I’m beginning to no longer recognize American left or right. I see the names of things being treated as though they were absolute — so often!
Everything is turning into nouns.
Author: admin
‘woke’ – ii
I take it back about the ‘woke’ idea being a bit toxic. Everyone needs a slogan. It’s fine.
There is something that bothers me in the undertone of we-alone-are-not-dreaming. But I guess one needs some sense of trueness. Something which feels like you can see what’s there. So, yeah. Okay. Woke. I don’t think I can use it for myself.
I only wonder if it is the ‘woke’ versus the ‘saved’, whose certainty will turn out to have been a fantasy?
amendment/commandment
It’s a pity how much the word ‘amendment’ resembles the word ‘commandment’, and that there are ten of each.
It breeds confusion. And, sadly, the second of the amendments seems to contradict the sixth of the commandments.
In a fundamentalist mind-set
commandment is to amendment as Saint Nicholas is to Santa Claus
An important joke
Three statisticians go hunting. The first shoots too low. The second shoots too high. The third lowers his gun and says to the others, ‘Got him!’.
Borders
It is a curious property of music that it can cross borders without breaching them.
‘Woke’
This is already a tired slogan. It reeks of bogus enlightenment. It alienates all who cannot be included, which means a large number of thoughtful people.
Some of the ideas to which it corresponds in real life are good.
And I suppose it has the quality of being memorable, which is why I might mention it.
Truth is not as attractive as fiction
I think it is one of the odd and unattractive side effects of the business I’m in (music, performing arts) that a certain amount of intellectual laziness is required to get things done in the first place – and that industriousness is used mainly for reinforcing the tropes of being ‘convincing’. It may be time to start over.
Here’s an interesting view, on the attractiveness of lies:
New Yorker
Two fascinating reads. And the podcast has a tone of voice I’ve missed. I think I must subscribe to the New Yorker from afar.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier
For a bit of renewed faith in the English-speaking world…
Thrashing
I’m not a computer scientist, but I think this accurately describes a lot of the effect that computers have on behaviour.
In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)
There is so much data to to get – so many potentially useful resources in so many places, that it becomes hard to get tasks done. They are never done.
I suppose that’s not entirely a new thing, but perhaps it was easier at one time to say, I have enough information, I will put it forth.
It’s probably true of reading, too, not just writing. How to settle upon a given thesis, knowing that infinite objection or variety of interpretation lies just beneath?
Another view on print/text
I think this fellow is writing similarly. When we pretend that we are ‘suspending disbelief’ at the movies, we are actually believing, much more than we would admit. And when the speed of communications is messing with our personal event horizons, there is danger of consequential confusion.