Sunday, March 17, 2024

Abridged Historic Right

The right, like the left, to my understanding came out of the French Revolution. Specifically, the foundation of conservatism is considered by many to be Edmund Burke's "Reflections on The French Revolution." A book I have not read.

So my abridgement is very compact, like the strap that keeps a Piano Accordion shut so the Polka cannot play. Which is also a metaphor for respectable conservatism - the voice that says "let's not get carried away".

Done well, conservatism is a bridle on enthusiasm to protect us from unbridled enthusiasm. Conservatism fundamentally exists to protect us from unintended consequences.

Let me try and put it thus: Most of us would agree that few people will miss mosquitos. As far as I know, the technology does not exist, to eradicate mosquitos, but I would assert that even something as likely to be as universally popular as eradicating mosquitos there would likely be unintended consequences.

A properly functioning conservative movement could be said to be rooted in or to Chesterton's fence, which is easier said than done. Chesterton's fence says that if someone come's along and makes essentially an appeal to personal incredulity, like "I don't understand why this fence is here, let's get rid of it." Chesterton's fence states one cannot alter the status quo without understanding why the status quo is the status quo.

Perhaps a fun example of Chesterton's fence failing would be Southpark inventor Mr Garrison's gyroscoping transport alternative "IT" where it takes one customer pointing out the redundant control buttons rendering the phallic and penetrative default controls unnecessary. Within the context of the story, Mr Garrison's design preferences could be safely scrapped. However, why not cut this gag from the show? In the greater context of Southpark satire, Mr Garrison's intrusive controls serve the function of illustrating how painful Airport security and Air travel has become, as residents of the world embrace anal penetration as the lesser discomfort.

A more complicated real world example, might be the cohesion of religious dogma driven bigotry to conservative institutions - like bigotry directed at homosexuals. It strikes me that Chesterton's Fence, a thought problem that came from a text called "The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic" would oblige one when a voice comes along and says "I don't understand why homosexuals exist, we should get rid of them." would not be permitted to take any action to try and purge the existence or practice of homosexuality from society, given that it is a more ancient tradition than say Catholicism. 

I feel it should be pointed out, that as at writing it is likely the case that anyone can observe unintended consequences arising from reforms that I am glad have taken place - the election of Barack Obama to the highest office of the USA, has had unintended consequences, that stand in stark contrast to Shepard Fairey's "Hope" posters. We are not living in the hoped for future, I assert. Similarly, there appear to be unintended consequences arising from marriage equality, a broad international movement that allows same-sex couples to legally marry and enjoy equal legal status to cross-sex couples. Those I have personally to take largely as hearsay, but it seems to be an unintended consequence of a changed perception of gay men within Queer identities. 

These unintended consequences, it should be pointed out, are not the realization of those negative consequences evoked by actual conservatives to try and scaremonger the public out of these reforms. Neither the advent of a black president, nor same-sex marriage have lead to the collapse of society. They have had unintended consequences that a historic conservative, which is to say, functional right should have soberly attempted to identify.

In some ways, under systems like the Westminister parliamentary system, the left-right historical dynamic is somewhat baked into the institution - commonly known as a system of checks and balances. I would specifically refer to the institutional dynamic of having a lower and upper house, or the houses of parliament and the house of lords, or the house of legislation and the house of review.

My previous post described an ideal left as a loose coalition with vigorous internal debate that are aligned on the broad recognition that some things have to change. In a legislative house, we have an institutional forum for these debates to take place, and in a house of review we have an institutional forum for the output, proposed reforms, to be scrutinized and reviewed for unintended consequences.

It is not that these designs realize so much as aspire to those ideals. In the UK the house of Lords were traditionally given to Land Lords and Clergy from the Church of England, not conservatives. Just privileged elites that were grandfathered in, that no doubt performed some conservative function. Furthermore, it seemed that despite the strictly conservative makeup of the House of Lords, Britain seemed impatient to have conservative voices heard in a debate, and so the legislative house, has been dominated by a conservative party. So we have left-right dynamics nested within institutions that are already set up with left-right institutions. 

A historical conception of the right, are defensive custodians. I'm not so certain if historically, those we label conservatives actually perform this function. This is because, I would guess, the status quo isn't a static status quo, it will contain some kind of agreed upon active path toward progress.

For example, deregulation is a now, somewhat antiquated path to progress. The idea that cutting regulatory oversight will allow commercial enterprise to liberate us all. This can be progress, if the circumstances that demand change, so the reality being, that markets (or whatever) are overregulated. However, circumstances may be that something is underregulated, like the financial sector in the lead up to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In which case, further deregulation is not progress but regress.

What needs must be done however, needs must be debated rigorously on the left, such that the right can consent to the best course of action to re-regulate a financial sector. That debate could be made more rigorous by left-wing voices from the 70s who brought in the deregulation reforms, now conservatively defending the reckless abandonment of reforms implemented. Chesterton's fence demands voices that for example, can represent why exchange rates were floated, why the gold standard was abandoned. This would be conservativism, or the right wing, functioning as I assert it to be historically intended.

To look at the sporting world by contrast, there has been a recent-ish push for deregulation, specifically of what qualifies someone to participate in women's sporting activities. Without getting into the issue, I raise it merely to point out that in this case the right-wing can be generally characterised as being against deregulation, in stark contrast to their attitude toward regulating the financial sector.

Both positions are reconcilable, as is the right's resistance to conserving the environment, the amazon rainforest etc. They are actively resisting changes to the status quo of exploiting the natural environment, hence why conservatives, are not as a rule, nature conservationists. Though there are certainly examples historically of conservative governments creating nature reserves and what not.

Progress requires friction, the left doesn't want to operate on slippery ice, it needs traction of some kind to operate safely. Ideally, the right would be like grass, operating on grass is fairly straightforward. It may be that the right functions more like ice-skates, in terms of, it can allow us to navigate on very dangerous, slippery ice, but not without a degree of skill, learning, training. 

I'm not sure if the symbiosis required between right and left tendencies is analogous to running across an open field, or whether it is more analogous to pulling off a triple-axle in ice-skates.

What I actually see, in practice are a polarized conflict between two radical left-wingers taking place in an extremely dangerous environment. Which is the subject I will turn to next. 

I don't look at institutions like the Republican Party, and think Burkeian conservatives. I see some corruption of the right, into something functionally more like a radical left, I see the left, as also a very radical left, but in many ways the radical elements are a smokescreen for a position far more conservative.

Stay tuned, or not.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Abridged Historic Left

 I am merely aiming to be approximately right so as to avoid being precisely wrong in these descriptions. Historically, to be on the left was to be pro-reform in some way, but I don't want to pigeonhole the left-wing into being only concerned with reform and absolve it of responsibility for revolutions, revolutions are excessively left.

Furthermore historically, the whole left vs. right wing comes from French Parliament in the lead up to the French Revolution - at the birth of these semantics, the left were supporters of revolution.

So, there are a number of historic and respectable, even admirable behaviours that could be described as left. 

I like a definition of left as "someone who is critical of the institution to which they belong." 

More fundamentally, what I notice is that the universe is dynamic. To be left is to recognize that something needs to change. That something being a something that is in the purview of our control, in response to the readily observable fact that things are changing. A response is necessary, what works today won't work forever, and if anything we will probably lag behind the threshold where change is advantageous but hopefully not behind the threshold at which change was necessary.

If that is all a bit abstract, consider the Edo period of Japanese history. The Tokugawa Shogunate did it's best in so far as possible, to hermetically seal Japan off from the rest of the world. It limited foreign access to the port of Nagasaki, and it was mostly Portuguese. Certainly, you can go to museums today and see Ieyasu Tokugawa's reading glasses on display such that it was not the case that Japan was so sealed off that it was completely unaware of foreign innovation. That much as they tried to create a kind of homeostasis within the territories they commanded, beyond their boundaries the world continued to change. 

The Tokugawa Shogunate ruled Japan with an unbroken line for about 200 years, the Japanese renaissance. It produced an enormous cultural dividend for the world because this is where distinct Japanese arts including music and theatre, and philosophy including martial and tea ceremony, all flourished. Then the gunships came and the US' Commodore Perry forced Japan to reopen, bringing about the Meiji restoration and eventually the Pacific War and Tom Cruise's "The Last Samurai."

But even cultural homeostasis requires some kind of leftist presence - which is why historically I view left-right distinctions as useful in a way that they aren't now, because there's a symbiosis between two vital components. Somewhere I have photos from my last visit to Japan where we visited the foundries which foresaw Japan's vulnerability to western gunships, by a samurai (Egawa Hidetatsu) who suggested for Japan to maintain it's closed-off status it would have to change by building sea forts with sufficient fire power to keep foreign navies out. 

Everything about keeping Japan closed to the world might strike anybody as inherently conservative, but keep in mind "left" and "right" are relative terms, for the Bakafu government merely adopting western military technology like cannons was progressive. 

In the same way, without getting to subject of the next post "the regressive left" someone can be the left-wing at a dinner party of left-wingers. You might think "of course, the far left." and maybe, but maybe not, the left-wing person relative to a left-wing dinner table is whoever is making the case that the left itself needs to change. In the 70s-80s for example, this would be the person that recognizes that Capital will go on strike if Labour Unions and full employment remains too strong. (Which is basically what happened in the 70s and ushered in neoliberalism in the 80s.)

Such to say, someone fulfilling the historical role (as per my opinion, remember that and merely weigh its quality) would sit at a dinner party as their friends sip champagne and replace the cigarettes in their cigarette holders uttering things like "workers control the means of production" and "we must throw off the shackles of worker exploitation for united we are strong!" the left-wing person at that left wing party might offer the criticism "you do not go far enough! we must embark on a journey to program ourselves as one might program the loom to weave an altogether different kind of man the New Soviet Man!" this would be technically left wing, it would just be stupid, kind of like suggesting the antidote to excesses is merely the matter of ingesting more of the poison. Alternately the left-wing person at the party might remark "but there is an extent that the exploitation of labour can become quite ordinary. We trade labour against risk - we gain our wages, capital must gain their profits. We trade our time and energy for risk, which the employer assumes. Should their business fail, they still pay our wages on the road to bankruptcy. There needs to be a mutual accounting."

This illustration sets up serendipitously, an illustration of how a healthy functional left could appear to manifest. Because both these dissenting voices could be present at the same party, nested within the left-wing of society as a whole, as two left-wing left-wingers relative to the right-wing left-wingers - those who just want to keep running the same left-wing program of reform as ever.

There are more ways to conceive reform than there are to defend the status quo. We should expect the left to take the form of diverse coalitions in vigorous disagreement about the best course of action.

In a well functioning society, the left would always be present, always have influence but only be given responsibility infrequently - in times of catastrophic breakdowns, or long-coming stagnation. 

The left ideally achieves a kind of symbiosis with the right. This is underpinned by the important concept that is under threat presently from a pincer attack by the regressive right and left - The Consent of the Loser.

In an ideal, rather than look like an existential threat to the right, the left should appear more like a menu. Take an issue like climate change.

Ideally, the left would be a coalition of people who broadly agree that anthropic climate change is an issue, and the left's first task is to convince the public at large, by largely convincing the right that climate change is an issue.

Taking our first diversion from the ideal, an ideal left has to coexist with an ideal right, no ideal right can assert without evidence or argumentation that it is never the case that anything need change. We may be living in a world where whatever we call the right, is disrespectfully simply adamant that climate change can't necessitate any reaction, which is something a losing left, cannot be expected to consent to, which will I suppose have the natural effect of denigrating the constructive parts of the left and elevating extremists like "Just Stop Oil" in the UK who are committed to making nuisances of themselves publicly.

But we may have in this coalition of the left, people who recommend an effectively priced cap and tax emissions scheme targeting the heaviest emitting industries of greenhouse gases coaligned with a group who wish to outlaw all animal-based diets, even pet ownership.

From this coalition, an ideal right would work to elevate those in the left coalition who have the least intrusive solutions to offer while diminishing the more extreme on the left with the most costly proposals.

That just about completes my take on a historic left. In summation, a historically utilitarian role of the left, is to challenge the status quo in a spirit of open collaboration. Including it's own status quo. Because fundamentally the universe is dynamic. Tomorrow will resemble today, but it most importantly is not just today again, there will subsequently, be things that need doing. Which is why I am for a left, that functions without polarizing.

In my own history, my sympathies lean leftwards, but the left is somewhat culpable for it's own contributions via it's own behaviour for the dysfunctional world we now live in.


Thursday, March 14, 2024

International Women's Day 2024: Another Dead Woman

I'm male, questionably a man. Tracking through the years, I find my personal awareness of international women's day tracking downwards over time. This year I would not have known but for the google doodle of the day, one that furthermore required me to hover over with my mouse to interpret. I thought it might be international quilt day or something. Had I known it wasn't I probably wouldn't have paid it any mind.

Yes, of course, International Women's Day isn't for me. It isn't about me. I am precisely, not the point. Bringing me at least, to the question of flattery - the Kantian ethic of always treating a conscious person, or peoples as an ends, not a means. What for me, is an honest reaction to something like International Women's Day? Which coworker am I in the music dance experience as women of the world shake their maracas to defiant jazz?

Is International Women's Day Galentine's Day by another name?

Am I free to do my level best to simply leave it to those who would have it? Am I a free enough person upon this earth to choose not to care? Like I would react to the Adelaide Crows or the Geelong Cats winning an AFL premiership. I personally was far more excited to see my Blues beat the Brisbane Lion's by 1 point at the GABBA after being eliminated by them in the semi-final last year.

Well I would have not cared, but for strange and mysterious happenings on an otherwise quiet IWD. The strange thing was facebook notified me of some friends' posts. It seems most people like me have learned perhaps over the course of Covid, that facebook is as much a means to stay out of touch as it is to stay in touch. A way to learn who your friends really aren't as bold declarations of who they would like to be make you forget the authentic reasons you are friends in the first place: usually that they are good and decent people, mostly harmless.

So it transpired that facebook told me on IWD of two profoundly impactful statements made by male friends. By profoundly impactful, I mean they got more than 50+ "like" reactions. The first was from someone who was personally proximate to the latest mass shooting in the USA calling for prayers. The second was from someone responding to the news that, and I must be careful to describe what actually happened, the police arresting a man for killing Samantha Murphy in my hometown Ballarat. A marking of the passage from likely dead, to presumed dead with confidence, though to my knowledge her body has not been recovered and even though her alleged killer had been named I know nothing of the police's case against him.

The coincidence of two tragedies and public responses to them on facebook I'll be honest prompted me to want to write this facetious status update:

"I wish to once again affirm that I am for everything good and against everything bad. I will not stay quiet or silent while injustices persist. I take responsibility by recognizing the need for betterment and call upon those responsible to stop *not* implementing the simple solutions to problems that have persisted for almost all of human history."

Something like that. I refrained because I assumed that most people would assume that I wasn't commenting on the generalized behaviour, and how I view it in many ways as counter productive, verging on vacuous* though I acknowledge that for some distressed people saying something to someone might give them personal relief...I assume most people would assume I was referring to Sam Murphy's news developments, making light of a specific situation. 

*(By vacuous I mean, that with some confidence, I can predict that most public calls to action assume that all the worlds problems could be solved if people just committed to doing everything correctly, as though we know what is correct and that it is within not even most people's power to actually apprehend and implement correct behaviour.)

One of my friends who posted, I consider a very authentic person. The other, time has wearied me into stark cynicism. I worry that posting such messages relieves him too much. We are all in some ways running a newsroom, susceptible to noticing how great tragedy is for ratings.

By 2024, the imagined discourse I don't even witness likely riles me more than were I to actually look to my newsfeed and see what people were saying about another woman killed by a man not even known to her or the family being revealed on IWD. Reported on by bright young women news correspondents with their whole lives ahead of them.

I carry to the present day the damage of the mob's catharsis-voice in the wake of the murders of Jill Meagher, the murder of Eurydice Dixon, the murder of Aya Maasarwe who I must confess, the last's name I couldn't recall off the top of my head. If Kimberle Krenshaw demanded I stand and "say their names" I'd get the first two, not Aya's. 

People who might remember the furore over Eurydice's murder and the media frenzy covering and generating the public response may also remember a few lonely banners carried to the vigils and protests asking that we also consider a woman murdered by her husband at approximately the same time that Eurydice was murdered by a stranger, can you remember her name?

I remember she was ethnically asian, though I can no longer recall whether she had a Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian etc. name. As such I can't exclude that the failure of her murder to gain any real traction in the public discourse, as attributable to racism - white victim takes precedence in a white culture. Equally I cannot exclude the implicit implication that society broadly still regards women as property, getting killed by your husband is sad, getting killed by a stranger is outrageous, what right does a stranger have to kill a woman? 

Okay. Having read that last paragraph, I hope you read this my memory, or impressions of the case was wrong and I who thinks about the issues women raise am as prone to basing my conclusions on things I assume I know, but do not, as anyone else: the woman's name was Qi Yu, she was murdered in Sydney by her housemate, not her husband, both Chinese nationals he was a construction worker who had overstayed his visa, he plead guilty, internet searches by him indicated the murder was premeditated, the judge accepted testimony by a psychiatric assessor that her murderer had schizophrenia though there's not much evidence this was accounted for in sentencing so much as his guilty plea.

So yeah, the likelihood that her case was eclipsed by Eurydice's was likely racism*. Finally looking up the details of Qi Yu's case, I'm put in mind of when a home intruder in October 2008 caused the death of a Chinese student who jumped from a balcony to try and escape her assailant, I remember it as a horrific crime that seemed to me to be barely making the news compared to Britt Lapthorne's death that had dominated headlines since her disappearance in September 2008 one month earlier. There was much criticism of Croatian police, Australians, looking at what GoT would make a tourist destination for losers everywhere, as dark and scary and backward. Meanwhile as Liao "Elva" Wei's mother stated she "thought Elva was safe here," at least according to a family friend. Her daughter's death remains as unsolved by Australian law enforcement as Britt's by Croatian law enforcement.

*(I'd still hesitate to conclude this strongly. A quick consultation with Googletrends indicate that compared to Jill and Eurydice, white victims killed by white perpatrators, both Qi and Aya were non white and killed by non-white men, I strongly suspect that Melburnian's particularly on the left are averse to touching non-white perpetrators for fear of looking like a Queensland Nationals voter.)

Is Australia racist? Of course it is. Do I think the people most vocal about racism are competent guides to a brighter tomorrow? Not at all.

I would still guess that the relative lack of coverage and public outcry as to women being killed by romantic partners, vs. women getting killed by a stranger with notable exceptions like the woman whose whole family got burned alive by her ex-partner, is akin to the disparity in public outcry about people who get killed by someone with a car versus people who get killed by someone with a gun or blade. Driving is too relatable, as is dating and marriage and breakups.

Personal experience in Mexico I guess has somewhat inured me to Samantha Murphy's horrific demise. In my heart lives a woman, that I watched suffer mostly alone when her partner, my friend, disappeared one day, just before Christmas, never to be seen again. An experience that told me, long before the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible, that horror is a part of life, one that we need be capable of processing. At the time this man I knew joined 107,000 Mexican's who were registered as disappeared. I used to jog regularly by the Glorieta de las y los desaparecidos - the monument to the disappeared, where families and loved ones attach their own missing person in a monument to a Mexican tragedy. 

Photo credit D. Hernandez T.

The number now stands at 111,896, which excludes any missing person's that were later found dead. Yes in a nation roughly 5 times the size of Australia, 4,000 people disappear each year, never to be seen again. It's extremely rare for any of those 4,000 stories to really make the news. Not when cartels leave bodies in the streets or hanging from bridges. The thing is, I never saw any cartel related crime or violence in the four years I lived in Guadalajara. I saw people using drugs. I looked up where various Mexican cities ranked on "the world's most dangerous cities" a statistic that is determined by homicides per 100,000 population. Okay, nowhere in Mexico is as deadly as the town in Australia where someone was murdered in a population of 11. Furthermore, if a friend told you they were moving to Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, Milwaukee, Detroit or Cleveland you would probably picture them doing something akin to living in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Bondi, Sydney. You understand that millionaire athletes move to these towns and hit their clubs, enjoy fine dining. The same is true of Mexico, if you want a huge carbon footprint for no fucking reason at all go stay in the district of Roma, Mexico City, it's just like where you fucking came from.

The big difference is, where community volunteers coordinate to conduct a search across acres of Bushland where a woman disappeared on her Sunday jog, with multiple detectives working the case to gradually close in on someone to charge with her murder by looking at cell-phone tower data and whatever else, in Mexico my understanding is, you will probably have 5 different police explain you need to fill out a form when someone you love disappears. You will also not be able to exclude the possibility that the very officer you are talking to knows where your missing person is because they disappeared them. Mexico's present institutions are very broken, but Mexico's future, I feel, is bright.

A friend once told me "if you can spot it you've got it." and all I write is really my own testimony as to my own frank incompetence. I'm not fit to tackle the problem of violence in our society. Furthermore, life has delivered to me perspective that while Australia is not free from horror, it's societal response to violence against women is pretty good. 

We have a slow, deliberate judicial process that is pretty good. This has the unfortunate effect though of meaning there might be a year between a particularly graphic crime capturing national attention, and the quiet to almost silent sentencing of the criminal. Police took into custody both Jill and Aya's killers within a matter of days, sentenced to 40 and 36 years respectively. Eurydice's killer turned himself in to police and was sentenced to 35 years.

There are of course numerous problems with the criminal justice system, and some, are likely baked in, unfixable, without omniscience. Prescience. 

So perhaps it's fitting, rather than depressing, for IWD in my locale to be punctuated with an arrest of a killer of a woman. Justice is likely never going to take the form of swapping the guilty living for the innocent dead.

And that's where I'd like to think there's space for me to be an Adam Scott dancing along from a safe and respectable distance while women of the world shake their maracas on the day patriarchy generously allows them. Alas, I'm probably somewhere between Adam Scott and Zach Cherry trying actively not to participate while those hyping the day remain insensitive to my emotional confusion.

For example, how is one supposed to feel about propaganda?:

*everything does not include co-ed education experiences. **nowhere does not include the numerous other places like MLC, some within walking distance.

has anyone ever said this? is it a former Pymble Ladies College slogan?

How long has it been since some pipe smoking singlet wearing father informed his daughter that she couldn't change the world like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did because they were a girl. Who in this post "The Descent" world is still crushing little girl's dreams of cave exploration? Mountaineering? People should be discouraging kids from mountaineering, way too many tourists are climbing Mount Everest now, and none of them are changing the world. Of course, it's obviously a metaphor a metaphor for...for how girls need to ignore the naysayers* and forge their own path by enrolling in a finishing school.

*(and seriously, I would not be surprised if the people most guilty of broadcasting messages about what women can't do and can't achieve, are now feminists of the Iago variety.)

I've long been fascinated by the outdoor advertising put up by Methodist Ladies College. It is perhaps my marketing sensitivities, but I think I read them as intended, the target market is private school's customer base - parents (tweenage girls in Australia don't tend to grab The Financial Review on IWD and be so inspired they beg their parents to send them to Pymbles Ladies College, they are targeting affluent conservative adults). The strategy is to facilitate being able to deny sending your daughter to a finishing school, a safe environment where she will be shielded from the harsh real world while learning the skills necessary to avoid reality forever, by hopefully progressing through a series of gated institutions until they retire to a gated community or something. No, you can tell your friends, you are not doing that, you are sending them to be challenged and inspired. Even though if you can afford private tuition they will be challenged and inspired by being sent to a public coed school across town where refugee immigrants get to send their kids. The difference being the latter option contains real and certain risk - incompetent unmotivated teachers and administration, defective disciplinary programs etc. 

I guess in pointing out my personal distaste for propaganda - propaganda that frequently misrepresents both femininity and misogyny, as per the Pymble Ladies College - I allude to a greater unintelligibility regarding feminism. It is no one thing, as are women themselves. There is also a distaste for the euphemism "ally" which is very much an off-the-shelf pre-packaged fait-accompli, not even a mule to be tailor fit. Functionally terms like "ally" and "allyship" and phrases like "being a good ally" are talking about serfdom, or protestantism or something. 

An alliance is a deal struck over a shared goal. If we take a really one-sided negotiation, like the terms & conditions I agreed to use google products, that isn't something I negotiate, it is something I can take or leave. Which again is to say, I recognize that the invitation extended to me, and men like me is to lend my weight but not my mind, not my voice. A good ally follows and surrenders their resources to the cause.

But it's even more than that, I don't even need to touch any of the lukewarm buttons on the issues like sex and gender, feminine and female. I can simply invoke for intelligibility purposes old names like Andrea Dworkin and Valeria Solonas compared to Ariel Levy and Rebecca Solnit all feminists of previous generations, previous waves. 

I do not see the current "wave" as innovating through clarity, cohesion either. Nor would I expect a wave born in the social media era, to produce clarity and cohesion. The best opportunity for alliances in the modern era, is in civilizing the wild-west of internet misinformation, much as "the west" had to be recivilized after the printing press created pamphleteering. I can find common ground with anyone who doesn't wish to see another Witch's Hammer.

I can only possibly ally with a form of feminism that interprets "equal" as "equal in dignity and respect" not one with a three-word-slogan like "equal is equal" as in my experience of the past decade such slogans generally predict a lack of any considered thought. 

As I dignify and respect myself as an aspirational reasonable person, averse to dogma, appeals to authority and assertions, I cannot respect as my equal, anyone who will not argue their case, nor cannot argue their case.

For this I can circle back to the problem of dead women at the hands of men. Somewhere in the past week I saw a screenshot of a tweet making the claim "until women can safely walk the streets at night we are not equal." a statement that is as vacuous as it is righteous.

If I'm reading the mood of the mob, the optics of me attempting to correct the error of this statement in order not to defeat feminism as movement, but to improve it, are worse than a women suffering through life as a result of her misapprehensions regarding the transformative powers of righteousness.

One thing about Mexico that is very visible, is that disappeared men outnumber disappeared women about 2~1. Just as it is clearer that a woman murdered by a stranger is a social issue than a woman murdered by a former romantic partner (allowing a woman's death to qualify all romantic partner femicides as former) most Mexicans allow that disappeared women are more outrageous than many disappeared men, given a tendency to presume that men who disappear are likelier to be involved in "the drug game."

But there is an absolute (in terms of raw statistics) truth on display that male violence in absolute numbers is far more dangerous for men, if less outrageous as a phenomena, because it is harder to predict which of two men will be victim and perpetrator based on sex characteristics alone.

There are likely very real and stable facts however that can predict reliably that I for example am 98% more likely to be a victim of male violence against men, than a perpetrator of violence against men. That just cannot be determined by looking at me standing next to another man. The fact is though, that it is not safe for men to walk the streets at night. 

I invite my fellow Victorians to consider the word "stabbings" Since I returned to Australia, I would guesstimate that I have heard of at least 6 fatal stabbings being covered in the news. Generally these stories have involved teenage boys stabbing each other. An alarming social phenomena that actually does not alarm me at all.

Therein the fundamental difference - the psychological difference. That while men are in far more danger of being violently attacked by other men, they don't suffer psychologically for the risk. They go to pubs expecting to come home, not anxious that they will bump someone causing them to spill their beer and then in a rage king-hit them and end their life. They walk the streets with no expectation that a group of pubescent little boys will pull out box cutters and stab them over a six pack of beers, or while they may fear getting called "freckle-face" at school, walk home from school with no expectation that their classmates will stab them to death because they have freckles.

Strict equity in this case is undesirable. For one, it would mean that the world needs to become more dangerous for women, to the point where what happened to Jill, Eurydice and Aya verges on being boring. Something I noticed walking Mexican streets at night, was despite the ubiquitous purple spray paint defacing statues, school campuses and government buildings with radical feminist complaints about femicide and abortion legalisation, and the very visible posters and murals dedicated to disappeared women and girls, even the stories of Police gangraping women that I have heard, none of these daily realities have left Mexican women more as afraid and angry as Australian women. A morbid conclusion suggested by the data, that the more progress we make toward equity the more women as a population will suffer psychology. As crime goes down, coverage goes up, but how else would we have it?

For second, I attribute the lion's share of the disparity in crime to phenotype and extended phenotype differences. This easily explains the massive disparities in crime within the male population. I have written at length previously, that I have heard enough rape jokes and seen enough posters outing male-feminist "allys" as sexual predators, that I find neither men who tell and laugh at rape jokes nor men who express their solidarity and "do the work" predictive in any way as to who will be the violent offenders among men. A reassuring number of men laugh at rape jokes, because they understand that rape is really really wrong. An alarming number of men who express their solidarity, are seeking access to vulnerable women.

The reality that has to be accepted, is that most women on this planet can give birth to a male, who in some 12~14 short years will be fully capable of overpowering them and beating them to death with their own hands. I've heard but haven't verified, that the average 70 year old male has a stronger grip strength than the average 25 year old woman - a suggestion that a man some 50 years removed from his physical prime can grab the arm of a woman in her physical prime such that she could not remove the offending hand on average.

That's the phenotype difference I allude to, and just the phenotype difference. What I would expect is that where there is pronounced sexual dimorphism like in the human species, there will likely be corresponding behavioural traits. A convoluted way of saying, that I somewhat expect people more capable of violence to wind up with frontal cortexes and hormone systems more prone to behaving violently.

So the second undesirable aspect of equality, would be men being as afraid of violence from women, and women being as afraid of violence from women, as women are afraid of violence from men and men are afraid of violence from men.

At my gym I got to watch a muted screening of "Where the crawdads sing" a film and story in a similar vein but likely inferior to "Fried Green Tomatoes" where ultimately, paralegal "justice" is somewhat glorified or justified - spoiler alert, women kill men who wrong them and escape conviction. 

I suspect these books and films hold appeal, as an archetype, because human stock is being civilised by institutions rather than being innately civilised. We are probably all naive-tribalists with double standards applied to people we identify with or feel we understand and different standards for those we don't.

I will hedge my bets in predicting a future, (I mean the easiest future to predict is one in which some baseline, equivalent to the neoliberal definition of "full employment (about 96-98%)" is reached in which women will continue to be killed by men, mostly by current or former romantic partners.) But that the fickle-fashions will turn again to problematise Where The Crawdads Sing for glorifying a false analogy to fire-flies and praying mantises as justifying a unilateral decision to murder a perceived or even real threat. The hedge is that if we don't live in that future, it will be a worse future.

The first two waves in hindsight appear to have merged into one and the same, a grounded feminism with some fringe elements that largely concerned itself with real problems many of which persist today and are in ample supply to be meaningfully addressed by the supply of feminists. 

From reading Ariel Levy, I got a brief primer in the confusion that arose between the simultaneous movements of Women's liberation and the Sexual Revolution - the basis I think, of her thesis for Female Chauvinist Pigs, the current era appears more confusing as women's liberation has become entangled with the deconstruction of women and intersectionality to the point that it is in my opinion, genuinely unintelligible. Though I will concede, my answer to "what is a woman?" is not so narrow as "adult human female" though I recognise how someone can arrive at that position rationally. 

Personally I regard "man" and "woman" as honorifics, indicating males and females that have attained the desirable attribute of maturity, and the reason it is as okay to label bathrooms with these signifiers as clear honorifics "ladies" and "gents" which are honorifics pertaining to more specific characters, is because manners are a huge part of our civilisation and explicitly are our guidelines as to how to treat with strangers so our bathroom doors give strangers the benefit of the doubt as to being worthy of the honorifics "men" and "women" even if they then go on to prove that they pee on the seats or don't wash their hands or prefer to use the disabled only toilet for the space and privacy.

Now the third wave is either current, or part of what I think is the second wave. What I'm sure of is that the current wave, let's call it fourth increasingly looks to me the product of a social science as undignified as economics. 

There is an economics joke involving respectable scientists and an economist stuck on a desert island with a can of beans and the punchline, at the expense of the economist is "assume we have a can opener."

With what economics training I have, I can appreciate this punchline, and it becomes morbid when you look at the human cost of austerity budgets and learn the economists assumption was that a person who lost half their household income due to public school teachers getting fired as a result of austerity, would be so thrilled at their anticipated lifetime savings in tax obligations that they would go out on a consumer binge and thus repair the economy. 

The current wave, the fourth wave appears to have it's own theories-into-practice underpinned by a premise of "assume men don't exist."

Where to comment that nobody, in a lifetime has ever uttered within earshot of a man "Girls can't change the world" such that a marketing slogan of "Girls can't change the world" seems like trite propaganda for a finishing school that will leave your daughter less capable of competing in a world in which men exist as a reasonable inference to draw about the efforts they appear to be promoting of protecting young proto-women from the stress of sharing spaces with men.

To comment as a man, even granting the limits of standpoint-epistemology, is an affront to theory's right to exist without reference to, or constraint by, reality.

Yet, a piece of text rings in my years following the death of Eurydice, who's death haunts me based on its proximity to a significant death in my life, of a friend lambasting the "deafening silence" I assume, on social media, from men in response to her death.

That was but one voice among many female voices, and more than one female voice in public argued a case that though tragic, the public outcry was overblown given that the dark streets of Melbourne remain statistically safer for women than the places they call homes. I just suspect I'm reading "the room" of public opinion right, when I continue to view that invitation to speak up as a man is an invitation to toe the line. It is not a suggestion I might have anything of value to offer (as I would if one assumes that men exist and need to be negotiated), it is a suggestion that I am passing up the incredible value on offer, because if I said what hyperbolically speaking "everyone" was already saying as a man and an ally, it would indicate I have read the material because the only outcome of reading the material is to agree. 

The truth is I've read much of the material, had the arguments, and remain unconvinced that it is as simple as presented.

All I choose to offer here, is the suggestion that often the deafening silence, is in practice a deafening politeness. The story of Samantha's murder I predict, will be the story of a troubled young man committing a crime of oportunity, much the same as Eurydice's story and Aya's story and Qi's story. But few people outside of me, will even follow up when the media covers the trial, verdict and sentencing.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Quick Sketch: Why You Should Watch The Wire

 The Wire was an early 21st century HBO drama following the heroin market in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. 

The 5 seasons gradually increase the scope of the problem of stamping out the heroin game in an environment as complicated as a city in the United States.

The first season illustrates in detail how complicated it is to bring down a criminal conspiracy, focused on a special police unit that wiretaps the Barksdale organization. Crime has evolved to survive in the police environment. One with civil liberties preserved. It is not as simple as finding a junkie, asking where they get their heroin and then going and arresting the person selling heroin. The first season will instill in you an appreciation for why a heroin epidemic can appear much more quickly in your neighbourhood than it can disappear.

The second season is considered one of the weaker, it moves to the wharf and the stevedore's union. The Barksdale organization fades into the background as the issue of importing heroin and the complex economic factors is introduced. It may not be instilled after watching season 2, that fixing the drug trade may be, in a complicated way interlinked with the problems of structural unemployment. 

The third season introduces local politics to the equation. I'll circle back on this, but it in many ways predicted the post Obama populist era in the character of Tommy Carcetti.

The fourth season many consider peak "The Wire" as it introduces the education system and schooling into the equation. By the time you finish the fourth season, you should appreciate just how fucking complicated the problem of drug trafficking is.

The fifth and final season, understandably many will see as a disappointing conclusion to a masterpiece. Nevertheless by introducing newsmedia, the press, if not a complete picture of how difficult it is to deal with crime, in many ways with an invented serial killer employed to garner public opinion to bring all the complicated variables together to bring down the successor to the Barksdale organisation, it is one of the least grounded of the series. Much like season 2, the additional element of the media has to take a back seat to the series concluding.

And the series conclusion, for something so grounded in reality and detached from romance I think needs to be consumed as symbolic rather than literal - Mike doesn't become Omar, Dukie doesn't become Bubbles etc. rather, the despite victories the root causes will keep generating the drug game.

The Wire is a show that made Breaking Bad quite hard for me to enjoy, because of its scale and scope. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell run a plausible drug empire, and relative to "The Greek" the heroin wholesaler in season 2, they are small players. Gus and Mike in Breaking Bad are just too condensed to be plausible after watching the Wire, even if they are in their own way compelling characters.

But don't watch it to ruin yourself for Breaking Bad, much of the technology is dated in terms of The Wire, even though it exists in a period of time that spans rapid tech advancement from payphone to smart phones and mms. Where it is positively ahead of times is the way in which it reveals the major two factions that generate most societal conflict historically and up to the present day.

Whether it is the police, the schools, the unions, the newspapers or government the major conflict is between people who want to do the actual work a job entails, and those that want career advancement.

The world of the wire is filled with protagonists who are trying to solve problems in regard to wider ideals. Whether it is McNulty who kicks off the whole series by complaining to a judge about the ineffective policing strategy, through to Carcetti who while a shrewd politician generally believes himself capable of reforming Baltimore politics before becoming corrupted by political survival. There is perhaps no clearer antagonist in the series as William Rawls, a careerist police executive that cuts off much potential good at the knees when it threatens to encroach on his career ambitions.

I don't think The Wire ever reaches us, as general members of the public, but it likely would have got their eventually. The general public are likely more careerist in nature than vocational. We do not want to understand, we merely want results.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Quick Sketch: Columbo is Why You Don't Want Magic To Exist

 "I'm writing a book on Magic." I explain. And I'm asked "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No." I answer. "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." ~ Lee Siegal, Net of Magic at least by Dan Dennett's testimony.

I can't make a better case for watching Columbo than George Rockall-Schmidt:

 Columbo is not a "Whodunnit?" formulaic police procedural like say "Death In Paradise" or Agatha Christy Poirot story's but a "Howcatchem?" formulaic police procedural. Insofar as we the viewer know who committed the crime and how from the outset, we are much more engaged with the mystery because it has been spoiled, so Columbo if nothing else, when you independently come to the conclusion it is one of the best shows ever made, could cure you of your irrational fear of spoilers.

But once you see Columbo latch on to having to explain why a pipe is in a driveway, or why there would be fresh water beside a pool one can seize the opportunity to realize that our whole justice system is predicated on the singular premise that something had to happen.

I recently saw "Anatomy of a Fall" having done very little presearch before I agreed to go see it. I didn't know it was set in France and for a moment I got really uncomfortable that I was going to witness a court drama played out in an inquisitorial system. (See Amanda Knox on Netflix for Italy's Inquisitorial system and El Cuerpo En Llamas which I think translates to "The Body In Flames" for Spain's Inquisitorial system) A horrifying way to pursue criminal justice. France being a Catholic nation that speaks a romantic language, my stomach began to twist that I was going to have to witness another inquisitorial trial.

Turns out France is adversarial, if you don't know the difference, adversarial is where the prosecution tries to persuade a jury of guilt while being cross examined by defence in the presence of a Judge who is there to represent the law. Inquisitorial is where the judge trying the defendant is also the prosecutor who apparently can speculate openly and address the jury directly.

My relief was short lived because, and I don't know why the French do this...The last few French films I've seen, like Raw (2016) and Titane (2021) plus some Netflix shows about Mortality cults in a near future of immortals and people trapped in an automated house...here is the feedback I feel France as a population lack: France undeniably has made great contributions to intellectual culture - Des Cartes, Pascal, Montaigne, Voltaire, De La Rochefaucold, Camus, de Beauvoir, even the Post Modernists made important contributions despite their present state of being super overrated. But French people are not intellectuals, no more so than Germans, Mexicans, Britains, Japanese or Texans. That's just not how intelligence or intellectualism works. But France appears to have a unique conceit that their population is more intellectual than the next and it's frankly embarassing. Their screenwriters can write arguments about how murdering a cow is the same as murdering a man into the script of Raw that is embarassing and a proud French citizen should be embarassed that their public be seen to carry on this way.

I would have been convicted of murdering my husband if I had to sit through the trial of Anatomy of a Fall just because I would be constantly interjected with "Jesus!" and "What is this bullshit?" and "This is horseshit!" constantly when trial lawyers start attempting to deconstruct literature to make a case, I absolutely would have been fined a bunch of money for contempt of court because I would expect the Judge to at some point instruct the attorneys to "dial the Frenchness down from 11 could we?"

But Columbo, Columbo is none of these things. There is no interpretation of subtext and then debating authorial intent. If a broken watch indicates the person was murdered at 6.30 but the nearest payphone they could use was 30 minutes away, and the phone was inside a Gas Station that closed before 6.30 and the phone company has no record of a call being made, then Columbo deduces not that teleportation is real, but that the time of death couldn't be 6.30.

The respectable conservative movement, not really represented by political bodies labelled conservative today, is a bulwark against unintended consequences. That's why you want conservatives to exist, to protect us from our own exuberance and the Dunning Krueger effect. People who want the alignment of Chakras to prevent aging, or Raiki to heal cancers, putting objects under their pillow to cause people to fall in love with them or decks of cards to make financial decisions for them; well those people are fine so long as they want to discover a science of Yoga, a science of Raiki, a science of Wikka etc. and for the most part in so far as these magical things are effective that science is understood to be human psychology, maybe probability.

Typically though, if you want to wish that magic was real, you probably want a hard magic system, rather than a soft magic system. Yeah, Harry Potter solved some mysteries explainable through polyjuice potions, but really if people can have time rewinding stop watches - you don't want to be an Auger in the Wizarding World because you can't solve crimes when you can't rule anything out.

Reassuringly formulaic Death In Paradise, at least in the seasons I still watched had many a contrived scene where the DCI concluded very quickly that the murder pretty much always had to be committed by one of 5 suspects because nobody could get in or out. That's much harder with flying broomsticks, flue-powder, portkeys, pocket dimensions, invisibility cloaks. It's hard to Alibi anyone when you can put a animated talking portrait of yourself against a window for the neighbours to see, without even having to brew up any polyjuice. 

"So the person died at 6pm from a forbidden curse judging by the neighbours testimony of the blood curdling scream they heard. The penthouse is only accessible by elevator because the staircase triggers an alarm which we already checked has been active all evening, meaning the murderer was one of the 5 guests, does that sound right to you seargent?"

"No. We can't draw any conclusions, because fucking magic."

"Right you are sergeant. The scream could have been a recording, the body could have been frozen in time using a stasis field, the victim themselves may have been impersonated at the party using polyjuice by the actual killer who then transformed into an owl to fly off into the night, after receiving and planting the body on the balcony using the fireplace. Or anything fucking else."

Columbo in revealing the elaborate premeditated murders and the elaborate impulsive murder cover-ups demonstrate highly intelligent people (way beyond 2 standard deviations of the average Frenchman) knowing that everyone knows something had to happen and trying to fabricate an ironclad alibi, dispose of murder weapons, eradicate all trace of a murderer, change the scene of the crime etc. and generally what Columbo is doing is proving that the impossible is impossible.

Which is why I would also recommend reading beyond Frank Herbert's Dune, onto Dune Messiah, even if the box office of Dune Part 2 is great it will probably take a few years to adapt Dune Messiah and they might Hobbit it. So read the book. Because Paul Atreides big advantage in Dune is that he is prescient - he can see the future, sort of like Madame Web. Dune Messiah is focused on a conspiracy to bring down Paul and end his reign. The conspirators protect themselves by having their own prescient member, because if two people can see the future it means nobody can see the future. The conspiracy also appears to have popularized "Dune Tarot" which is never described in great detail except that it appears to either randomize human behaviour to render prescience difficult, or it imparts a degree of prescience upon the population at large blinding Paul's ability to predict the future.

Hence magic remains fun and games so long as it isn't real, and that was what Dan Dennett employed the quote from the book to highlight - real magic is fake whereas fake magic is real, which you can read either way suffice to say that what is possible is ultimately constrained by something like Newton's laws of motion.

So teenage girls who pick up a book on witch-craft, that I'll extend the benefit of the doubt that the author watched Teen Witch (1989) as a teenage girl, had her mind opened to hip-hop and received the message loud and clear about the pitfalls of compelling someone to love you or even transforming a frog so you can have sex with it; and subsequently the spells of the 75 that help someone "find love" do not involve compelling Johnny football hero to love them, but spells that say help you notice that asthmatic Dennis who is in your league might be someone you can form a loving attachment to. I have come across many examples of people flirting with taking magic seriously that demonstrate a duty of care to potentially naive and undiscerning clientelle - be it a crystal healer that told her friend that based on the alarming size of the tumour her son had, it wasn't time for crystals but maybe chemo, or the fortuneteller that told my friend that her ex boyfriend wouldn't call her back until she stopped wanting him to etc. Plenty of people in this space demonstrate conscious...

That said there's always going to be a distribution problem. the publishers of Teen Witch blurb their product:

With more than 75 spells for finding love, money and happiness...

It seems they have no scruples about selling the book to someone who might be seeking a spell to compell Johnny football hero to love you. The thing is, that if a book can help any highschool girl get asked to the prom by any highschool boy, then the spell presumably won't just work for you, but that bitch Tina. Furthermore, while you may pine for Johnny football hero or Aquamarine non-binary activist hero right now, hopefully you learn the same lessons as the girl from Karate Kid 3 and Teen witch that compelling someone to love you is ultimately a hollow victory, that means magic is most likely going to be employed most frequently by dark-triad individuals, people with PDs, psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, hystrionics and some of the time borderline individuals.

And now vet the spell book as to whether if this magic worked, the most repulsive person (maybe me) on earth could use the spells on you. Because as appealing as it might be to possess the power of magic, the idea of everyone else possessing the power of magic should appal you.

From which Columbo could probably deduce that any well written book on magic will have been effectively edited by natural selection to contain pretty much benign-to-inert descriptions of magic.

Think of it this way. A society like the United States can cope more-or-less with the existence of hand guns. If magic was real, society would organize around it, it might render things like women's independence and democracy impossible, just like portable fool proof killing machines are real and US society organizes around that fact. I would assert, nobody but the worst people, are jealous of the US' second amendment. I suspect that in the UK, Canada, Scandanavia, EU, Australia, Japan etc. are quite glad and un-eager to make hand guns available to the general public without quite rigorous regulation (as I believe is the case in Japan).

But moreso than just someone you hate being able to put the cruciatus curse on you, or even as much as you love Harry Potter but don't want Draco Malfoy to be a presence in your life, it is more so everything you would lose. Namely how it might take three or more victims to build enough circumstantial evidence that a violent male keeps killing his partners, he isn't just being stalked by a witch or wizard that is trying to frame him.

The fact that only a narrow band of things are possible, is something that makes building a community everyone can live in easier.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Quick Sketch: Bobby Chiu Isn't Everything Wrong With Art

 Back when I was renting a studio, sitting on one of those equilibriums of life, happy to flirt with a studio colleague by day and a call centre colleague by night; a friend of mine visited and expressed the idea that they would like to come document my process as an artist. I was incredibly productive at the time, if a mediocre artist, staging two solo shows a year, but I liked the idea because I felt it was important for young artists to know how much of my time in the studio was spent eating Doritos and watching tv. 

Being good at art, like a disciplined, dilligent artist improving their craft with a dedication that falls far short of machine learning, is, to many an outsider, indistinguishable from someone in a deep depression. They may not leave their room except to make toilet and eat some garbage they can cook most of the bacteria out of with minimal fuss. They may draw all the blinds so they can control the light sources and sit in front of a computer with a vacant expression on their face all day. When really inspired, they may roll out of bed and put on yesterdays clothes skipping a shower so they can get right into it.

Having a studio, as well as providing you with a dedicated work space sufficient for all the shit your practice accumulates over time, can also serve to remove you from the people who become concerned about your mental health and happiness when you are working hardest at work worth doing, something many people in conventional careers may never experience. This is not to poo-poo anyone who works with spreadsheets or whatever, that is work I have also done, found incredibly rewarding and it is slightly unfair that when an analyst has reconciled a bunch of disparate and disorganized finances or built a superior prediction model for the forthcoming years production and sales targets, it's not a thing that they can hire a room in a trendy district and have all their friends and family gather to celebrate their production like an artist can. 

But let's be real, there are far more people working with spreadsheets than want to be working with spreadsheets because that is where the economy is at.

Flash back a further 8 years or so, I was discovering what art was all about when I just set myself the challenge of staging a solo exhibition. I had no idea what I was doing or even if I could do it. Bobby Chiu was at that time incredibly, incredibly important to me. He was a digital artist in the era of CGTalk and Deviant Art, he did these long youtube streams if you want an idea of what Bobby Chiu was like 15 years ago, here's one I remember watching but haven't reviewed:

He basically used to paint and impart the experience of an older artist to younger artists. Talking about how hard it was going to be, how important your mindset was, how to deal with failure. They took the form of a conversation with a wise man, even though you weren't talking. 

At the time, he was probably getting enough income from selling prints and maybe books at conventions, doing some concept work here and there. He was running as near as I could discern a community group called "Subway sketching" in Toronto where people met up rode the subway all day sketching commuters to improve their drawing.

Bobby Chiu was incredibly important to me at this time and he was really passionate about building a community of artists. He had some connections and started interviewing in depth artists that I like. Tim Sale, I only found out was dead from writing this blog post, what a shame, but Bobby Chiu interviewed him and it wasn't behind a paywall, or membership-newsletter wall, nor was Marcelo Vignali, Bill Pressing, Francis Manapul, Cheeks Galloway, Francisco Herrera, Alberto Ruiz or Humberto Ramos.

The early tingling, that this feast of online parasocial artistic community and connection could not last wasn't driven by the knowledge that Bobby's gotta eat, that artists can't live off "exposure" forever. It was actually when Bobby started interviewing people at Pixar. 

Like arguably the least interesting aspect of Tim Sale's career as an artist was that he did the paintings of the psychic heroin addict in the first season of Heroes, a show that ran into the writers strike and immediately crashed and burned, yet that was what Bobby really wanted to talk to him about, not Tim Sale's work on "The Long Halloween" set in the DC Batman "Year One" continuity established by Frank Miller and probably best known to you as the comic Nolan adapted "The Dark Knight" plot from.

Most of the above links to artist interviews for Schoolism login possessors, came I think from Brand Studio Press, they were all artists publishing books of their collected illustrations through the same outlet. They were probably largely drawn from Bobby's professional network.

This was contemporaneous to when Kevin Pollack could get Tom Hanks, Larry David etc. down to his podcast. Joe Rogan probably hadn't started his podcast yet, or had done so very recently. 

The impression I got, and largely given by Bobby, was that the vast majority of people watching his interviews really wanted him to interview Pixar artists that could tell them how to get hired at Pixar.

That's when I began to lose interest in Bobby Chiu's interviews, because I had no ambition to one day work at Pixar, I wanted to make comics and improve as an illustrator. I already found Pixar movies fairly generic, and they probably hadn't made Toys 2 or Cars 2 at that point.

The thing was, like Disney, Bobby was listening to his fans and trying to give them what they want.

He'd already started his venture "Schoolism" a correspondence course for artists that boasted really talented teachers. Cheeks Galloway for example, was one of the earlier interviewees and he was already working for Schoolism. But that was less of a warning sign than the Pixar interviews, Schoolism was new, online correspondence was new. The idea that someone in the Phillipines could have their work critiqued and digitally painted over by Jason Seiler was new.

Flash forward 13 years:

This is a free lifedrawing class Schoolism offers that can be joined by anyone anywhere and generally uploaded to youtube so you can participate in the exercise on your own time.

Participants in the live stream can via chat, direct questions to Bobby Chiu and other participants sharing their work like Kei Acedera, etc.

You could win money all day long betting that any question Bobby Chiu fields the answer will be "You know what I did, I actually enrolled in [insert schoolism course]" Nowdays if you asked Bobby Chiu what he wants for lunch, he would probably be reminded by the thought of a ham sandwich of a Schoolism Course someone can take for that.

And sure, this is a professional Artist that has worked with Tim Burton who runs a business giving 90 minutes of his time a week that he could be using to paint concept art for Tim Burton. In return for access to professional artists, it has to be paid for via advertising, and advertising Schoolism. I feel I could be forgiven for presuming that the cessation of the 90MAC series in June 2022 was because of diminishing returns as an advertising model. If you access the playlist and mute the video it remains a valuable and generous resource Schoolism deserves kudos for.

I understand the business model, and it's nowhere near as egregious a "thing" in the art world as traditional art schools pushing out conceptual and installation artists and found artists. Nor is it on the flipside AI startups launching globally into markets that culturally do not even not respect Intellectual Property, but cannot even conceive of the idea of someone having some ownership of their ideas, like giving midjourney and AItools and whatever other programs have proliferated to people that do not understand why someone would be upset that they picked apples, crushed sugar cane, milled flower, churned butter, exchanged their children for some cinnamon and cloves, made a pie, baked a pie, put the pie on the windowsill to cool and then you came and ate it. These are huge problems to be navigated by art.

This is just someone who used to be a person, and now is a hamster in a wheel. This is a human face to the sad fact that people have to say "don't forget to like and subscribe" because they know full well that people won't if they don't ask each and every fucking time. From the user side, a HUGE part of why I am reluctant to subscribe or like a video is because it's very rare for a new video to get past me. Subscribing to a channel has pretty much no benefit for me, I'll be suggested everything they upload, but it's a currency Youtubers need to get advertiser dollars.

At some point, Bobby got skinner-boxed into being a full-time non-stop mouthpiece for his business ventures. No doubt, because like all sales techniques that are annoying, enough people reward it. If I didn't find Bobby viscerally painfully disingenuous now (and not even in any malicious way, he is just diligent to always be promoting Schoolism) I could probably pinpoint the exact interview where they ceased to be two artists talking about their craft, and began being native advertisements for Schoolism courses thinly veiled as two artists talking about their craft.

Bobby better be struggling, or Schoolism, or both. If Schoolism is doing well, and Bobby is considering which Canadian NHL team to purchase, personally it's appalling to me because the success in art Bobby is modelling is a career I don't want. I want to make art that creates a connection with its audience, I don't want to become a relentless salesman (so relentless Bobby Chiu doesn't have a wikipedia page, only trusting a google search to Imaginism Studios his own production company) who's own artistic output hasn't really been relevant since Tim Burton was. 

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Quick Sketch: Why Are Punks Wet Farts and Metalheads Mensches?

 Full disclosure. I don't know why fans of Metal are so nice. The best I can offer being that they aren't punk fans. But in my experience they are nicer than like, the Indy crowd who are hanging around whatever the "scene" is right now. 

Go to a metal gig, and you'll see fat bearded dude in faded black shirts that list a bunch of tour dates on their backs for a band you aren't currently seeing, and between the bandroom, the bar and the bathroom you'll see these fat dudes running into eachother and being all "Hey Steve! Good to see you. How are the kids?" and so forth. Like you are at an Xmas bbq and not The Tote.

Bringing me to the stimulus for this post:

Literally the laziest cash-grab example I could find. I initially saw a hand embroided patch for sale on etsy. I picked this one, because if my post inadvertantly draws some poor individual that never asked for my opinion, better it be someone who spent all of 12 seconds typing a slogan into a Photoshop text box to sell on a kids t-shirt.

I've been to a few punk gigs, very few, because broadly speaking, the Blink-182 lead punk revival was for me the harbinger of the death of the 90s and the beginning of the truly terrible 2000s period. I don't like the genre of music, but the closest thing I ever got to a girl making me a mixtape was just a cassette tape of the Dead Kennedy's. 

Musically, I find Punk uninteresting, I can recognise it's contribution to the history of music, and how it gave birth to a bunch of genres I do find interesting. 

Fundamentally though, punk is ushered in by The Sex Pistols, and there anti-meritocratic protest against prog-rock. I can understand that, thanks to eras of "conspicuous intellectualism" I have lived through, like when everyone was into reading during the Obama presidency. There must have been insufferable prog rock fans all over the place in the 70s. 

But it was a fundamentally stupid question like "why should only the people who are good at playing instruments and singing get to perform music?"

Giving us music that is interesting, kind of like The Shagg's "Philosophy of the World" album is interesting, and subjectively good, to people who want it to be good, but in many senses objectively bad.

Flash forward 20 years, and scales begin to lift from my eyes. I notice that friends I would have called ********** to their faces in the mid-90s, are fans of punk. My feeling that punk music is generally not that great isn't what makes me uneager to see punk gigs in Melbourne. It's how awful the people at punk gigs are. 

Once I laughed at this fat ugly girl wearing the punk uniform who picked up a dead pigeon off swanston street and threw it into a gathering of private school girls in their uniform. That was pretty amusing, that imposition of one world upon another, it was even admirable that one girl had overcome the emotion of disgust to exacerbate another group of girls oversensitivity to disgust in a very public and spontaneous performance art piece.

Outside of that though, I've never seen anything to suggest that the punk crowd isn't human excrement. Just the worst people to try and share any space with. Just anti-social dicks.

That's why it was surprising to learn that that cohort of my friends who identify as "having anxiety" and did things like not eat animals, nor eggs, cheese and honey, they were really into punk.

I know the ethical arguments for veganism, very well, even made well by characters like Alex O'Conner. Arguments are one thing, in practice generally I observe veganism to manifest more as an eating disorder that is fundamentally about control - a way of tackling life's uncertainties and placating personal anxieties by controlling what goes in one's mouth. 

I'm not saying veganism is a mental illness, I'm saying it pairs well with poor mental health.

So my initial conclusion was that punk is like jazz. It has the image of being risqué but in fact it is not. it protects its enthusiasts from risk by remaining largely inaccessible. It's about rejecting the effort to be appealing, manifest in the hairstyles, the fashion, the dancing and fundamentally the music. Greenday's "Good riddance (Time of Your Life)" in being accessible, sentimental even is far riskier than Bad Brains "I Against I" and that is why the former made a whole bunch more money than the latter. 

Sex Pistols "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols" was a risk at the time, it wouldn't be in 2024 because that statement had been made. Just like we don't need a whole genre worth of comedians doing Andy Kaufman's schtick.

I was fairly satisfied with that hypothesis until I saw on pinterest the "Punks Respect Pronouns" patch. 

When I see a meme like this, my instant reaction is to be like "What if Johnny Rotten doesn't respect pronouns?" like, this is a gatekeeper statement, a definitional retreat, a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

It seems entirely plausible to me, that you would get punks, as in punk music enthusiasts, that feel quite ambivalent about pronouns, certainly don't feel a need to respect them, and would possibly find the formal etiquette of pronouns tedious. 

This is an aspect of culture synonymous with HR guidelines and policy. It doesn't strike me as punk per se.

Then it clicked, a better model for understanding why the punk crowd is so awful and unpleasant to share a space with, so obnoxious, anti-social, snobbish, chauvinistic and puritanical in my experience, where metal crowds are so inclusive, inviting, friendly and non-judgemental in my experience.

Punk is a music of rebellion, it is characterized generally as the music of revolutionaries, people who reject the society we live in because they know better. It is an act of resistance against a society that oppresses them.

Metal is more a Hobbesian-leviathan, a Jungian-integration, a Rogerian-congruity. Metal is a radical act of acceptance that we are imperfect people living in an imperfect world that nevertheless can find moments of happiness, like running into Steve at a gig between the bar, bandroom and bathrooms. 

Punk is acting out, Metal is acting in. Not acting in as in buying into a societal narrative, but acting in as in accepting things as they truly are, darker than we'd hope or want them to be. Simply accepting what is. Accepting our past follies, accepting our present follies and predicting our future follies.

Punk isn't just a bunch of people with bad fashion who listen to bad music. Those are arts students. Punk is a movement that wants to change the world but is very unsuccessful at it. Of course such a persistently unsuccessful movement is going to sit squarely inside the Dunning-Krueger effect, yet occasionally produce real musical talent like Josh Freese of The Vandels and I'm sure there's more I can't be bothered thinking of them.

Of course it's going to be synonymous with "Road for the child" strategies for changing the world, like veganism and pronouns that basically require everybody to voluntarily do the right thing to work, and other doomed to fail strategies. Of course, it goes without saying, it is going to be affiliated with Marxist thinking.

Punk is revolutionary in outlook, ideological, incongruent, in denial. It no doubt can be a stepping stone to greatness to look at all the musical icons, and genres that Punk has given us but are not themselves Punk anylonger. We wouldn't have the 90s if not for Punk. It practically mirrors the wealth of intellectuals society has enjoyed that identify as former-Marxists, and yet, it's almost impossible to find an intellectual that was formally-non-Marxist and has become a Marxist late in life.

Just to be clear, my or anyone's position on pronouns is not the point, it's the seeming incongruity of punk having rules. Like when people laugh at their local Anarchists having a secretary and treasurer. Just as I as an atheist can appreciate that the global society I live in is what an anarchy naturally produces, I guess I can understand that a highly regimented, discriminatory gatekept music genre is the natural product of Punk's core rejectionist ethos, even if I'd stumbled across a patch that said "Punks brush twice daily".