Thank U

I haven't delivered a eulogy in 8+ years. Relative to that, my facebook profile picture is pretty fresh and recent:

"It would be nice if an emergency meeting of the UN security council declared me insufferable, but less so when I am absorbed by little dogs and granted me a stipend and visa to just hang out with dogs again." March 31st, 2024.

It's Usma, star of my post 'microcosm of helplessness' and I haven't tried it in a while, but yes, I can close my eyes and still picture the moment she looked back at me and then ran across the avenue to get hit by a car. A memory seared in by my hippocampus that fills me with cold shame and guilt, I remember the decision - the ultimate one in a series of decisions that lead to that moment and it still rattles me, shakes me up, recenters me in that microcosm of helplessness.

I'm sad to say that Usma is now deceased after recovering from that hip fractured in three places and posing for the above profile picture. She died about a fortnight ago as at writing and of course, her death has effected me. 

I've been processing, and it's probably a great opportunity to slow things down a bit by acknowledging that 'processing' is one of those psychology speak terms that have been adopted by the general public to use at their convenience. What needs process is that the death of something is a catalyst that causes a chain reaction of changes to your mental schema with which you navigate life, that we simply do not have the bandwidth to update everywhere, all at once. That schema is made up of many relational thoughts and feelings, and again, I feel lay people have heard through popular culture and social media of the 5 stages of grief or whatever - shock, anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance or whatever. 

This is not a good model of grief, it is based on terminally ill patients experience of coming to terms with their own death, they are grieving some kind of future they imagined for themselves, and its a process that doesn't ulitimately terminate in acceptance, but terminates in death. 

'Bargaining' always caught me out, I suspected it was where you begged your girlfriend to get back with you on the promise that things would be different. But certainly, shock tends to happen, and it makes sense that it does because you know all our ancestors would have seen things like their children die while trying to paddle a canoe out past the breakers, so going into shock can zombiefy you into functioning while not registering distressing events as and when you hear about them.

But a better model, at least one I am persuaded of, is the resilience model of grief which I think better explains the vast disparities in human responses to bereavement. There are people who can more-or-less function as normal, and people for whom a death can effectively disable them. I suspect the variation can in some part be explained by variations in people's ability to regulate their emotions.

So that's what I'm up to, have been doing recently, when I get the chance, and what I call 'processing' and in part this death of a beloved canine companion is cumulative, an opportunity to come to terms with mortality as a whole. 

Cumulative but also specific, I'm mourning the loss of Usma and she offers me specific mysteries that mean I can never quite be sure when the grieving process has done its thing.

James, for whom I delivered my last eulogy, humbled me in my inability to perceive how much his death fucked me up, and how unwise I remained. So I'm now cautious when it comes to Usma.

A Caution on Privacy

Usma is my dog, in the sense that we accompanied each other, as humans and dogs do. But not in the property sense. She belonged to, and the person most important in the world in her opinion was, Ale, my former partner. She was already an extention of Ale's inner world when I met her and although we bonded quickly she remained forever and always, Ale's biggest fan.

As such, you know there's reflections I have on her death that would likely be of some value for anybody to hear, whether for inspiration or validation, but I won't because it's a private matter, pertaining not just to my private life, but Ale's too. 

There's a greed too, a simple desire to keep cherished memories to myself, as, as with all grief, the pain I feel at loss is a function of wealth, the pain you don't feel at my dog's passing is a function of your relative poverty. 

The people at a funeral that care more about you than the deceased, do so because they never had what you lost in the deceased. That's the deal, and you know I don't feel particularly compelled to share memories that belong to myself alone, or more frequently between Ale and I.

And I've also been callous in the past writing about James. I've never been raked over the coals for my solipsism, more a dawning self-awareness that just because I felt alone in my prolonged grief and incompetence at coming to terms with his death, didn't mean I was alone, just more likely, I had the biggest mouth.

But I'll share as much as I feel both good about, and is useful so as not to deliberately waste your time. 

Reason as Impediment

My friend John has a construct that I believe he calls 'Rational Man' very similar to Behavioural Economics founder Richard Thaler's 'Homo Economicus' in that it describes a mass of people who likely do not exist. People who do what is reasonable and rational all the time.

Generally people who put stock in 'Rational Man' particularly in their design principles, design an engine of their own frustration with the world. Notionally they do this because they discount irrationality, a part of which - the relevant part to this post - is not treating emotions as data, and building them into your model.

This is my main takeaway from Alain De Botton's pop-interpretation of Stoicism in his 'Consolations of Philosophy' BBC miniseries, where he rode shotgun with a London Van driver who experienced road rage daily at London's variagated drivers. De Botton aserted, that from the perspective of Stoic philosophers, if you carried the expectation that today was the day that everyone in London (and/or the world) became proper, competent, considerate drivers in the face of all the data to the contrary, then it is you, not the shitty drivers that frustrate you when they merge without indicating or do a 3-point turn rather than detour a single block, or park outside the lines, or talk on their phones while driving, steer with their knees, check their socials at traffic lights, exceed the speed limit, fail to exceed the speed limit, drive under the speed limit, drive in a hat etc. etc. It is in fact you who are irrational, for not observing empirically what your fellow humans are.

Rational analysis can be a defense mechanism against painful emotions. Instead of simply feeling the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the despair etc. you instead try to understand it. The moment it crops up you internally say 'that's interesting, lets try and analyse where that came from and how to fix it.'

Given who I am, I'm almost certainly prone to this, and mindfulness techniques are a boon to put me in touch with my emotions, experiencing them in the body, observing them as I feel them rather than understanding them. Otherwise, I'm not a huge fan of mindfulness.

But to a degree, I am helpless in the face of analytics, I try to adopt a policy of 'feelings have to be felt' and I have a luxury of minimal contact hours where I might have to function in a manner that doesn't center my emotions such that I hijack the social program. I can grieve largely and sufficiently in private.

So I want to assure you that's what I've been doing, even prior to Usma's death. A general approach, and since Usma's death this manifests in listening to the songs that come into my head motivated by the emotions I feel. I do not look away, and I don't try to shove those feelings down. I try to get the fuck out of their way so they can come out.

There's still a bunch of wishing though, feeling and expressing emotion I have found means that they don't repeat on me. I have done much grieving for Usma, but no ruminating. What I do wish for however, is that I could just get them all out, like if one feeling just cascaded into the next, instead I just have episodes here and there, they come up and kind of break off and I know a part remains that will have to be felt later.

In that breaking moment, that's where analysis tends to begin on my part, as I contemplate what the feelings mean, how I am changed having felt them. Again, this can leave me wishing for more, like that I could just complete the grief metamorphosis.

Where I think I feel I'm at

Today it occurred to me, that the nature of my grief in this case feels something like this:

All there is to say is "thankyou" but the thankee is gone now, so I can't.

What I need to feel, is her absence and come to terms with it, complicated by being separated by half a planet for 3 years.

I also know what Usma represented to me symbolically, well it's multiple things, but the one I miss that is particularly resonant with her death, was coming back to life, as in liveliness, vivacity. I met Usma while grieving, a big cumulative ball of grief that included the loss of two of my dearest friends under very different circumstances (suicide and ostracism) and the death of the family dog of 15 years, the last 6 or so of which I was her main companion. 

I just hadn't bridged that experience I was conscious of, which was getting attached to another dog. I'd been through it before, but in my head was the fact that dog's only live so long, and I'd had Bess for almost half my life by the time she died. I'd let maths get into my head, realising that every dog onward would be in my life for smaller and smaller fractions.

I needed a girl to shove me across that stalling though, and Ale brought with her Usma and we quickly fell in love. Much quicker than Ale who took like a half dozen walks compared to Usma's two.

It was all very delightful very quickly. 

For the moment though, appreciation comes with pain.

A Vision of Running

So today I was walking past the vet clinic where Bess my longest serving companion, spent most of her last week of life. Her kidneys suddenly and catastrophically failed, but in a manner somewhat ideal she was able to be kept alive on IV until the whole family could assemble, bring her home and we could all be there to euthanise the beloved family dog.

Such a walk I would have done over a hundred times since Bess died, but it resonates once again as a bitter-sweet memory because of Usma's recent death. I looked at the curve where the heel of my hand meets the wrist and where I have a particularly pronounced scar from where Usma buried her tooth in my flesh when I picked her up after she was hit by a car.

I would already have recounted in that microcosm of helplessness post, that when she bit me all I thought at the time was 'good' because it meant she was most certainly alive. Because Mexico has a rabies protocol that bite turned out to be super debilitating in the form of applying yellow goop to it every day for a fortnight while it healed up without any bandages or anything.

Anyway, I'd never made the connection before, but...look to this day I remain somewhat of a fantasist. I have a strong visual sketchpad, music often evokes powerful imagery in my minds eye and from time immemorial I have always found it easy to superimpose what I see in my minds eye over my actual vision.  

In my teens and early twenties though, I was often daydreaming fantasies of a megalomaniacal nature no doubt a response to coming of age during the War On Terror and instead of the fantasist response of assuming comforting conspiracy theories to explain away the confronting incompetence of world leaders and subsequent all-of-society, I used to imagine just basically being powerful and in charge.

I was also almost certainly, heavily effected by Frank Herbert's Dune series. All nerdy stuff, and nothing that came close to preventing me from inhabiting a mundane existence. But as say, a rooftop amateur sniper doesn't appreciate, you can't just exercise power and not think all of societies institutions won't come crashing down on you. 

This is why people can't easily stand up to say, organised crime, even if you aren't afraid they go after your family. 

Without contextualising the whole post-hoc rationale of the vision, running around as a youth (training for cross country) I had recurring visions of running through streets carrying a severely injured lover. Alternately, and even more fantastic and self-aggrandizing visions of carrying a lover in my arms after I had been shot or otherwise injured. 

And today I was just remembering running with Usma in my arms, freaked out, Usma in shock, arm bleeding, Ale talking to me but not registering what she was saying, the driver stopping to ask if the dog was okay and trying to reassure them without wasting any time on them, and just making our way half a block to the vets.

I don't believe in 'manifesting' I think in most cases that's more a case of confirmation bias and predicting the obvious, like if you are an attractive young woman people will give you free shit because they either want to have sex with you, or because they are hoping you will tell them a way to have people give them free shit because they want to have sex with you.

This was more, exactly what processing grief means in terms of updating your schema. I didn't recognise that I was living a recurring fantasy because a) Usma was a cute little dog and not a woman like Ale and b) it wasn't a fantasy it was a nightmare (particularly given that Usma's injury was my fault), and c) Usma being dead likely relieved my anxieties that she will die enough to look at that moment of personal history where I was extremely worried that she was going to die.

I started to cry, mourning finally the lost sense of clarity and purpose that I had in that desperate moment, that was chronologically buried by the immediate guilt and self-loathing I felt once Usma was in the vets hands, but that partitioning the sequence of events, from the moment I scooped up our squealing piglet from the road, supporting her neck and spine and getting bitten almost to the bone for it and that desperate rush to the vets to get painkillers into her, I'd passed a test I'd long been desperate to pass, and didn't even notice it happening.

Don't Mistake the Banal for the Profound

In the last eulogy I delivered, going by memory, though I have roughly what I said written down somewhere, it wasn't a jazz-eulogy; I'm pretty sure I said something like 'just as a part of me has died with James, a part of James lives with me' which I feel is in danger of being construed as profound, whereas if you reflect on it as much as I have, it's simply acknowledging something quite banal.

This is how relationships work, they are built on resonance, commonalities resonate more so in the presence of one another. When someone dies, the resonance stops, but what resonated for you, still exists. This is as mystical as the cables on a suspension bridge, or if you will, a guitar string. They can resonate by having a wind blow, or being left on top of a speaker. If some external force doesn't act upon them, then if you want to make the noise you have to exert the energy yourself.

Smash the body of a guitar or snap a suspension bridge cable, it won't resonate at all, which is death in this metaphor. Specifically the brain death, hence you can lose your resonance with living loved ones due to conditions like dementia, while still feeling great sentimental attachment to their living remains.

So, it's banally true also of Usma, that a piece of me died with her, and a piece of her lives with me.

It becomes more true in this case, because of an inside joke between Ale and I, that was our characterisation of Usma. Near as I can recollect, it began with Usma following Ale's lunch to her work desk. Ale told Usma "It's not for puppies/peritas" and I, as would come to be the notation of Usma's voice remarked "sOy gEntE" ["I'm people"] which became the beginning of Usma's long running scams to get fed people food, most typically involving variations of "[Insert fOOd] InspEctOr..." but also got laughs when the illusion was broken by having Usma ask Ale "cOmO sE dIcE..." ["hOw dO yOU sAy..."] which would prompt Ale to scold Usma "Usma you speak Spanish you don't ask how to say things in Spanish!"

Anyway, I'll spare you more elaboration, because, well, greed, but also an appreciation that without loving attachment to this particular dog, I'm sure the gag gets tedious quickly.

But Ale paid me the huge compliment of, upon returning from a day trip to the nearby lake-side resort town that she went on with Usma while I stayed home, that she had thought 'Usma is really quiet today' and not referring to her penchant for barking at dog-drama bullshit, but the conspicuous absence of the illusion of Usma's personality, before remembering that it's an illusion.

And that persona, was me, and Ale very quickly (instantly) learned the persona herself, the only difference being the differences between Ale's voice and mine. But it's not like you can project any personality onto any dog and effect the same willing suspension of disbelief. It needs to comply with our sense of animism, it needs to be congruent with the dog's stable personality traits, her behaviour, it requires a cognitive empathy with that particular dog's-eye-view of the world. It's not arbitrary.

Just so, Ale created Doki's voice on a whim, but not arbitrarily. It was my birthday, and at that point Doki wasn't allowed on the bed, he came in in the mornings after our housemate left for work and typically napped on either my backback, any dirty laundry I'd left on the floor, or the couch until I got up. Ale picked up Doki and said 'happybirthdaytohm' (as the nomenclature for Doki's written voice became) and it was perfect straight up.

If you could hear, and can't synesthetically imagine from the nomenclature what the dog voices sound like, you wouldn't find them particularly original. They no doubt share a pedigree with all cartoon dog voices ever, but they were distinct enough to describe the distinct personalities of the dogs.

Now, with Usma dead, she can talk from beyond the grave so long as I am alive. Just in my voice for Usma, not her own, which was a dog's voice, expressed as barks, growls, whines, shrieks and whimpers. 

Just days before learning of her death, I'd been feeling sadness and longing, reflecting on the dramatic reactions Usma produced when either of her people returned home after she'd been left there. There are few people whose day I earnestly want to hear about. This is largely based on the modal ability at storytelling. Let me take it further, there are few people whose wedding or trip of a lifetime I want to hear about, generally because most people in my experience, assume something rare to be intrinsically interesting, and don't realise that it is possible to make describing a cabbage as interesting as coming under mortar fire, and coming under mortar fire as interesting as describing a cabbage.

Part of my motivation to partner up with Ale and make a go of it, was because Ale is interesting to me even when she talks about something I profoundly disagree with. 

Ale aside though, I was recently reflecting that Usma was someone, that earnestly I always wanted to hear all about her day, even though what she was saying, not in our persona's voice for her, but her own voice "you were gone and now you're back and I didn't know if you would be back but you're back but you were gone."

Of course, there's a general conversational principle of "avoid the middle" that Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts as, for example, that if you are on a University Campus and you can't talk to the world's leading expert in a field, the next person you want to talk to is the janitor, not an undergrad.

Dog's of pretty much any stripe, are always for me, going to trump any human who lacks conversational skill. 

The above is a photo I took of Bess, and a friend, and I took it at the time because it was salient that my two favourite conversation partners were together and perfectly illustrated this principle. Within six months of taking this photo I lost both, so I'm really glad I have it, and though Ale and I still communicate, and obviously have been communicating with the death of Usma, we don't really converse and furthermore, Usma was a point of connection between us that is now gone, which is why grief isn't really discreet.

Again, the loss of beloved interlocutors echoes, rhymes in this present moment. Usma is the first dog I loved after Bess. I mean I loved Millie, my brother's dog whom I'd regularly dogsit, but she was alive before Bess died, and also it's one of those rare instances where English lacks sufficient vocabulary, with Millie it was Storge, familial love, Bess and Usma was Ludus, playful-joyous love.

But I owe a debt of appreciation to Millie as well right now, a kind of reverse-bringing-other-shit-up that any particular bereavement could do. When I left last time to go to Mexico, I had no idea I was saying goodbye to Millie forever. She got sick and died, not knowing what had happened to me, a member of her extended family and caregiver.

That was a new and unpleasant experience for me, an experience that beds-shit-down in the emotional wake of Usma's demise. 

"But you know I don't care. What I care about is to see you again. And to dance that song

From the record that we love so much, so much, so much..." ~ Tijuana Makes Me Happy, Nortec Collective.

A motivation in life was to somehow make my way back to Usma again, to validate her faith in humanity. But upon my departure from Mexico, I knew it was a distinct appreciable possibility, that I wouldn't get that chance. There was a world of possibilities, estrangement from Ale, dog attack, car accident, dognapping, all the myriad health issues that shorten dog's lifespans, getting deported and banned from re-entry, my own death.

I know in part my muted response, the resilience of my composure, to news of Usma's death and confirmation of this undesired reality, is in part because I had to grieve Usma several times. Ale knows and she's the only one who really gets to know. From my first return to Australia, to our first relationship crisis, to our separation, to the uncertainty of my departure date, to my departure, to our estrangement. 

Every time was heartbreaking, and every time I got to see her again was appreciated wholeheartedly.

Devastation

'If I die while I have a pet, let my animal see my dead body, please. They understand death and seeing me dead will allow them to mourn, but if I just never show up one day they’ll think I abandoned them. I know what it feels like to be abandoned and I never want anyone to feel that way, especially my dog.' ~ attributed to Sir David Attenborough, I can't source it.

It was upsetting to read this, but no-less true. What a privilege it is to be present when your dog dies, so they die with your living scent on their brain. Though sick dogs having no real stance or appreciation for euthanasia do seem to seek out some dog-privacy, liking their own death like they like their bones, solo. 

I feel crushing guilt that I abandoned Usma. Those friends I have that I was able to talk to, in the messy mucassy hours of fresh grief console me that my guilt isn't warranted, sharing my understanding that I didn't deliberately or maliciously abandon Usma (and Doki, and Millie) it was the collateral cost of a failed relationship, compounded by immigration status.

I just don't view "Abandonment" as a legal term like like Murder, distinct from Manslaughter by having the qualities of mens rea and malice aforethought and whatever else. It certainly makes no difference to a dog.

There psychology is evolved to excel at being a pack animal from the plains, with a unique interspecies capacity among mammals to induce oxytocin based bonding through eye-gazing with a human. We are their pack, and I know Usma, she never understood why we would ever split up the pack.

There is a greater meditation there about responsibility that I simply haven't done yet. I take responsibility, given the facts, there was nothing else I could do, certainly was willing to do, to exchange for staying in her life. Equally, Usma was not taking any bargain where she kept me and was abandoned by Ale. 

That was the breakup, that none of our pack got what we wanted and hoped for, was both the cause and the outcome.

Usma would have got new adventures, new joys, new people, new pack members as well. I'm sure also, there is a confused, uninformed form of mourning an abandoned dog goes through too. 

When I started living seperately, and just visited Usma, dogsat her, it wasn't the same as when I went to the shops without her or the gym, even when she came to visit me. She started greeting me like Ale. An experience I both loved and hated. 

The qualitative difference, indicated that Usma felt my absences, and felt them more when they grew longer. It was plain to the naked eye, that my moving out distressed her, that she didn't understand. 

After I last saw her, staring through a doorway as my Uber pulled away, she went through something. 

Whatever that something was for her, it is its own particular experience of devestation for me.

But I would not wish it away at the cost of not ever being her beloved person. 

I think it's under circumstances like this, which is to say, unideal deaths which everyone who gets a sufficient shot at life, is going to experience be it first-hand, second-hand or third hand; that the resilience model of grief truly shines, and the 'stages of grief' model fails. 

It happens that people die alone and terrified, deprived of a chance to say the things and hear the things that really matter to them. What those who survive are left with, is just a fact they can contemplate, and yeah accept rather than deny. 

But accepting need not translate into any kind of peace, I feel you simply have to function in light of that accepted fact.

Though I have no children of my own, and I'll acknowledge that tedium to a greater extent later, I am convinced by Dr. Gordon Livingston, that the primary responsibility of a parent to a child, is to model for them that it is possible to be happy in an imperfect world. And I am anxious to clarify, even if Dr Livingston doesn't, that to demonstrate the possibility of happiness does not mean it's necessary to achieve a state of static happiness, but to be happy when one can, with the knowledge that we do not live in the best of all conceivable worlds. 

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times*, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”

― Voltaire, Candide 

*My ability to discuss suicide candidly myself, including suicidal ideation, has inspired some to express their concerns for me, and attempt a kind of intervention. As such, I am in turn anxious to convey to people that I have never seriously contemplated suicide, much as while I have speculated on whether I would suck a man's dick sooner than fight him in prison, I have never seriously considered blowing a guy.  

Stuck in the Middle With You

With some bitter irony, I became closest to Usma during her recovery from the broken hip. We didn't like leaving her alone, and I having less friends, less clubs, less commitments was the natural choice as dog sitter.

I don't think dog bones heal any faster than human bones, around 6 weeks or something, but unlike a human with a broken hip, dogs figure out ways to compensate and walk around with broken hips sometimes immediately after a car hits them. 

Our landlord and neighbour Gina gave us some spare pet blankets, and by around the 3 week mark, Usma could be experienced walking hurriedly from one dog bed setup to the next dog bed setup around our apartment so she could keep an eye on whoever was there. It was cute, endearing and ridiculous.

We grew close then and never really separated emotionally. 

When I got Covid in Mexico, I had only one day of feeling under the weather, after that, the only symptom I ever experienced was not respiratory but the loss of smell which lasted 12 days. I have a spreadsheet somewhere where I tracked it. Each morning I would test for the return of my smell by picking up Usma and sniffing her.

The foolish thing I did at that time was never get a test for Covid, which later as Mexico changed its Covid mandates and opened night spots up to people who could either prove they'd gotten a vaccine or had Covid, Ale and I were paperless.

Similarly, in the years I was in Mexico, in hindsight I suspect I had symptoms of depression. Likely sub-clinical depression, but definitely something that impeded me from functioning and that was very likely environmental as upon returning to Australia I very quickly got back into the workforce, finding motivation easily to get shit done.

I feel I am too far removed from the experience I was having, to pursue a legitimate post-hoc diagnosis. I missed my opportunity to obtain an opinion I could have any confidence in.

In Mexico I was overwhelmed, and what eventually happened by the end of Ale and my relationship and cohabitation, was that my self-soothing routines that staved off these undiagnosed and hence speculative symptoms, expanded to take up my whole day. 

Again, occasionally I'd get work, commissions and contracts here and there, but very minimal and I'd function fine doing good work.

And here's what is difficult to describe. It was a really difficult time, stagnating like that while my relationship slowly suffocated. It was also, the best time of my life on a consistent basis. The two were occurring simultaneously, coincident, and Usma was there for it all.

I ruminated on the perplexing way that from my mid-20s to my mid-30s I suddenly found it impossible to get a relationship going, but my work (as opposed to wealth strategy) was ideal, doing my art and financing it with a call centre job, while my parents heavily subsidized this lifestyle by letting me live in their house while they were off overseas.

Then I found the relationship at long last, and between a global pandemic and a lack of citizenship, now I didn't have the income by which to plan out a future, though I had substantial savings, when you live off them you have to keep saving them.

I also ruminated on the potentially debilitating effect appreciation was having on my life. I have the language now, but even the stuff I could articulate, I struggled to talk to Ale about. 

The world we live in is driven by anxiety, the average person functions through a lack of perspective in order to motivate participation in the economy. Most people feel a sense of urgency, a sense of deprivation etc. via this anxiety near as I can guess.

I was trying to describe to a friend, the general nature of the "real talk" parents give their children to initiate them into adulthood. For example, recently watching a review by Mark Kermode of the screen adaptation of Camus' "The Outsider" Kermode characterised existentialism as adolescent, books like "The Outsider" something teens get into, but you have to grow up some time.

The Onion has an article baring the headling "Free-Spirited Man told to grow up and stop being happy."

I was describing it to my friend, as being a talk that takes the archetypal form of "look son/cupcake, we know for all your life we've been showing you stories and teaching you the importance of standing up to bullies, but the truth is, we don't. Life is all about appeasing bullies in order to survive, they are much much stronger and much much more important than we'd have children believe."

But, while you may disagree with my characterisation of the diversion referred to in lay terminology as "life in the real world" and more technically/specifically the modern economic project, it's not very controversial to point out that what the vast majority of people do with the vast majority of their lives, is not sustainable. Most of what we produce is waste, waste that will be recycled by ecology in a time frame that doesn't sync with the continuation of human society. 

The "real talk" that basically consists of telling people to get in the habit of doing what everyone else is doing, is fake, the real real talk is that we can't keep doing what most people have been doing for very recent history, and actually, most everybody will have to make quite drastic changes, the longer we drag our feet in changing.

But on the microscale, having the perspective of the real-real talk is debilitating. People who produce less waste, are given less food clothing and shelter, less resources, less opportunities.

Most people only snap out of the sensitivity (doing what everyone else is doing) driven habits (doing what you've always done) when berieved. Distant relatives, functional strangers, articulate inanely that death "really puts things in perspective" but in my experience, for most people this perspective is fleeting, they experience life as a series of discreet incidents not incidents that form a greater context.

The silt settles for a while and the waters become clear when the shock of a death disrupts them, but in two to six weeks they can get back to spiking their own cortisol over shit that literally doesn't matter, like traffic congestion.

I've observed that, but it is not my own experience. The cortisol never came back, particularly after James' death, to behave in a way that didn't get me called on in class when I hadn't done my homework. In the bigger picture, it is an adherence to the principle that "things not worth doing are not worth doing well." An antithetical notion to cultures like Japan and maybe South Korea, cultures that are slowly going extinct while simultaneously being fetishized by outsiders.

When my mother called to check in on me, during those years of stagnation, she would ask me a question repeatedly from a place of worry, that I found hard to comprehend "are you getting your needs met?" I think in the manner intended, there was much to my mum's question, in the manner unintended though, a large part of the paradox of having the best years of my life in a bad situation, was because the answer was 'yes' and a big part of that, was the heroic companionship of Usma (and Doki).

I would consciously marvel, and still do, that to some degree, a dog is just a bag of organs on legs, and yet they can evoke such meaning, love and happiness. The perspective made salient by James' death, and exemplified by dogs, is seeing intrinsic worth. I suspect in part James' struggle, though complex and not understood by me, had a contribution of unjust expectations. When he died it hit home hard, my own luxurious position of not needing James to be anything or do anything, just to be. 

As Gabor Mate pointed out, before he became known to US markets and the podcast circuit, human value is not discovered or created but intrinsic. Dogs' achievements are hard to quantify or weigh, those that are not strays or wild, are overwhelmingly employed as companions, the health benefits can be measured, their union is relatively week. Dogs I suspect, routinely extend the lifespan and expand the quality of life for their people, at the cost of their own, particularly in a 21st century, largely post-growth economy, where people are routinely both asset poor, cash poor and time poor and members of the precariat.

As such, for everything that was bad about the situation, I woke up to a beautiful woman, in Mexico, with pups and cats and it was all quite wonderful. The major stress, was not knowing how to keep it going, but I had it and perhaps nobody else appreciated it as much as I, bar Usma. Usma had it too.

She was fully attuned to Ale, but she was also apart from Ale. Usma and me, we were in sync. what I went through in those years, we went through together. I lost my fellow traveller.

Ring Theory, A Response

"Ring theory" regards manners, it is a heuristic. When I first came across it, it appealed to an intuitive sense, I have even shared it or explained it to others, and almost certainly written about it on this blog. 

I no longer agree with it, I think it a flawed model though it could still be a nice idea. For example, from the linked article:

"Susan Silk gives the perfect example in the article:" ~ anonymous author of content on speakinggrief.org

This may be one of the more bizarre things I've ever quoted, being the framing sentence that leads in to a quoted example. The flaw is that ring theory's creators do give a perfect example:

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.” “It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”

Now, the original article is behind a pay wall, even though it is not news anymore. I recall it, but can't rely upon, having another perfect example where the concentric circles of ring theory were drawn up such that there was terminally ill patient, patient's husband and work colleague, where the work colleague had an emotional breakdown over the impending death of the patient in front of the husband who supported and comforted her.

This is a perfect contravension of the "support in, dump out" heuristic that makes up ring theory, based on the heirarchical value of closeness.

When James died, it was only about a fortnight prior to the murder of Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon. I first heard the news, from one of Eurydice's friends and fellow comedians. Somebody who had actually seen her act, knew her personally, knew her boyfriend (whom I'd met at my friend's gigs, but never since). As such, I had both direct experience of a very private constellation of grief, and indirect experience of a massive, public collective meltdown sparked by a high profile death with a tangential single point of contact that amounted to DM thread where my friend and I compared some notes, once.

That note was the spanner in Ring Theory for me at least. It was an observation that people's reactions, particularly devastation in the face of grief was not a function of emotional closeness and investment in the person at the centre, but a function of how much it resonates with their own unresolved shit.

Again, the resilience model of grief, a mere observation that grief impacts people's ability to function differently, proves itself to me, as superior to both the 5 stages of grief model, and ring theory.

Consider these imperfect examples where ring theory falls apart:

A military veteran's son dies in a drink driving accident the son was responsible for. For the veteran this personal tragedy is but the latest brush with death he must process, for his son's school peers, it is their first real confrontation with their own mortality, at the public memorial several of the son's peers are frankly, losing their minds and badly in need of support due to their inexperience with grief. The bereft father is actually perfectly positioned to offer such support, the egocentrism of youth is by no means going to be the worst thing that happens to him, given the tragic loss of his son itself. His grief cannot be made worse by the incompetence and inexperience and myopia of youth. It can be made better, by his doing something incredibly valuable for his son's friends, even though he will think of his son every day for the rest of his life, and these young people won't until their next brush with mortality, where remembering the loss of their friend they haven't thought about in years might help them, and help them help others. 

Or:

A divorced dad's new partner dies of a sudden brain aneurism. His children had only met her a handful of times as she generally mostly stayed over when the kids were with his mother. The dad's support network rallies, as the person they know closest to the assumed "center" of the ring in ring theory. The thing is he is aware that he can luxuriously indulge his grief by offloading his parental responsibilities for a couple of months, but the benefit to him is outweighed by the cost to his own children.

Or:

Larry and Susie are both close friends of Marty, whose mother has recently died. They see each other for the first time since hearing the news about Mrs Funkhouser. Susie waits for Larry to offer her his condolences while Larry waits for Susie to offer him her condolences. A petty argument ensues.

 Ring Theory I suspect, is precisely wrong moreso than it is approximately right. The fact is that many funerals are attended by dozens, up to hundreds of people. Eurydice's example is one where the media might put a photo of candles and flowers left in the park where she was violently murdered by a man, and splash a headline like "Nation grieves/mourns" and there may be an argument to say the generalisation is fair and that the resemblance to grief or mourning or bereavement is near enough, but I would specifically describe what most people were processing was a story they heard.

What happened to so many people, was that they heard something and had an emotional response. They didn't 'lose' Eurydice because far more people were effected by the story than had ever known she existed. Who they imagined Eurydice to be, reminded them of either themselves or someone they cared about. It reminded them of personal experiences they had banked that were on some level unresolved. It may have even been a story, that brought up other stories that had effected them.

An obvious example being women, just women in general were massively effected by the story of Eurydice's death and I personally witnessed a variety of responses from women in my life that ranged from a mix of stoic realism coupled with frustration and alienation from fellow women, to very public meltdowns that played directly into the negative stereotype of hysteria, behaviour that amounted to women taking to social media and attacking every man they knew.

And so, even if, as a public event surrounding a private grief, we can apply ring theory by saying in terms of identification and relatability, women are closer to the centre of the circle than men, you are then going to get the clunkiness of group identities that not only belie the heterogeneity of women, but are not easily comparible - like older vs younger women, who is on a closer ring? Younger women that suffer from the fear of male violence as they enter sexual maturity, or older women who have suffered and survived male violence reexperiencing it psychology in the wake of this event?

Then the collision of public and private - who is on the more inner ring? The boyfriend of Eurydice or a young woman who is hesitant to pursue their passion for stand up comedy because they feel unsafe?

I would not throw out the ring theory of grief, but I would give it a postmodern treatment, deconstructing the assumptions by examining what power structures they preserve. 

As conceptualised in the original article and repeated by the various websites and blogs that distributed the meme - the structure of the concentric rings is predicated on familial values, privileging direct family members over extended family members, friends over colleagues, colleagues over strangers.

Charitably noticing that no version of the ring theory I've seen, explicitly maps out such a heirarchy, rather implying it should be intuitive, unfortunately I don't think intuitions are up to the task. It is all too often taboo and impolite to mention that someone is actually estranged from their partner or spouse, and it is all too easy to overlook that the partner of a friend attending a funeral, based on their personal history and not the closeness of their relationship to the deceased, may need far more support than the person who knew the deceased.

I would propose that the rings should be arranged fragile in, resilient out. An elderly woman may be the most impacted by the death of her husband, but in many cases it is plausible that the couples children will need more support from their mother, than the mother will need from her children. (Especially with the recent transfers of wealth from young to old, meaning a widower who vacates the master bedroom for her precariate children to stay there while she moves to the guest room may be providing both emotional and practical support to adult children who badly need it).

What does all this have to do with Usma? It's almost certainly the case that Ale is more adversely affected by Usma's death than I am. They were much closer to the point of sharing one heart. But it's also the recognition that I am largely resilient, and while there is much to process, the support I have needed and need going forward in order to feel the feels and function, is not in proportion to how much I love Usma and how much I regret her loss. 

I can lean on the benefits, the luxuries I've had to grieve heavily the loss of grandparents, friends, prior dogs, relationships etc. such that there were many feelings familiar to me, that didn't require processing or understanding, that I saw coming and as such have not been thrown into disarray by. 

I have been able, for example to attend my classes and support my student peers through their anxieties and stresses of having to deliver a training session, when they unlike me, have not lost a precious little dog. I am not doing a disservice to myself, by not disclosing my private grief and (as I feel would be the case) hijacking the emotional resources of our student community. Rather enjoying the dividends of being able to function in such circumstances and feeling I have done no injustice to myself or to Usma.

Focus

When everything I'm feeling makes it hard to understand

That what, what I need to miss

It's what I need to miss... is you ~ The Eels, Going to Your Funeral Part 1.

I've recently become aware that not everyone experiences life as a continuum. They appear to consciously experience life as a series of discrete events, apparently disconnected. These people likely get tremendous value out of sitting down with a therapist and being coached to connect the dots and see patterns.

People tell me, and I experience, a struggle with abandoning context, to just "get to the point" instead of providing the context, contextualising the context and contextualing my contextualising of the context and then giving a few dozen examples to assure you and myself that the point is robust, founded, coherent.

Usma's death is part of a continuum of mortality, it's something else I loved and lost. Her death brings up not just the loss of Usma, but the loss of Doki who is still alive, but in a different town, with a different family and no clear path back to reunion and only at most one or two years younger than Usma. The loss of what was my home, much autonomy, dignity, a relationship...

This cascades in turn, into bringing up other dogs lost, friends lost, family lost. Life lost, time lost.

These I think are the breakdowns we can see. The real breakdowns in ability to function, the people who lose themselves to grief. When it cascades. A reliable predictor, is when what people lose in death, is not just the person of the deceased, but the opportunity to resolve some tension, the opportunity to hear sorry or say sorry.

I have been told by someone, that the death of their elderly, very sickly mother, was the greatest tragedy of their lives. The very antithesis of the Zen story, where a family asks a monk to write them a scroll to hang in their shrine, and the monk writes "The Father dies, the son dies, the grandson dies" and the family are all like "what the fuck is this?" and the monk reassures them "this is a very auspicious wish, for it is the right order of things, any family that faces death in this order is very blessed." or something.

The way an ill, elderly person dying can be a tragedy, is if there was that much opportunity while they were alive to have an honest conversation about what was done and what was said, and everyone just put it off because it was too uncomfortable to stop pretending, and then one managed to run out the clock.

In some ways, Usma's death is tragic. For one I wanted to see her again, dogs in my experience generally adhere to "what have you done for me lately" so while I think she'd remember the smell of me, she'd be less excited to see me again after these years than Ale who just went to the shops. She also feels a little young, though we can't know her exact age she was adopted off the streets.

But that cascading effect her death brings, of bringing up all the other deaths, the losses, the self-reflection. Even though it doesn't result in breakdown, I've simply had too many breakdowns over James and B. and I mourned Bess when Bess died, and Lil when Lil died and Millie when Millie died. 

I still relate to the Eels' lyric above. My emotional regulation and tendencies to intellectualise, despite all the progress in emotional competence I've made, mean that I can forget that what I miss, what I need to miss, is Usma.

That there's an acceptable, but fundamental injustice to the nature of this world, that I could never express what I feel for Usma, because you know, she's a little dog. There are many like her, but she was mine.  

Acknowledging Tedious People

If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe as much as half the population are just not dog people. Those people are to be readily expected to exist and aren't going to get someone being upset by the death of a dog like people who don't get sports don't understand that people can feel emotions over the outcome of a game.

I feel a dog person is far more likely to be anti-cat than the reverse, and frankly I haven't come across any chauvinistic cat owners that might say 'good, that's one less of them' whereas the reverse phenomena of chauvinistic dog preferers have oft stated an abject hatred of cats to the point of dancing on their graves.

The truly tedious people are the ones who do not understand the algebra and subsequently will remark, almost with a sense of pride or superiority 'it's just a dog...' making a comparison to typically, some person they lost, some person your grief inconveniences or the anxieties they feel about their own children.

In many ways they have answered their own puzzlement astutely. People grieve dogs hard because they are 'just a dog' which is to say remarkably uncomplicated compared to the people in our lives and it is rare, if not pathological to feel ambivalent about a dog.

Let me say for the benefit of the anxieties of these tedious people who help none in these situations with their skewed perspectives: yes, your kids are objectively more important than my dog. They are your kids though, and I don't like them as much as my dog. In the rock-paper-scissors of it, as a believer in the basic decency of humanity, I would sacrifice my own life to save your children. What I wouldn't sacrifice however, is my dog for your children. Frankly if you can't control your children in the presence of dogs, or keep them on a leash and they get bit, I think it is your kids who should be put down, I don't know what the answer is to 21st century parenting's shortfalls, but it feels like a good place to start.

A Thought Experiment

You've struggled with God all your life, or maybe you've looked up at the stars and wondered if we are truly alone in this universe, maybe you just seek answers to deep existential questions like 'if life is absurd why do I persist in living?' or 'what does the end of Inception mean?' 

Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer and Apu go to the first Kwik-E-Mart and it is at the end of a long journey on top of a mountain presumably somewhere in the Himilayas?

Well picture yourself as Moses climbing mount Sinai, or Musashi fighting his way through Japanese swordmasters, or a Space explorer flying to a habitable exoplanet in a distant solar system in search of Alien intelligence, or Misty Copeland having a transcendent moment dancing solo and interfacing with reality itself, or just on your deathbed having visions of a tunnel of light as all your neurons fire off before going dark and...

Tell me if you can think of something better to meet at the end of these journeys than this:

sourced here.

I don't know if you'll agree with me, like you'd be slapping your own head thinking 'duh!' right now, but I do think you'll struggle to imagine a better outcome. I also think (unless you are one of those, not so much cat-person as carpet-person or couch-person, in which case you might think it obvious that who someone would want to meet is Martha Stewart for whom I'd hope you find it super easy to imagine how increadibly disappointing and disheartening that would be for a plurality of your fellow humans) you'll find it easy to make your own sense of discovering that Yoda is a warm dog.

I'm not anti-SETI and I appreciate those who need a more intelligible wisdom tradition to get through the long dark night of the soul, but I'd emphasize that our best friend has a pretty special and unique place in human history for a reason. 

Now, I probably need to specify, this dog you meet, isn't a talking dog, nor a magic dog. It's just a friendly dog that likes pats and play. It's vocation is the same as the majority of working dogs - companionship. It is there to adopt you and be adopted by you. It's survival is dependent on clicking, on meshing, on 'getting' you and its pretty damn good at it. 

It has no wisdom to confer beyond its lived example, its intelligence caps out at somewhere near a human 5 year old, it has to win you over despite its breath, its somewhat vapid interests, its taste in food, its penchant for rolling in stinky shit, the craps it lays and its habit of licking its own genitals and your face.

Yet the covenant that homo sapiens has with canis familiaris is I think one of the most wonderful things about the universe, and we have it, what better thing could we hope to find - plausibly some kind of interlocuter, some perspective other than the human condition. But I think it will be a struggle for life to ever experience itself in a better way than that of man and domesticated dog.

And it's so much better if, while you have it, you do not take it for granted:

from the wikipedia page "human-canine bond" Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

Gracias Usma. Descansar mi amor.

News Cycle Cranky Tired

Tantrum

I feel like I'm writing this post for the dozenth time, it is a wholly reactionary post to an irritant, that has been irritating me for over a decade. 

It is the unfounded journalistic approach that functions as this irritant. Meaning that content gets continually generated that has no premises. 

What irritates me are journalists or commentators that begin with a premise that what they are looking at, for example, is a functional democracy and then like bad pantomime actors they shrug and ask the children "where is he?" and I feel not like a child, but an old man driven to the point of screaming "behind you fucking behind you you fucking morons you skipped the part where you determine if you have a functional democracy or a dysfunctional democracy, you started in the wrong fucking place!"

Whosoever figured out the way to advertise casual mobile phone games, is to run an ad where a moron plays it badly while you spectate is a genius. I haven't bought a game where I have to figure out if 14 is a higher number than 12, but I'm certainly tempted to everytime I watch someone play it as if they think there's a chance 12 might be bigger than 14. 

Not so with watching journalists who cannot figure out after 12 years or so, that Trump is exactly who he fucking appears to be. And my fatigue has tipped over to the point where I will fly into a rage at the Spanish backpackers who turn the dorm lights on at 2am and chat with lisps while they make up their beds.

3D Chessboxin'

I haven't listened to "The Glenn Show" in maybe years, a podcast that mostly to the brink of entirely consists of commentary on the news cycle by Brown Professor of Economics (Neoclassical/Orthodox/Mainstream Econ.) Glenn Lowry and Stanford Professor of Linguistics John McWhorter. Glenn is a conservative in the US terms, but not a radically insane postmodern totalitarian as most Republican talking heads present themselves, it's more that he will demand that Chief Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court be respected and shit like that. John McWhorter is I would say, nominally a democrat, certainly would unambiguously have been described as left-wing right up to about 2014 though spends most of his podcast time (which is considerable) criticizing the largesse and overreach of identity politics, he is one of the only people ever that Ta Nehisi Coates engaged with and responded to as a critic of his work.

Glenn and John were two helpful sense-making intellectuals for me who puts no stock in argumentum ad populum and when the collection of memes now ambiguously referred to under the umbrella term "woke" that back in 2015 I was discretely experiencing in my social media app facebook in the specific memes of 'trigger warnings' and in particular 'call out culture' but you know, obviously we had a wild ride through a bunch more discrete memes for around a decade.

I stopped listening a few years ago not because Glenn and John crossed some line that discredited them in my eyes, but more in the same sense as when a sporting contest is 3/4 of the way through and the lead is insurmountable and you switch off but the commentators can't leave their booth.

I don't think woke is 'dead as disco' likely more as dead as rockabilly or ska or glam rock. It is in my impression consigned to cultural cul de sacs with the moment that it might go plausibly mainstream passed.

But a few evenings ago during a gym session I checked back in with Glenn and John where they were debating the extent to which President Trump's 'personality' mattered, with John diagnosing him as an 'asshole' and to finally get to the subject of this post - Glenn's incredulity that Trump could be exactly what he appears to be. Often referred to by commentators, since the George W. Bush administration and possibly going back to Reagan (I'm not old enough) as the "3-dimensional chess" position which is worth I feel, articulating a bit.

As far as I can tell, "3-dimensional chess" is a Star Trek reference, where Gene Rodenberry and his writers sold the idea of a post-scarcity future with space faring homo sapiens by having the military elite play a form of super-chess, expanded by a dimension and realised in a prop that looks like chintzy 70s shelving.

I would attempt to do justice to the belief position while not being an adherent myself, as saying advocates for 3-dimensional chess make a form of argument from personal incredulity, a position as indisputably important as president must be correspondingly too difficult or complicated for an incompetent person to get near, it can only be occupied by what we might term an 'elite' with respect to cognitive performance, someone of sufficient intelligence, literacy, emotional regulation and personal self-discipline to occupy at the least the top 5% of the population in cognitive function.

But then you get characters like Trump, Bush, Truss, Musk, Milei etc. that as Bill Burr puts it "blunder into coffee tables" seemingly constantly producing sets of data that can be easily explained by stupidity. Which is impossible by the first premise of 3-dimensional chess, which is that the positions are too difficult for a fucking moron to occupy. So it gets reconciled with a multiplying of causes - the populace is generally, wary of 'elites' if you come across as too educated, too articulate, too privileged than you alienate yourself as a candidate from the electorate, as such the populist adopts a complicated double-bluff, hiding their elite cognitive capacities behind performative oafishness.

They don't communicate in simplistic ways because they are themselves too stupid to understand complicated nuance and second order effects, but because they are 'tapping in' to the stupidity of their voter base. It is essentially just a humanistic version of answering the philosophical refutation of an All-loving God by pointing to unnecessary suffering readily observable in the world like animals that die in wildfires and children who get leukemia referred to as 'the problem of evil' (though this begs the existence of evil into the question) for which the refutation is 'god works in mysterious ways' presuming that the seeming unnecessary suffering is just a matter of our ignorance of some greater good god's cooking up. 

In the same way, people waiting for George W Bush to reveal his true intention for the massive cock up that was the 2nd Gulf War will go to their graves waiting for the missing piece of information that explains why it was all a calculated good idea.

But for someone of Glenn's vintage and accomplishment, waiting for Trump to make clear that he has any fucking idea what he is doing, is in my view, incredible. I struggle with my credulity in regard to Glenn's incredulity.

And it isn't just Glenn, I listen to James O'Brian on LBC on the regular. A British journalist, O'Brian is known for going hard against Brexit and history has proved him right, but I think that as I'm writing King Charles the whatever is still in the US having just completed his meeting with Trump. News in the UK covered by O'Brian is that Trump made a public announcement that King Charles agrees with him on Iran, something that would certainly be *news* to the subjects of the UK. 

King Chuckles' press office released a statement that was classic English double-speak, the way in which "your proposal is very interesting" is polite for "no fucking way" in British. Something like "As is well known the King has long opposed the threat of nuclear proliferation." A face-saving masterclass in how to say "no he fucking doesn't agree, the US president is a fucking liar" while appearing to say the opposite.

O'Brian claims outwardly that he has given up on trying to make sense of the US President's actions, even advocated the liberation sensed, when one gives up on the endeavour of trying to predict what Trump will do. Yet, and maybe just because it's his job as DJ of a call-in show, like Glenn continues to express incredulity, shock, and to question what Trump is thinking, when in the most recent example Trump posted a generated image of himself with sunglasses and a machine gun with the caption "no more mister nice guy"

Marx was right

'He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.' ~ Groucho Marx

Sarah Paine's Framework

Sarah Paine is a retired professor of something that does these long Q&A sessions with Polish people who invite her out and put her talks up on Youtube. 

I find her analysis persuasive that in general the historical moment we are going through is probably best attributed to the tax-code and that western democracies in particular is having a crisis that threatens regression to a more pre-20th century world because our politicians are purely operational, not strategic. If that is a fair representation of her opinions.

Sarah Paine tries to give us, as in plebs like you and me, tools by which to think about the world, the one I've seen her offer is strategic-operational-tactical.

From the bottom up, tactical might be Seal Team 6 on a stealth helicopter. A tactic that enables a targeted strike on a specific human target like a leader of Al Kaeda or Venezuala. 

Operational might be the abduction of the Venezualan president, it's a big military operation that Sarah Paine describes, I think not unfairly, as perhaps the most successful military operation of all time.

Strategic is ??? we don't know what the fuck Trump was thinking when he ordered US Military forces to go nab the President of Venezuala. Speculation runs from he just wants the oil, to Maduro's dancing offended him. It is more ambiguous than W. Bush's war on Iraq where most people assumed it was about oil but could have been about daddy issues. Because US oil companies turned out to not be too keen on investing in Venezuala.

And you might see 3-dimensional chess cropping up already in this example, not by Sarah Paine herself who posits more plausibly that the strategic component of kidnapping Maduro is unknown likely because it is non-existent, but journalists who posit that there must be a strategy not only to the Venezuala thing, but to the Greenland thing and the Iran thing and possibly Cuba.

Even if it is speculated to be a bad strategy, people are drawing on the precedent of past presidents and world leaders going back to fucking Hammurabi of Babylonia and miring themselves in the presumption that there must be a cogent reason for all of this.

Trump doesn't frustrate me, he doesn't confuse me, and though alien I don't find him that mysterious. I find him an extremely useful thing to point to when looking for examples of stupidity and incompetence, but otherwise quite boring, like crypto is boring, "AI" is boring, Hitler is boring.

The Strategic Imperative of the Trump Administration

Trump's vision that he is dedicated to realizing, is a world in which everyone agrees how awesome he is. Everywhere he goes, without fail, people realize that he's just the fucking best. Historians will arrive at the consensus that he is the greatest President ever.

That is the vision behind every single action the Trump administration takes. That's what they are operationally and tactically geared up to try and achieve.

Can they do it? No. It's doomed to fail. The leading candidates for greatest President in the history of the United States are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I know that all three of these beloved and venerated Presidents have detractors, that they are controversial. 

Certainly if you got a unanimous consensus that any one person was unambiguously great, you would probably by default achieve the status of "Greatest President ever" but the fact is Trump has never been close to even being popular.

But this I feel, is the strategic driver that makes sense of absolutely everything Trump does. There's no maps with pieces being moved around by generals envisioning a new world order. There's a juvenile fantasy of being crowned prom queen and FIFA officials seem to understand this better than serious journalists like James O'Brian and esteemed social scientists like Glenn Lowry and I'm tired to the point of cranky that such intellects can't seem to get out of their own fucking way. 

Let's dig down.

The Many Operations of the Trump Administration

If your strategic imperative is to have everyone agree how awesome Trump is, then there's going to be two broad families of operations to run:

1. Get people praising the president.
2. Stop people praising anyone else.

Now the first family of operations implies another operation:

        3. Stop people criticizing the president.

And if you combine 1, 2 & 3 into one super-operation you get:

        4. Big Beautiful Dumb Ideas

That are simultaneously designed to be so spectacular that people forget to do anything but say "wow" the President did the greatest thing ever. 

And lastly, we can derive from the 2nd operation a watered down family of operations:

        5. Stop people from talking about anyone else.

All of which are necessary if your strategic vision is getting everyone to talk about how great Trump is, all the time. And so I think I can predict the rest of everything the Trump administration does or will do for so long as it remains a thing:

• Break shit any other president did, especially Biden and Obama.
• Try and create a 51st state. eg. Greenland, Canada.
• Try and quickly resolve long standing geopolitical impasses - Venezuala, Iran, Cuba.
• Censor and cancel critics.
• Build monuments.
• Fire administration officials who get more attention than the president. 
• Go after people who criticise Trump.

I feel that aside from a tax cut or something here and there that may actually go through the due processes of congress as the legislative branch, all of Trump's administrations operations unify in the core strategic consideration of getting everyone to talk about how great Trump is all the time.

The Tactics of the Trump Administration

Are stupid. They have to be stuped because not only is the strategic vision of the Trump administration global in scale, it is urgent. Supremely urgent. Everyone not recognizing what an awesome president Trump is cannot be tolerated for a single minute. Moment even.

So nobody has anytime to prepare to try and achieve the impossible. So of course, at a tactical level, everything is going to be fucking stupid. No due process, no time to win over stakeholders, no consultations, no going back, no hesitation, no second guessing, no reflection, no learning.

A Modestly Proposed Organising Principle of The Republican Party

Apparently early on it was a matter of some debate whether a good Christian earned their place in heaven through works, which is to say doing good deeds and being a disciple of Christ (in the sense of disciple = following the discipline of) or if one earned their place in heaven through faith, that is believing simply that Christ was/is lord.

For the latter argument, it is to this day, pointed out that that was kind of the whole point of the, to-me, nonsensical story of Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected and dancing around before going up to heaven before leading an army to hell to bust out all the pagans that would have been christian but unfortunately were born before christ was or some shit.

I suspect that these factions - does salvation come from works, or does it come from faith, probably reflect broad variations in human personalities. Some people are universal, and hence believe in some kind of universal ethic yardstick by which to evaluate their fellow people, and other people are tribal, they have double standards, specifically are you 'us' or are you 'them.'

The Republican party I feel, as judged by their actions and function, have no organizing principle beyond membership. Membership entails dogmatic loyalty to the party, and if the party winds up being lead by Trump, then the party has to rally around him. 

“There are two kinds of patriotism -- monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.” ~ Mark Twain.

 This is why the Republican Party cannot do anything about Trump to save itself, but double, treble and quadruple down. The organising principle of the Republican party makes it predictable that Mitch McConnell will refuse to hear testimony and consider evidence to realise his impeachment for his involvement in the Jan 6th insurection, and why J.D. Vance won't take steps to declare the president unfit for duty anytime soon. The Republican party doesn't stand for anything other than the Republican party, and it is no coincidence that it represents the factions of christianity, that don't necessarily map to any sects that hold nothing necessary for salvation beyond membership - which is to say, simply believing that christ is the tits.

The Democrats Are Neither a New Hope, Nor a Good Hope.

Trump is a loser, because of that fact, he can be succinctly analysed as 'the loser's president' and if the Democrats want to enter a post-Trumpian era, what they needed to do, from pretty much 2008 is stop creating losers.

Unfortunately, the main organising principle of the Democratic Party institution, as far as I can see, is to preserve and extend neoliberalism, the "third way" pioneered by Clinton and Blair that saw left wing parties adopt virtually identical economic policy to the right wing parties of the 80s. Globalising, Privatising, Deregulating and whatever else.

They are Homer, still holding onto the cans in the vending machine. Unfortunately, there are likely compelling reasons to do so, and it is something that echoes throughout democracies around the world that Sarah Paine articulates under her own framework as politicians being purely operational - they have no strategy just re-election.

We got a stark example recently in the UK Labour Party's 2024 Ming Vase landslide. Where the strategy is to have no strategy lest it offend, give your opponents no ideas to criticize etc.

In the US however, we can see since at least the Hillary-Bernie primary race as manifest in the votes of the super-delegates, and likely going back as far as the Obama-Hillary primary race, that the Democrats are institutionally resistant to calls for change from the voter base. It's a diversion, but likely important to point out that Barack Obama delivered 'hope' itself, a very easy thing, vast numbers of people got to hope that things would be different based on the colour of his skin and not the content of his character. At the time I was painfully aware that Barack Obama was not Chuck D of Public Enemy. He didn't strike me as even a black JFK or RFK Sr. 

He was very likely a product of a filtration process:

Andrew Marr: How can you know that I'm self censoring?

Noam Chimpsky: I'm sure that you're not self censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you are saying. What I'm saying is if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting. ~ Concluding statements of above linked interview, emphasis mine.

The compelling reason that the Democrats are the lesser evil compared to the Republican party, is in part that they have this filtration process that prevents characters like Trump from becoming president. Unfortunately, that same filter keeps characters like Bernie, AOC or Mamdani from becoming president, it is a mediocritizing risk-averse filter. 

We Are All Iranians Now

If a nation state does not have a democracy, in my view it is basically a gang territory, or a Mafia state. When Trump effectively broke the global economy by going in on operation "Epic Bullshit" on the fumes of hope that by toppling a long standing awful regime quickly and simply (why didn't anyone else think of that?) it would realise the strategic vision of everyone talking about how awesome and great Trump is; early journalists prefaced their words by making clear that where they were about to criticize Trump's prosecution of whatever the fuck this war is - that this didn't make them pro-the Iranian regime or admiring of the atomised former Ayatollah.

If you want to think that I am pro-a fundamentalist theocratic regime that among all its features includes a literal morality police to police morality on the off chance that the creator of the universe has any more clout as to how people should live as a regular consumer can define the cannon of books to put on a bookshelf from Ikea they allen keyed together and that this clout laden creator delivered their moral code to some guy over a millenia ago so well that when that guy died his followers immediately splintered into sects, go right ahead.

What I mean by 'we are all Iranian's now' is that we all have to process the data we have into information and subsequent knowledge, as the Iranian regime appears to understand.

The data being that after negotiating a nuclear non-proliferation deal with the United States at the United States behest, the United States citizens may elect a leader who will unilaterally tear that negotiation up, making a deal with the United States near worthless. Furthermore, that the United States citizenry may just elect a leader who will unilaterally take military action without congressional approval or public debate. In this sense, what Iran knows and we collectively have no excuse not to know, is that the United States is an existential threat.

The specific nature of that existential threat, is that US' voting citizens behave in a juvenile manner. In transit to Mexico a friend of mine took me to a friend of theirs house, and I recall trying to explain the myopia (which Australian voters share) of self-indulgently voting in a buffoon because you like them, but that buffoon is who you are sending to represent you on a global stage and they will go up against serious people.

This myopia is while not literally, but symptomatically a reason democracies going all the way back to ancient Athens and possibly excluding Pirate ships (where cabin boys likely got a vote, but being a pirate ship, likely a very informed vote) have had minimum voting ages. It cannot be the historical reason, but we can contemporarily understand that 12 year old's could vote for Mr. Beast if given the opportunity. And people advocating for lowering voting ages today are likely highly biased in their selection, thinking that young people are all into Greta Thunberg (who I feel, would be a terrible political leader, anyway) and not overwhelmingly into Mr. Beast, or the Minecraft Movie, or K-Pop Demon Hunters.

This is one of those areas where an entities character isn't up to date. Just like if your husband cheats on you by having a secret sexual encounter with another person that comes to light, your husband's status as a 'cheater' is not a matter of self-identification, and so it is not a matter up for debate, "you don't understand, I felt really powerful emotions that this was somehow the right way to handle things and thus is not an immoral or incompetent act but something really that commends me as an incredibly special person who seized the opportunity to be special." is not an argument that you are not a cheater for the act of infidelity that defines cheating.

In the same way, a TV gameshow show host, with a string of failed business ventures including a casino, whose policy centrepiece was to build a wall across the southern united states boarder that Mexico was going to pay for, who announced their presidential candidacy by riding down an escalator, and who has visible fake-tan on his face with 'raccoon eyes' in the negative space, and cannot wear a tie - is not a serious candidate. There was sufficient evidence from the outset that Trump was not a serious person worthy of serious consideration for your vote. In his case, in particular, there's simply no basis for any 3d chess debate. As Matt Dillahunty says "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absence of evidence where evidence would be expected is." or something, and there's an absence of expected evidence everywhere we would look for evidence of Trump's competence.

But the key thing, is that it is actually the US voting citizens that cannot be trusted, that are an existential threat because they are not taking their votes seriously. There is likely a complicated overdetermined reason for this, that can be boiled down to failures of education, and in this the US citizen is not isolated, citizens and subjects of democracies throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and the specific have fans of Donald Trump who would have voted for him if they could, and have voted for his franchisees.

The US Number One Strategic Weakness

Prior to Russia's 24th February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the world had been under the impression that Russia was a military power, like a serious military power. It remains a Nuclear power, of course, but much as the world was caught off-guard by its invasion in the first place, the world was then caught off-guard by what a shambles the Russian military was and how ineffective it was at annexing the Ukraine. 

This should not have been surprising in and of itself really, given how difficult it is for a military power like the US to occupy countries like Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But Russia couldn't even do the part that the US military is generally recognised at being good at - which is the initial incursion and breaking of a states main military resistance. 

I'm not a Russianologist, I have no expertise whatsoever on historicity or geopolitics, but I feel confident in asserting that one powerful explanatory factor for Russia getting bogged down in what is now a 4+ year war that was projected to be an overnight seizure, is that Russia has this major strategic weakness: Putin can't fail.

I saw op-eds speculating that Russia's military had become a culture of 'yes-men' one survived and advanced by telling Putin whatever he wanted to hear. And the Russian military fish had perhaps rotted from the head, leaders taking Putin's example to lie and steal from the military machine.

Beyond that, I don't have the means to understand what the fuck is going on over in Ukraine, like China, Russia is a subject that attracts content farming on Youtube where every day there's a story about Russia's imminent collapse and I have learned not to trust them at all, as one does when an imminent collapse fails to collapse for 4 years.

Where I will put my confidence, is in an opinion of martial philosophy, that may be controversial but I am convinced, that the numero uno, biggest strategic liability is being unable to fail. And Trump cannot fail.

I appreciate how more literally minded persons might be like "but if you can't fail that means you can only succeed" which would be true, if we were talking about reality and not language:

Once there was a parrot who knew only one word: “victory.” Yes, sir, the days came and went, and on one of those days when our poor parrot was sitting on his perch without a care in the world, a hawk set his eye on him and swept him away through God’s air. The poor green thing clutched in the hawk’s claws began to complain, but he couldn’t say a thing except the one word he knew by heart. Each peck the hawk gave drew forth a cry of “victory.” A peck, a “victory,” another peck, another “victoryds.” The whole while he was being pecked to pieces, he kept saying “victory.”

—JOSE JOAQUIN FERNANDEZ DE LIZARDI, “The Parrot’s Victory,” El Pensador Mexicano, October. 11, 1823 

Trump can't fail, he can only succeed. The strait of Hormuz gets blocked? Huge success. A girls school gets bombed? Another victory. NATO allies refuse to send military aid? Trump for the win. Ultimatums increasingly ring hollow? You'll win so much you'll get tired of winning.

In Monty Python's The Holy Grail, the Black Knight could have called it quits when he lost an arm, instead after losing two arms and a leg he starts hop-headbutting King Arthur who is then forced to reluctantly cut off his remaining leg. 

When the Black Knight describes his injuries as "just a flesh wound" that partial admission of failure renders the Black Knight as less of a strategic liability than Donald J. "Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen" Trump. A man who cannot concede, and could not concede that he lost the 2020 US election.

"Novacaine" legacy artist Jack Quaid's Comedy Action movie's central conceit is an unlikely action hero who has a genetic condition where his nervous system doesn't register pain signals. When we meet his character, he can't eat solid foods because he may not notice biting off his own tongue and is at high risk of bleeding to death simply through a lack of feedback.

Though the movie shows us a fairly unique circumstance where this translates into a kind of superpower, an inability to feel pain is counterintuitively a very debilitating condition that renders a person extremely fragile, not extremely resilient. This is a person who can lean on a hot stove, and won't notice until they smell burning flesh that they have inflicted 2nd or 3rd degree burns on their hand.

But in the ability to smell burning flesh and act upon it, such a character is less of a strategic liability than Donald J. "Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen" Trump.

You do not want to go to war, with a person beside you for whom forgetting their helmet, forgetting their gun, forgetting their food, shitting their pants, pissing their pants, tripping over and breaking their teeth, alerting the enemy to your position, failing to surrender, suffering severe injuries, getting taken prisoner, getting subjected to torture, starvation and humiliation, giving up military secrets, having wounds get infected etc. are all medal worthy military victories.

The only ambiguity as to the relative military strategic strengths v weaknesses of Iran and the US, are whether the Iranian regime also is unable to fail and can only succeed. But they certainly seem more competent than the commander in chief at the moment.

And lastly, this is a broadly understood martial principle learned from history and martial philosophy, not a brilliant insight or "predictive history" as "Professor" Jiang might milk having predicted something quite obvious - that the US and Isreal might go to war with Iran. 

I'll use Mr Jiang as a segue into hopefully my last section of this post, which is to do with the impotence of language. I stumbled upon "Professor Jiang Clips" Youtube channel a few months ago and it had been on my list to discuss. He immediately reminded me of Jordan Peterson, and like Jordan Peterson or Slavoj Zizek, Jiang is a producer of interesting ideas that could be dangerous if taken seriously, by which I mean authoratatively. 

Jiang's choice of identifying himself as a "Professor" is, no racism intended, the immediate yellow-flag. Watch enough of his 'classes' and it becomes clear that he is addressing perhaps as many as 6 highschool students, whereas with JP it was obvious he was delivering actual lectures to actual university students and in a sizeable fashion in Toronto when he first uploaded his psychology lectures to Youtube. The voices also sound young, and a quick google you discover that Jiang is a highschool teacher at a private highschool in China. 

Whether intentionally or not, he is exploiting an ignorance in the Anglosphere, (with English being the language he delivers his content in) that other cultures use titles that are quite impressive in Anglo-Academia to describe people with lesser and even no qualifications. For example in Brazil and Italy, anyone with a tertiary degree earns the title of 'Doctor', in Mexico anyone who teaches anyone anything with or without qualifications, is a 'Master' or 'Maestro', in Peru highschool teachers are referred to by students as 'Professors' and in Australia a PhD holder delivering lectures to students as a tenured Professor of the Economics Faculty is referred to as "Gary" by his students, because that is his name.

Jiang exercises the power of language by simply asserting via a title that doesn't translate accurately for a western audiance that he is somebody to be taken seriously. He is not. He may be someone worth entertaining, but certainly he is not safe to engage with uncritically as in his talking on subjects as dubious as 'evil' he will invoke a conspiracy of international Jewry, and notably have absolutely nothing to say about the organised criminal gang that commands the territory known as China that hosts him and has an appalling human rights record, a supreme leader for life, and zero rights for the subjects of the regime. He is fucking silent on Xi, at least up until I stopped watching.

Futile Resistance is not Resistance is Futile

Postmodernism, or poststructuralism in terms of the generalisable lay nature in which it is understood - that reality is structured by power - deserves its due.

In the small picture and small run, social animals like, and possibly exclusively, humans can make reality a kind of coerced performance. Like a bank can use its power to conceal from us the financial situation of a person, that allows them to perform as though they are solvent wearing nice suits, driving nice cars, buying meals prepared for them etc. when the reality is they are bankrupt and had we known this we never would have given them our money.

We all know, this happens some times, in some situations. We tell stories and people behave as though they are true.

I just feel, that there are limits to "postmodernism" as I've described. It is remarkably inefficient for one, and energy intensive. 

Furthermore, there is much that narratives simply cannot achieve. Physical, or natural phenomena are largely uncontroversial. I recently watched one of Angela Collier video titled "Physicists don't know how planes work" and I ran into a problem with my own typographical preferences because the title of that video is quoting some anonymous person's(') dumb take, in which Angela repeats many times that "air go down plane go up" is a perfectly valid explanation of how planes work, as valid as 'road goes back car goes forward' for how cars work (or walking or running for that matter) and I think about this as regards the limits of postmodernism.

The only story you can tell to make a car fly, is a story where you call an aeroplane or a helicopter a car, and I hope you can agree, that the usefulness of this deconstruction of language is pretty fucking low.

In a moment of prescient transphobia, Abraham Lincoln was (likely apocryphally) attributed the following anecdote:

When consulting with his generals, Abraham Lincoln asked the assembled commanders "How many legs does a dog have, supposing we call the tail a leg?" and the generals took the bait and said "five" to which Abe said "The answer's four, calling a tail a leg don't make it so." 

Now I've been given no reason to believe this anecdote ever actually happened, and we cannot know Abe's position on trans rights. He fought to preserve the union and emancipate his fellow men from the condition of slavery, but I wouldn't be confident saying Abe was definitely not a racist.

But the anecdote itself is not a portrait of postmodern leadership. Characters like Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un and many dead tyrants before them are postmodern in style.

Here is another quoting of Yale Professor of History Timothy Snyder yet again:

We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible.

So there are a couple of centuries of Democratic theory which make that argument in one form or another. That's an old argument. And what follows from that is that if you want to build an authoritarian regime you try to make that factual world less salient, you try to make the world less about the facts that are between you and me and more about the emotions that will either divide us or bring us together, it doesn't really matter which. 

I think if you have a decade long lesson in the importance of free speech and the consequences of abandoning it, and you are now in year 11 of that lesson, you fail. I think that's a fact.

Michael Shermer is not a towering Colossus  of intellect but he hosts a podcast where he diligently interviews people who have written non-fiction books, including many historians and political scientists. For the decade long lesson in free speech, one of his most routine questions for guests was about their opinion of North Koreans rolling around on the ground shrieking and wailing to hear about the death of Kim Jong Il, late father of the current supreme leader and son of North Korea's founding father. 

He asks if they are really grieving or if it is just a performance, a roundabout way of asking 'does propaganda work?' and specifically 'does propaganda convince its targets?' and the consensus that appears to be being reached by scholars who look at this and Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and Maoist China etc. is that the key ingredient to propaganda is state violence. 

It is power exercised to coax a performance out of everyone. But it is not in itself persuasive, there's generally a whole bunch of other psychological factors that are much more important that mostly revolve around making people afraid to say anything different.

I think this is bad, this is a bad way to live. If it isn't clear, I think the Trump administration's strategic vision is bad. It is a terrible strategy that I feel is being proven, day by day, to be one of the most egregious wastes of everyone's time and energy in the history of humanity.

Alas, back to Timothy Snyder, if there are no facts then there can be no resistance. Most of my friends moved into cultural cul de sacs that I feel categorize the futile resistance of the left that endured as the dominant storytelling voice for around 10 years.

It was basically "We can all agree, that the audience of an Ani Di Franco concert, isn't going to start wars, bully kids, oppress minorities etc. etc. the whole world should just be an Ani Di Franco concert." Speaking as a fan of Ani Di Franco, I don't want the whole world to be an Ani Di Franco concert. I can see why a political movement based on the whole world being a Metallica concert, would be more popular. I can also see that both utopian visions are equally the stuff of pure fantasy, a complete waste of time to implore everyone, literally everyone to just commit wholly to listening to only one catalogue of music forever.

Monopolies and tyrannies are fundamentally unstable by nature, and the complete absence of competition makes this counterintuitive, because competition is seen and felt as a stressor, but its the stressors that help us identify failures constantly so we don't wind up with something structurally unsound.

Resistance has failed because it has framed the conflict in terms of who can seize the power to tell stories, and the answer is nobody. But it resulted in people seizing the power to effect real consequence in the world, because so many people forgot about that while escalating fiction to central importance.

There is a form of effective resistance, and Abe is attributed with pointing it out - stop pretending that whether a leg counts as a tail is a matter worthy of time and energy.