6 Underground Fallacy

I'm proposing a fallacy that probably already exists and has a far less obscure name. Just it's 2026 and I have been a long time reflecting on the enormously destructive hot air that entered our atmosphere in the past 10 years.

I named it for a line, a single line of lyrical content in trip-hop act Sneaker Pimps' single "6 Underground" that possibly isn't even styled that way:

"Don't think 'cause I understand, I care."

Though the delivery set to the music makes this sublime lyric much easier to parse in terms of emphasis and importance, here's my attempt to put that into written word:

"Don't think'-cause-I understaaaand .... I caaaaaare."

Now, the informal fallacy, such as it is, is going to wind up being twofold, because with a little rearranging of the lyrics, we can completely lose the meter of the backing track but get:

"Don't think because I don't care, I don't understand."

So the first fold has a warning of fallacious inference Because A do not conclude B. 

And the second fold works backwards as a warning to not infer because not B, do not dismiss A. 

First fold

So a vegan is walking along the street and they see someone sitting at a cafe drinking tea and eating a crumpet.

"Sir! Sir!" they say with some urgency. The man eating the crumpet quickly chews and swallows his last bite.

"Can I help you young...?" The man says.

"I notice you have honey on your crumpet, are you aware that honey is made by bees?"

"...yessssssss?"

"A single bee produces less than a teaspoon of honey in its entire life, it's an animal product, insect exploitation!"

"Yeah, so..."

"So multiple bees worked themselves to death to produce the honey on that crumpet."

"I said 'so' sir."

"Whaaaaaa..."

My example is cartoonish, and I want to say on the record that vegans can be both rad and super tedious. The only thing all vegans all have in common is that they try to avoid eating beef.

In the first fold of this fallacy, one actor assumes that the dissemination of information will lead to some behavioural change, possibly some moral chafing. 

Instead, the very information they have found compelling enough to put at the centre of their identity, they discover has little to no impact on a stranger. Like, the stranger...doesn't...really...care.

And lest I paint myself as someone who is like "fuck the bees" because in writing this scenario, I at least am aware of the commonly held belief that a bee produces miniscule amounts of honey from their lifetime industry, my brain apportions my concern to think in terms of things like the worker bees conscious capacity for suffering, and wonders about other things like "how long does a worker bee live?" (google says 5-7 weeks).

Overwhelmingly, though I probably share the majority intuition - cruelty to social mammal species - I care a lot, cruelty to reptiles that routinely eat each other's young - I care a little, cruelty to insects - don't pull wings off flies and shit, but otherwise I don't give a fuck, cruelty to microbes - I'm not sure cruelty to microbes is even possible.

In the past 10 years, which strictly speaking would be from 2016 which probably is when it went loco bananas but may go back to 2014 or sooner, the 6 underground fallacy such that I assert it exists has grown in potential utility, though because I'm only asserting it now in 2026 that utility may already be on the decline.

To go all "realtalk" which was probably last a popular expression in 2014, a social phenomena emerged in the following behaviour - somebody wrote a something, an op-ed that was basically a meme and it would share a recent and wholly plausible and even shocking finding from a recent legitimate study like "60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment" this could be shared on then-popular social media like facebook, now presumably everyone 1) understands, then perhaps online, or offline someone might have an exchange like the following:

1. Q: (innocent) "How old is your sister?"
2. A: (non-innocent) "Old enough."

At which a participant or bystander to the exchange might attempt to enforce 2) care.

"Don't joke about that. There's a 60% chance your sister has been sexually harassed by now!" or something.

 Now, carefully, I don't want to bismirch the non-innocent responder in suggesting that they do not care about the issue of sexual harassment of in particular, minors. It is however likely, that they care less than the person who calls them out.

The 6 underground fallacy holds, because information and knowledge simply does not oblige someone to care. There is possibly a larger fallacy at play that suggests people optimise for morality, in some form of "begging the question" which for clarity, as a fallacy means you forcibly insert your conclusion into the premises of your argument.

1. Premise: To care about something is not to make jokes about it.
2. Premise: "A" made jokes about something.
3. Conclusion: "A" does not care about it.

Premise 1 is worthy of rejection. Clearly people make jokes about things they care about all the time. But this example has already also demonstrated the second-fold and so is a good segue.

Second Fold

"tohm, tohm!" I turn around. "I was just talking to Nathan, he is going to ask Chris out!"

"You think I like Chris?"

"No, Nathan is a man, Chris is a man. Nathan is inviting Chris to enable eachother's sin."

"Yeah, so?"

"Aren't you aware of what the book of Leviticus says?" 

In this example, we get the second fold. The unnamed speaker, assumes that because I don't care that Nathan is into dudes and if Chris is too, and specifically this Nathan dude then there might be some dude-on-dude action, then I must not understand what a book purporting to contain the revealed design of the creator of the universe has to say on the matter.

In the previous section, under the "realtalk" example of the serious issue of sexual harassment of female presenting minors, I wrote the "call out" response as citing the 60% statistic. Which again, it's a reasonable inference that the speaker by citing the relevant statistic to emphasize the careitude has inferred that the joke-maker must not understand that female minors do get sexually harassed to better than-even odds otherwise they would not make such jokes.

I do not deny that heinous people exist, in particular misogynistic men and boys of a violent disposition and/or possessing of dark triad traits. At no point in my life did I reach the previous conclusion via disillusionment, I never had the illusion from earliest memories of red faced blustering bearded alcoholic men and the fear they induced that I have, that men could be assumed to be generally good.

Learning that men I was frightened of, men I despised, men that I was both frightened of and despised were capable of heinous things only made sense of the fear I felt unbidden. That the scary-red-faced-bearded men that instilled fear in me to my knowledge never did anything heinous possibly disillusioned me of any sense I was a good judge of character.

What I would point out here, as the basis of the 6 underground fallacy, is that moral optimisation may be admirable but fundamentally unmanageable. 

The Silky sifaka is a type of Madagascan lemur that is critically endangered with an estimated fewer than 1,000 left in the wild. Prior to 3 minutes ago, I was unaware of the silky sifaka's existence, but now that you and I know the 6 underground fallacy demands we care. 

And this caring can't happen in isolation, because we also think we know that 60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment. 

You and I would agree both the prevalence with which women receive unwanted sexual attention and the fact that we are undergoing a mass extinction event is bad. But the 6 underground fallacy I assert says that it is wrong to presume moral failing when somebody doesn't care, or doesn't seem to care, or doesn't care as much as you do.

The 6 underground fallacy I feel generates the satirical perfection of Patrick Bateman's "Sri Lanka" speech in American Psycho's film adaptation, where we get demonstrated understanding of world problems of the 1980s without any caring, even Christian Bale's performance captures that Bateman himself is not interested in what he is saying, as a psychopath Bateman is likely incapable of caring, but framing the world as knowledge = obligation rather than knowledge = overwhelm and existential angst, is I would suggest, psychotic.

Not Dunning Kruger

If two people disagree, Occams razor I think would say the simplest explanation is that both parties have different information. Next to that, we go up in simple explanations to one party has considered more information than the other party, as the origin of the dispute.

Invoking theology is a useful pull for this point from the big data set of arguments that have been going on since long before Christianity. Maybe longer than history, we don't know. 

I say it is useful because it can give us a bit of a hierarchy in the above example of the second-fold 6 underground fallacy:

1. tohm doesn't care about Nathan and Chris' same sex attraction therefore tohm must not understand what is "bad" about same sex attraction.

2. The fallacy has already been committed, because tohm does vaguely understand that some line in Leveticus claims man on man action is a sin.

3. But the committer of the fallacy hasn't considered why scripture should be regarded as an authority on anything beyond what the scripture says.

And we could keep going, but frankly, my knowing about the historiography of the bible's authorship and composition is in my view a biproduct of living in a world where people still take it seriously albeit in an unserious/unscholarly way. My feeling is there are sufficient arguments to be understood to be highly sceptical of any revealed theism, long before you need to open the cover of any holy book. (things not worth doing are not worth doing well).

But to a degree, this can apply to numerous applications of the 6 underground fallacy where someone thinks others should care because of a deficit of understanding.

Consider a child who needs to impress upon their parents that they had a bad dream. The child may be confronted by their parents lack of concern over the possibility of monsters in the closet or whatever. The child hasn't considered that the parents have a life time of observational data to know that the supernatural, pretty much doesn't exist, that they maintain a household for the child to live in by attending jobs that have brutal hours compared to the child's, along with a bunch of domestic labour that eats into their leisure time such that the parents don't care about the details of the child's bad dream and their perceived mortal dangers, only getting back to sleep or having some time in which to be adults and not parents.

They (the parents) are likely far more concerned by the valuation and division of domestic labour between them, than the possibility that their child's dream portends an actual attack by a supernatural monster that manifests either in the built in robes or under the bed with the condition of darkness. 

The parents actually "don't care" by the child's perception of their parents lack of distress and poor performative reassurance at 3am on a week night, because they better understand the situation than the child is capable of doing.

As such, I guess this post is imploring you reader to understand that "caring" is a conclusion leapt to, by underplaying how difficult it is to actually attain knowledge - which is a justified true belief, adjudicated by predictive power.

What that last sentence means via example is: You know you have $20 when you can pay for something worth $20 - having $20 predicts the transaction, justifying your belief in having $20 as true. (Quite often, I forget about some direct debit payment, resulting in my card being declined. Sometimes I suspected my balance was low, other times I had an unjustified false belief, and didn't know I didn't have the money.)

TA Adult vs Parent/Child Ego states

Long forgotten by the passage of time for most people, but in the year 2000 Bill Clinton's presidential term came to an end and his VP Al Gore was the Democratic parties candidate to contest the 2000 election against upset candidate George W Bush son of Clinton's 1-term predecessor George HW Bush. 

The election was close, dead close, and there were shenanigans I am not confident I can relate with any accuracy that made the election come down to Florida as decisive. It was called prematurely for Bush on a TV network, and others repeated the projection like blind mules hoping not to get scooped. Gore made a concession speech, but then someone suggested Florida might all be premature he unprecedentedly took-backsied his concession. 

A recount ensued and eventually the US Supreme Court ruled on it in a split decision and one of the opinions said:

On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.

I remember this because Michael Moore who use to be popular, wrote in a book somewhere his interpretation of what Scalia had said which was "the recount should be stopped because if it turned out that Bush was not president, this would hurt his chances of being president." 

SCOTUS is now well and truly stacked, and as a result, lacks legitimacy as an institution, I would interpret Scalia's opinion more charitably as "the recount could cause irreperable harm by giving credence to the idea that US elections were not free and fair and that the country was stolen." However, it doesn't make much sense to me, and Scalia may have intended this and was simply wrong, as a recount could only serve to make clear who was president, so in effect Moore's interpretation holds, and regarding the 2020 election, SCOTUS in the spirit of Scalia could have cited the irreparable harm the could befall Biden to compell Trump to stop all the stop the steal bullshit and concede that a President that was always unpopular as an incumbent may plausibly have just lost an election via that unpopularity.

This is all to say that my lived experience of the 6 underground fallacy is in parent-child ego transaction, terminology from the transactional analysis (TA) theory of psychology. Scalia under Moore's interpretation was parentally saying "Give baby Bush an icecream because he'll go waah-waah" and may as well have been saying "Give the Republicans a president or else they'll go waah-waah" and the 6 underground fallacy is generally employed to imply a party is responsible for the emotional state of a third party.

The detail of whether the invoker of a 6 underground fallacy is coming from parent or child ego state is irrelevant to me. I can imagine both, the danger of the 6 underground fallacy is its potential to have the recipient respond from a parent or child ego state. 

Clapping back, for example is a fairly childish response, as is doubling down. Alternately conceding the fallacious conclusion that caring needs must follow understanding, is a very paternalistic response. TA games often involve movements not just between parent and child ego states, but roles of victim, abuser and rescuer. 

My favorite feature of TA though, is the simple heuristic by which virtually all games can be defeated (more so than 'won') and that rule is: whoever adopts an adult ego state first, defeats the game.

Probably in its essential form, the 6 underground fallacy plays out in the following way:

1. Parent to Child: I told you that upsets me, so why did you do it?
2. Adult: I understand that it upsets you, but I won't take responsibility for your emotional state. I'll respect how you choose to handle your emotions, but I'll make my own choices.

Another, terser, blunter way of stating (2) is "don't think 'cause I understand, I care."

The Fallacy fallacy

From what I've written in this post, some people may feel anxious that what I'm advocating for is complete unaccountability for behaviour. I am not, which is why sadly, any discussion of fallacies practicly obliges the invocation of the fallacy fallacy.

If an argument is fallacious, all it means is that a reasonable person cannot accept the conclusion. Matt Dillahunty, professional magician and atheist debater uses a gumball analogy that I like.

If there's a glass jar filled with gumballs (or jellybeans, or m&ms or whatever) and you assert that the number of gumballs is even, and I say "I don't believe you" and then you assert that I must then believe that the number of gumballs is odd, I respond "I don't believe that either."

There is plenty of caring that follows quite directly from understanding - if you tell me the kitchen is on fire, I will care and rush to assist. If you tell me that humans exploit insect labour for taste based pleasure, my evaluation of the care factor is wholly different.

Where I struggle the most, is with the autonomy I extend to other people in making decisions such as whether to avoid or confront concepts really, that emotionally they struggle with. 

I personally believe that "Confrontation over time can make things better, avoidance, makes things worse."

I have a young relative who has irrational fears (phobias) of insects. They are a child, so to me it is more appropriate to actually deny them agency where I wouldn't an adult stranger, and test the limits to which they can confront these debilitating phobias. At the moment, they are scared of pretty much all insects including bugs that are in almost all cases, harmless, we don't have cockroaches that can get in ears and break eardrums or centipedes or the bombardier beetle (which I'm not even sure is dangerous to humans). It also includes all spiders, even harmless ones like the daddy-longlegs and relatively harmless ones like the huntsman.

To allow a child to persist into adolescence with such phobias seems far more uncaring than attempting to confront those phobias through respectful confrontation, which can be as simple as role modelling calm.

Moving away from children, if someone chooses to avoid rather than confront their triggers, it is hard for me to respect that behaviour, but intellectually at least, I respect the right to do so. I do not feel it is my job to force confrontations. 

Where I struggle most is that society simply can't function by even aspiring to be triggerless. For one, emotional states can be a zero sum game, where the request isn't "don't upset me" but functionally "you be upset so I don't have to be" and for two; greater society needs to be insensitive. In parenting terms this is expressed as "prepare the child for the road not the road for the child" or "you can pave the world or you can make sandals" for adults. 

Public spaces, third spaces, social gatherings need to be accessible and free. 

I like Dr Grande's usage of a car alarm as an analogy - A car alarm that is too sensitive is as useless as a car alarm that is too insensitive. It needs to be calibrated. 

In this sense, both sensitivity and insensitivity need to be respected. The masters of this calibration act are canis familiaris who (human inflicted trauma aside) can discern intent. They know when their tale is stepped on by accident, and when a human kicks them out of malice, and those two things rarely happen in conjunction with eye-contact. They can discern intent from the toes to the knees. 

It seems to me, that people likely have a disadvantage on account of our greater cognitive abilities, our larger vocabularies, that we can confuse ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves and frankly, while I know my emotional intelligence/competence is low, I am not impressed in general by others and suspect that many are disadvantaged by stories and stereotypes that suggest they have some natural advantage in emotional intelligence and empathizing. 

Perhaps a simple example is dinner parties, I understand that some people have weird dietary preferances based often, on the podcasts they listen to, and I also understand that some people have anaphalactic allergic reactions and religious/philosophical beliefs that restrict their diets. I do not care about the former preferences that I do understand, and I do care about the latter restrictions that I also understand.

Furthermore, sorry vegans, but I was once at a party where I quipped "No meat, that's offensive" and my friend pointed out "some people find displaying animal carcasses offensive" when my quip didn't land with that crowd. I better understand the perspective of some vegans and vegetarians, and my quip remains a quip because I personally am not offended by an absence of meat and as such I remain uncaring as to whether animal carcasses are displayed for consumption or not. I do not care if some people have arrived at a world view where they find the displaying of animal carcasses offensive.

Fundamentally, I feel as I've described it the 6 underground fallacy is a sound one. We cannot reasonably arrive at a conclusion that understanding obliges one to care. Furthermore, I dislike the 6 underground fallacy because it is either totalitarian or condescending or both simultaneously. 

Probably the only loose end, which I shall leave loose until I can be persuaded to care, is that the 6 underground fallacy did a lot of damage over the last decade. I think it did, but you are free to both not understand my thoughts on that, nor care.

 

Venezualepstein

 My mentor introduced me to a concept called "the parking lot" and it is probably by now a business training cliche for how to have more effective meetings. You may also know it as a "bike rack" the more eco-friendly urban planning adored alternative.

It's function is simple - whenever somebody interjects a "whattabout"-ism into a meeting, you write it up in a corner of the white-board or create a virtual post-it-note on the shared screen, and that interjection is now "parked" so it will not be forgotten, and the only person with authority to remove it from the bike rack/parking lot is the person who interjected it.

So say you are cussing out your husband for coming home drunk, and he is all like "whattabout that time you slept with one of your students?" that goes into the parking lot, to be dealt with, at some time, and when your husband is satisfied by the issue of sleeping with a past student, he can take it off the list of things to discuss. Now, back to how he is coming home drunk.

The DOJs bungling, incompetent non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files is what was under discussion. The bill passed the House and Senate with bi-partisan support and the President didn't veto it. The deadline came and went and the DOJ made a partial release with both possible errors in relation to redactions - they both failed to redact information that they were meant to redact, and redacted information without explanation or justification that they were explicitly not to redact.

I am neither journalist, nor historian, nor scholar - the timeline is well documented on Wikipedia, prior to the Military abduction of Maduro and his wife from Venezuela, here is how I would have bet:

Trump was almost certainly in the Epstein files, we've already seen enough, though based on the released emails that mentioned Trump by the house oversight committee, I didn't expect anything more. I think Trump possesses (if nothing else) the basic competence of not placing himself in a position of responsibility, as was most public with his speech delivered prior to the January 6th Capital Riot/Insurrection in 2020. He spoke at length about fighting to avoid having the country stolen and injected a final "peacefully" qualifier. 

So I would have bet that what would come out was a lot of correspondence about Trump, and perhaps by Trump and photos with Epstein and Trump that would strain credulity based on what information about Trump's character is a matter of public record, that he didn't have sex with an underage sex-trafficked girl, but nothing concrete.

But now, Maduro was captured, and this dramatic event should, tactically and strategically speaking, have gone straight to the parking lot/bike rack. Press corp. questions about Maduro's capture and arrest should have been framed as "Given the DOJ's non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files by December 19th 2025, what confidence can the public have that Maduro will be competently arraigned, charged, prosecuted and convicted?" and "Was this operation in Venezuala a desperate attempt to generate a smoke screen for what is now reported to be 2 million overdue Epstein files?"

Because now, based on how successful this Venezuala bullshit has been as a smokescreen, and furthermore the "Greenland" hypothetical that is obsessing the UKs press cycle, that is also bullshit (by which Rory Stewart explains the bullshit here) I would now bet the following:

Trump's depiction in the Epstein files is at least as bad as Andrew Windsor's (the former UK Royal) I would bet at this point, that the DOJ will not get around to releasing files that contain mentions of Trump until there is a change of government.

Yo Democrats

It is my opinion that Trump has been routinely overestimated, and overanalysed. 

Trump can be defensively summed up as "the loser's president" he is a loser, for losers. 

His success at winning the oval office, particularly in 2024 I assert will prove to be directly correlated to the creation of losers. For this, and the state of the world we live in, where effectively, the US is spiralling, the Democratic Party bares its fair share of blame in being an ineffective opposition. The nomination of Hilary Clinton as the 2016 candidate, particularly by the superdelegates, such as those in the largest state of California, who declared for Clinton long before the state held its primaries, communicated to me a myopic self-interest of the institution, and particularly in both the figures of Trump and Sanders, the Democrats in particular ignored a growing public sentiment demanding real change.

Change to what? It is probably best summarized as "neo-liberalism" or the "return to profits" of the Reagan-Thatcher years in the 80s that ended the post-war period and effectively social mobility and the middle class, albeit the existing middle class have to endure a long, slow, painful death.

I am tentatively persuaded that a more descriptive name than "neo-liberalism" for the cluster of economic paradigms broadly shared by the international business environment is "Asset management capitalism" the result of which is growing wealth inequality whereby the wealthiest are eating not only the middle class, but eachother to consolidate wealth and exacerbate inequality.

My feeling is, that for me it has always been a red-flag regarding identity politics, that it was embraced by left-wing political parties around the world, despite being niche, unpopular and most importantly despite, in the neo-liberal era, most left-wing political parties around the world having abandoned the working class.

In brief, I noticed that left-wing parties, including the Democrats, couldn't get shit done on climate change, a minimum-wage, housing affordability, education, poverty eradication etc. etc. shit that would help anyone outside the wealthiest 20% in wealthy countries, but largely performative taxing social rituals carried out by private citizens were embraced.

I appreciate that in the absence of campaign finance reform, being a left-wing party that stands for tackling the pressing distribution problem that faces wealthy nations, is difficult. But avoiding this challenge will simply allow more and more losers to be produced by the economy, and losers think "it's gotta be the shoes" losers think the way to prove you are strong is to pick fights all the time. Losers think both apologies and forgiveness are signs of weakness etc. etc.

A brief word on disqualifying the opinions of Celebrating Venezualans

Around the world Venezualans are celebrating the tentative deposing of Maduro, who seems by all accounts an utter pendejo to put it mildly. 

I don't give a shit. The Mexica peoples, better known in the Anglosphere as "Aztecs" were nasty and unpopular. As such, many indigenous groups such as the Confederacy of Tlaxcala, Tetzcoco, Totonacapan, Huejotzingo, Zaachila, Purépecha Empire, Otomi, Chalco, Xochimilco, Mixquic and Iztapalapa allied with the Spanish conquistadors and likely celebrated the downfall of the Aztec Triple-Alliance.

Now, I tend to agree, that colonialism is not all bad. Unfortunately for whatever can be said for colonialism, it is a violent and brutal process historically destroying not just people, but culture and heritage. World heritage. 

It was likely nice to end the Aztec practices of capturing slaves for ritual human sacrifice. Alas, becoming a Spanish territory is no picnic either.

Cortes vs the Mexica and his cousin Pizarro vs the Inca are the two big ones as far as conquest of the Americas go, but Venezuala, Columbia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Belize, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, The Caribbean etc. would all share similar stories with the exception of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. 

Furthermore, Columbus for which Columbia is named, was an objectively awful person by pretty much anybodies standard. There was nothing more devestating he did though, to American Indians everywhere than simply making contact and bringing European diseases to the Americas.

With this history in mind, I had thought that if anybody would take a pandemic seriously, it would be the Mexicans, and if any Mexicans would take a pandemic really seriously, it would be the indigenous scene who reminisce and tell it like it is when it comes to the impact of colonialism...

But no, expectations and intuitions were thwarted. The indigenous circles I was in denied the existence of Covid. Refused to believe in it, yet believed in contradictory conspiracy theories like lab-leaks and plandemics. Refused and avoided vaccinations. I met multiple people who lost one-or-both parents to Covid and still stubbornly clung to denial.

From the perspective of history, and with all due respect to those Venezualans that have been personally effected by the reign of Maduro, the Venezualans now caught up in the moment of Maduro's kidnapping and arrest, they are participating in a long held tradition of conquest, a tradition of fascist narratives and naivete:

Maximilian von Heune: The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do serve a purpose. Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we'll be able to control them.

Brian Roberts: But who exactly is we?

Maximilian von Heune: Germany, of course.

 

Limits of Postmodernity

Postmodernism works, provided you have buffer between power and reality. A position that ultimately isn't tenable.

Lately I've been reflecting on what it means for something to be "bad" as opposed to a word more virulent like "evil" to explain my own emotional investment or lack thereof in things. Something is bad if it isn't ultimately going to work.

"Postmodernism" I should be clear, I am using via the general usage I come across. It likely means something specific in academic circles, but for me it is the general idea that "truth" is a construct determined by power. 

I'm persuaded by Brown professor Glenn Lowry, that money is not a social construction but a convention, but that is a technicality. It is sufficiently constructed and sufficiently neutral to be a good go to example of postmodernism in practice. 

How many bananas are there? This question represents the buffer zone in which postmodernism works, before it breaks down. The question has an answer, but our ability to determine the answer is extremely limited. All over the world there are Schrodinger's fruitbowl situations going where people think they have a banana, forgot they had a banana, expect to have bananas, are going to pick their bananas, are planting next seasons bananas, are going to the store for bananas, dropped their banana. 

The people will wake up tomorrow to discover they in fact, don't have bananas, discover their banana is rotten, have a cyclone take out their banana crop, have a fungus infect their crop, have a bumper crop, have their plantation repossessed or nationalised, realise they need more bananas for the recipe, get offered a free banana and discover a banana was in fact just a decorative plastic banana.

Multiply this uncertainty by everything and you have what all money represents. All the uncertainty in reality tends to be fairly stable, such that in large numbers like a global economy we can generally rely that while we don't know how many bananas there are, we are not going to be so far off as it turning out tomorrow that there are "no bananas" or "everything is bananas."

We expect that markets will quickly and efficiently correct for these uncertainties with price changes. But occassionally, a market can cumulate errors until reality pushes back and we can get a shocking crash. This is literally what happened in the GFC where Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were believed to be as safe as US government bonds, AAA rated by agencies, and they turned out to be worth nothing. There just is no way that tiny pieces of mortgage debt taken out by people with no income, no job and no savings in return for penalty interest rates that could be discharged by mailing the keys to the property back to the lender was as safe a financial product as bonds issued by the treasury of a state with its capacity to tax future generations to pay off the debt.

But for a while, paper wealth was created by the stories being told by those powerful enough to tell them, which could be exchanged for real wealth. People would buy shitty mortgages packaged as CDOs with money, real money that could be used to buy real assets.

That's the bufferzone in which postmodernism can work.

Postmodernism then, firstly requires modernity, it requires people with a capacity for story to be living on the grid. This is to say, they are not capable of feeding and clothing themselves, but instead dependent on massively complicated supply chains that span the globe. This means people can't really comprehend their own lives, but lacking comprehension they still function.

They go to work, and are vaguely aware this activity results in deposits being paid to their bank, a process that is increasingly an abstract operation of numbers. This allows them to go to a supermarket and purchase garlic when it isn't in season, because it is shipped from China or Mexico. If they live in Australia they may go to and from the shops in a vehicle that was manufactured in a factory somewhere around the world and then put onto a ship before being loaded onto a truck and driven to a dealership that then sold it or leased it either to them or some series of previous owners or users. It is fuelled with an oil derivative or charged from the grid both of which people around the world are currently fighting eachother to death about.

Humanity would literally die out, tomorrow, if the citizens of Earth were required to understand things before they used them.

As such, in this modern world where people who need milk don't milk something to get milk, you can tell reality altering stories by creating information that is separate and distinct from knowledge. 

Simple examples, you can tell a story about how popular a political leader is. Ordinary people do not have the resources to verify or investigate such claims. You can pay people just to repeat it, you can obfuscate the inaccuracy of this claim on reality by putting the source of the data behind a paywall so very few people can read the methodology and question it.

You can tell stories about the future that are baseless, like that in ten years we will have solved mortality and everyone will have nanobots in their bloodstream making ongoing repairs to our tissue in real time such that everybody alive can run a 200km ultramarathon. This way the average person can direct their creative energies to a tech-hub for decades before common-knowledge stumbles upon the reality that there is nothing to indicate such breakthroughs are imminent.

Such stories alter reality by having people believe them. Such that even if the stories have no basis in reality, anyone trying to build a working understanding of reality now have to contend with a reality where a bunch of people believe in something unreal. eg. people trying to address catastrophic climate change have to build into their solutions the fact that a whole bunch of people think the issue is a hoax.

Conclusion

The point of this stubby nub of a post, is that yes, thinkers like Michel Foucalt and Derrida and Judith Butler have made genuine contributions to intellectual thought including useful ideas. 

But it operates in this limited space that basically says "a lie can persist up until the point that the truth is revealed."

So yes, power knowledge is a thing, you can class same-sex attraction as a mental illness that spreads through social contagion (grooming) and try to cure it through electroshock therapy for a very long time, but it isn't going to work because homosexuality appears to be innate and just crops up in the population so all you do is increase the suffering for as long as you can persist in the delusion. 

How long such an example can persist is undetermined. Conversion therapy is still in effect in the world, yet other jurisdictions have presumably done enough science based mapping to abandon stories for knowledge and determined that there is no evidence conversion therapy works, and there is evidence it is damaging.

While I concede that postmodernist thought has a place, I think it is bad, as in it can't work. The sum total of postmodernism's promise is that it can make us feel good until our denial can no longer be sustained. 

Personally, I would rather feel bad now by confronting exactly how bleak a situation is, so I can feel better in the future by reacting to reality in some positive action beyond telling myself a feel good story.

Go scientific method!

Australian Social Media Ban for Under 16s and State Intervention in Norms

 I want to keep this brief because the emotion that motivates me is annoyance. 

Australia passed a world first piece of legislation that banned people under 16 from having social media accounts. 

The question as to what will happen if kids get around the enforcement of this ban has been asked and answered, and then, here comes the annoying part - asked again.

Growing up in Ballarat I never touched a cigarette, even though the first photo of me ever tagged on facebook is one in which I have a cigarette in each nostril and earhole, an act of drunken disrespect where I destroyed about $5 of a friend's property. But I knew of Poony the milkbar/newsagent owner who was known to sell cigarettes to children. 

I knew smokers who were 13, and my education that had us role play "peer-pressure" scenarios where I would be offered cigarettes and we had to learn how to say "no" pathetic as they were, were also overkill because it isn't easy to get a 13 year old to share cigarettes, probably because they are neither cheap nor easy to obtain.

Other realities were acknowledged, probably unsanctioned by our education system, but it was useful for me at least, and perhaps an introduction into socioeconomic realities when in a moment of candour Mr. Martin on a hunch asked Erin, an 11 or 12 year old classmate of mine, if her parents had given her cigarettes and Erin said yes.

The fact that kids were able to obtain cigarettes in the mid 90s up until present day is no argument for scrapping a prohibition against underage smoking. 

I had a similar annoyance around the "debate" regarding Melbourne's harsh lockdowns albeit from the opposite direction when they attempted to lock down specific Melbourne postcodes between lockdowns 1 and 2. Locking down postcodes was unworkable, unenforceable and plebs immediately reached for their individual exceptionalism sooner than their sense of social responsibility.

After I don't know, one or two days the Andrews government locked down Melbourne. While it is pure speculation, I suspect the odds are favorable that some meathead planning to flee their fingered postcode to go stay with a relative found a phone call going one of two ways - mostly it would have been "Sure Sheryl it's bloody ridiculous, come on down and we can take the kids to laser tag and other super-spreader activities" OR less often "Don't you fucken dare come here bringing covid and lockdown down on us!" those poor hypothetical Cassandras.

But, entirely predictably, the attempt to surgically lockdown postcodes failed quickly and all of Melbourne went into lockdown 2 which lasted months while the murdoch press raged, and conspiracy theories boomed and dickheads succeeded in nothing but making a bad situation worse. The government that locked us down then won a free and fair election in a landslide.

What is missed, is that in terms of physics and statistics, the City of Melbourne cannot be locked down. Melbourne has more people than island nation of New Zealand, in 2025 the entire state of Victoria has about 15k Police staff, about 12k excluding public servants so administrators. The police are less than 1% of the population, technically as bound by the laws of physics, the police are incapable of administering breathalyser blood-alcohol tests, let alone locking down an entire metropolitan population.

But it is possible, because of human behaviour - most people obey most of the laws of the land. If everyone drove drunk, and ignored the police officer guiding them toward the "booze bus" and just sped off, we just don't have the resources as a society, the police presence to track them down, let alone high-speed pursuits. 

I heard somewhere, in some news report TLDR or something, that 30% of adults surveyed said they would help their children get around the social media ban. I don't know what's up with those parents, I don't know what relationship they have with their child that makes them want to take positive action to keep them on tik-tok. The best argument I heard from youtuber struthless was that for queer kids and disabled kids social media allows them to find communities they simple can't get in RL, but 30% seems way high for the population of kids that fall into those margins. 

What I am prone to imagine, is something like a dance mum, a showbiz mum and weaker, and of course dad's too whether through omission or commission I hold accountable for what likely transpires to be a large personality cohort of morons who think it is important that their kids be internet famous or some shit, as well as drowning time-impoverished parents who need a distraction machine to take away parental attention in order to survive.

But I easily imagine back in the late 80s early 90s when our government like many others around the world began to denormalise smoking based on the adverse impacts on health (that are less obvious than social media's impact on the modal person) that a survey would have shown on the advent of the first ban on cigarette vending machines in public spaces that some 30% of parents said they would buy cigarettes for their children. It's easy to imagine because I met parents well into the smoking ban that not only would give their kids smokes, but offer their kids friends (me) a rip of a bong.

The beauty of a blunt instrument like a citywide lockdown, is that it is easy to enforce when police don't have to go "if we stop this person we have a 116 point checklist of reasonable exceptions for them to be out and about." In Melbourne's lockdown there were just 5 reasons you could be outside your home - shopping trip, exercise, doctor's appointment, essential worker, carer or something. 

Delightfully, most people got it, hence the volume got to a point where our limited law enforcement resources could largely successfully uphold the lockdown. But the percentage of people who do not get the concept of "others" could have been as high as 30%. One thing to throw out from the Covid years in Melbourne, and likely can be generalised to the world, is that if children are too sheltered and spoiled "these days" it is because adults are too sheltered and spoiled too. 

I mean, and I'm working myself into a tizzy, I can recall at the daily press briefings which were so fucking simple literally if the case numbers were going up, the lockdown was continuing for the short-term forseeable future, and if the numbers were going down, the lockdown was continuuing for the short-term but tracking toward ending. I remember journalists people paid to hold power to account asking if a fucking highly contagious virus would make an exception for Easter lunch so fucking authoritarian families could gather at super-spreader events.

Just as a child may throw a tantrum because a parent says they can't have their screen time because they didn't eat their vegetables, we saw plain as day journalists advocating on behalf of adults throwing a tantrum because they couldn't go to the pub for after work drinks because they hadn't gone two weeks without being a disease vector.

It was the same thing with masks, whether they worked or not, mandating masks created a new norm that let everyone know that things were not normal. They are a simple and effective way to put the population on "pandemic alert" mode. When masks are normalised, your boss is unambiguously the arsehole for demanding workers come into the office.

Bringing us back to the beautiful simplicity of Australia's social media ban - for like almost a week now Australia has this new state imposed norm - kids should not be on fucking social media. Maybe 30% of parents hate this, because their tedious unlikeable kids just do shitty viral dances for tiktok so pedophiles can rub one out to them, but there will be 30% maybe more of parents who are fucking whistling and skipping now because they had to get their kids a phone and let them use social media because if they didn't they would be excluded. 

Now it is unambiguous, if you as a parent are putting your 12 year old on social media, you are arsehole parents. And you'll be fine, all you've lost is the ability to gain status and esteem by talking about how your kid is an "influencer" or whatever because very quickly it will not be socially acceptable to do so, but you will absolutely get away with giving your kid social media just like parents in the 90s got away with giving their kids cigarettes and alcohol.

"AI" Hallucinations de-hallucinating Ayn Rand

 There is a special place in hell for people who make Ayn Rand look relevant. I haven't read Atlas Shrugs, but will concede that it is a fucking great title for a book, a trailer in two words that promises drama. I have read "The Fountainhead" was given a copy of it, enjoyed it, but even as I enjoyed it, knew it to be trash. A smut like reading experience, a guilty pleasure.

Looking up Ayn Rand, I found some quote saying "objectivism is stillborn as a philosophy" and while that quote and review may be an apocryphal artefact of my imperfect memory, I believe I could defend it regarding "the fountainhead" - It is an argument from accident, the whole story precedes from presuming a protagonist that is basically omniscient. 

There's a grain of truth, I myself have brushed up against. People by and large, so the modal person, is risk averse - they are not entrepreneurial, they work for a salary under contract, they are not experimental, they seek out vocational training and credentials, they are not ambitious they make consumption choices based on what everyone else around them is doing. 

These are fairly good strategies to survive in the world we live in, but if someone is risk-seeking they swim in a soup of people who actively discourage them from doing so. Even something as simple as booking an international holiday can be met with misgivings, advice to get shots, join tour groups, plan your itinerary, look up trip advisor to make sure none of your experiences touch a frontier.

Then we can turn to reality TV to better understand the reality that renders Rand's objectivism, and to some extent The Austrian School of Economics, philosophically stillborn. 

American Idol, or Master Chef, or So You Think You Can Dance, or The Voice, or even popping down to your local Comedy open mic night and you will be confronted with the spanner in the works of a philosophy based on "everyone should get the fuck out of creative people's way."

That spanner I call "delusion" relative to gigging as a musician, or apprenticing as a kitchenhand, or building up a social media following for your dance troupe, these reality shows throw open the doors to a frictionless audition process where anyone can come join a line that is kilometres long, in their nearest metropolitan area and queue all day for the chance to be given a chance by a production assistant to audition in front of a panel of celebrities, we still see a curated sample of the most delusional people in regards to their own abilities. 

What we don't see are the vast number of hopefuls that turn up that are neither good nor interesting. From establishing shots of a camera showing the lines, we know that this is approximately 90% of dreamers. I would also point out, that the liberal application format of these shows has also produced largely mediocre results.

Kelly Clarkson, inaugural winner of American Idol can probably be described as modestly successful, what needs must be considered is the incredible success of American Idol then as a publicity campaign. I believe Harry Styles came out of a reality TV process, and there's probably a few others. I'm located in Australia and our inaugural winner Guy Sebastian is a small market analogue to Kelly Clarkson. Later winners were nowhere near as famous, many go financially backwards due to the exploitative contracts they sign and routinely are outperformed on a global stage by people who write their own songs, gig, send demos to record labels, crowdfund tours etc. 

The biggest source of friction a talented and creative individual can face, are all the untalented and uncreative people out there that vastly outnumber them but nevertheless compete for the same resources.

All of which is to say, Ayn Rand, The Austrian School of Economics etc. that rail against state interventions like protectionism and regulation and taxation for holding great men back. Its stupid, these things hold back the 90% of us that aren't great from making life hell, a bulwark against stupidity like the human propensity to keep giving money to people who don't need anymore. 

I could go on. Hopefully I've impressed upon you, that I in no way endorse making the writings of Ayn Rand the cornerstone of your personal philosophy. To do so requires wilful ignorance of reality.

Bringing me to Peter Keating, Peter Keating is the initial antagonist in "The Fountainhead" an antithesis to Red, I think his name was Howard Rourke. They both go to architecture school, and Peter Keating follows an elite-career strategy, acing his assessment and getting an entry-level position at the most prestigious architecture firm, whereas Red is "too real" for trendy architecture and seeks an apprenticeship with an underappreciated maverick architect. 

Peter Keating, and this is the relevant bit, has a viable strategy for gaming his career advancement - he offers to take over the workload of a sleep deprived colleague. That collegiate draftsman simply appreciates the help, being able to collect his wages without doing work. He doesn't realise, presumably because Keating covers for him at no cost, that Keating is making him redundant and taking his position.

This is another area where Ayn Rand is describing a true phenomena - use-it-or-lose-it, though her allegory is a cautionary tale against letting someone else take over the value-producing work you do, the Large Language Model based generative "AI" products apply more to how our brains function.

Yes, this is a comedy segment, edited etc. Also, I literally only use LLMs when coerced to do so, I find them by and large useless and annoying as well as unconscionable in terms of the environmental cost for the benefit they produce.

I'm so out of touch, that the idea that people use ChatGPT as an alternative to google baffles me. I looked up and found a reddit post about how I could set my browsers default search engine to exclude "AI" summaries, I scroll through youtube videos and am genuinely confused as to why screen space is taken up by "AI Summaries" of the video, presumably were they any good they would spare me having to watch a video, from Youtube's advertising based business model, this makes little sense to me, but they are not good the general pattern is that a video with a thumbnail and title "Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world" uses litres of water and causes brownouts in New England to produce the "AI" generated summary "In this video a man makes arguments that Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world."

So full disclosure, I don't understand the minds that are excited by "AI" and actually use it daily. I do not understand why people are impressed by these chatbots in any other sense than comparing them to chatbots from 10 years ago.

In the Daily Show remote segment, the last question asked of ChatGPT is "where should I get coffee?" This is actually unconscionable if you are not ignorant of the environmental footprint. It is more appreciable of the dude who asked ChatGPT to devise a meal plan or whatever, to be confused into thinking complicated nutritional bullshit requires excessive computing power. People can easily be beguiled by the promise that if they gain control of what they put in their mouths, they will gain control of their lives, but Ronny Chieng's "stop eating food" I would argue, though played for comedic effect, is actually good enough considering his intelligence runs off something like 100W of energy, and that this guy if I had to hazard a guess, is trying to optimise his calloric and nutritional intake while still drinking excess amounts of beer like some kind of college student every week.

Rename ChatGPT "Peter Keating" and suddenly Ayn Rand looks like a veritable prophet. Here is something that you think is helping you, when in actual fact it is harming you. 

Regulatory processes are famously and historically slow moving. Few people alive today appreciate that last century there was a time when a doctor would prescribe you cigarettes for nerves, and it was easy for 12 year old's to smoke. The adverse effects of smoking were known to medical journals, I'm going to guess by the 1960's at the latest, but Australia, that leads the way in many ways on regulating smoking - took half a century before cigarettes could not be sold from vending machines, could not be sold to minors, bore graphic warnings about the health effects of smoking and required generic branding to a specific scientifically determined least appealing colour of diarrhea greenish-brown.

Then vape came in unregulated to the point that my friend enjoyed a few months being able to vape in the cinema and it has in a few short years completely undone all the gains made in half a century of cutting smoking rates.

Maybe by 2060, presuming the AI investment bubble doesn't short circuit the product market, people under 18 or maybe 25 will not be allowed to use AI. We will probably know by then, if regular usage of LLMs significantly increases risk of conditions like dementia, and early onset dementia and generally lowers life expectancy. Due to the environmental impacts, where we already face ecological crises, maybe by 2035 laws will pass that mean you cannot ask an LLM for trivial bullshit like "where do I get coffee?" which is seriously, like asking someone to drive an SUV to the Library and do a google search on "coffee near me."

I have raised it before, and maybe "when did tohm last mention Gordon Neufield on his unsearchable blog?" is a valid question for LLMs to be used, but I'm going to repeat it here so don't - Dr Neufield pointed out in a talk on peer-orientation and all the issues it causes children-come-adults, that by the 90s parenting hadn't figured out TV. TV posed a challenge to raising healthy adults and we hadn't figured out how to incorporate this new reality when we were hit with the internet, a decade later and the internet came on phones, then social media, like the tech sector has literally just been lobbing fucking grenades at parents every couple of years for 3 straight decades.

Alas, it is worse than that, because parents aren't having grenades lobbed at them, but instead they are giving their children grenades thinking it is somehow a good idea.

Peter Keating the LLM maybe bad enough when he is "helping" you lose your job and cognitive capacities, but its worse when you are rolemodelling "how to charge headlong into redundancy" for your children. It may be time to seriously reconsider pulling out your phone and saying "hey Siri, make a reservation at 5.30 for dinner at McCheesables Family Restaurant." because you are teaching your kids not to know shit, and not to do shit, only how to consume.

And what would be truly terrible, in making a prophet out of Ayn Rand thanks to these electronic Peter Keatings, is that Peter Keating is the minor antagonist of The Fountainhead. He is a tragic cautionary tale, as while he plays the game to attain honour and prestige and promotions in his architectural firm, he has no real interest in what he does, he fails to produce any social goods. He loses his glamorous wife and career and winds up trying to rekindle his creative spirit by taking up painting, taking it to the protagonist Red for hopeful validation, whereby Red-the-omniscient uses his fictional omniscience to scare the world by telling Peter that it is too late for him to get into art now. 

Red our protagonist "wins" in the end by marrying a horrible woman who was married to or shacked up with both antagonists of the novel, and finally getting the financing to build a skyscraper in Manhatten, the pinnacle of human accomplishment, you know like Trump Tower. Ayn Rand is trash, but the trap of convenience is real and I humbly beg, via a blog post that people stop stumbling into that trap it is getting embarassing.

A Naive Series Part 1: Chauvinism

 "Naïve" is something like French for "childlike" and in this series where I ponder the unanswerable question: "what are people?" I'm employing the prefix in the sense of being a default psychological disposition.

Intro over, let's get into part one - Chauvinism.

Naïve Chauvinism

In the prefix sense, I know "naïve" mostly from its use in "naive dualism" dualism basically is the belief in the soul. Slightly longer is to say dualism is a belief that self and body are separate, hence you can watch those movies like 'Freaky Friday' with suspended disbelief.

Generally it takes education to become a monist, people don't really default to that.

"Chauvinism" I'm going to be guessing, most English speakers would know as the suffix from "Male Chauvinism" and often "Male" can be dropped and people can just refer to "Chauvinism" as a synonym for "sexism" like in the title of the book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" which is about the rise of sex/porn culture and women participating in their own oppression. 

At this juncture, I should say, that I am not a pedant who believes dictionaries to be sacrosanct and that people can get language wrong. I think dictionaries do not define words but document usage, and that the standard of communication is understanding. So long as you are understood, frankly anything goes.

I just hope you understand that I don't mean that people are born sexist, though they may be. I mean people are born chauvinist in the older, and now less used sense of the word :

The unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people.

So let's get into that.

Your Grandma's Chocolate Cake

There's likely a generational divide here. I know chocolate cake still exists, but it was probably also a fairly 20th century thing. Reality show Master Chef came out when I was an adult already, and here in Australia (and I presume everywhere) at the height of its popularity, it produced a spin-off "Masterchef Kids" which was my introduction to a new world where even children can be fucking pretentious.

So maybe, shortly after publication and for so long as the internet endures, you will be reading this being someone whose family tree is white as alabaster but for some fucking reason you took "bento boxes" to school with a dozen compartments of crap prepared anxiously by your mother who you just euthanised because the pressures to keep up status in an economy that transfers wealth from the young to the old increasingly has rewarded her agreeability with MS or ALS, and you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "you're grandma's Chocolate Cake" because Grandma's of your era don't bake chocolate cake they bake shoe pastry and temper chocolate to make sure you have a pistachio croquembouche for your birthday or something.

But, as recently as last century naive chauvinism could manifest by a widespread belief that your Grandma made the best chocolate cake in the world!

Naive chauvinism is no more complicated than that. Most of us, prefer to be us even though this is largely irrational. 

A relationship will struggle, if you ask your mum for a recipe that is the epitome of comfort food for you and you serve it up to your partner and they are like 'it's not my favourite thing.'

If you travel, hosts will take you to some local spot and give you the local treat and if you are unlucky the local treat will be a) shit, b) offensive or worst of all, c) a pale comparison of something you find readily available at home.

To boot, naive chauvinism I feel is likely universal enough, that we all intuit that the polite thing to do is not disillusion others of their naive chauvinism. We eat the horse penis, the salmon sperm, the ox eye or the vegemite sandwich, smile and say 'mmmmm...' to their expectant faces.

Only actual children come home from a sleep over and share their confusion with their parents that "The Grosbys make grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles in the microwave and they seemed to think it was a treat..."

George Carlin

-said "have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody who goes faster than you is a maniac and anybody who drives slower than you doesn't know what they're doing?" 

I'm asserting this phenomena is both real and can be described as an example of naive chauvinism. If you think about it, it makes sense, you have to pick a point on the speed continuum to prefer driving at, and because you can't be wrong about your preferences you go on to assume that your preference is universal.

After that, everyone who doesn't share your preference is explained away by some sort of cognitive deficiency, either gross incompetence - they want to drive at your speed they just lack the know how, or some form of reckless disregard for the sanctity of life - this person knows driving faster than you is too dangerous but they just don't care.

Carlin's insight was that this worked as a bit because it is true of everyone no matter how fast they drive.

Even I, a cyclist who rides a single speed and thus never caps 30km an hour, experience this psychological phenomena. I despise 'safety Petes' who are cyclists that wont run a red light even in the absence of all traffic and who ring their bells for everybody they pass on a shared path regardless of whether the path is obstructed by peds or not. But I also disapprove of those riders who bike salmon and ride out into a busy intersection expecting other cars to stop or who ride up to lights and position themselves in front of me even though the last set of lights determined empirically that I have the faster take-off, acceleration and top speed.

The thing is, if you asked me why I break the exact right amount of road laws that effect cyclists, I would be tempted to confabulate an answer. And there are reasons, like the laws I break have never resulted in a collision or accident or any other kind of penalty, whereas the laws I observe when I haven't observed them have gotten me at least a talking to by the police.

But in my sobriety I understand that just because I observe a rule (generally) that you only wear a bike helmet if you are touching a bicycle, it doesn't really bother me that much if a friend of mine dorks it up and puts their bike helmet on before they reach their bicycle.

I also wish I could wait for tram doors to shut before advancing up to the lights, instead of simply waiting for all the passengers to get on and off but I can't because tram drivers seem to have a habit/be instructed to leave their doors open until the light changes to green, after which they shut their doors and then slowly accelerate and if one fucking straggler runs up to the tram in a place like Melbourne's CBD you can potentially get stuck behind a fucking tram with open doors forever. So I just ignore the law and watch for people. Other people, including car drivers, don't stop and I'm sure they are both maniacs and don't know what they are doing.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Effect

Just upfront, I rate MBTI as just above Horoscopes. I'm not a big believer, though unlike horoscopes mapping personality traits arbitrarily onto people based on birth dates, MBTI contains personality traits that are in robust personality models like OCEAN or 'Big 5' like extroversion-introversion spectrum of ambiverts, and one of the 4 axis from memory maps pretty well onto some combination of openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism such that I would be surprised if people with MBTI 'high S' is somewhat predictive of low openness to experience etc.

But even if not scientifically robust, nor particularly predictive of anything useful like career or relationship success, the MBTI is out there, it is popular and as far as I know career guidance counsellors and recruiters may still employ it. 

I think you could probably sub in as an exercise a "know your horoscope" activity, but in terms of naive chauvinism MBTI and also the more common and more useful 2 factor personality models (where you might be told you are a "Type A" or "Driver/Dominance" personality etc.) are a potential invitation out of naive chauvinism.

Think about it, you are sitting in a room of 40 people, and you learn that only a quarter of that room (or a sixteenth for MBTI) care about and value the same shit you do. What an opportunity for people on the job who are 'not there to make friends' and 'get results' to learn that many of their coworkers, don't give much of a shit about getting results at all especially if they and their friends hate the process of getting those results.

Simultaneously, an equal opportunity for somebody who cares about their coworkers weekends, relationships, children and pets to realise that they share a workspace with people that find such discussions tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying. That there's people outside the HR department that find 'mandatory fun' a gross infringement on their human rights and dignity.

But it has been my experience, that naive chauvinism overrides the empathic utility of such exercises, dubious or not. People more readily learn about their personality, than learn about the existence of personalities. The results come back for them as something akin to a disabled parking permit and a pro-forma rider for a rock star. They learn more about their own preferences and immediately begin explaining to others how to best accommodate them.

Remembering that chauvinism is "unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people" similar to how Jane Elliot's Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes produces results that are way less powerful than what we might intuit; most people on balance can't imagine having preferences other than their own. 

Helen Fisher a researcher into relationships that created a 2-factor model of relationship styles similar to MBTI but based on primary hormone drivers - dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins something else... relates assuming that some types would want to be 'cured' into another type and had the personal revelation that people's personalities tend to be aligned with what they already value and desire.

So there's two ways to react to discovering different people value and desire different things:

1. You take a chill pill, recognizing that there are many people and one planet and that life is going to be a series of negotiations.

2. You circle the wagons, inside the circle is "us" and outside the circle is "them", you remain sceptical that people actually desire and value different things, there's just people who "get it" and are good at it like you, and people who are dumb and ignorant and getting things wrong like "them" and realise that life is going to be a battle for your rightful dominance.

Why I think naive chauvinism is a thing, is that I have literally had a guy explain in excruciating detail, with diagrams his understanding of the theory of personality and how it effected his own life and what he learned from it, who rode his preferences roughshod over everyone and everything every time including in that very meeting where he explained personality to us.

Naive Chauvinism in the 21st Century

Our education system isn't that good. I suspect I am simply lucky to have come of age prior to Malcolm Gladwell's publication of "Outliers" which changed the paradigm from all-rounder to specialist. 

I remember in my late 20s meeting a guy who played in indie bands and identified largely as a muso who didn't want anybody knowing that he was into footy (AFL) for fear of being shunned. Being only slightly older than him I was incredulous, having gone to a school where one was expected by parents to land the lead role in the high-school musical production and be a member of the rowing first's crew.

A few years later and I met an increasing number of people in the arts scene who used terms like 'sportsball' unironically (though I'm sure they were trying to be ironic) and reinforced this arbitrary divide. 

A few more years and Brexit and Trump's first term happens and well, we've been living it so you and I know everybody went nuts. Crucially though, polarisation caused political identities to collapse onto a sounder foundation of naive chauvinism. 

I had the privileged vantage of being a white heteronormative male to observe becoming homeless on the left. Despite prominent leftist media figures being white men like Jon Oliver and for new media David Pakman etc. but these tend to operate a kind of "turn-and-point" progressive identity politics, if you know what I mean, which you probably don't but its where you turn and point to another white guy and sort of say "hey everyone look, that's a white guy over there! Do better white guy!" so you can still be host of the show and it seems a sufficient fiction to quash any questions of diversity and representation being applied to you.

But if you weren't already at the top when the right thing to do was pull the ladder up, the subjective experience of naive chauvinism on the left was one where there just was no place for you in the promised neverland. 

Historically marginalised groups went straight from being underrepresented, silenced and erased, to chauvinism. Tragically, many people on the left, faced with this surging chauvinism were not so much recruited by, as assigned to an increasingly chauvinistic conservative circle because few people can cope psychologically with being homeless tribe wise.

And now we see it, though if you've been indulging your naive chauvinism, algorithms may have assisted your blindness, in election results where people naively feel that anyone outside the chauvinistic political in-group can legitimately govern, so when the election outcome is announced no matter who wins or who is defeated roughly 50% of people who live in democracies around the world experience a kind of existential terror.

This is not to say that election results are arbitrary. Regarding the things that are broken everywhere like campaign financing, there is a degree of arbitrariness. With 2+ years now of weekly protests against the Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian Gaza strip (in which Palestine became recognized as a state by more nations) many people find in their own country no actual choice come voting time on foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine foreign policy. But there's plenty of non-arbitrary meaningful differences.

Chris Rock once described George W Bush as "the first cable president" with previous US Presidents being I guess "network presidents" where even civil war president Abraham Lincoln, and post-war reconstruction presidents like Ulysses S Grant who accepted the surrender of General Lee, understood that they were the president in service to both the people who cast their vote for them, and all those that didn't, and even tried (and in Abe's case succeeded) to kill them. Bush, according to Chris Rock was basically like "Fuck everyone who doesn't watch Fox News" and while Bush was the first, I think we are observing now an even more extreme chauvinist administration as evidenced by where the national guard is deployed versus where crime is actually really bad.

Conclusion

Naive chauvinism is really really bad, because democracy is really quite good. Demonstrably so. It is so much better to live in a democracy and it is especially nice to not have constant civil wars. 

In the 20th century, or pre-internet age, the benefits of democracy could be imposed upon us without us needing to understand what strapped all that democracy together.

It kind of worked with zero-understanding among the general public because without the internet and smart phones it was so much harder to book ourselves a one-way ticket to chauvinistic crazy town. Globalization was hard, so people bought local newspapers because news had to be printed and shipped daily. 

Yes in the 1990s it was possible for Saddam Hussein to get all the major newspapers of the world delivered daily to Baghdad, Iraq, but most people in wealthy free democracies simply couldn't be fucked going the extra steps necessary to get a copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Asahi Shinbun and Neinkampf!

Then we built the confirmation-bias superexpressway and globalised the competition for media such that your local paper has to compete with all the resources of The New York Times and a much more dramatic and higher stakes political scene, as opposed to your local broadsheet's in-depth analysis on the debate in parliament about the proposed changes to the sheep tax.

Such that when I log onto my local broadsheet, it is full of clickbait headlines behind paywalls - global competition has dragged it to headlines like this: "Time and again, the men in my life fail me when it comes to this simple task" just shy of finishing with "You'll be shocked by what it is!"

Basically the attention economy is a petri-dish for growing the influence and impact of naive chauvinism and naive chauvinism basically makes bloody conflict inevitable because children create visions of the future that have no place for outsiders. If politics is beholden to naive chauvinism, then unless the superior values of the in group suit you - be that being a tradwife married to a white Christian nationalist husband, or passing as a pansexual to maintain your place in a polycule of fours, someone is going to resist. 

It's not even the diminished rights of individuals, but the suppression of whole communities through sheer neglect, thanks to the personal incredulity of why anybody wouldn't want to live beachside wearing athleisure to the local cafe when it's just a 2 minute drive in your german SUV/anybody wouldn't want to live in a gentrifying former industrial slagheap where you can deliver your genderless short-adults to a Steiner school on a dutch e-bike via the reclaimed rail-trail where the community got together to replace the graffiti piece by "Cuntzcrew '98" of King Neptune as a pimp paying his Mermaid hos, with a mural of a genderbent Paolo Freire, where what was really working for democracy 20 years ago was that there was space for all these subcultures to do their own thing, while sharing a common media and the real issues between progressive suburbs vs materialist narcissist suburbs being wealth inequality was less bad than it is now.

Democracy is good, and it can only be sustained where the electoral cycle doesn't begin with telling the people who voted the other way that they can go fuck off and die.

You've probably heard the legend of the inventor of chess in India having the Sultan promise him anything he wants for inventing such a marvellous game and the dude is like "a grain of rice doubled for each square of the chessboard" and the Sultan is like "how modest" and claps his hands or whatever, and then the treasurer comes back and says that he calculated it and to fulfil the request would more than empty all the granaries in India? Well naive chauvinism is kind of the same maths but opposite - that priests poem about "first they came for the communists and I said nothing, then they came for the jews..." 

In-groups are relative. No group can actually "win" which is why there's a general consensus that totalitarian regimes are inherently unstable. Intersectionality basically tells us this is the case. So if in a scenario of actual female chauvinism, Patriarchy was "smashed" and replaced with an equally chauvinistic matriarchy (as opposed to a new feminist egalitarian world), that victory would be cashed in for a further schism. 

Often enough, narcissism of small-differences takes effect faster than chauvinist attacks on the outgroups. 

So I'm just bringing a notional concept to your attention. I'm asserting that chauvinism a) has to be unlearned as a default, and b) is worth unlearning.

Revisiting "Epic-Pooh"

I stumbled upon a youtube channel that was interesting, one of the many that talks about books and writing.

In my personal opinion, most literary youtube channels are terrible, albeit watchable. They often represent an extreme form of "those who cannot do, teach" and there is both tragedy and comedy in the fact that so many people can amass half-a-million to a million youtube subscribers by posting regular content about how to write fantasy, in some part (or rather often) as a vehicle to promote the youtuber's own literary effort; which with a little investigation usually results in a book that has a dozen reviews most of which disclose that they were given a copy for review purposes.

Most of these how-to-write-fantasy channels resort to formulas, what they try to impart is some way to turn a crank on a wheel and a fantasy story comes out. I suspect on an intuitive level that this is the whole trap. One can learn much in terms of formulas and tropes to move from the insane incoherent ramblings of a fantasy consumer that doesn't understand why they like what they like, to putting it into something coherent with a beginning middle and end...that nobody wants to read because ultimately all it says is "I like something better, that already exists."

Here I am now going to struggle with my own ability to articulate. The most common subject to be substituted into "something better that already exists" is "The Lord of The Rings" though it may be challenged by Harry Potter if we are including fan-fic.

This most recent channel I stumbled upon, was interesting because it didn't push formulas, didn't have clickbait titles like "NEVER DO THIS when writing a..." and "5 Tropes to avoid..." sighted research papers when making arguments that something was good or bad etc.

I get an instant sense that the youtuber and I are going to have different tastes because so many book enthusiasts fit themselves into a trope of books, cats, coffee and witchcraft. This is fine, that you like chocolate and I like artificial strawberry flavour doesn't mean I'm getting nothing from your video on how to make icecream.

What throws a spanner into the combobulation works, is when somebody drops out of the blue that they think LOTR is great. Not in a passing acknowledgement of its important place in literary history, much as say, Hegel deserves acknowledgement for his important contribution to philosophy but nobody would commend reading Hegel unless out of sheer necessity. For me a more apt analogy for LOTR is The Wright Brother's Aeroplane. Historically incredibly important, but there is no necessity for anybody to ride it ever again, and yes there's plenty of room to agree that most air-travel is as a passenger on an Airbus or Boeing and the experience is now utterly shit, but much better to pine for a Spitfire, or the Concord or Stealth Bomber or whatever jet plains were in Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick or even a hang-glider or wingsuit.

But to actually refer to LOTR as a great read, knowing what books are out there. Not a "sure go on read it, it won't hurt you" but like "this book is really great, you should read the books even though we have movies of them that are better."

Now, for me personally, to explain that LOTR is a "masterpiece" I will receive this explanation as plausible but one of the form "Wagner is better than it sounds." As in sure LOTR may be great, it is not however for me, a great read. But a great deal of people seem to feel it is "the greatest" read and being honest, I tend to assume this phenomena is easiest explained by these people being nerds so beguiled by the tedium that is LOTR that they've never moved past it.

(This post is already getting out of hand, and I fear I fail to convey that all I want to say about LOTR is that it sucks, and that that shouldn't be controversial or demand explanation. That is generally all I say, or perhaps qualify it with "I think it sucks" and offer as argument that it is long, tedious and boring, so I am actually unpractised at discussing LOTR. What I feel strangely compelled to mention, is that I was only recently made aware of a stereotype that autistics love LOTR, and mentally when I compare LOTR to a train timetable this stereotype checks out. And I have nothing against people with autism loving trains and finding train timetables captivating, magical and enchanting and so too a perfectly valid argument to boost LOTR is that it is captivating, magical and enchanting like a train timetable, where GoT or A Wizard of Earthsea is chaotic, surprising, disordered, emotional, messy, empathetic, sensual, passionate etc. then we are firmly back in Chocolate and Artificial Strawberry Flavoring territory.)

One of the least successful expressons of algorithms in my Youtubing experience are the frequent recommendations of channels "Jess of the Shire" and "In Deep Geek" that will produce hour+ long videos on some tedious detail of LOTR and I notice that such videos get view counts that often approach 1M. 

In one of Kevin Smith's Q&A comedyesque-specials he does a bit about how nothing LOTR story is, which he then adapted into a Randal scene in one of his Clerks sequels, expressing his ire that LOTR was displacing Star Wars as "the trilogy" in younger generations. As overrated as Keven Smith is, and the number of turkeys he has created, his reduction of LOTR is in essence, on the money.

Similarly, the video-essay I watched was on the death of the fantasy genre. The main culprit in that essay is Lester Del Ray, but then later moved onto Michael Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" which for anyone who is not into LOTR just the title of that essay will resonate and you may remark "Yes! Exactly" without needing to read the rest of the essay.

Exposed to this essay, I found myself at a crossroads, a Disney-like crossroads at the beginning of the animated "Beauty and the Beast" with one incredibly obviously unattractive way - re-read the Lord of The Rings, which immediately prompts memories of the chapter "A Shortcut to Mushrooms" and then I think of Tom Bombadil and become frustrated and annoyed at my memory of reading Fellowship of the Rings. 

Or I could re-read Epic Pooh, this is the sunny, well lit path with butterflies, largely because however bad the essay may be, it is going to be mercifully short, even relative to the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring. 

There was another hook, as it transpires that when Michael Moorcock originally wrote "Epic Pooh" in 1978 or earlier...maybe it was revised in '78. Moorcock confessed that he had not actually read LOTR, merely skimmed it.

This is enough, no doubt, for much of the LOTR fanbase to simply handwave Moorcock's influential essay away. But for me the question is: 'how much LOTR does somebody need to read?'

As in, how much shit does someone have to eat before they are qualified to say they do not like it. LOTR probably benefits from enough word-of-mouth to suggest someone need to read up to at least the Prancing Pony and the introduction of Aragorn (Strider) and if they aren't feeling it by then, then by all means give up, the book is not for you.

I do not think it is a legitimate position to demand that people read all of LOTR before they can pass judgement on it. This is special pleading, the high drama of Gollum biting off Frodo's finger before falling into some lava does not retrospectively justify the tedium of everything that proceeds it, the characters that range from pitifully unlikeable (Frodo, Sam, Gollum) to wooden (Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Arwen, Elrond). 

After the tension, or spine of the story collapses, the post-climax simply drags on and is a complete mess. Asking someone to read all of LOTR is as illegitimate as demanding somebody not read all of LOTR and instead omit the chapters featuring Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the shire, Sam's wedding, and Bilbo's departure with the Aryan master-race, in order to appreciate how good it isn't.

As such in rereading Epic Pooh, there's this delightful enticing hook - could Moorcock still offer a valid thesis having only skimmed the subject on which he wrote?

Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be  a bit careful because the hand­‐rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the  approval yet to put a new one in. ~ Epic Pooh pg. 5

So the answer is yes. I think this is a fair characterisation of LOTR even though Moorcock writes "like Tolkien" and so simply could be referring to all the Del Tor LOTR wannabes (eg. Terry Brook's 'Sword of Shannara').

Having now reread Epic Pooh, the essay is mostly a survey on the state of fantasy and remains, I feel, relevant. In revisiting it, the only shift in my perspective came from time affording me the ability to identify Marxist terms like 'petit bourgeoise' 'reactionary' etc. 

I was first put onto Epic Pooh, by China Mieville who is a radical left-wing writer maybe going off memory a full-blown Marxist. Mieville summarised Epic Pooh as defining a schism between a Tolkien-camp who think fantasy should be pure escapist comfort, and for-better-or-worse a Moorcock camp that feel fantasy can be used to challenge people.

I don't begrudge people liking LOTR, but personally I begrudge their market power and I find there to be something irresponsible in the chauvinism of the Nerd who simply want more of the same.

(Actively, I would bet that if I used fanfic or something as a barometer of fantasy taste, JK Rowling's Wizarding World would be on top, and I feel that that's probably because JK wrote nothing but Hobbits and no LOTR. But if we cordon off that and did a pie chart of 'Epic Fantasy' I wouldn't be surprised if the interests of the general population of Epic Fantasy fandoms are 80% LOTR, 16% GoT, 2% WoT and 2% for everything else. While GoT has new media going to air, I wouldn't be surprised if these pie-charts get flooded with what we might describe casuals, and it may seem like there's some genuine 50-50 diversity in the Epic fantasy fan base, but I expect over time, the fanbase to uneven out into the LOTR dominated market. Another barrometer are DnD party-art, and this is what is depressing: The prevelance of people with an interest in fantasizing, given the tools to literally imagine themselves as anything they want and how often people choose to imagine themselves as Legolas, Arwen, Gimli and Aragorn.) 

I am sticking up for, in other words, the Elayne's of this world, who are oppressed by a majority who think "The English Patient" is great, and deny Elayne's right to say that it sucks. 

I've watched The English Patient, and it's not bad, there's a lot to commend it, but it also isn't great. Certainly it isn't anything anyone should be forced to sit through twice, and I'd never wish it to be longer.

LOTR I can acknowledge occupies an important place in the history of the fantasy genre, this does not make it worth reading, and it doesn't mean it doesn't suck. 

Briefly, I will bring in GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire for a brief comparison on the most curious aspect - LOTR movies are better than the source material, Peter Jackson used the medium of film to realise fantastic visions of Lothlorien, Gondor etc. in the vacuum of Tolkiens dead prose. He excised crap from LOTR like Tom Bombadil, picked up the pace and although the movies are still long and a drag, where not much interesting happens, they make the source material look good.

The Hobbit was the opposite, and so too was HBOs Song of Ice And Fire, being trash relative to the source material. Where the showrunners seemed to put supreme effort into talking down to their audience and making everything as obvious as possible "more wine!" and that scene where Littlefinger explains his plot to two whores he commands to fist eachother, the infamous 'sexposition scene'.

Again it is a curiosity that, and I stress, in my opinion a skilled filmmaker is required to take a bad book and make something out of it, whereas a good book is almost inevitably adapted into a piece of shit.

I must admit, that I stopped watching GoT as early as maybe 4 episodes in. I checked out when Peter Dinklage did his confession at the Aerie, and probably no coincidence given that most of the show felt like I was being forced to watch cosplayers act out their fan-fic, and once Dinklage an accomplished actor joined in the fun I enter the Twilight Zone. The show may have found its legs like Seinfeld or something, I don't know, I didn't need an adaptation so I never gave it a chance to redeem itself, my understanding is that whatever high it reached, it plummeted inevitably into an abyss thanks to whatever genius agreed it was a good idea to produce an adaptation of a series that hadn't concluded yet.

But I'm sure MANY people have written at great length arguing about which is better GoT or LOTR. Since I haven't referred to Epic Pooh much, let me draw on China Mieville's interpretation - that Epic Pooh argues whether fantasy should be comforting pap, or be about stuff, and contextualise that debate historically for mere substitution of "which is better the Ramayana or the Iliad" having had both read to me in Audiobook form, I like the Iliad better, and have written about it before because of its moral ambiguity. The Ramayana has flat characters because Rama is good, so is his brother, women are the root of all evil, the Demon king is both bad and impotent and the only character that comes close to being two dimensional is the monkey king, who is chastised for any times he forgets to act as one dimensional as Rama.

There is no Hegellian dialectic going on of "Tolkein-Anti-Tolkein-Anti-Anti-Tolkein" if you can find both Tolkien and Anti-Tolkien precedents in the Proto-European root story that likely explains both the Iliad and the Ramayana.

I would rather compare LOTR to Hemingway's "Old Man and The Sea."

The Old Man and The Sea is arguably an escapist fantasy. I cannot imagine what people would argue to me, makes LOTR good, after I have read it, and found it, not forgettable, but somewhat regrettable and feel the same about the much much better movies.

One potential candidate is just the sheer depth of worldbuilding, and that maybe I can't appreciate how great LOTR is, until I have read the Silmarillion and forced myself to learn elvish, or some of the other 32 languages Tolkien created as backstory (Train timetables anyone?). However impressive Tolkien's worldbuilding of a world derivative of European mythological traditions, The Old Man and The Sea is a fantasy set in a much richer world because it is based on reality, hence we have an elderly fisherman in Cuba who escapes by listening to baseball on the radio. 

Appreciate how complex that world, our world is, whatever expert on Tolkien thinks they can exposit about the various ages, the creation of Middle Earth the various races and history of conflicts, it is going to be bare-boned compared to the backstory of the world a Cuban fisherman lives in, and Hemingway knows that world, perhaps not with the academic rigour of Tolkien the linguist, but because he had been to Cuba.

For all the Bestiary of middle earth, with goblins, orcs, balrogs, wargs, nazgul whatever, in Hemingway's water we know there is more than just marlin and sharks. It is the gulf of Mexico. 

The story is simple, just as LOTR's story is. There's an old man on a losing streak in terms of catching anything, he goes out on the day he breaks this streak. LOTR is a sequel, and it turns out an invisibility ring from the previous book nonsensically is what the bad guys want, and then some guy has to walk to a place and drop it into a special disposal chute.

A big difference is the pacing, The Old Man and The Sea is engaging, captivating, and succinct. For a book about fishing, there is never a dull moment. The LOTR with its much more mechanical plot, plods on for three books that simply have to be slogged through.

Moorcock's essay is a polemic. He clearly doesn't like this incumbent crowd that holds LOTR as its North Star. Having said that, I actually feel it should be safe for any individual to not just criticize LOTR and its impact, but safe for them to lose their fucking mind. 

I am not a big fan for yet another example, of Shakespeare, a Shakespeare play is not something I would read for fun. Yet it is easy to recall arguments for why I should read Shakespeare, it would be easy for me to articulate why Iago from Othello is one of the most unique and greatest villains of all literary history. 

Peter Jackson's film adaptation of LOTR took a boring story (on account of me being bored) and made it slightly less boring via spectacle. I subsequently have a reference point from which I can imagine how much room there is to fill with arguments as to why I should read LOTR (again) because of all the brilliant reasons why it is so brilliant...

All I can recall, and this is a flawed availability bias, is that people don't argue for LOTR, they just really like it. It even seems easy to conceive of a rebuttal to Kevin Smith's visual comedy gag on what happens in the three movies - translated here into words:

Movie 1: Kevin Smith sets off on a walk at a gentle pace.

Movie 2: The walking Kevin Smith briefly stumbles then continues walking.

Movie 3: Kevin Smith arrives somewhere and then drops something into something else.

Because indeed loads more stuff does happen, there's the Balrog scene, the magic door, a horse chase, a siege battle, betrayal, a battle between orcs and trees, a giant spider, Gollum stalks some guys a long way... I haven't even heard someone articulate this defence of LOTR.

But to justify its dominance in fandom, and in fantasy markets, I would need to hear an argument not to the effect that it is better than Kevin Smith makes it out to be (and there's an argument that it is worse, because the same story takes 9 hours on film) but that it is intrinsically a great book, an argument remotely like the ones made to suggest one should read Shakespeare, Dickens, Brontes, Elliot, Woolf, Plath, Le Guin, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Eco, King etc.

Feeling a pang of guilt for a lack of due diligence, I decided to check out a channel that explains "great literature" usually succinctly, in 15 minutes, that channels video on LOTR runs for 30+ minutes, and from what I have watched so far it is mostly autobiographical, contextualising all Tolkein's middle-earth works in his life story, particularly the influence of World War I.

If anything though, the first half of the 30 minute video's argument validates Moorcock's criticism. It contextualises LOTR and its taking us to the edge of the abyss to point out the lovely tea-garden at the bottom and says "mind the handrail it's a bit wobbly" as basically Tolkiens fear of actual, real, distressing danger. Like LOTR is an attempt to explain trench-warfare in France to a 6 year-old without making them too scared, but scared enough to never go do it because it is better to live in a rural countryside. 

I think Moorcock in his essay, articulates to the limits of his ability to write, the pernicious safety-ism of LOTR. In the video on Great Books Explained, it points out that the plot of LOTR is quite singular, and I'm going to rearticulate what interests me this way: What if the story was about the kid in class that wasn't popular and nobody paid attention to, what if the story was about that kid taking 'popularity' and destroying it so nobody would be popular or unpopular again?

Sub what you will for popularity, aggression, charisma, make it better or worse. But I suspect that is why Moorcock (maybe), Mieville (maybe) and myself and others experience LOTR as a story of 'fear and safety' Frodo's epic journey being an expansion of a door blowing open in the night and maybe a raven flying in, and a kid having to get out of bed, investigate, shoo the bird out and shut the door.

In which case, sure at some point invest the time in reading LOTR to appreciate its place in the history of the fantasy epic. Do not stop there, also read Epic Pooh, read Epic Pooh and watch TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE both requests combined being a lesser ask than LOTR.

I raise Team America because I think the famous "Pussies, Dicks and Assholes" speeches articulate the fundamental flaw of LOTR, that I will suggest Moorcock in Epic Pooh is getting at as the 'condescension' that comes through in both Tolkien and CS Lewis' prose, that "Pussies think they can handle assholes in their own way." vulgar though the terms may be, that is what over decades LOTR and its fandom reek of...

I have to cut myself off, because I realise I omitted a thought that was leading to this conclusion. My brother told me that somewhere JK Rowling expressed regret that she had Ron and Hermione become a couple in the end, that in a world where teenagers drink butter beer and shout "expellidocious" at eachother and fly around on witch brooms but never finger eachother in the bus sheds and sniff eachother's fingers nor even talk about the guy that fingered a girl in the bus shed and what he said his finger smelled like, felt the pairing of Hermione and Ron was 'unrealistic' and I'd actually agree. 

Ron and Hermione are but a detail, totally peripheral to the plot of Harry Potter which was...confront your fears. 

Frodo being entrusted with the ring and tasked with its destruction is the plot of LOTR, and mechanically the plot works - the Eye of Sauron is fixated on power and so is blind to the humble unassuming camouflage of Frodo and Sam. 

Frodo's goodness though is based on absences, rather than the presence of heroic traits. Frodo is by Team America's term, a pussy, selected to bear the ring because he is not a dick nor an asshole, and everyone at the council of Elrond is overly concerned with a dick making a cock ring out of it and going fuck crazy.

I'm not going to accuse Trey and Matt of being Nietzsche fans, but aware that many will find pussies, dicks and assholes too crude to entertain that maybe the metaphor has depth and value, Frodo is more like a celebration of 'Slave Morality' and in Peter Jackson's film moreso than the books, with or without intent this is made clear - Sauron is a towering giant clad in heavy plate armour such that we see no part of him fighting on the frontlines of an Army destroying his opponents. An actual hero succeeds in severing his finger and Sauron is undone, Frodo is short, weak, soft and a man of leisure, walking around barefoot, he has no acquisitive traits whatsoever and when Gollum severs his finger Frodo is saved.

Crucially, all the stuff heroes are doing, is either protecting Frodo, or after the breaking of the fellowship, is merely stalling for time or distracting the impotent eye of Sauron. It is hard to say that Aragorn puts 'his body on the line' in a manner that Frodo doesn't. But the difference is that of Aragorn charging into the fray and Frodo hoping nobody and nothing notices them.

LOTR in some respects, has the same foundation as 'if women were in charge there wouldn't be any wars' a theory that is untested, or perhaps has been tested as the history of Feudal Europe has seen women in charge or defacto in charge as regents or matriarchs. Regardless, I am highly sceptical that Matriarchies would have no wars, though they may be of a significantly different nature. In the same sense, I am not sure if the 'neither the good guy nor the bad guy, give the McGuffin to the nobody!' has ever played out in history, apart from maybe Steven Bradbury winning Australia's first ever Winter Olympic Gold Medal, when his entire field of competition crashed out on the final stretch of the final bend.

It is perhaps, the specific conditions necessary to make Frodo a worthy hero of his own story, that perhaps makes LOTR such a widespread bog for the genre, and also could explain a fandom that hates antiheroes, flawed heroes, moral relativism, ambiguity, sympathetic villains etc. largely because the plot becomes a power struggle, instead of anti-power. Don't scour the Shire, Don't take my headphones I'm sensitive, don't take my smart phone I'm anxious, don't shame my lack of power, the only thing wrong with my lack of power is all the other people who have it...

That's far more than I wanted to say on this topic, and the conclusion is that Epic Pooh holds up, it holds up despite being half a century old now, it holds up despite being penned by someone who didn't even read LOTR. It shouldn't even be threatening to LOTR fans, because LOTR fans have LOTR and appear to be content with it. But Epic Pooh might shake a LOTR fan loose from The Shire and send them on their own adventure, and that is a great literary service. Now, let's finish with some Pussies, Dicks and Assholes:

Drunk in Bar: See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

And:

Gary: We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong-ll is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes — assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!