Two Attempted Applications of Marcus

"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong, and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own (not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity), I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism." ~ The Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Book 2.1, translation from Greek sourced here. Emphasis mine.

Contemporary to writing, I have the slight perception, as per "The Cancelling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, a book I admittedly haven't read but am curious to, and from what I can glean from publicity interviews - in it's chapter "the Perfect Rhetorical Fortess" they allude to the lazy rhetorical shorthand employed that if someone is conservative, they can be dismissed without having to listen to them all.

There has been a rush of fools embracing the cosmetics of stoicism in recent years. Likely sold on the promise that it can make one manly and rich or some shit, in the same way elite female private schools in Melbourne and perhaps the world over use sanitary advertising to sell themselves as finishing schools to parents with a veneer that they are educating future titanic female leaders. Such that, I'm aware an invocation of stoicism for many is enough to be dismissed before even reading this far.

I can't help that, but thanks for reading this far. If you have a hard on for stoicism as some shortcut to being right in stupid culture war arguments, I invite you to enrich yourself by considering that Marcus didn't live up to his own stoic ideals, couldn't. He wrote his meditations as admonishment to himself and it is hard to point to anything from his reign that demarkates it as a particular golden era, with his most consequential act being the appointing of his son who came to be known as Commodus ("The toilet/latrine") co-emperor before his death being an utter disaster. As Sam Harris points out, all of us have the capacity to offer great advice to friends as though willpower were no great constraint, such that to be wise is to be able to follow your own advice. Marcus probably opens Book II with his daily reminder that people are people, given that Book I is what today many would call "Acknowledgements" because it was something he struggled with daily.

In some sense, provided you aren't so devoid of imagination that you can't extrapolate the meaning without "men" being expanded to "men and women" or "men, women and non-binary" which is to say, you have no power to include yourself and must beg inclusion from those you cast as superior, like the Torah, The New Testament and the Quran have nothing particular to say about Tik Tok, I'm going to attempt the conceit of pointing to two contemporary examples of mannish behaviour it is wise to accept and work with rather than against as Marcus appeared to perceive. Things people are going to do because they are fucking people. 

These are attempted applications of a principle only, applications I find useful:

People Who Think It Would Be Cool If Computers Were Cooler

Probably the simplest way to allude to the kind of people we needs must stoically accept the ongoing existence of is to describe two potential people: 1: People who enjoy the game of chess. 2: People who enjoy building machines that do things.

These two groups will have some overlap, such that naturally some component of the latter group will feel inspired to build machines that can play chess. Not only do they enjoy the game of chess, but they enjoy things that can play chess. They think it would be cool if not only can they build a machine that plays chess, but if they could build a machine grand master of chess.

So they do, and it doesn't destroy the game of chess. What happens, is that someone is faced with the question "why play chess when a machine can play it better?" they may even ask this of themselves. They arrive at the perfectly valid conclusion that the point of playing chess, is to play it. 

And so, I'm told, because I don't find chess that interesting or fun, that people are way more interested in watching Magnus Carlson play chess, than AI play chess. Playing against computers I'm also told, is how kids get good at chess now, and the internet has transformed the path to grand masterdom. 

Is it cool? Well that's subjective. It's also what has to be accepted. There are people who think it's cool that they built a powerful tool that makes humanity even better at chess, even if those tools are better at chess than humanity is.

It changes slightly, when someone sees a kid delivering pizza pies, and thinks "wouldn't it be cool if drones could do that?" or they see someone drive them across Los Angeles, and think "wouldn't it be cool if that guy didn't have to do that for me?" 

Now, when I asked my brother, who is much closer to the demographic of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" than I, and he thinks the dream of silicon valley is getting super rich really young.

So I'm possibly too generous in casting this demographic as naively thinking they are helping people who grumble about their job sucking. Besides, they already fixed the economy, we plebs just need to start using cryptocurrency because...fed prints money? Therefore profits. 

I digress too much, need to get back on the old trackola:

Mrs. Doyle says it best, though that needn't be the pathos motivating all. Much of the world is fucked up, telling some international student they don't need to deliver pizzas on an e-bike anymore, may not help the international student delivering pizzas on an e-bike. You just made the world slightly more fucked up for him by selling a fleet of drones to Door Dash. 

The guy willing to pick you up from LAX at 5am to drive you to Santa Monica, I would hazard a guess isn't doing it as a favour to his cousin who owns Uber. I suspect he is out working those hours to make a living because it is sparing him from work he finds much worse.

With some economics training, I am open, even perhaps a believer in the general trend of automation providing massive productivity gains for all society.

I'm also open to the idea, that the washing machine was more impactful than the internet. I'm open to the idea of enshittification, a more general "tech-hype" that is unwarranted, and I am reasonably confident that the music industry was irreparably damaged by digitization even, if it ironically means that music will be easier to preserve from an archival perspective.

You would be correct to point out that phenomena like enshittification and the pitfalls of monopolies aren't so much the progeny of computer nerds as running companies to the exclusive interest of shareholders. 

What must be accepted, is that enough people out there just want computers to be cooler and they'll help make that happen because they can't help themselves.

Now, as for subjectivity:

Image taken from Yahoo! News, for the purpose of commentary only.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that for some chair moistening neckbeards out there in internet land, you are convulsing with incredulity saying "you think those guys aren't cool, they captain the top League of Legends teams in the world!!" and yeah the winning team won $445k so like, in 2023 a team of athletes win the equivalent of the loser of the US Tennis Open's Women's/Men's singles quarterfinals loser.

I'm tempted to get into the economics, because I am interested in whether young attractive women are learning to be attracted to the e-athletes in their high school, but there's just too much going on, and I don't want to commit a conjunction fallacy - it seems plausible to me, that someone who spends a lot of time playing video games, might be more likely to land a lucrative IT job than someone good at kicking or throwing a football, but it isn't necessarily so. Such that I would guess that LoL contender e-athletes' can consider themselves lucky to have girlfiends at all still.

The thing I would point out, is that I believe the avenue is there, to take an esports tournament and market it to a broad audience in the exact same way that the Simpsons' marketed Soccer/Associated Football to a US Audience, which is to say, condescendingly. I look at the photo of the LoL champions and can't help but wonder which country is the greatest in the world Mexico or Portugal?

So what I need to accept is that it's okay for kids to want to spend time with computers, enjoying every minute but for the desire that computers somehow could be even cooler. I also need to accept, that those computer hipcats won't accept my nigh total disinterest in how cool computers are. I use them, sure, but for fuck's sake, I'm still blogging in 2024.

Recently I watched "Devs" and even more recently the 1st season of "3-Body Problem" giving me pause to reflect that I do not enjoy a genre loosely described as "hard sci-fi". 

It doesn't begin there though, hard sci-fi probably goes back to Jules Verne, I've read 10,000 Leagues Under The Sea which compared favourably to a text-book on marine biology and not much else. It's a tedious book with an interesting scene in which electric bullets are used to kill marine life. Upon reflection, the most charming thing about 10,000 Leagues, is that the characters, being French, eat absolutely everything. But I also reflect that that's going too far back into the genre of hard sci-fi.

Both Devs and 3-Body Problem had the same problem for me. Devs more so because it is a smaller story. I can't relate to any of the characters and was indifferent to any of them dying, hence, for me the show had no stakes.

3-Body Problem is most interesting because it is sci-fi written by as near as I can determine a Chinese Chauvinist, it is on my to-do list to learn more about contemporary Chinese Intellectuals, but obviously this was Netflix's English Language adaptation, so I'm sure getting a taste of Chinese sci-fi was heavily filtered. 3-Body Problem I would concur, is mostly boring and despite being hard sci-fi, I'm reasonably confident its science doesn't work at all.

It does however feature perhaps the very epitome of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" in the form of it's "sophons" which, is a photon sized supercomputer, depicted in the Netflix adaptation as a photon that is "unfolded" into 2-dimensions making it incredibly large and then presuming some alien technology, engraved with a planet sized circuit board which can run a sentient computer software, before being collapsed back into a 11 dimensional photon or whatever and entangled with another sophon and then sent at the speed of light to earth. Pretty cool huh? No.

In 3-Body problem you don't get Ripley taping a flamethrower to a pulse rifle and climbing into an exo-skeleton to take on the Xenomorph Queen. You get physicists in shapeless khaki pants calculating how far away super colliders would have to be to prevent two sophons from disrupting all scientific experimentation and spying on the Earth's counter-invasion leadership while they plan for an invasion 400 years from now.

Benedict Wong is good though. He usually is.

Devs, what can I say, the actress playing Lilly actually gives a compelling performance as someone I do not give a shit about and do not want to know. Nick Offerman gets to play someone who isn't Ron Swanson, but the overall plot again, I am guessing is supposed to appeal to people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because they have a quantum computer, which I'm under the impression, scientists the world over are still trying to find something they are capable of, that ordinary computers aren't.

Again, my brother explained to me that it is hard science in so far as apparently the Universe is either deterministic, or it has many worlds. 

This show could have been in some sense "brilliant" even with unlikeable characters I do not care about. If it was making the same point, and it really flirts with this point, that "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story" was making - that tech-popes of silicon valley are stupid. If I had any confidence that that was the point of Devs, I would consider it redeemed.

I have no confidence.

Let me give it to you straight, if you didn't see Lilly throwing the gun out of the elevator, not necessarily specifically, but just using the computer's prediction of the future to make an alternative choice, you are an idiot. You are a fucking moron if you reacted like the in universe morons who had their minds blown by Lilly breaking their illusion of determinism.

At that moment, the show had the opportunity to be brilliant, because they'd set up everything to be brilliant - these tech morons thought they'd made a computer that showed them the future, believing it to be determined they did in the future what the computer said they would do, and due to psychological anchoring, these morons never bothered to test whether they could defy the predictions. 

Lily sees a prediction that she will get into an electromagnetic lift with Nick Offerman, holding him at gunpoint and then shoot him with that gun, causing herself to be killed by radiation or some bullshit. This also plausibly explained why the computer couldn't predict anything beyond that point, because it was forecasting that it would be shut down. Yeah we can predict things happening after our death, like I predict there will still be crabs hanging out at volcanic vents under the ocean after I die, but whatever.

As soon as Lily demonstrates that they all have the agency to not do what the computer told them to do the bad guys, who were misguided into being bad guys, realize they are culpable for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, obstruction of justice, desecration of a body etc. 

Beyond Lily breaking determinism, by using a prediction to determine her non-compliance with the pre-determined prediction, manifest by her throwing a gun out of an elevator so she couldn't shoot Nick Offerman; none of that potentially brilliant and satisfying conclusion happens. 

Instead, Lily and Nick Offerman are resureccted in a quantum computer simulation of all possible worlds, and living in Silicon Valley with resurrected loved ones is deemed by Nich Offerman to be "paradise" (which it probably is for Lily and he, because they are normcore) but newsflash: it isn't for most people. It also heavily implies that simulated Lily with her illusion of consciousness, is but one of a multitude of simulated Lilys many of whom are experiencing simulated breast cancer, simulated early onset dementia etc. It's fucking stupid and the whole show is stupid.

There's a particularly painful scene where Alison Pill explains determinism to Lily, that I think assumes that the audience for this show are absolute morons. This scene could have worked, if it was intended to establish that Alison Pill, Nick Offerman et al. were all morons with a really cool computer. I'm not left with the impression that that was the intent. I'm left with the impression that its target audience was meant to be all like "whaaaaaaaaaaaa...[mind explodes]" when they have determinism explained to them - poorly. That they are tellingly supposed to identify with Lily as maybe good at maths, good at coding, but like Lily who somewhat satisfyingly again and again plays herself with her own plans by not thinking them through - do not think things through.

Bringing me full circle, to the need to accept that I share this planet, and society, with people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because such a demographic is not in my experience, reflective, imaginative or thoughtful. I cannot emphasize enough that the impression I am given is an almost monomaniacal obsession with it being cool if computers were cooler.

I've never watched a single Lex Friedman clip, and felt a reassuring "good, I'm glad that guy is a bulwark for humanity while he works hard at disrupting things." I feel Lex Friedman is some kind of idiot savant, personable enough to enjoy his podcast success, and his audience, I cannot credit with the savant or personable part.

Why are they a problem at all? Alain De Botton in a BBC series adapted from his "consolation of philosophy" book, went out into London traffic with a commercial driver, and he really demonstrated the practical application of stoicism, by consoling the frustrated driver that his rage at shitty drivers was born of hope - that today of all days - would be the day that everyone on the streets of London will drive competently and considerately. He points out that getting frustrated with bad driving is irrational because bad driving is the norm.

Consider, that cars are a powerful technology, that many societies actively turbo-charged the public adoption of them - with subsidies for manufacturers and lax lending standards for financing new vehicles. People who think it would be cool if computers were cooler, that's largely what they helplessly facilitate in our society - putting powerful tools in the hands of idiots and incompetents. They aren't the only culprits - industrialists did this first, and I have similar opinions of financial tools like superannuated retirement funds.

Nice People Who Want Things To Be Nice

I guess these people are the antithesis of "Realpolitik" or "Realism" maybe they could be succinctly described as "Unrealpolitik" but that might have you thinking too Kafka-esque.

This was certainly my experience: In highschool, sometimes the population of my year level would effectively be halved for two weeks. The reason being, one half of the year was sent off to school camp, then the following week, we'd switch places.

My school had fairly arbitrary "houses" and that was what determined who went which week. This could disect some cliques, leave some inseparable friends temporarily separated or even remove some cliques in totality. Everyone would likely notice that social dynamics changed, and that it wasn't necessarily bad.

You might get more attention from the girl you had a crush on, because your romantic rivals were gone. You might get relief from the anxiety of possible rejection because your crush was away on camp. Someone who normally caused you angst, chilled out because they were relieved of the need to impress someone they normally did. 

The sudden halving of the population, more generally just reconfigured a bunch of dynamics, but reliably in my experience, always provided an opportunity to experience what life would be like if some quantity of dickheads you usually had to live with, were gone.

"Gee," you would muse, "some people are like clouds: once they are gone, its a beautiful day." 

Of course, all this reprieve was only temporary, because the fact is those dickheads aren't gone they are merely away. They still exist. They come back. 

Sure, in life, some dickwads get expelled, some might even get arrested, some die. But a hell of a lot of dickwads we have to endure, because they are just dicks, they aren't doing anything so bad that we can justify not tolerating them.

All of which, is calibrated by the sensitivities of an individual.

I think nice people who want things to be nice are largely fantacists. These are the people stuck musing, stuck painfully musing how good life would be if we could just remove all the bad people and keep the good people.

Their fancy might be that their children never cry, never suffer. Their fancy might be that comedy:

"Excuse me, ma'am. Do you like to laugh?" "Oh, yes. As long as it's tasteful. And never at someone... or with. And not-". ~ Marge Simpson, The Simpsons.

Graduating from highschool now, my first real encounter with a nice person who wants things to be nice, was sitting around as a student council for my residential college that was struggling, and we struggled, to field teams in intercollegiate events.

We were an if not the international residence. The population was 50/50 local/international students. Our perennial problem was that domestically the residence was marketed as a multi-cultural melting pot for the then largely generalist ideal Australian high-achievers. It was marketed internationally as a safe place to send your kid where they wouldn't get pregnant, be exposed to drugs and alcohol and could study under lock and key 23 hours a day. 

The result was a bunch of exhausted 18-22 year old Australian kids who wound up having to play every sport, simultaneously, run every social event, sew sequins onto everyone's costumes and the reward was often failing a semester of Uni and having to repeat it.

I suggested that in the future we might stipulate that as a condition of residence, one had to participate in a sport or cultural event of some kind each semester. 

A nice person who wants things to be nice attempted to shut me down - not with an argument about the legality or feasability of my proposal, but because they hated that in highschool.

I tried counterempathising, that at first I had hated compulsory extra-curricular activities, but had come to really appreciate it as one of the most enriching things in my life.

They hated it, and that was that.

This is the thing that needs to be stoically accepted, nice people who want things to be nice, waste our time. 

They are a demographic that basically see conflict as illegitimate, everyone should just chill out, go with the flow, mind their own business. 

As I am attempting to phenotype them "nice people who want things to be nice" (npwtbns/nipweebs?) generally have the consistent personality trait of assuming that issues are much simpler than circumstances suggest they are. 

An example I came across today was in a video talking about how Comedy Specials were killing comedy. I watched it because I agree with the broad thesis, but the video maker was fixated particularly on what we would hopefully both use scare quotes to describe as "edgy" comics. 

He had a bit in his video essay which I'm reasonably confident was meant to mock "edgy" comics, rather than nipweebs. The bit went thus:

Comic: What's the deal with trans people?

Heckler: They're just trying to live their lives.

Comic: Oh...

While I'm sure that the heckler's characterization is broadly true of most trans people. To me it reads as largely in line with my own position - that gender rights are human rights in the domain of freedom of expression. But if that is your take on why the culture is obsessed with the issue, you are probably an unhelpful nipweeb.  

It is the distinct combination of holding as the loftiest ideal "niceness" a kind of edgeless, cornerless, toothless ideal fundamentally free not only of struggle, but discomfort, combined with the wantoness the sheer avarice for things to just be nice that make this psychographic so necessary to endure.

These people are paradoxically incurious as regards everything they perceive to be "not nice" and yet are for their wanton nature are quite obstructionist, active. They do not just nicely mind their own business.

So if the issue is a more perennial and ubiquitous one like bullying, the nitweeb in the room performs the role of - say someone suggests disciplinary action, even powers being extended to teachers, the nitweeb says "no I used to hate when a teacher yelled at me at school, they are so big and tall and intimidating." okay, someone else suggests that they've heard researchers find if you give the bully a special role like welcoming all the other students to the class, it satisfies their need to dominate and the bullying behaviour can actually stop. "No!" says the nitweeb, "That's rewarding them for being a bully! I'd feel awful if I was in his class and saw him getting recognized and rewarded when I was a good student."

Okay, the facilitator says "don't be stern, don't be nice, no carrot, no stick, what do you suggest nitweeb?" and the nitweeb's practical suggestion is: "They should stop being a bully."

It puts me in mind of the days I spent down at the Ballarat Library, they had a series of introductory paperbacks like "Introduction to Zen Buddhism" "Introduction to Nietzsche" and "Introduction to Wittgenstein." etc. In one of these short illustrated books, one on one of the eastern philosophies, came an account of a Chinese Emperor meeting with a Buddhist Monk and asking what the essence of Buddhism was the monk replies: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify your heart." and the Emperor is like "Even a child of 7 knows to do that." and by my recollection of the tale the Buddhist monk replies "Then why can't you do it?"

Similarly Soljenisky memorably wrote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In terms of disorders like narcissism and psychopathy, I would have to say I'm a believer that while not simple, society could do a great deal more to protect itself from these personality disorders - it would do well to keep such personalities out of positions of real authority.

Beyond that though, recognize how unhelpful the simple ideas of good and bad are, and subsequently we can recognize what a tiresome pain in the arse nipweebs are with their impractical and useless suggestions combined with their oppositional defiance of any more practical attempts to address their genuine complaints (people shouldn't harass trans people, kids shouldn't be bullied, racial slurs shouldn't be thrown, fat women should be able to buy and wear bikinis to the beach etc.) 

I propose that accepting the fact, even inevitability of their existence means appreciating their ability to provide useful friction to deter overexuberance if no real insight, and work around them. 

For example, if there's a meeting about bullying, take the response to a vote after open discussion, not a consensus. Take the nice person who wants things to be nice's ability to shame and coerce others into polite solidarity with them away by making the voting process anonymous. 

There is no need to be driven nuts by these people, as per Marcus Aurelius, the tedium of nitweebs is literally born through their "ignorance of real good and ill." 

Like Marcus, I often fail to live up to my own ideals, but I endeavour to respond to nitweebs not with ire and frustration but curiosity. 

Anybody who has not thought things through is curious to me. 

 

 

Left-Right Scraps

This is just some shit that I forgot to work into the previous two posts somewhere, abridged over, if you will. Those posts have proved less engaging than talking about a historic left and right that possibly never has and never will exist. 

These scraps tickle my brain to irritation though, so here you fucking are: 

"Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" ~ Disgraced Former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison

A big conservatory sentiment that is both regressive and mainstream among the right, is the idea that if an industry exists that creates jobs, it has basically crossed the threshold of two-big-to-fail.

There are probably some artifact "company towns" still existing in the wealthy educated industrialized r-something democratic nations of the world, perhaps none larger than the city of Toyota in Nagoya, Japan. And I as an individual am not sensitive really to department of labour unemployment statistics. I will confess I can't fathom news headlines that read "$56bn project will create 1500 jobs in Palookaville, Anywhere." I do not know whether to be pleased or outraged by such a headline.

It took way too long for the gears in my head to click however, why for example Jordan Peterson since becoming an employee of The Daily Wire, spends so much time on "climate alarmism" to the point of upping his production values while lowering his relevance, I mean the regressive left almost doesn't bother with him anymore, and they were bothering with him while he was in a coma.

Near as I can guess, climate change is perceived as an existential threat in a very different way by the regressive right, than by both the productive left, and counterproductive/regressive left. It is seen as a threat to some kind of perceived social contract that says something like: You are allowed to live so long as you go out and find a job. So long as someone pays you to do something, you exist.

The regressive right's opposition to even acknowledging that something has to change I think is born of an anti-enterprise spirit that by definition renders this faction of the right regressive.

Suppose for a second that there were no issues with climate change. None whatsoever. We could find, extract, refine and burn oil without having to worry about icecaps melting and vast swathes of productive land becoming arid deserts. But someone was just inventing small personal aircraft made from bamboo and powered by hydrogen with feasible fuel cells that were cheap and safe to run, and could even remotely haul cargo and goods.

Absent a problem, this would be technological progress (maybe) in so far as it would be better than a bunch of people driving road trains on no sleep, and people having to go to airports to cram into middle seats for long haul flights. 

A traditional right I posit would simply try and foresee the unintended consequences - maybe the visual and noise pollution of congesting the skies with personal aircraft in numbers approaching that of cars, or as may still be the case with electric vehicles, pointing out the massive ecological footprint of getting the rare earth minerals and the trade off between the lifespan of e-vehicles.

Certainly, there is much technological progress that is an illusion, but I don't wish to digress too far from the point that the regressive right is anti-enterprise. 

Upon someone estimating that the sea is overfished, or the forrests are overlogged etc. I notice that the effort to conserve jobs often takes precedence over the effort to conserve industries. There is of course, a major part of this equation, being the demand side, that likely is independent of political leaning or manifestation.

No doubt it is argued by the regressive right that people neither wish to eat less fish, nor pay more for their fish, therefore, overfishing should continue to employ the 10,000 commercial fishermen until fish stocks collapse. Rather than resolving that to preserve the fishing industry, less fishing licenses will be issued and perhaps a full half of the people will have to embrace enterprise and endeavour to change careers. 

This isn't just saying "learn to code" because, as we should all now be aware, those coding enthusiasts have written code that can learn to code for you. One thing I appreciate about Mexico, is that Mexico is a country where if you lose your job at the plant or the mill, it is extremely viable for you to support your family by opening a food stand. In Australia, you would probably need to have $50k~$180k to open a food truck, in Mexico to become a hotdog vendor we are probably talking hundreds of dollars in start up capital.

Granted, Mexico is no paradise, but it is filled with entrepreneurs. 

I myself have been keeping one eye on AI art, as a potential existential threat to something I want to do. Thus far, because it is a potential post in itself, I mostly feel AI art is garbage-in-garbage-out:

By which I don't even mean that the figure in the above AI generated image is either missing an arm, or about to fall off her seat. I mean AI is being largely embraced by careerists, people who want to be artists, rather than vocationalists who want to do art. I don't think tell-tale mistakes that only a machine would make because it doesn't comprehend what it is trying to do, will last, those will be learned away, the big tell remains how generic the art is, everyone's AI art looks in some significant way, the same, even with multiple projects, like everyone is printing zine's in helvettica now. Because writing text prompts into something that spits out fully rendered composite images for you can only be fun for so long.

What it does promise to do, is liberate me from the need to put energy and effort into horrible art-job drudgery, here is a really long talk titled "Concept Art is Dead" from 5 years ago, basically asserting that if you are an artist working for a game development company, forget doing anything creative it is ll about churning out joyless photo-bashed concept art for the next installment in the Call of Duty franchise. Generic art for generic projects. I couldn't do that job, what I could do is get paid $50 an hour to get AI to shit out generic art for generic video games.

I suspect what makes me not-regressive right in disposition, is that I've never had a concept artist job, nor have I bought a house in an area proximate to my work and had a bunch of kids that depend on my salary. The thought of being nobody for a while until I figure out the next thing to do is not a terrifying prospect for me. But I can understand it being terrifying for most people.

It is likely analogous among the regressive right, to the misguided belief by the original classical economists that recessions would end by firms lowering their prices and workers lowering their wages (and landlords lowering their rents) etc. until the market clears again. Keynes pointed out firms don't lower their prices, workers don't negotiate for lower wages, landlords don't read about an economic downturn and think they better ease the squeeze on their tenants. 

All these corrective actions seem antithetical to progress. 

An ideal conservatism, to me, might look at overfishing, and sort of combine it with a UNESCO heritage vibe, to say "we need less fishing, lets regulate for more traditional, less productive fishing." Because there are likely unintended consequences to losing from the culture, people who make their living by going out to sea. Fishing is part of human identity, from every coast and island of the world. It is a living heritage that deserves to be preserved. 

It would to me, be a matter of regulating for example, that fishing boats have to be wind powered, with a diesel engine solely for emergency use. You know, just a continued exploration of the same principle as specifying tuna has to be line caught not net caught and shit like that. Consumers be damned, they can pay a premium for sustainable fishing practices.

"Maybe Cheapness Is A Sense"

I'm sure I'd written about this before, certainly in my post "Polarization by analogy" that Identity Politics are very cheap. It really should be a red flag for anyone who thinks that things need to change - for example, real wages have been largely stagnant since the mid 70s, since the early 90s left-wing parties like Tony Blair's "New Labour" and Bill Clinton's Democrats adopt in essence the same economic policies as the Reagan-Thatcher era better known as neo-liberalism, carrying through the dot-com bubble of the 2000s, through to the Global Financial Crisis, and yet, between 2014~2016 the left wind parties, who treat an increase in minimum wage, or regulating employment contracts, protecting gig-workers etc. like pulling teeth, embrace identity politics. 

I think it is because unintended consequences aside, identity politics and in a dark reflection of the regressive right pandering to single-issue voters over abortion rights. The culture wars in general are really cheap compared to tackling socio-economic issues. 

Possibly, like Cersei Lannister not apprehending the consequences of allowing their in-world religion to revive it's militant arm, career politicians and bureaucrats did not apprehend that creating a few cheap cosmetic positions and departments to hand out on the basis of identity politics, might then attempt to function in some way. 

At some point, I think the regressive left will, moreso than the right, have to answer for dedicating so much oxygen to identity lip-service.

Embracing the Paralegal

This is a bit of a story, but I think it is in many ways a reasonable candidate for the story of the left losing its way. 

British-US Citizen Jon Oliver ran a story some years ago on his comedy-news program "Last Week Tonight" ran a story on chicken farming. You can click through and watch the segment, but in a swift recap, there are a lot of chicken farmers in the US going bankrupt because of predatory corporate practices.

Almost like a corporate version of the cuckoo, farmers sign deals where they are responsible for all the aspects of farming chickens that cost money (sheds, feed, equipment, utilities etc) and their supplier owns everything that makes money (the chickens and the eggs they lay).

Furthermore, the piece establishes that attempts to regulate this practice such that chicken farmers aren't fated to go broke, or go into debt and commit suicide, can't find the political will among elected legislators.

The silver ligning, came in the form of a paralegal remedy - namely activists pressuring large consumers of chicken products like McDonalds, KFC, Chick Filet, Popeyes or whatever, to essentially adopt "fair trade" chicken branding. Appealing to corporate greed.

End of recap, now, based on other stories Jon Oliver has run, I don't trust his coverage to be, shall we say, true. The situation, as described by Oliver's show, has the potential to meet a criteria outlined by Prof. Timothy Snyder, "The situation is this [our elected representatives cannot legislate to protect us] it's unbearable, therefore we rebel [by targeting corporations with activism]"

This story, doesn't translate however to what I feel is fairly characterized as a left-wing movement, in the context of "#metoo" a movement that was initially intended to have the limits of women voicing there experiences of sexual harassment and assault, so victims of such abuses did not feel alone, and to raise consciousness in the population in general as to how frequently that was occurring.

Original intent aside, in some manifestation, #metoo became a paralegal movement, particularly in the media industry, where person's usually men, were named and then their employers would terminate their employment. 

I would describe, however frequently or infrequently this occured, and regardless of guilt or innocence, a paralegal process, because people were getting fired not out of an interest in justice, but brand equity. I cannot exclude that corporations were not so much contacting HR and asking "how many complaints have been lodged against Harvey?" but consulting accounts who were saying "Harvey brings in $1.2m in revenue, we pay him $600k salary per year, and we estimate the damage to our brand from the press coverage of this allegation to be $1m and an additional $1m in PR and advertising to restore our reputation. The cheapest option is just to cut the turd loose."

It may not even have been predicted, by anyone who ever shared a #metoo experience, that corporations would go into damage control quickly and forcibly, and that it might feel like justice.

Of course, with or without an investigation, and barring some neurological/psychological issue, the only people who often know the truth of an event, are the assaulted and their assailant. Even in a court of law, the standard would be "beyond reasonable doubt" for criminal offenses.

Our legal system I think we can describe, for all it's floors, as being based around the heuristic "serious allegations should be taken seriously" and I recognize the limitations of resources and competence that impede reaching high legal standards. I would not be surprised if in the act of reporting a crime, our legal system fails to take a serious allegation seriously.

This however, is a much better heuristic than "believe women" or "believe victims" I'm sure it's best arguments refer to studies that show how statistically rare it is for a woman to make a false allegation of sexual assualt or rape. I suspect the error made by people willing to embrace paralegal activism are making is thinking that just because the amount of people who steal cars or stick up liquor stores at gunpoint are statistically rare, perhaps close to absent in demographics like 30 year old women, it would be naive to assume that legalizing or otherwise endorsing the practice of stealing cars and holding up liquor stores at gunpoint would not, in short order, result in people doing just that.

What is perhaps noteworthy, are in all the forms of cancel culture, which are paralegal practices, of which I think there is enough credible testimony to suggest it is a tactic that exists among, if not exclusively so, the regressive left. We can also state the right has regressed in this polarized age, because the dismantling of legal avenues is a great example of Chesterton's Fence. 

You have to literally not understand why courts demand evidence, discovery, an adversarial trial presided over by a judge who represents the law to a jury drawn from the community who deliberate as to whether the state has made its case on a preponderance of evidence, or for criminal charges beyond reasonable doubt.

No matter how many criminals are hopping the fence of our judicial systems, those judicial systems did not fucking build themselves. The right should only allow the dismantling of due process and presumption of innocence, when the left can demonstrate they understand why these things exist in the first place, and I would assert, that anyone who understands why due process and presumption of innocence exist, would not call for their destruction.

Bringing us back to cheapness. I'm sympathetic to Fran Lebowitz' theory that #metoo only came about when it did, because the movie industry has declined to decrepit. That it also explains why #metoo has done little for hotel maids and fastfood employees earning minimum wage, and often subjected to tyrant shift managers.

Abridged Regressive Left

 I'm not sure where to begin, because after writing about the regressive right, much of what there is to say about the regressive left seems redundant. So maybe just get the redundancy out of the way:

The regressive left, like the regressive right is tribal in nature and operates double standards depending on whether it identifies you as the in-group, or the out-group.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, albeit to a lesser extent has withdrawn the consent of the loser. It does not regard dissent as a legitimate right, or democratic exercise.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, are anti-liberal, anti-individual.

The regressive left, like the regressive right, has the fatal conceit of believing itself in possession of the ideals, subsequently all problems are merely a lack of commitment all opposition is a malicious waste of time, barely worthy of contempt.

That there is a regressive left, and that the left can be regressive, at this point in 2024 has been overdetermined. The work has been done to argue that case, even if the message hasn't penetrated. What is underdetermined, I feel, is how unconscious the regressive left is, relative to the regressive right, and even the more traditional left that criticize the regressive left.

When I hear: "We should all go to a free Palestine protest!" I feel I am hearing: "We should try the new Korean BBQ place, I hear it is fantastic." or "I want a pair of Nike Blazer mid-tops, I've seen people wearing them and I think they look really cool."

Which is to say, I feel the regressive left has the feel and flavour of a largely cosmopolitan fashion trend. I suspect it survives as a social phenomena by having, built in, a hostility to argument. 

On this front, I have described a traditional and useful conservativism as being routed in the idea of Chesterton's Fence, a vanguard, or check-and-balance, against unintended consequences, and a functional historical left as grounded in the observation that the Universe, World and subsequent society is dynamic and things therefore need to change. 

The regressive left seems fixated largely, on controlling the Overton Window. Probably what the regressive left has become most notorious for, are their attempts to police speech. To make certain subjects, or positions on subjects, unspeakable. I would guess the naive assumption being that, for example if people can't discuss fascism in public forums, then fascism will go extinct. 

That is largely how the regressive left self-organizes. It likely begins with an ideal, say for example that "Alegria" is the ideal art style. By the time an individual, such as you, notices the phenomena of the Alegria artstyle, it is basically presented to you as a fait accompli. The regressive left then tries to close the Overton Window's shutters such that the only publicly permissible discussion is about how great Alegria is, if for example, you personally have nothing against Alegria, but you really like comic-book dark-age over-the-top artstyle of 90s comic books, a la Rob Leifeild, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo etc. you would be assigned to the right, in a unilateral act of discrediting, because suggesting that other art-styles can viably co-exist with the ideal of Alegria, is to detract from the achievement of the ideal.

I presume that Sepultura fans lean largely left. "War for territory" seems to have seeped into the collective unconscious of the regressive left, who see the landscape of ideas as a warzone where all is fair, rather than holding positions that can be argued for.

So circling back to the Alegria vs 90s-Dark Age artstyles example, there are arguments, and probably compelling ones as to why, if you want to sell furniture or consumer software packages Alegria is superior to 90s comic book artstyles. The regressive left however, sees the very process of arguing for a position or against another, some kind of affront.

Subsequently, it isn't really the content of the regressive left's basket of causes that concerns me so much as their methodology. Like the regressive right, they are prone to being people who "believe in lies and therefore will lie for their beliefs."

Another example, the slogan "Love is love" employed in Australia in the leadup to a postal survey in which all Australian's of age could state whether they were for or against same sex marriage, the result of which was a large majority and though non-binding the incumbent conservative government of the time allowed a conscious vote (party members could vote with their conscious instead of along party lines) in which the legislation for marriage equality passed. "Love is love" is as effective a slogan as other superficial slogans like "build that wall."

You may feel the comparison is unflattering, until you have to argue why "love is love" is somehow an argument for same-sex marriage, but not an argument for bestiality, statutory rape, incest, pedophilia. The regressive left will get up in arms and incensed that same-sex attraction is being compared to criminal sex acts. That distinction that is the basis of offense - the difference between consenting adults and predatory behaviour is not made by a slogan as vacuous as "love is love" a deepity if ever there was one.

The regressive left doesn't argue, it just loses its shit. I do not see it as an ideology, such that the content of its ideas are the main thing to consider, so much as the spread of a bunch of rhetorical strategies to control the Overton Window, likely through an unfounded belief in the power of media effects.

Now, as Michael Shermer points out, there are no pseudoscientists, nobody wakes up and says "off to my pseudo-lab to perform pseudo-experiments to advance pseudoscience" they most often have convinced themselves that they are doing real science. Just so, I'm sure nobody believes themselves to be on the regressive left or right. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm off to drive moral progress backwards by resurrecting racism, suffrage sessions and repressing free speech!"

On the left there is the distinct issue of what to call what Coleman Hughes refers to as "the thing", I have written before that I reject the self-identification of progressive. This is based on simple observations like if the Gender Wage Gap (adjusted or unadjusted) was 60c to the dollar in 1960s, 70c to the dollar in 1970s to 88c to the dollar in 2023, then the system we have is progressive. Progress is being made an an actual progressive should seek to conserve the system we have. Instead the wage gap appears analogous to crime, where I could be convinced that just as crime goes down, reporting on crime goes up leading to less direct suffering from crime but more psychological suffering from the perceived ubiquity of crime.

"Woke" is a useful and predictive descriptor. If someone says a movie franchise has "gone woke" it reliably predicts identity characteristics of protagonists, and of antagonists, the presence of heteronormative romantic relationships on screen, and the amount of dialogue that will be dedicated to lecture style content or if you will overt-social commentary vs. covert-social commentary.

The unfortunate thing, is that any short hand used to refer to the regressive left, will be denounced by the regressive left as a pejorative. It is quite consistent with the fixation and belief in the Overton Window. The regressive left itself, cannot be the subject of public debate.

Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs" gave an abridged history of the confusion caused by the simultaneous movements of second-wave feminism born out of Roe v Wade and the Sexual Revolution that also was born out of access to reliable birth-control. The regressive left, is still, unsurprisingly prone to confusing unintelligible collisions of movements. Feminism that I do not pretend to understand, has in part being trying to break down stereotypes of femininity, assertions that women are constrained by some essential female nature to be agreeable, risk-averse, emotional, abstract, etc. such that it could be seen to be championing the idea that there is nothing it necessarily means to be female. This naturally gets entangled with trans-rights, which can be broadly interpreted as fundamentally maintaining the right to transit from one identity to another. Such that you wind up arguing for a position that allows someone to transit from an identity with no real characteristics to another identity with no real characteristics. 

These confused and unintelligible positions I suspect are why the regressive left survives on rhetorical memes. I will concede this to postmodernism and power-knowledge. It can work in the short term. I suspect the regressive left are largely self defeating however, because things don't work in the long term.

An example of this, could be the Academy Awards, that I don't know, were possibly seen as a lever by which to control the Overton Window. I think it is fair to say, the right regressive or not, are particularly concerned with the employment of and representation of marginalized groups in cinema, I hope it is not a bridge too far, to call diversity qualifications to be considered for an Academy Award, as a left-wing reform. The trouble being, that you might eliminate the literal best picture, from nomination, or the literal best actor or actress, the best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay, all from pictures that were made because a WWII era biopic featuring every white male actor in the world and three white women was something a cinema going public were willing to see, so it got made, and a small indy-film competently made about a refugee community that live in a trailer park seen by a few thousand people but not meriting word of mouth is among five similar competent-but-forgettable movies that are all acadamy members are permitted to consider.

Leaving an awards ceremony where a shadow looms large, that we are watching what used to be an open professional competition that is now the under-12s flag football competition. I suspect the initiative will be quietly relaxed, and the modernising of the film landscape allowed to naturally progress on its natural timeline - it is worth pointing out that movies like Spiderman: Homecoming are diverse (cast wise) successfully, because modern NYC is different from the 60s NYC in which Stan Lee originally set Spider-Man. The same is true for forthcoming films like Ghostbusters: Frozen Kingdom, in which the 80s cast who are as diverse as 80s NYC was, will star alongside kids who are as diverse as contemporary NYC. It was the same deal with Gene Rodenberry's original Star Trek series, with Nyota Uhura, Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov. Rodenberry's optimistic vision of the future can be characterized as propaganda, as can late-Dr.Who series, but propaganda selling a brighter tomorrow is progressive whereas propaganda retconning the past is regressive and does not appear to be working.

Similarly, since joining a gym I've noticed that ads for Channel 7 and Channel 9 news teams, are not diverse. In fact their news teams look indistinguishable from each other, just a bunch of white people. These will be in between ads where an affable Polynesian male buying sleeping duck mattresses, affable Polynesian male buying property apps, affable Polynesian male buying underwear (I can't remember the brand) and affable Polynesian male choosing healthcare providers or something. You get the idea. There's nothing that doesn't really work although if I were a Polynesian male, I'd be concerned about being considered the human embodiment of the Alegria art-style.

There's an episode of BBC's Travelman, when Richard Ayoade was hosting it, where Richard meets John Hamm in Hong Kong for the show's natively advertised "mini-breaks" the horrible practice of jacking up your carbon footprint to spend a mere 48 hours in a foreign country. Their local guide takes them to sample local Hong Kong food specialty "Stinky Tofu" which the two foreigners do not like. Their guide explains that this vendor is one of two remaining shops that still serve Stinky Tofu, a food that is dying out and John Hamm remarks "So not only does it taste bad, it's also unpopular."

There are things that die out, like the chequebook, you can go watch old movies, perhaps none so memorable as "The Big Lebowski" where characters write out a cheque. Cheques still exist, but nobody pays for groceries or restaurant meals or clothes shopping with a cheque anymore and people do not generally carry a chequebook. Then there are things I suspect that there are simply supply and demand issues - like martial arts. A lot of people get a hard-on about fighting and dominating an opponent, but being good at martial arts is kind of redundant in a largely safe world. It is much cheaper and safer to just give your assailant your iphone, than to invest in getting good at BJJ. 

One of the things that makes the regressive left obviously anti-progress is likely a supply-demand issue. People who want to fight racism, often need to innovate more racism, with the unintended consequence of further racializing society and resurrecting racism. Taking people who do not as a rule, generally think about race, and "educating" them to think about race all the time, is likely to result in greater racism and bigotry. Furthermore, on the subject of race, we can see a symptom of the regressive left in 2023 media darling and sporting hero Sam Kerr, recently arrested for a racial slur directed at a police officer. She likely had no idea of the gap between one social sciences discipline theorizing that racism = oppression + power broadly conflated with it being not possible for BIPOC individuals to be racist, and another social science namely legal studies, defining bigotry as prejudice based on immutable qualities or something like that.

I think Sam Kerr probably has a genuine case to be made that she actually wasn't capable of distinguishing right from wrong before the law. I have written before that the last decade has left me with the distinct impression that the education I received failed to impart to most people any understanding of why Nazism was bad, what is wrong with racism. Most people merely remembered they can pass an exam by recalling that Nazi's are the bad guys, and racism is bad. The likely know nothing of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao.

The regressive left is profoundly ignorant, much like the regressive right is when it comes to knowledge of their own holybooks - I have linked before to The Atheist Experience's playlist of calls regarding biblical slavery. The ideals the regressive left assert differ from the regressive right because they are looking to an ideal fictitious future with some grounding in truth, rather than some idealized past.

For example, though I'm dubious that anyone who invokes "systemic" or even "covert" racism are actually talking about the concept explained in various explainer videos, there are notable truth's at the basis of this.

The regressive left for example, for all it's concerns with racism overidentifies and favours a US-centric worldview. Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Barrett's appointment to the US Supreme Court when compared via google-trends to the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, dwarf the latter in terms of topic interest. An argument can be made that the overturning of Wade vs. Roe and affirmative action are issues more far reaching than the dismantling of Hong Kong as a special administration zone within China, but there's plenty of room for both. I suspect it is more to do with who we identify with and the narcissism of small differences.

Trumpist insurgency failed, and though shocking, was a poorly organised uprising by a group of people that could generously be called clowns. Meanwhile, President Xi quietly became paramount leader of China for life. The regressive left, it can easily be observed is more concerned with when a woman of colour can be president of the US, than when a non-Han Chinese will be paramount leader of the CCP, something presumably far off, given that Xi will not step aside until he dies or is forced out. Simultaneously, the regressive left would likely roll their eyes at me, if I suggested that the three female Prime Ministers and incumbent South Asian Prime Minister of the UK (all from the conservative party) are indicative of any moral progress.

On this front, the regressive left is particularly ill-equipped in my experience to appreciate that as bad as it would be to see Trump serve a second term as president, and as bad as George W Bush and Ronald Reagan were, even Clinton and Obama (remember Rage Against the Machine - they recorded most of their songs in response to the Clinton years). As bad as Mitch McConnell is, and everything going wrong with the US republican party in the past 30~40 years, do you have any idea how bad they would have to be to cause anywhere near the abject human suffering and attrocities of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism? 

My understanding is we are talking about regimes that killed some 120 million people. I would concede that the brutalizing of one's own people indiscriminately, seems more palatable than the Nazi brutalization of the Jewish diaspora. Compared to the problem faced by the Russian people when the Bolsheviks seized power, modern political disputes between left-and-right are truly trivial.

For my money, which is admittedly, not much, Karl Popper provides the best bulwarks against regression into horror: the first is tolerating anything but intolerance. I struggle, given the difficulty of dealing with the regressive left, whom I have access to in a way I do not the regressive right, with the moral obligation to not tolerate their intolerance. The second, is to insist on clarity, the regressive left is fairly characterized as being intellectually opaque to the point of unintelligible. There is nothing Judith Butler has said or written, that she could not have said or written in plain English, except for the fact that it would make obvious, that she has nothing much to say at all.

"Gender performativity" is just an obtuse and specific (therefore inferior) way of saying "we are what we do" except that behaving in a masculine way as regards attitudes toward sexual intercourse, will interact with human biology. The consequences of an unplanned pregnancy differ greatly between sexes. As do legal consequences. One can become in my experience enraptured with the seeming promise of complicated esoteric language that produces memes like "performativity" while not critiquing the dubious process at which such conclusions (were more often than not, not even) arrived at.

Bringing us, if not full circle, to that extreme of the left on a shoe-horn where the far left, the regressive left winds up resembling the far right. The process is the same, the commit the fatal conceit of thinking themselves already in possession of some determined ideal, a universal ideal being probably impossible (hence favouring Popper's intolerance of intolerance) that being a lie, the regressive left is forced to lie for it's beliefs. It becomes not political but totalitarian, Machiavellian. Believing itself to understand the wonderful ends, all means are justified. Debate, argument, engagement become a waste of time. Consent to lose is withdrawn. Opposition is illegitimate. Suicidally, the regressive left eats its own and assigns the left, increasingly to the right. Through rigid intolerance, a complete lack of epistemic humility that borders on grotesque hypocrisy, the right, even the "alt-right" or far-right, becomes anyone right of you, creating a further cannibalistic cottage-industry of inventing new "problematics" to denounce those impeding you and advance you further left. 

I would conclude, by saying that my amatuer diagnostic that the regressive left is obsessed and overly invested in the Overton Window, is my attempt to be charitable. That the regressive left isn't merely a modern phenomena of exposed cynical narcissist careerists fighting eachother for dominance over a society that is worse for their interventions. I believe at core, it is just a naive assumption that if people cannot discuss bad things, then bad things will cease to exist. Most often I assume, left wing voices can be characterized as "Nice people who want things to be nice" and we must stoically accept them. Making analogous errors to the devoutly faithful, that naively believe that some holy book if adhered to by everyone, would make a kingdom of heaven here on earth.

That if straight men can only look at "body-positive" lingerie ads, everyone will be better off for the expanded dating pool. When it is more likely, some complicated feedback loop where advertisers notice what women notice men pay attention to, even catering to distorted lenses resulting in women thinking men prefer thinness over muscularity and vice versa. 

I know skinny jeans on men baffled me.

Abridged Regressive Right

Chalk it up to narcissism of small differences, but a fair criticism of me would be that I spend almost no time here shitting on Andrew Tate, if I've ever mentioned him here at all. Or Sargon of Aakad or whatever, who else? Alex Jones, I certainly feel I mention Donald Humphrey Trump, the Loser's President, and Jordan Buttersworth Peterson, effeminate postmodern guru often enough to be self conscious of it. I would readily concede that I don't go hard on the right wing of things as much as I pick at the left wing.

I guess in my personal history, I'm not certain there's even a post there. How deep do I have to dig to say that Tucker Carlson or Matt Walsh are insufficient to the task of explaining anything about the world? There is also a great deal of redundancy between criticising the right, and being an atheist. The right as it exists, not so much in Australia because of mandatory preferential voting, but certainly US and UK politics, has very few perches for me to get on board with because of all the god bothering, monarchism and probably biggest for me: economic mismanagement.

There will also be a great deal of redundancy in describing the regressive right and the regressive left. 

Both regressive right and left are tribal, by which I mean they operate double standards for insiders vs outsiders.

Both regressive right and left, have withdrawn the consent of the loser, viewing the people's right to choose the other to govern them as illegitimate. (though there is a legitimate point about who started this death-spiral, and I am fairly certain it is the US political right aka Republicans).

Both regressive right and left assert rather than argue. The both have a fatal conceit that they are in possession of universal ideals, and everything is simply a failure of commitment to realizing those ideals. 

Both regressive right and left can be characterized as "believing in lies" and will therefore "lie for those beliefs" though we might substitute "lies" for intellectually bankrupt ideas.

Right, so a lot of overlap. Two sides, analogous bad behaviour. 

Conservatism, ideally is not that interesting, it's almost just the party-pooper role. Everyone's excited, conservatives need to burst that bubble. 

Allow me to regress to Chesterton's Fence, because Chesterton specified conditions under which a fence could or could not be destroyed and described not a conservative custodian but "the more intelligent type of reformer".

A helpful dichotomy I find, much more so than left-right, is careerist-vocationalist. I think career conservatives likely do not understand the useful function of conservatism, and are subsequently prone to getting mired in the past, and probably confuse conservatism for nationalism. The adopt not just a literal "genesis" myth of lost eden, but a figurative one on top - narratives that take the form "everything was good until x came along." A yearning for a past as an ideal. 

I assert my experience that most lay people are fairly capable of describing what an ideology like communism is about. If I ask a lay person "what is communism?" they generally don't reply with an example, but some summary of the idea like "it's where everyone owns everything" or "workers own the businesses, farms etc." I assert that it is also my experience, that almost no lay person can do the same for fascism, just as when you ask people what communism is nobody says "well it's like Stalin" or "Mao" when you ask a lay person what fascism is they will say "the Nazis". 

I would expect the same inability to describe what something is if I asked lay people what they think "mercantilism" is, or "Georgism" because these theories/ideologies are obscure. Fascism is not obscure, almost every highschool graduate has probably somewhere in their education been exposed to WW2. Yet there is much confusion as to what fascism consists of. I share this confusion, there is a vague and important intuition in which fascism is not defined by hatred of Jews, to recognize that though the Jewish diaspora will likely always be vulnerable to attack, future manifestations of fascism may target other groups. Once you subtract that, it is harder to differentiate fascism from totalitarianism and imperialism. 

Now, this outcome shouldn't be surprising because there really isn't an answer. You can click through the link and get a general picture, but one definition I like is the idea that "the nation" exists within the blood of the people. So in my case I'm an Australian that spent a significant period of my life living in Mexico. I would then in the eyes of a fascist, somehow not simply be Australian because I happened to be born in the nation state of Australia, but that I somehow am Australia (putting me in mind of Steven Colbert's "I Am America and You Can Too") and when I lived in Mexico, I could not in anyway become somehow Mexican, but rather was corrupting Mexico by introducing Australia.

What one might be surprised to note in the definitions of fascism is how frequently "anti-conservatism" is sighted as a feature of fascism. 

I should also invoke nationalism at this point, the regressive-left would probably view, somewhat correctly, nation states as "social constructions" and few people make the distinction between "construction" and "convention", I'm more inclined to call nations a convention by which people around the world self-organize. Nation states are now so ubiquitous, that I would guess, most people don't even think the world could be another way, nor realize that nations are relatively recent ideas. 

I suspect this is because nations often map onto historical kingdoms, like Britain, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden etc. I would forgive most people for not realizing that nations like Italy (1861) and Germany (1870 and 1990) are younger than the United States of America (1776 or 1619 in regressive-left years). Timothy Snyder talks about these conceits of oldness and youngness a lot. Nationalism is so ubiquotous that if you are like me, you don't think of it as a 19th or 20th century idea that won out, more so than ideas like "Democracy" "Communism" "Fascism" "Colonialism" "Imperialism" etc. 

My guess, is that it is through the broad ignorance of concepts like nationalism and fascism, that the right can slip. It can cease to be conservative, and simply become an entity that retains power for powers sake - esteem, salary, the offices etc. while being largely indifferent to the function they perform.

I like Never-Trumper and likely, "true" conservative David Frum who said that basically The Republican Party recognized that the US was changing, and faced the choice of either changing themselves or to try and game democracy and retain power while declining in relevance. They chose the latter. I'm also dimly aware that Ronald Reagan broke a kind of gentleman's agreement that nobody pander to religious America, and he famously said something like "I know that you cannot endorse me, but know that I endorse you." as a wink and a smile. 

I also accept Johnathan Haidt's identification of Newt Gingrich beginning the massive polarization of Washington by forbidding intermingling and bipartisanship of his republicans. This was the right's withdrawal of consent. Eventually you get Mitch McConnell who basically takes it as the republican's divine right to stop anyone but the Republican Party from actually governing. We see the clear cut regressive double standards where McConnell blocks confirmation of a SCOTUS judge because it is an election year, then rushes the confirmation of a SCOTUS judge mere weeks from an election. 

I think pearl clutching prudes on the far-left who decry everything as fascist, while not convincing me they have any concrete understanding or even approximation of fascism, are reacting to some real intuition. The far-right, much like the far-left, cannot accept or infer anything from, their own lack of popularity. They are totalitarian and anti-liberal. 

The major difference being that the right appears to me, to yearn for an imagined past with some basis in reality - in many ways things were better in the 1950s, unless you like living outside an iron-lung, fucking a member of the same sex (consensually), or being physically capable of turning the wheels of your car while at a standstill. Wealth inequality was smaller, real wage growth was higher, housing was affordable, it was really worthwhile to complete a bachelor's degree and you could expect your standard of living to grow, while children roamed free and blissfully ignorant of how dangerous it was to do so.

Herbert Marcuse argued for "liberating tolerance" which argued for intolerance and repression of right-wing ideas, while practicing tolerance for left-wing ideas/movements. This argument I suspect lives and dies on the premise that the left is in possession of an ideal. Something I feel is the fatal conceit. But change this premise to the ideal being "1950s Americana" or "Ukraine-as-Russia" or "The Holy Land belongs to Christendom/Islam" and I'm confident Marcuse's argument, so long as one believes they possess the ideal, is the same argument for an illiberal right, where we must not tolerate left-wing causes and only tolerate right-wing causes.

The regressive right is depressing for it's lack of imagination. Born of the substitution hypothesis - the idea that "wokeness" is a natural consequence of the decline of religiosity in society, so society had to invent new religion - has some merits but I find it incredibly frustrating as framed. For example, why has religiousity declined? Many right or right-leaning commentators seem to think Christianity needs to make a comeback, as if we just dropped the ball or some shit. I posit that religiosity has declined because religion is very bad at describing reality. Where the substitution hypothesis has legs is pointing out one doesn't go from miserable Christian to happy Atheist. Losing faith in god is but the removal of an obstacle in the way of learning how to be happy on occasion in an imperfect world. 

Being unable to divorce, likely for many has some benefits, salvaging perfectly okay relationships. It would also have had some very negative impacts like trapping people in abusive and loveless relationships, and sentencing generations to untreated misery perpetuated through dysfunctional families and learned attachment styles. 

It's these kind of vanilla issues that an ideal historic right-and-left could symbiotically navigate together, and form the basis of intellectually bankrupt memes like "Judeo-Christian values" among the regressive right today.

I tire of this subject, what is worth emphasizing above all the detail, is the process. First the right adopts the fatal conceit that they know the ideal, they know the correct thing to do. Then believing yourself in possession of an ideal, you withdraw your consent to the very concept of losing, you view lost elections, defeated bills etc. not as your failing but societies. Any contrary perspective on your ideal is not friction through which you could attempt to move onward and upward, but illegitimate toll booth, delaying your arrival at the promised land.

Before you know it, you don't even need evidence to conclude that an election was stolen. You begin arguing against the concept of elections themselves. You resent anyone else exercising the power you would have for yourself. The extent of your criticism is simply determining who is in or out, you do not criticize yourself, only others.

Before you know it, believing yourself in possession of the ends, you embrace Machiavelli's "The ends justify the means" and before you know it, you believe that you are not what you do, and not even who you say you are, but who you think you are.

And suddenly you are Tucker Carlson, going to a Russian supermarket and marvelling at the price of bread, and all you have to do, to get cheap bread, is live under Putin.

Abridged Historic Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned, or not.

Abridged Historic Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Women's Day 2024: Another Dead Woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit D. Hernandez T.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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