still Just Worked. It was cheap. It was standard. It was backward-compatible. It was 1.2MB a disk and not even that formatted, and that was shit even back then.

The headphone jack is on its way out, and we–all of us–are going to be fine.

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Best Sellers

Just time this week to check in on the Times Best Sellers List…

Hardcover Fiction

1. THE LORDBURN REPETITION, by Kluey Part Smith. (Niffen, $26.00.) Super spy Rex Coulter must stop a large thing from happening.
2. THE PERSPICACITY OF DOUBT, by Lucy Blovine. (Scor/Delfine, $26.50.) Summering on Wild Horse island, recent divorcee Hailiey McElle-Saphire meets an otherwise perfect man with a dark secret.
3. CHURNED, by James Patterson and Olivia Sciatica. (Buffet, $28.00.) Ribald O’Makepeace will stop at nothing to avenge his carpool. Patterson Vermeers his name onto an eleventh USA Original-grade potboiler this year.
4. ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BOURNE BORING, by Eric Von Lustbader. (Taipei Holdings Corp, $24.99.) Renegade agents delve underground as Von Lustbader continues to serve out some karmic purgatory inside the long-dead corpse of Ludlum.
5. PIECES OF A LIFE ONCE LIVED, by Katherine Loft. (Shumberg, $26.00.) Nothing much happens.
6. A MURDER IN THE COLON, by Dee Brettfield. (Snorium Mystery, $23.95.) Questions must be answered when bodies begin turning up outside homicide dick-turned-doc Rue Level’s Hollywood practice in Brettfield’s latest colonoscopy-flavored opus.
7. HEART OF THE HEART, by Lisette Poe. (Snaf Books, $26.00.) A story about sisters in which they don’t just plain hate each other.
8. STAR WARS: QUORUM OF THE JEDI: THE FORCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS, by Callista Quing. (DF, $24.00.) A whole galaxy at war and it’s the same ten goddamn planets and cast members. Followup to Star Wars: Quorum of the Jedi: Lodgers of the Force.
9. JEREMIAH’S SWORD, by J. Luke Taper. (Swaggart Press, $23.99.) A young man’s flaming sword thrusts the spirit of God into the backs of the unrepentant in Taper’s post-Rapture Christian allegory.
10. DEAD IN THE FAMILY, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) Sookie Stackhouse is exhausted in the aftermath of a Fae war.
11. PROFOUND TONE, by Paulo Coelho. (Shiv/Livertoot, $27.95.) The author of The Alchemist pads out another child chapter book plot with his trademark Buddhist Monk Voice.

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. THAT WEBSITE: THE BOOK, by Stu Borgen et. al. (eBooks iPublications, $22.99.) That website, in book form for some reason. Destined for the can.
2. IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO HAVE SEX WITH A GENERATION, I WOULD HAVE SEX WITH THE GREATEST GENERATION, by Tom Brokaw. (Culthouse, $24.00.) Further wankery on the generation that beat the Depression, World War II, blacks and women.
3. MR. EIFFEL’S AWFULLY BIG TOWER, by Snake Morley. (B&W/Weege, $29.99.) New revelations on the temporary unpopularity of the monument, from the archives of the Parisian Ladies’ Anti-Berber League.
4. STEPHENIE MEYER: CREEPY, SEXUALLY-REPRESSED MORMON BROOD MARE, by Deedee Copenham. (Salt Press, $22.00.) The authorized biography.
5. FAILED GOVERNOR, by Mitt Romney. (Tankard, $28.50.) The one-term Massachusetts executive explains why he’s somehow relevant to national politics.
6. I’M A CELEBRITY… FUCK!, by some chick or other. (Tarpaulin Books, $23.00.) Yet more reminiscences by the woman who has the routine about- Wait am I thinking of the other one? The one who was always drunk.
7. MY MONEY IS IN MY SHOE, by Lou Dobbs. (Milli Press, $27.00.) Something about immigrants, something about gold, and other stuff it’s getting increasingly hard to classify from the former pundit.
8. IN LEAGUE WITH DEVILS, by Gordon Bott. (Walden Press, $29.50.) It doesn’t matter what it’s about, the crappy university publisher didn’t expect it to do any business and it’ll be backordered for a month.
9. WHEN WE DIE, WE DON’T DIE, by Premaketuur Jones. (Shambhala, $24.50.) Deep meditations on the large “Continue? 10… 9… 8…” screen that appears over our heads when we die if we properly practice spiritual quantum mindfulness soul vibration wellness.
10. …AND HE PROBABLY HAS A TINY PENIS, TOO!, by Laura Ingraman. (John Birch Books, $24.95.) Ann Coulter takes us on another tour of vitriol, crackpot research and insinuation. Laura Ingraham. Whatever.
11. COUNTERFACTUALS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Greengreen, $24.99.) Sixteen more hilariously surprising bullshit essays, including “Reevaluating Ethyl,” “Anyone Could Teach Elementary School” and “Caesar Invented the Typewriter.”

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India, Nationalism and Archaeology

East Asian cultural blog A Man With Tea muses on the implications of a request by the Archaeological Survey of India for the return of certain art objects in the British Museum.

On paper, at least, India under the Raj wasn’t the single nation “India” as we know it today, but a massively fractured series of kingdoms and micro-nations. (Think of the Warring States period in China, or Italy until the late 19th century — but cloned many times over.) Each was (in theory) independent, though deeply linked with the others through trade and treaty. Each (in theory) had its own arrangements with the British. In practice they were vassal states to a virtual vassal state (“India”) of Britain.

In ethical terms, there is a difference between taking advantage of a period of unrest to loot art objects, and taking things with the permission of whomever is in charge of the place where the artifacts are located. (In some cases, like Boston’s Japanese art collection, the items were literally being discarded during a period of unrest, and would no longer exist if some foreigner hadn’t taken a shine to them. VERY tricky.) Obviously leaders change, and by the standards of democracy virtually no leader from the past would now be considered “legitimate” — but that’s applying modern ethics to the past. Modern ethics are a modern technology.

Indians are wonderfully legalistic, and I’d be a little disappointed if they didn’t try to make a case for having the items returned. But Indians have a bad habit of building a convoluted case and then BELIEVING it too. I’m afraid that what this probably comes down to is nationalism, and that’s something that I, personally, have no truck with.