Erm Dark Academia

 Firstly, I apologise, but around the outbreak of the the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I watched Timothy Snyder's Yale lecture series on Ukraine and he was talking about Putin's essay that was like "On the History of Russia and Ukraine" and he said to use "On" was to assert that something was indeed a thing, and I'm fairly confident that "dark academia" is a thing, but not confident that I understand it well enough to be sure I am talking about the thing most people who have any interest in "dark academia" would understand to be dark academia.

And I disclaim my ignorance because of this:

The trend emerged on social media site Tumblr in 2015, as an aesthetic that captured the imaginations of a maturing "Harry Potter generation" ~ From Wikipedia's page on the aesthetic.

So great, now I have to write disdainfully because I can't efficiently process away the emotions evoked by one of the most problematic symptoms of infantalism being that large cohort that cannot get past Harry Potter. This all could have been averted by the prefix "physically" before "maturing." 

Harry Potter is a children's book. I've written about this before in a much longer post, just because Cedric Diggory dies and then a bunch of others does not make HP not a children's book even though the primary cast age-up. Had "The Deathly Hallows" opened with JK graphically describing Harry jerking off as he listened to Ron fingering Hermione because they thought he was asleep when they are fugitives at the beginning, then maybe Harry Potter would not be a series of children's books. But they didn't, we just assume that happened, but The Deathly Hallows is no IT by Steven King with a minors gangbang graphically rendered in prose.

I listened to Donna Tate's "The Secret History" which is generally credited as foundational to the Dark Academia genre. This will largely be what I am talking about when I talk about Dark Academia. I will dither a little upfront though to opine that I find "genres" not so helpful a term. Particularly when I look to music, genre is probably a bad way to approach music. There are either genres so big as to be meaningless - like do NOFX and Blink-182 really have anything meaningful in common? (no doubt more fans than we might assume) and others where a genre mostly consists of an act that basically is THE genre, and then a bunch of Chinatown junk store rip-offs, like Industrial is really just Nine Inch Nails and then what? Ministry okay, Marilyn Manson for one whole album (of his two big ones) and then pick through the list.

I suspect Dark Academia the literary genre is more of the latter type, that in some meaningful sense there's "The Secret History" and then a bunch of dime-store homages that boarder on fan fiction, near as I can discern. 

So this I will say, I think "The Secret History" is a book for grown-ups, depending on one crucial factor - if you find the aesthetic the least interesting or most interesting aspect.

Meat and Potatoes

The heading is really just a milestone to commemorate me finally getting to what I want to talk about in this post - which is the central aesthetic of "The Secret History"

The title you can set aside, it is almost as perfectly neutral as "The Name of the Rose" in terms of describing the content of the story. It is also billed as a reverse-detective story, with opening lines revealing that Bunny was murdered, and I initially learned of this book by watching an old interview of Donna Tart by Charlie Rose. 

What the secret history reminds me of most, is actually "The Great Gatsby" in an almost derivative way, it is allegedly set in 1985 but one could seriously defend an impression it is set in the Gilded Age. Henry reads pretty much as the mysterious Gatsby, Camilla as whoever Gatsby was in love with, Richard functions like Nick Carraway.

The inverted-detective story built no tension for me, which Tart had lured me in with in her interview by sighting Alfred Hitchcock's observation that tension doesn't come from not knowing what will happen, but from knowing there's a bomb under the table and watching diners obliviously eat their dinner as you dread what you know will happen to them - like I imagine the opening scene of "A Touch of Evil" which is Orson Welles not Hitchcock but whatever. 

My thing, as the ebay ads of the moment say, is that I don't care enough about the central cast of characters to feel any tension at all. Their lives and deaths are statistics to me. In short, these are the kids that I would turn up to a college reunion and their aged adult faces would evoke in me the jamais vu that accompanies recognizing someone I had completely forgotten existed.

Richard, Henry, Bunny, Camilla, Charles and Francis are in short, kids on the margins. For me the most interesting aspect of The Secret History was Richard's journey into, and disillusionment of, a clique that turned out to just be unpopular kids.

For others though, I fear, this clique is the precise appeal of "The Secret History" the kind that 30 years after its publication take to tumblr and pinterest and put together vision boards like this:

In an abstract sense I get the appeal, but it's shit.

For my sensitivities, nothing tells me more about an aesthetic than the monomaniacal effort-at-arms-length Koreans and Japanese pour into their pastiches, which then get fetishized by the very cultures they refuse to interact with when making their counterfeits and create a bizarre sad-interest group that also functions as a feedback loop.

Where I can build a bridge with cognitive empathy, is that me and my friends would idly wish aloud to eachother that a bus might rock up and simply take the dicks in our year away, and the removal of two-or-three dickheads could yeild exponential results. 

The thingamajig being, that I'm self aware enough to know that very likely I was on someone else's list of two-or-three dickheads they wish would get deported. Hell is other people, alas. We can choose our friends, but the offcuts don't go anywhere.

Donna Tartt paints a fantasy though, of an eccentric effete professor who handpicks 5 students to study Greek Classical literature as their major, and they do no other subjects and pretty much interact with nobody else. These kids dress like it's 1929, but elsewhere, everywhere it is 1985 so presumably they are hoofing it in wingtip shoes and button down shirts with tweed jackets and wire-framed spectacles while those studying practical majors are wearing acid washed shrink-to-fit Levi 501 distressed jeans, Van Helen cropped t-shirts, bangles and have permanents. 

This is what "Dark Academia" has become to me, a censored-for-comfort Solzhenitsyn quote:

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?

The central cast of the Secret History impress upon me 5 Xenophobic children who simply do not wish to have to navigate a world populated entirely by their outgroup. Then there is misguided Richard the narrator, who mistakes these losers for elites and entangles himself with them, and is destroyed by their incest. There is also Julian, the professor, who is by Richard's subjective evaluation, awful and encourages the misguided children to pursue their deluded values. He is both gatekeeper and enabler.

This aspect of the Dark Academia is what I find morbidly fascinating. I feel the appeal of this kind of xenophobia is worth at the least, writing a blog post about, because it is rarely recognized as such.

Hirohito was a very naughty deity.

Nietzsche who was likely the darkest academic ever, had his "slave morality" a morality based on resentment, I don't buy wholesale Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, though I suspect phenomena akin to his "slave morality" would be empirically observable in a discipline like anthropology, religious studies, history, sociology etc. One such being a kind of "nerd xenophobia" definitely exhibited by incels, but also I suspect more garden variety unpopular kids.

And in that way, unpopular kids are likely not-too-different from so-called "popular" kids, at the cool table, they wind up in a clique that is roughly the same size as the population of unpopular kids and they likely are both consummed by feelings of inadequacy coped with via judgement of out-groupers.

For me, there is little difference between popular kids wishing everyone who couldn't afford to keep up with seasonal releases by Lulu-lemon would be barred from entering the Brighton Yacht club so they could enjoy an Apperol Spritz or whatever unbothered and unsullied by the outgroup, are morally equivalent to those who wish all the jocks and meatheads and Barbie dolls will be repelled by the Dean of Admissions so they can sit and summarize Proust to each other in the quadrangle, or whatever the appeal of Dark Academia is.

Ricardo is probably the true father of classical economics, and therefore neo-classical economics, which is the mainstream orthodoxy now. As such, there is clearly a lot David Ricardo got wrong, but one thing he cruelly got right is that "absolute advantage" is a thing. He is famous for modelling the benefits of trade by having Portugal produce wine (it was really good at that) and England produced wool or cloth or something (it was really good at that) and then by trading their surplus both economies are better off than if they allocate resources to producing wine and cloth in-house specifically.

That is comparative advantage, and I think some people lack the observational skills not just to miss that the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong etc. but that they don't observe that the athletically gifted can often be academically gifted also, and that the reverse can be tragically true as well, where somebody with no athletic ability can be twice cursed with no real academic ability either. Hence you can find in Oxbridge no-doubt, students reading in Law or Medicine (I don't know how their archaic system works) doing rowing and cricket on the weekend, where those who read Sociology (I don't know) eat Doritos (I know the british call these "Nachos" and pronounce it wrong despite the reputations of Oxbridge) and drink mountain dew and have little awareness of what day of the week it is.

Dark Academia isn't cringe because it doesn't impress me as having risen to even that level of self-awareness, it isn't obliviousness either, nor oblivion. Its an immature person's idea of maturity, maturity as liberation abrogating all social obligations to cooperate with the full gamut of human quality that would better be described as "infancy" than maturity. The seeking of sanctums preferably indoor ones, under the misguided notion that anxiety is "out there" rather than within. 

Whereas actual maturity, involves a lot of acceptance, especially of responsibility. It is in many senses, an act of making way for the immature. 

Concluding remarks

Okay, you probably get that I'm not a fan of Dark Academia, is Donna Tartt's book worth reading? Yes. Just don't go nuts, and there's better books for sure that I'd read first, so many one could be forgiven for not getting around to it. That said, The Secret History is one to read sooner than Harry Potter, provided you are not a child. Children's books are appropriate for children, and grown up books have more utility for adults. 

More important to say than that though, is that I firmly believe that responsibility is a prerequisite of maturity, and the meting out of meaningful responsibility has been less and less generous since the late 70s, I suspect rivalling only growing wealth inequality as a social transfer.

Remaining a child into your mid-20s or even early 30s is somewhat appropriate to the circumstances the economy presents young people with. Forget the "AI" shit, due to quirks of habit and sensitivity we have been operating in an eccentric, inefficient and irrational economy for decades already. 

Boomers entered executive positions in the late 80s for superstars, and early 90s for the mediocre and 40 years later they are largely still there. They are retiring and dying off in record numbers, but consider Gen X in a holding pattern for 30 years. 

Yeah, fucken play quidditch then, doomscroll tik tok videos, there's no rush particularly for the mediocre for you to be called in to the economy to do any chores. There's already 6 people lifting the couch and a 7th would get in the way.

The real issue, is the xenophobia, you may not need to mature and in some ways it may be better if you take your sweet time doing it. But these exclusive cliques aren't good for anybody and its better if you learn to play nice.

There is plenty of pressure on the jocks to play nice, to stop bullying. Pressure on unpopular kids to socialize - as in, not just interact with others, but to learn to navigate social situations - has never been lower. I fear there are many that regard this as progress, and that's not even counting the screen writer of The Predator 2018 that propagates the idea that the non-verbal autistic are actually the next step of human evolution as well as getting every single other thing one could get wrong in a movie wrong making for a fascinating case study in cinema.

Solidarity with the precariat, it is the fastest growing class. Get out of your xenophobic lifeboat and talk to your uber driver, answer fucking phone calls. You can still spend most of your time at play, just your schema for life can't be "Mum! Dad!" romanticisation of Oedipus Rex. If your childhood was deprived of unsupervised play, a campus in your 20s is a great place to redress it, just...try not to get raped.

On Pantellaria

 My sister had a wedding to attend to in Italy, friends from the UK to catch up with, and there I was taking an advanced after-life I wasn't sure I'd earned in Zena's Apparizione neighbourhood where rainbows curved for me, fire flies glowed for me, songbirds sang for me, honeybees buzzed for me and strangers said "ciao" and "bon giorno". 

not mine, credit in corner.

I was running an experiment, and early results were promising - for me, the way to travel was to be somewhere, a tonic for something that had previously done my head in, which was travel in order to do something. El diablo has always found trabajo por mis manos inactivo and yes I know that's Spanish but the Devil certainly isn't from Zena, he's going to be Spanish (according to La Leyenda Negra) or Venetian like those terrible blinds for perverts.

My sister being younger wasn't there yet, and is perhaps just different, for I sense that to this day when she travels she wants to do stuff. 

So with a nominal day or two to transit in and out of Zena, she suggested we Ryan-hop from Pisa, Tuscany to Trapani, Sicily to Pantellaria, end of the Earth. To which I countered "I wanna take a ferry ride on the Mediterranean" inspired by how easy Rick Stein made it look to just hope over to Corsica or Sardinia and I figured island hopping in the Mediterranean must be easy as breathing around these parts, "let's take a ferry to Pantellaria." So we bought return tickets to Trapani. For, if I was to sacrifice some of my 90 days tourist Visa to somewhere other than Zena, Mercantile Princess, I may as well cross off my ambition to take a ferry somewhere.

Anna and I had Focaccia down in Porto Anticho, and I showed her what had become my favourite lunch spot - a place where you could get a 4 euro meal that fed mostly stevedores and sailors, and if you dined in you would see a cockroach for sure and maybe a rat, but the food was just that delicious. I can't remember what else we saw or did, there certainly was not enough time to share all of Zena I had absorbed, and I must have been about mid-way so there was plenty for me left to absorb.

We trained down to Pisa, with enough time to get lunch from an Afghan kitchen that simply served us two portions of food, and time to take deliberately misaligned photos of us "holding the tower of Pisa up" before we were off to soak up the heady ambience of Pisa's Ryan Air terminal at the Gallileo airport. 

We ate our Afghani food just outside the airport, then enjoyed an awful flight that thankfully landed in Tripani on time and was made less awful by having a seat next to Anna. Our Air-BnB host picked us up from the airport and drove us to the property we would stay one-night each way in. It was in that ride I got my first real experience of using google to translate conversations in real time, something that would clue me into the low usage cases of LLMs a decade later when Samsung would try and promote it during the Paris Olympics via a feature/benefit that had been around for so long.

Summer was in bloom, and Anna and I walked the streets of Trapani that night, and picked a restaurant where Anna ordered Pasta Alla Norma, and I ordered something unmemorable. The Pasta Alla Norma would haunt my sister in the best of ways, like Mark from Peepshow taking cocaine. Where my sister is a seasoned traveller it is in the knowledge that window's of opportunity are small for the vagabond, and if you have to eat a dish for breakfast lunch and dinner to compensate for a life of lacking, then that's what you do.

We retired to our nautically decorated Air BnB, one I would describe as "Tier-2" being that we had a place to ourselves, with "Tier-3" being the Air BnB that came to haunt Europe...of turning housing into hostel's with worse security, where you book a room, and then you share the place with a host of other transitional strangers including a bathroom, all trying to do their best impression of Victorian ghosts and pretending the other guests aren't there. I was lucky both in Zena and GDL to find Air BnB's that are "Tier-1" which was the original dream of Air BnB, where you rent out the guest room in a local's home, and have something akin to the adult-exchange-student experience.

Anyway, in the morning we had time to check out Trapani, my sister hoping to have time before our ferry departure to maybe get some more Pasta alla Norma in. 

Trapani remains, really my only experience of Southern Italy, something that more recently I've been reflecting on as a lasting yearning especially after binge watching Gamorra La Serie (set in the Scampia neighbourhood of Napoli) and Cold Summer ("Il Metodo Fenoglio" set in the city of Bari, 1991) where though in my Italophilic heart I am Zenese, my eyes long to see and understand the Mezzogiorno.

We walked the boundaries of the port-come-peninsula, with some stone fortifications that kept southerly(?) winds out of Trapani's historic centre, out to the ports where my sister observed the first Italian man she regarded as 'a bit of alright' a stark contrast in our experiences of Italy, where I was overwhelmed almost to the point of being inured to the experience of turning a corner and meeting the most beautiful woman of my life. Or standing still and having the most beautiful woman of my life pass by. Or catching a bus and sitting opposite the most beautiful woman of my life. Or buying a pair of socks and having to interact with the most beautiful woman of my life. etc.

I have elsewhere to write about that. And have. 

We walked out past various fish vendors until there was nothing but the Torre di Ligny between us and the sea, but didn't go in or investigate, then walked back, probably looked for Norma, grabbed our bags and went to board our ferry. There was another couple there waiting in confusion with us as we inquired of a ferry that arrived and departed until some port authority eventually informed us that our ferry wouldn't run today because there was "waves". 

Unimpressed by the lack of robustness, this left us stranded, far from our next nights of accomodation, without an automatic refund of our ferry, no visible recourse and no wifi because we were standing beside the sea. We found some cafe where we could buy some drinks and get a wifi password, then did that hasty scrambling thing until we found a way to buy last minute tickets for some seats on the mail plane to Pantellaria that would get us to our accomodation on time. 

We bit the bullet and bought the additional airfares, managed to get a taxi or uber or something to the airport and got away. The couple that were also waiting for the ferry had found the exact same recourse. 

On the flight to the island, a local girl overheard Anna and I talking and we got talking and it turned out she was coming back to the island from University summer holidays in Canada to visit her family. My sister explained that she had found out about Pantellaria from the Tilda Swinton movie "A Bigger Splash" and liked the look of it, much like I had previously in my life visited Mumbai, India because of the book Shantaram. I asked for her number and she gave it, doing my thing where I establish vague expectations in women where they feel ambivalently creeped out and excited, I assume, one of those sour-grapes-if-you-do-sweet-lemons-if-you-don't type exchanges caused by asking for a woman's number in front of her mother and my sister. What was going on? I had an Italian sim card and credit, Anna did not.

You may have already deduced Pantellaria is not the easiest place in the world to get to. It is not exactly convenient, even for Italians or for that matter Sicillians or Tunisians. The next incident would be the "bitter" in any attempt to pigeonhole our trip as "bittersweet".

At the airport my sister went to arrange a rental-car. I forget how it would have worked if the sea had been smooth as glass as the ferry seemed to require, but Anna was able to obtain the keys to a nice little black hatchback of now long forgotten make and model. The couple who had made both the same travel arrangements as we had, and were Italian now departed from us by renting a Vespa like thing. 

Because we'd had to forkover an extra hundo or something each to buy the plane tickets, we were both feeling snug with a buck when it came time to rent a car. As such, perhaps sensing my sisters hesitation, a guy on the desk opined that the insurance probably wasn't worth it, because for most damages to the car the premium would be more than cost. My sister took the advice and it seemed to make sense to me. 

Only after keys had been exchanged for cash, did my sister realize her travel insurance covered any insurance premiums, but she had to buy insurance for rental cars. We followed someone, probably the same guy, to our Air BnB where we were met by a nice elderly couple that showed us around the lovely house and how to lock up and my sister and I observed Crucifixes and photos of the pope in every room, perhaps something that had lead to Pantellaria's decline in population that now left a whole house as affordable accomodation for us.

I forget how it was partitioned, but it must have been because we were introduced to a young attractive Italian couple by our hosts that were eating takeaway pizza on the patio and I think we asked for dinner suggestions before concluding that we were too tired, it was too dark and the roads around the island were too narrow for us to be bothered going anywhere. 

I got a text response from the woman on the plane with a bunch of suggestions as to what to do and where to eat during our brief stay on the island. I thanked her, and we took, mostly the eating suggestions and also where to best view sunset from. 

Driving around the island was a nightmare, and the brunt of that nightmare was born mostly by my sister. Being 9 years ago now, I feel like the first thing we did was circumnavigate the islands outer coastal road. It's not quite one of those Peruvian Andes roads, but it is like one lane and a half, and it isn't one way, furthermore a massive water tanker seems to drive around the island constantly turning driving around Pantellaria into something more akin to Frogger. 

There was a one-way street my sister and I managed to drive the wrong way up, getting quite harsh jeers from the locals. This aside though, it was more a so-far-so-good kind of vibe where we hiked up to Pantellaria's highest point on "Monte Grande" 836m above sea level. The dirt was full of ash I remember that because a large chunk of the island's tree line had recently burned, but I can't remember if I already had gone through the ordeal of sourcing Eurotrash white Ontisuka Tiger Slip on shoes.

 Fortunately my sister took photos that are preserved across time and space. I actually have returned to Eurotrash white since, and really love how the white turns to dirty grey and fades over time as shoes turn into socks. But this is probably why the ashy dust on my feet was so memorable.

Things then began to fall apart. I can't remember the order of events. Likely the worst thing, happened fairly on, which was being pushed into a panic by the aforementioned fucking water tanker, we had to back off the road at some point where a big chunk of volcanic rock crunched up a nice panel beater and repaint bill on the rental car that we tried to convince ourselves wasn't too bad. We had at least one night of chasing a sunset that was really special when your world has shrunk to the size of Pantellaria, before having a meal with some pasta and seafood that lead my sister to muse upon how it was not as good as Pasta alla Norma, and nothing ever would be, ever again.

The next day we checked out Pantellaria town briefly, had gelati in brioche that turns out to be good thing + overrated thing = bad thing. Some aronchini before heading to Elephant rock, which really does look like an elephant above the water, and a beautiful little cove for swimming in.

Anna and I entered the water, clear as crystal, it was like fucking Neptune's reception hall. We splashed around, and I can remember even now the hypnotic allure of being submerged in the medium, the sudden urge to try and dive to the bottom. This was where I discovered that duck-diving is another range of motion I am no longer capable of doing without dislocating my shoulder. 

I had to exit the water, somehow, have some exchange with the locals and improvise some sound effects to convey that I'd dislocated la spada. I got sat on my arse, then covered with towels until I was taken in an ambulance back to Pantellaria town and the hospital to have my shoulder reduced. My sister was able to drive behind the ambulance and hence probably had the lowest stress drive of her time on the island.

My conceit is, that if you wrote the meaning of life on the haft of a spear, I would impale myself to read it. I want to be clear that very much the point of this post, is that I am glad for the experience, though it resulted in a dislocated shoulder and an afternoon lost to recovering from anesthesia, (I was only billed for one of those immobilising slings, that after almost inducing a panic attack attempting to sleep in it, I returned and got refunded the next day.) 

We visited somewhere else where making room for another car to pass, branches of some scrub further scratched the rental car quite horrendously. That was occassion for my sister to have a melt-down over the stress of driving in these tiny goat tracks in a pristine uninsured rental car, the unforeseen and unwanted expense of the bill that was anticipated and its impact on the savings Anna had lived like a miser in Sydney for years to accrue. I did my best to comfort her, telling her to keep all the refund from the cancelled ferry tickets, but I like her was quite underfunded for my whole "my life is going nowhere" 3-month trip to Zena. 

And yet we are rich. We are middle-class Australian's privately educated, both of us having the immense privilege of going to University twice and choosing careers in the pursuit of happiness, not to amass some estate in an impossibly ever-upward act of social mobility like our parents that nintendo switches might trickle down to future generations, but wealthy by Southern Italian standards, wealthy by global standards, but wired up, biologically to react emotionally to the same subtle variations in changes in wellbeing as all other human beings. 

Here were all the bitter tears that maybe, were the price of admission to Pantellaria, an amazing, but inconvenient place. Calm would reassert itself, though perhaps, I can't remember, and I can't really speak for my sister, but there was a constant unease at visiting the end of the Earth. I imagine it might be similar to summitting Mount Everest, where one may wish to stay there forever, to die there, but also anxious to get back down the mountain, where people don't die from the act of breathing. Then just replace "die" with incur additional rental car repair costs.

The day after dislocating my shoulder, we went to a Lake called "Mirror of Venus" A lake, in an island, in a sea, in the middle of the world, that the goddess who emerged fully formed from a shell to join the Olympic pantheon used as mirror. 

It's the thing, rich people can put a pool in their property. But the kind of wealth to obtain and create what nature provides has not been achieved yet. How much to make the mirror of Venus? Billions. How much to locate it on an island that isn't visible from space? Hundreds of millions? 

It is there and there alone. There are many wonders of the natural world, and many one can bathe in, swim in, lay back and stare not just into the sky but through it, beyond it, into the vastness of the universe and wonder what wondering minds attempt to stare back millenia beyond millenia of photons limiting them from any real connection, but that we are all connected across space and time. That life is there, and it is there's, and that if the Universe is infinite, then that includes infinite myselves, who have infinite time to bask in the personal property of a goddess on holiday at the end of the world with their sister, in this moment that is just for them and nobody else. 

You know, and I can't put it into words, but I remember it. We have it, you don't, and it was perfect for just relaxing about the whole being alive thing, to just be alive.

I think more so than anything else we did in Pantellaria, this was our place and our time that endures at least for me. Those money problems it induced were survived, and the cycle of windfalls, tax returns, bills, rip-offs etc. continue for us all. The experience endures though, and though I contemplate my love of the city of Zena herself far more, and the metaphysics of truly loving a city somewhat endlessly living rent free next to losses I can't process, terriers that are grafted onto my joy-receptors proving that neurons that fire-together, wire-together indeed. Pantellaria is like an island in my memory that is Anna and mine.

The return ferry was also cancelled due to waves, and one wonders when a ferry will be invented that can operate under conditions of waves, but we pretty much suspected that the ferry never does actually run and were well and truly ready to take the mail plane back to vaster island of Sicily. Plus Pasta alla Norma awaited Anna, though I cannot recall if she was able to get it again. I know she naively hoped it could be found in Zena, though I'm sure I tried to explain that I had had to quickly learn that actually there is no Italian cuisine, that only exists outside of Italy where you can get Bolognese and Carbonara in the same restaurant, let alone state.

Zena was safe, I was entrenched, by the time Anna returned to her for another over night before she packed off to Zurich to fly home. Fabrizio my Air BnB housemate for the 90 days, was happy for Anna to stay on the couch rather than Hostel it, Anna got to see me as I lived there, walking daily 12-16km return, though I couldn't and never could, convey to her the totality of my picture of Zena.

And at that point in time I'd had 6 weeks, or two months, tops, in Zena, it would end being 90 days give or take a day trip to Milan, another to Cinque Terra, 3 days in Barcelona and arriving and leaving via Zurich. My sister returned once, transiting through and sending me a photo some years later. I have not, and in some sense must, but in any real appreciation of the nature of life, need not because I have hanged drawn and quartered myself by putting roots down in Ballarat, Melbourne, Nagoya, Zena and of course, GDL over the course of my life. 

It is my ambition to return to them all, somehow. To live in all my homelands, somehow. The how isn't known, apart from a vague understanding that it will take money, and will take money away from this, for that. Pantellaria though, we have. I doubt either of us will return unless we find ourselves chatting one day and concurring we'd like a second shot at it. Maybe in another lifetime, in the jail-term sense, 25 years from now we'll decide to fuck off and hire bicycles next time. 

Do I recommend Pantellaria? I find the question, posed to myself, unintelligible. You know it feels like the kind of special place where one could die on vacation, and confused and distraught relatives fly out to ID the body and get it released for repatriation before or after cremation, and they have a still moment on the island and are like "No, I get it. This is a good place to die." and they wind up scattering your ashes into the Mediterranian. I mean this as high praise of a spectacular place.

It is not the same spectacular as Cinque Terra, go there. I care not. It (Pantellaria) may actually be akin more to Zena, La Superba's great and far more famous rival Venice, La Serenissima, in that some people actually avoid Venice because of all the tourists, and it is somewhat overrun with tourists, but all those sweaty, fat, obnoxious and disoriented tourists cannot conceal the fact that Venice is other-wordly in its beauty. It makes Amsterdam look like Horsham. It makes Chicago look like Los Angeles. It makes Kyoto look like Bendigo, Tokyo like Beijing, and Beijing look like Beijing. 

Pantellaria with its intimidating one-lane two-way roads hemmed in by abrasive volcanic stone fences and dislocated shoulders, remains an amazing place that I'm glad my sister dragged me from the warm embrace of Zena through two airports to share with her, though it literally broke us, we are a fragile people made for breaking, it is what we do and keep doing.

Vale Wikipedia

This is a post in response to a kind of mental chafing, where a thought gets lodged in my brain and gets me irritated, so I'm purging it here.

I've never had no money, I've never struggled so much financially that I've failed to donate to the wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia is so fucking great.

I also remember how it was treated:

'Tis but a sketch, from Collegehumor no-less, published some time in 2009-10. But this was a popular meme that went around when Wikipedia emerged as one of the internet's most visited sites.

In some ways, when wikipedia was a story, it was just archetypal. Like it's essentially the same thing as this low-rent Conan sketch about Google's attempt at a self-driving car. Similarly, I can recall going to Sustainability events around the same time, and people would talk about creating a global wiki-government through grassroots citizen participation to address climate-change and other utopian optimism much like some people talk about "AI" now curing cancer and solving climate change etc now.

What was different though, and what is so irritating, is that people disparaged wikipedia as unreliable, and wikipedia was great and cheap and free and ad-free, and while just about every other contemporary platform has gotten worse from Google-search to Amazon to Facebook etc. Wikipedia remains terrific.

ChatGPT puts wikipedia, and reddit and newsmedia and whatever else into a blender, then uses an incredible amount of resources, something like 10x or 100x the energy of doing a google search and then just clicking on the wikipedia link. Gemini produces for you, a worse and less reliable result than the wikipedia article, and yet...

For me a literally unfathomable amount of money has been poured into promoting just this application of generative LLMs. That's the big difference, using a little hyperbole license, it's fairish to say nobody invested in wikipedia in any financial sense. A community produced a social good, which was great because it updates constantly, but is also checked constantly to enforce community standards. ChatGPT 4.whatever now has a crappy little message at the bottom to disclaim that the content may not be acurate. If you go to a wikipedia page on a subject that few people are interested in, there will be a big box up the top warning you that the article has numerous problems with it. Claims will be followed by "[citation needed]" there's a talk page where you can see conspiracy fiction fans demanding answers as to why the subject of a page has to be introduced as a "pseudo-scientist" and "conspiracy theorist".

I can only speak for myself, but my direct experience of the ease of adoption of Wikipedia into my life vs. the friction it was given by the media and contrasting that to the continual attempts to force me to adopt "AI" features from companies burning money to try and fuel this revolution and with literally pretty much every business exec in the world desperate to believe it will soon help them reduce headcount and hyperscale their output.

It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous time to be alive. I don't think generative LLMs have no use cases, I don't think it will, nor needs to be "uninvented". I think the returns on investment just aren't there and it vies with Private Credit as a herald of the next GFC-like market collapse when we have enough data now, that we are really just waiting for silicon valley to admit the "AI revolution" is just the latest in a 12~13 year series of dud investments, but now interest rates aren't 0% they need returns.

Hail to Wikipedia. The Queen ain't dead yet, the rest of the internet just about is though.

The Problem of Small Folk

 Relax, this will have nothing to do with genocide or eugenics I promise.

A Salute to the Ordinary

Congratulations, you are an ordinary, or modal (most frequently occuring) person. One of them at least, of the many many ways to be modal, you like me, are probably most. Neglected by "The Great Man" theory of history, "successologist" podcast hosts, but celebrated by brutal dictators and wannabe totalitarians as a pretext for crushing their "elite" political rivals and the subject of "slice of life" comics, indie movies and zines where ordinary people learn to grow by leading ordinary lives, gathering the necessary personal growth to successful get a life, largely not worth paying attention to, back on track.

This is a pleb:

Distributing Bread to the Plebians By Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16958883

These are ordinary people, trying to live fulfilling and largely unassuming lives. They probably had dreams, dreams of a bread buffet or something, and maybe an entirely paved or cobbled road to walk to their field on so they didn't get flecks of mud sticking to their calves. 

Good decent folk, not the great men and women of history, but the modal people whose collective economy likely defined the course of history more so than the decisions of leadership, but both equally being largely products of their environments.

And in the spirit of inclusivity, although in some broad sense members of the LBGTQIA+ community could never be called modal, along with people in the disability space; with respect to the singular dimension of honesty, minorities too are likely to have this in common with the mode.

Most people are pretty honest. Not necessarily informed or competent, but honest. Decent. If they say they will do something, we can pretty safely assume they reasonably expected themselves to do it, and failures to do so can mostly be attributed to a failure in competence of either the situational analysis or communication. (Like when they would do the dishes.)

I'm going to examine now, but one problem - and let me be deliberate with my wording - we face in the emergent property of society. That is one of dishonesty.

I'm going to start tossing out some premises.

Premise 1: Most people are mostly honest.

Size equals relative population

There appears to be some research that supports this, though how cross-cultural it is I don't know. It is consistent with Pareto distributions though where we can expect something like 15% of the lies are told by 85% of the population. This premise of course implies a second premise.

Premise 2: A few people lie a lot.

This then would be the roughly 15% of the people, who tell about 85% of the lies. (the little red guy in the image above)

Hopefully so far, not only are their studies to kind of suggest these premises hold up to empirical observation, but with the high likelihood that you are in many ways a modal person, with an unassuming life, it also conforms to your experience - that most people are basically honest, and a few people stand out for being unusually deceptive, in a way that isn't just fraught, but also kind of weird.

Their being two-faced is noteworthy to you, know what I'm saying. You see them behave dishonestly, and it leaves you with a kind of greasy remorse for a while, wondering if you should have said or done something.

Premise 3: Projection is a very common psychological phenomena.

Now, I'm an odd duck that is of the opinion that when most people talk about 'empathy' they are most likely referring to 'projection' and that this premise is not to suggest most people lie about their empathic ability, but rather most people don't think too much about empathy or projection, would not know what empathy feels like as distinct from what projection feels like; and routinely confuse the two just through sheer incompetence.

No the relevance is, that if you are basically honest, you are also likely to project that honesty onto others. This would result in behaviour like taking people at their word. A behaviour that is adaptive, because most people are honest, and so they basically say what they do for most ordinary claims. So they say they'll brush their teeth, then they brush their teeth. There's no need, or at least no benefit, to scrutinizing if they do indeed do what they say.

In the above image, the "big guy" is projecting their own blue honesty onto others, for the most part (4 of the little guys) this projection is as good as empathy, they are projecting honest behaviour onto people who behave honestly, but the one little red guy also has honesty projected onto him. This likely is the what is happening when we come across someone who doesn't just lie chronically, but also isn't even very good at lying, and once we wise up and ask "how do they get away with it?" it is likely because most people don't even look for deceptive behaviour.

But the same is true of liars, they also project, and as a result they tend to not take people at their word which in their case, has little benefit, it is mostly cost as they scrutinize the actions of people, too ready to jump on the slightest deviation from their stated claims, but most of this time and energy is wasted. 

In this shitty image, from the perspective of the big red guy, the liar, dude projects his own deceptiveness onto both the honest majority, and his fellow lying minority. This somewhat protects him from other's deception, but may also explain rationalizations from manipulative people like "everyone does it, don't be so naive." 'n' shit.

Premise 4: Manipulators use rationalization as a psychological defense.

Straight from the last part of the last premise, someone who lies, needs to feel in some way okay with their behaviour of lying. There are many means by which to get there, but the one I shall focus on is a form of self-deception where those few liars, lie to themselves with the rationalization "everybody lies" you know, the motto of Dr House M.D. who was himself a chronic liar to facilitate his abuse of pain medication. He even lies in one season about having brain cancer in order to get a cool drug injected directly into his brain.

There is likely to be other determinants to this premise - like selection bias, confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Basically, the liar justifies this self serving world view of seeing liars everywhere in order to justify their own deception as tit-for-tat, by ignoring the abundant data suggesting that people are basically honest and decent.

Indeed, since the truth tends to out, they likely naturally migrate into silos we might describe as "cesspools" where their estimation "everybody lies" comes to ring true, though should be properly read as "everybody I associate with lies."

Conclusion: That's How Plebs get Got.

They project basic decency onto predators, who due to their low numbers can sustain extracting large prices for this naivete - in the form of scams that ruin their marks financially and what not, or setting them up to take the fall for the cumulative damages of their persistent lying.

If you think about, for example, how many people hold jobs for a number of years. Their jobs wind up having little resemblance to their position descriptions for which they were hired, and their job titles. Much of the arrangement they depend on to house, feed and clothe themselves are informal. They don't consult lawyers or get advice, they are given a great deal of autonomy etc. 

These situations arise, because most people are ordinary, ordinary and decent. The sheer abundance of ordinary decent people, mean in most cases a police state is too costly, so bad actors can often just walk right in, unquestioned.

I'll go out on a limb, and assert that most of what we do is informal. For example, my immigration status is rarely checked, if ever. Even when I've been an illegal immigrant. My tertiary qualifications can be obtained with 50% passing grades, so which half of my qualification do I know? Then apply the half life of knowledge, and we are looking at a situation where most of most working professional's education and training comes informally from learning on the job etc.

Now, the above is likely an unsound and invalid soliloquy, let's get to the problem of the small folk in respect to deception.

First Problem - There's Good Information, but it's Useless

An ordinary person, can be well equipped to spot lies, flattery and bullshit and know what appropriate course of action to take, with excellent resources we already have and have had for a long time.

We have Josef Pieper's "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" an essay, really, an ordinary person could read it in an afternoon, and of particular note and worth, is Pieper's take on flattery, psuedo-reality, manipulation and the costs it imposes.

Then there is "On Bullshit" the 1985 essay still holds up. With a particularly valuable contribution to the subject by pointing out the difference between a lie, and bullshit. The difference between lying to someone, and bullshitting someone.

Then there is Sam Harris' booklet, on lying, where he attempts to reproduce the value he got, from a single philosophy subject and where he argues about how lying pretty much never produces the best outcome. Even in extremis, where a lie might save someone's life, he points out that this merely kicks the can up the road, and the life-threatener will have to be dealt with, at some point, by someone. He extends it to lying about medical diagnoses, and about lying to kids about Santa.

But these all reek of solutions, not a problem, so what is the first problem? Well it's some combination of the fact that most ordinary people, just aren't going to read that shit, they don't see it as an investment of time when there is me-time - self soothing through consumption and diversion. There are urgent things to do, and there are incentivised things to do like school and work. But even if we leveraged institutions like school and work to make learning about lying mandatory through simple and accessible texts like the three I've mentioned, people wouldn't apply these learnings, in the same way that telling people hamburgers and soft-drinks aren't good for them, nor dignified, they know it, it doesn't stop them. I can't stop.

People don't get exposed to information, update their beliefs and translate that into action with anywhere near the efficiency a naive belief in strong-media effects assumes. And ordinary people in my experience tend to massively overestimate the effects of media, confusing their feeling bad because they don't conform to beauty or other esteem ideals, with the world where such effects were powerful where they would feel worse relentlessly pursuing those ideals because the media effected them so.

The number of people who really descend into body dysmorphia because of media, I suspect would in the wash, turn out to be similar in proportion to the number of people who improve their lives in some way, by putting into effect good advice they read in a book: as in like 1~2% of the population who change up their habits without an imposition by the external environment. It's just one group is acting on bad media, the other on good media.

Second Problem - The Machiavelli Constraint

The Prince may be, one of the most valuable books still in print. People don't read "Mein Kampf" so the closest we have is "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli.

However, I can't claim and wouldn't assert that "The Prince" is misunderstood. I'm not sure if it can be understood. The author's intent appears to be the loser Machiavelli a deposed and exiled statesman making a sales pitch to Lorenzo di Medici to say he'd make a really good consultant and can he please come back from the countryside now. 

Centuries later, this brown-nosing letter purporting to be expert advice from a statesman to the statesman that defeated and deposed him, is considered mandatory reading for Europe's ruling elite. A youngish "Old Fritz" being Prince Frederick II of Prussia, an awesome homosexual, writes a pamphlet critiquing "The Prince" from the perspective of an actual statesman, who will go on to be more successful at running a state than either Niccolo Machiavelli or Lorenzo di Medici. His buddy, Voltaire, decides to publish this pamphlet as "Antimachiavelli" and it makes a valuable text even more valuable, by pointing out how stupid some of Niccolo's suggestions are, and rejecting the overall thesis that it is in anyway necessary to be an asshole.

Leaving us with a text that I still think is valuable.

What I feel is most valuable, is that Machiavelli is doing some of the earliest work that will later be expanded upon by Bonhoeffer and Cipolla - he is whether he intends it or not, saying, look assholes exist, we cannot operate a state successfully that doesn't take into account assholes.

Poo-poo Alain de Botton's School of Life all you like and its $75 calming candle merch, his video "Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys" is the best approach in terms of extracting value from The Prince. Basically it is saying "when they go low, don't go high." I've read the Prince a bunch of times, there's no explicit advice that can be interpreted as "when they go low, you go lower" it is rather most explicit in "keep an eye on all these shenanigans."

Now the bind for nice guys, and modal people, when it comes to deception, is to go looking for evidence of deception, is likely to show up the same in your behaviour as deceptive people's projection of deceptiveness onto the population as large.

You will come across as untrusting, and this in turn, is behaviour from which you and others may infer, that you are unlikely to be trustworthy.

Unforch, this is one of those situations that I think is like insurance.

Insurance Companies

Insurance companies are pretty solid businesses. They tend to be profitable. They are profitable because they are charging more in premiums than they pay out in claims. They figure the chance of you being hung, drawn and quartered is pretty low, so for $1000 a month they will insure you against the event of being hanged drawn and quartered for $10,000,000.

They do the same with the chances of you being stuck in an MRI machine in the US, or having your home and contents burn down. Most people, never experience their house burning to the ground in their lifetimes (apologies California, but it's not like you can get insurance anymore...) but they pay home and contents insurance.

Why? Well because having your house burn down or being rushed to a US hospital can ruin you for life. Wipe you out in one hit, game over man, game over. You dead as Bill Paxton.

I'm asserting this is the same situation ordinary people face with deceptive people - their lies can wipe you out in one hit. So you just have to maintain all the costs on an ongoing basis to mitigate that threat. This is reading contracts, not signing them before you have asked yourself if you should run them by a lawyer, insisting that suss directions be communicated in writing, documenting who said what and who is to do what by when. 

Basically, investing in making life as costly and difficult as possible for liars to operate in. Because if their lies get them in trouble, they will tell another to make their trouble, your trouble. Aka scapegoating.

So that's the rub, that's the bind, but the bigger picture is - ordinary modal people have virtually no chance. This is just one thing, and I don't fancy the chances of say, this post going viral, most people reading up on some accessible and insightful texts on lying, and migrating their cognitive behaviour from "that's weird, something doesn't feel right" to "nope, unacceptable. Let's not see where this goes."

All of this is unlikely and it is comparative chicken feed to the problems ordinary people face as a result of their economic literacy.

Hoo mama.

Beyond Left and Right the future of discourse in a post-intelligible world "by" Judith Butler, Josef Peiper et al.

 Now what do I mean by "by" well that depends on what YOU mean by "mean"? [looks smug]

But practically speaking, I mean in plain English "not by" when I put the word "by" in scare quotes for the purpose of signalling my personal disdain for sophistry.

I want to write about the usefullness of "left-right" distinctions. 

For example if you watch media content that is critical of Elon Musk, the state of Israel and its prosecution of it's counteroffensive in the Gaza strip, Boris Johnson's prime-minister ship, and American government responses to school shootings OR you watch media content that is principally in support of Elon Musk's DOGE agenda, defends Israel's right and necessity to defend itself against Hamas, expresses sceptical views as to Labours' ability to address the problems created by the long tenure of the Conservative party in the UK, and expresses concern about taxing the rich due to capital flight, you have probably heard a sponsorship for "Ground News" where regardless of their own political bias, your podcast host be it Adam Conover or Coleman Hughes has talked about how much they love Ground News' "Blindspot" feature, and you have been impressed by how effective Ground News is at overcoming media bias and allowing its users get to the truth by the observable convergance of both left and right biased commentators converging on a neutral editorial stance of reporting objective facts that describe reality.

Again, I'm being facetious. There is an even simpler and more cost effective way to avoid being misinformed by media - and that is to consumer less media. Especially under conditions of an attention economy, which is our present media reality. If this is not clear enough to you, I am attempting to make the simple observation that given the probability that any piece of data is in fact misinformation the simplest way to reduce misinformation is to take in less data. 

By analogy, if 8 out of 10 apples were poisoned by the evil queen, you could buy a cheap "apple poison testing kit" or even cheaper, you just stop eating apples, much as is most people's policy towards eating puffer fish.

I do want to point you to Australian comedian and ALP shill "Friendly Jordies" video about Ground News, and in particular where he makes an argument that if Ground News scrapped the Left-Right analysis of news sources and replaced it with Astrology, it may be a more valuable service for its subscribers.

The Catch-22

Obviously, Left v Right has predictive power. Eg. if you know where someone stands on gun control, you generally know where they stand on abortion. People do cluster their beliefs into baskets largely driven by habit and sensitivity. 

"Left" and "Right" likely don't mean much in coherent intelligible terms, and of course they remain relative, such that it's possible for someone to be the right-wing faction of the anarchist collective, and another person to be a left-wing pope.

But though these terms may remain approximately right where "Left" can conjure pictures of a grey and drainbow haired Coburg lesbian in birkenstocks with an "Always was always will be" embroidery patch ironed on to her tweed jacket using her e-bike with dual kid-seats to ride the Upfield line shared bike-pedestrian path to deliver her kids to Steiner school, and "Right" can conjure a Toorak boomer driving their Porsche Toureg SUV to the opposite corner of their Townhouse block to meet at the new AFL player owned wine-bar to complain with their friends about the outlandish 1% capital improved value land tax on their $13M property being outrageous; they prevent discussing all the ways in which the members of these two market segments are alike, and simply causing an intractable power struggle that doesn't solve anything while a clock is ticking.

The Dependence on Not Understanding

Australia's recent elections were dramatic enough for me to pay attention. While the polling generally accurately forecast the "coalition" being the Liberal party, The National party and Queensland's Hapsburgian Liberal National Party losing, they lost quickly and the Liberal component of the coalition in particular could be described without hyperbole as being annihilated. 

However, since the election, News mastheads have proffered post-hoc explanations for just what went wrong that I believe are a concise and practical example of Upton Sinclair's pithy observation:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

I assert that while Sinclair's assessment has broad applications it applies specifically to Australian newsmedia's post election coverage, particularly in the analysis of where the ALP went right, and the Liberal Party went wrong. Articles like, but not limited to: "This election result shows Labor learned a lesson that the Coalition did not" by Laura Tingle for the ABC, "Australia rejected the Dutton-Murdoch agenda, now we’ll see if Labor does the same" by Amy Remeikis for the New Daily, "‘Far worse than Morrison’: where did the Coalition lose the election?" by Krishani Dhanji and Nick Evershed for the Guardian etc. and I should point out that news media with paywalls like Australian broadsheet The Age/Sydney Morning Herald are no better, but I can't be bothered linking to examples that are just paywalls and given their value can remain safely behind paywalls.

I'm not suggesting you seriously invest your time reading and understanding the above examples, though you are obviously free to. 

The conceit however, is this idea that in for example, an election the candidates put proposed policy or "election promises" out into the public domain, and then journalists employing specific areas of expertise analyse this data, processing it into valuable information that is then purchased by their consumer base who value it in terms of making informed predictions and projections useful to their decision making process as to how to cast their vote or some bullfuck.

In practice, it seems likely to me, as reflected in the polls that the election result while having multiple determinants is most easily explained by the US Trump administration's media event "Liberation Day" on April 2, (April 3 in Australia which is located in the future) and the subsequent destruction of wealth following market reactions - net-present-revaluations of assets given the probability of the announced Tariffs being implemented.

By Canley – get the code and data - Own work. Data is from the polling tables at w:Opinion polling for the 2025 Australian federal election., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130997458

Now the scale of the above image is a little small, but what we can see above is that for some reason on the two-party preferred basis, the coalition (in blue) were leading the polls up until January 2025, then coincidently as 2025 progressed and the RBA cut interest rates, which informed news consumers should understand has nothing to do with the Federal government as the RBA's monetary policy is based on target inflation and target employment and operates independently to the government, polls seem to indicate that coincidently for some reason, voters in aggregate grow less disgruntled with the incumbent ALP and less enchanted with the challening Coalition. 

Then on April 2nd, coincidently after the Trump administration announces wealth destroying Tariffs on uninhabited islands and China alike, the polls begin to diverge wildly into a massive landslide victory for the ALP.

Journalist George Monbiot sat down with comedian Richard Herring for a bookclub-style podcast and explains a folklore of how politics work, particularly how "the great majority of voters have no useful information whatsoever" now he cites an example of an election outcome effected by shark attacks that are dubious, and his qualifications render this interview opinion but I feel the opinion is broadly right and I like depictions of the reality of voters in Netflix series "The Politician" that even in a high-school context indicates the complete mutual disengagement between voters and campaigning politicians, and adman Bob Hoffman when discussing the three-word-ad-brief talking about how fame is the greatest predictor of political campaign success, not content.

So I better conclude this point rather than continue to overdetermine it. The news has this conceit that their income depends on, that all their reporting on the content of proposed policy in political campaigns is somehow useful and as such valuable and hence their salaries are justified. And so, it is almost impossible that something like the news, regardless of left-wing or right-wing bias, can come to understand itself the subjects on which they write about - like how an election was won or lost, or what is causing the housing affordability crisis, because if the news media understood how little value they actually offer, they could not in good conscious continue to operate.

It is very similar to Noam Chomsky's description of Post-modernist academia whom, cannot make a career out of stating simple truisms like "women are underrepresented in STEM disciplines" that are as obvious to a tenured professor as they are to the janitor that empties their wastepaper basket, you wind up having to write these painfully obvious truisms in an abusive style of language exemplified by Judith Butler.

Ideology

I am not going to claim I share an understanding of what "ideology" is that is shared by experts on the subject, and I leave it to you to do at least a cursory reading of it's wikipedia page and assess what I'm asserting.

What I'm asserting though, is based on describing observed behaviours of what I'm calling ideologues, being people who behave as though they possess an ideology. 

These people tend to approach the world as though some persistent wicked problem society faces (eg. inequality, violence, stupidity, environmental degradation, economic mismanagement and existential angst) are solved problems, which is to say, we have the answers, widely known answers.

This further presents as behaviour consistent with a held belief that the only reason these problems are not resolved is simply lack of commitment. 

What I personally think of as "the infinite recourse to lack of commitment" renders the beliefs of ideology unfalsifiable, which is to say, ideologues struggle to entertain the possibility that they are wrong, and that perhaps we collectively endure ongoing problems because we collectively do not as yet understand the true nature of the problem. This is what makes them so annoying, regardless of the content of their beliefs, but not just annoying, dangerous too.

Authoritarianism

I will now assert that ever holding the hand of any "infinite recourse to lack of commitment" is authoritarianism, it is a natural pairing like pork and fennel, lamb and rosemary, beef and pepper and chicken and bacon. I'd hesitate, but I'd be open to somebody smarter than I suggesting that more than a pairing, they are basically synonyms, like knowledge and wisdom.

This framework allows us to compare, for example 21st Century Wahhabism to Byzantine Iconoclasm as authoritarian ideologies despite being competing Abrahamic religions and movements separated by a millennia. 

But we can also use this framework to make useful analogies between radical feminism and Wahhabism despite the seeming vast left-right gulf between them. 

Copping to any potential allegations of shit-stirring but I've had this story open on my browser now for quite some time that I think is useful in talking about authoritarianism:

She Matters memorial to women who allegedly died by violence defaced in Melbourne's Hosier Lane

On the surface, looking at this news story in sheer practical terms, it is a pretty open-and-shut, one-sided affair. The memorial was defaced by a crude throw-up piece of graffiti reading "war on men" for which the obvious and reasonable inference is that some dickhead who feels angry and persecuted defaced an expression of a popular cause with a highly unpopular one, with any charitable interpretation of a "war" on men a very weak one.

But the real characteristic of authoritarianism, is that because ideologues believe in "solved" problems, and that these problems persist simply due to a lack of commitment, discussion cannot be tolerated because discussion is the real problem a symptom of a lack of commitment, that can spread like a contagion. The time to act is assumed to be now, and the time for discussion is assumed to be somewhere in the past.

Now, had the defacer not been some sexist dickhead, I want you to entertain the following shit-stirring scenario. That instead of hastily throwing up pitiful victimology, they had papered over the memorial of women victims of mortal violence, with infants who had died from diseases.

I put it to you, this this would not be a cut-and-dry news story to cover. I would estimate, that an argument that covering one memorial with another was actually disingenuous would win out, but it would be much much harder to cover and finesse than a story about something popular being defaced with something shit.

While I am capable of thinking like Niccolo Machiavelli, I am rarely if ever Machiavellian in my practices. I rarely visit Hosier Lane, I don't give much of a shit about Hosier lane, I am not interested in graffiti turf wars, nor graffiti terf wars, and I am not encouraging anyone to wage war with MRA stupidity nor Machiavellian cunning.

Indeed, if you had not gathered already, what I am opposed to is authoritarianism. I am not pro-it. As such, what I want, what motivates me to use this shit-stirring hypothetical, is discussion, for example:

"[Ms Moody] said graffiti-protection paint would be used to try to stop it from being damaged in the future, and she was considering hiring a security guard to watch over the mural until the protective layer dried."

Kudos points to you, if you can identify the irony in using graffiti-protection paint in Hosier Lane, to prevent graffiti being used in Melbourne, possibly Australia's most famous graffiti destination.

When I was in Rome circa 2007 I took a guided tour of the Colosseum, and my tour guide, so keep in mind the appeal to authority fallacy here, stated that the Vatican appropriated marble from the Colosseum to build St Peter's Basilica on the pretext that Christians had been persecuted in the Colosseum so the marble was taken as part reparations for pre-Holy Roman Empire's persecution of Christians. Now how true this claim is, I don't know, but hopefully an engaged mind presented with some Renaissance Pope's alleged argument can instantly start picking holes in it.

Similarly, I've lived in Mexico for 4 years, a country where roughly 1% of its population has disappeared since 2007. I ran the streets at night in my provocative outfits, and though I'm using an availability heuristic here, more ubiquitous than sculptural renderings of place names in downtowns, are "She Matters" style memorials of disappeared people of the sun made of their actual "have you seen..." pro forma missing persons posters pasted up on buildings, but most prominently recreated in larger poster/banner form and used to cover prominent "glorietas" or what English speakers would call roundabouts. In Guadalajara where I lived, the "Glorieta de los Ninos Heros" had been popularly appropriated to become "Glorieta de las y los desapericidos"

And for those of you who habla espanol at least as bad as I do, you may notice and infer from "las y los" a political bias that I would emphasize is not what I am interested in here, and much more interested in moving beyond, because the left-right analysis has in my arrogant opinion, been successfully used by authoritarians to divide and conquer the anti-authoritarian.

Because I can segue, just watch me, from the Glorieta de los Ninos Heros to Parque Rojo in Guadalajara that got appropriated by capatilism. The herald of this capatilist conquest, was feminist capatilism, some feminists cordoned off a corner of this public park, I can no longer recall if it is every Saturday or Sunday, with a market that was "women only" a safe space for women to browse macramé, crystals, jewellery, second hand clothes and books etc. They went as far with the cordon as to have security consisting of angry young women, not necessarily intimidating, but as effective as black-shirts, brown-shirts or the red guard, for the majority of non-confrontation seeking members of the general public.

Within a year, I would guess, this public park, once a multi-use space where people gathered to catch up, eat, rollerblade, skate, practice yoga, hold yoga classes, teach circus skills like juggling and tightrope walking etc. became edge-to-edge market stalls of which the women only section was a tiny sliver. It was a good market, popular even, but at what cost? This was a popular capitalist privatisation of a communal good - a public park.

Just as I can't fault the enterprising capitalists on strategic grounds for turning the commons into a thriving economic enterprise, I can't fault on strategic grounds Sherele Moody for appropriating a significant portion of one of Melbourne's most popular and promoted tourist attractions for a cause she and others believe in, for, I will charitably assume, as long as the problem of femicides persists (aka, realistically in perpetuity, but ideologically until sufficient awareness is raised to generate sufficient commitment to the ideology's assumed known solution.)

What I am critical of, is the status quo that accepts the actions of ideologues and forfeits discussion actively. Here we can return to objectively assess the usefulness of Ground News, with a search on "Hosier Lane" producing 5 news sources that covered the defacing of the "She Matters" memorial. Ground News' functionality tells me in this case study, that the coverage leaned 67% left, as in two of the three of the five sources that Ground News tracks for bias, lean left. I do not need to unlock extra features to assume that the right-biased source likely stuck to the facts. Because of a paywall, the only thing I can't see, but feel again I can safely assume, is that none of the coverage gave any significant consideration to the "war on men" position, by perhaps citing any statistics on how male violence effects men compared to women, and then perhaps pointing out that while generally men are far more directly affected by male violence, women suffer more psychologically - as in men go to the pub and wind up dead because they spilt another man's beer, but had up until that fateful confrontation not lived their lives in dread anticipation of their likely death at another man's hands, whereas women grip their keys in their hands as an improvised defensive weapon, and make obligatory phone calls while walking the streets at night, in the expectation that even while taking precautions a man is likely to kill them. 

Now certainly, an interesting discussion is to be had about capitalisms seizure of Parque Rojo, and even Christian capitalism's seizure of Parque Refugio for 3 straight months to sell Christmas ornaments, Nativity ceramics and Christmas trees, and I would be far less vulnerable to the authoritarian rhetorical strategy of questioning my motives in choosing the "She Matters" mural as my case study.

The reason I am drawn to it, and flag my own choice as shit-stirring, is because of the rhetorical power of "surely everyone agrees femicide is bad" because most everyone, including me, does. Where the difference lies, and the power of the case studies, is that we have ideologues who think that there is simply nothing to discuss about the She Matters memorial, and then there's fuckwits like me, who from the perspective of authoritarian ideologues stir up shit, not just unnecessarily, but antagonistically by wanting to know more about the manners of graffiti and street art, like among the graffiti subculture on what grounds does somebody claim wall space? how long can they reasonably ask of the community to occupy that space with their art? at what opportunity cost is the "She matters" mural installed in Hosier Lane with respect to other worthwhile causes? how are we to arrive at a consistent position with the defacing of "She matters" in Hosier Lane, and the defacing/destruction of the Banksy piece(s) in Tattersalls/ACDC lane? how does it compare to the Catholic Church's seizure of Orsanmichele grain market in Florence? (Again as explained to me by a tour guide, someone painted a picture of the Virgin Mary graffiti style, then later someone attributed a miracle to the painting and the Church used it as pretext to seize the premises. There seems to be some truth to this telling, though Ground News' non-existent "Catholic bias" feature can't tell me whether the authors gloss over the questionable behaviour of their own ideological institutions...)

Like I could go on, and because I can go on, my motivations can be questioned as to whether my intent is to filibuster progress perhaps via concern trolling consistent with the strategies of general sabotage outlined by the OSS (precursor to the CIA) which of course to ideologues, has to be the case because the time for discussion is over, femicide is a public health emergency, for which to use George W Bush terminology we have been on amber-alert for roughly all of human history, but was solved, presumably, by the social scientists, sometime in the late 20th-early 21st century and simply lacks commitment.

But to reject one extreme is not by necessity to endorse another, I am not saying no action can be taken by anyone on anything until all concerns have been addressed, I am saying that some discussion would be nice, if for no cause higher than it being diverting, as stated I don't particularly care about Hosier Lane, I think the de facto seizure of public space in a prime tourist location for a permanent installation without due process or public discussion is a triumph for an activist like Ms Moody. 

And then, what if at the opposite end of the lane, someone installs a memorial for those killed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine? 

My stated motivation, is that I see a problem with how we even begin to discuss such a development, due to the precedents established by righteous-idealogues.

Simples

By which I mean, useful distinctions are actually fairly simple in terms of separating out ideologues from the rest of the spectrum. Solving the problem is hard, because I would guesstimate, most people are authoritarian ideologues, it is a naive intuition, a default state. 

I tend to think of the dichotomy of single vs double. Single what? Double what? Why standards of course.

It's just that easy.

A few people believe in single standards, for example that everyone who makes an assertion is obliged to expose their assertions to questions, and defend their assertions against questions with arguments.

Ideologues tend to operate a double-standard where they are fucking Socrates when it comes to people they disagree with, but defending the detail of their own ideology is beneath their dignity, and can be freely dismissed.

That is but one example, but the pattern of toxic behaviour is the double-standard, that ties woke activists into the same bundle as christian nationalists. Wahhabis with Marxists, because we aren't wrong, we just haven't achieved the necessary level of commitment.

But in my experience, free speech, is for most people, simply too complicated and counterintuitive a concept to understand. Another example, most people through word and deed, cannot demonstrate to me that they even understand what was bad about the Nazis. They appear to think it was the whiteness, the swastikas, the toothbrush moustache (even though they are aware of Charlie Chaplin, and even "The Great Dictator") the salute, but curiously not the Germanicness.

And on this front, I am not myself, an ideologue. I suspect double-standards are a wicked problem, and moral progress/regress will forever be on amber-alert. I have a personal resolution to move away from left-right tribalism, but I am open to discussion as to why this may not be a sound strategy, at this point I am still gathering data.

I suspect a large obstacle is the robustness of Hanlon's Razor, I recently stumbled across a perfect example where in a New York times Podcast on "Modern Love" interviewed marriage therapist Terry Real where at one point, I infer incompetence rather than malice the interviewer asks on behalf of I guess, the audience, why Terry would dedicate resources to men, given their privilege.

This is just a specific example of ideologue behaviour, particularly in its tribal manifestations of us-them. I can only guess, but the journalist probably believes in doctrinal ideas like sins-of-the-father, and is using group identities as the prism of their understanding, they express a similar sentiment to the objection to addressing school bullying, by attempting to give identified bullies roles and responsibilities that will improve their esteem in socially constructive ways - for example designating the bully the task of welcoming other students to class. Allegedly parents object to "rewarding" bullies in such a way, because they see a role that is identical to that of the lowly esteemed Walmart greeters as prestigious like a prefect or class captain.

In the same way, the journalist seeing men and masculinity as the problem, appears to have the naive intuitions of justice manifest as this being only legitimately addressed by the apportioning of more resources into women, unable to conceive that apportioning resources to men could result in women as beneficiaries.

If you will, ideologues appear to make incompetence driven errors akin to "if the husband is sick why should he get the medicine? Give it to the wife as reward for her being healthy."

This is really bleak behaviour, and I just, at a personal level, want to chip away at it. This post is not about feminism, and if you can parse it, hopefully you'd agree with me it's not anti-feminism but pro.

My problem with the left is that they are too conservative and authoritarian, and my problem with the right is that they are not being conservatives and have gone radical and authoritarian. I am left of you all and attack via the narcissism of small differences. 

Authoritarian ideologues have done tremendous damage if for no other reason than their ineffectual and incompetent management has wasted precious time and resources with an unserious approach to serious issues that need addressing.

Lamba out.