Trivia that matter
The current flood of junk mail indicates that there is an election coming up. It puts me in mind of Jeff MacNelly’s depiction of the hypothetical “Reagan/Wallace” ticket from fifty years ago. A quick search online didn’t find it, so I thought I’d see if AI could approximate it. Ronald and George are long gone, of course, but the image remains universally applicable.
I am seriously right on the cusp of completely discounting everything we’ve heard about Caligula and Nero based on what I’m seeing about how ink-stained wretches who hate Trump write about Trump.
It is truly baffling why men have gasped in horror at American fiction in much the same manner they would at the announcement of a Streisand-Cher double bill. I finally walked through the fiction section of Barnes & Noble some time ago and decided that I would rather be waterboarded than spend another minute there.
Literary notes:
Ted Gioia recommends seven novels by Philip K. Dick. It’s a good list, though I would have included Martian Timeslip and added a collection of his short stories.
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JMSmith seeks to enlarge your vocabulary:
“Unctuously rectitudinous” means “too damn nice.” It means what Sam Francis meant when he called the ineffectual gentlemen of American conservatism “beautiful losers.”
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Question and answer with Clayton Barnett:
Q. If you could have lunch with any deceased writer who would it be, what would you eat and what would you talk about?
A. I would invite Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, and Kant. I would be late as I am calling in a tactical nuclear strike on these morons who pulled the so-called Enlightenment out of their nether-regions.
Now notice: climate alarmism is rather rational, compared, e.g., to Leftist confusion about who is female. You could make a serious, albeit stupid, case for the old Leftist causes, like income inequality. The Leftist causes that make headlines these days – infanticide, genital mutilation of children, deletion of the Constitution and the cops, opening the prisons and the borders, and so forth (NB: it’s not just the clickbait media looking for yellow, these are the causes that the Leftists themselves are *massively pushing*) – are *manifestly insane* compared to climate change or price controls or even white privilege (nobody is really fooled by the Jason Arday nonsense; still, there will soon be another even more egregiously insane Jason Arday case). The water seems to have been leaking fast out of the Leftist pool, so that all the remnant water is at the deepest, maddest, muddiest end. Recoil and revulsion at that among even lots of lifelong Democrats – indeed, even among red diaper baby Commies, who after all grew up in an environment of some late perdurant Stalinist realism – is palpable. Hell, they are saying it out loud.
While at Swarthmore College, W.H. Auden taught a seminar on “Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler.”
It’s not often you see a quadruple negative in the wild:
Do the negatives cancel out?
If June is “Pride Month,” then is July “Envy Month” and August the “Month of Wrath”?
Grim:
The good argument in favor of billionaires — trillionaires, now — is that one person can make a decision about how to deploy substantial capital in efficient ways that a government, a corporation, or a committee can never. Musk is building space rockets and tunneling equipment that could build a Mars colony because he wants to, not because of fiduciary duty or because spreadsheets suggest it is wise. We are lucky that the world’s richest man loves Buck Rogers rather than Karl Marx.
… the one core belief of the Puritans, that which survived any number of changes to mere theological and moral beliefs, is that they, the enlightened and holy, should be in charge. Starting with the University they founded within a decade of establishing their first town, the Pilgrims asserted what to them was the obvious and certain truth: they had a bead on things, anyone who disagreed was stupid or evil. It was their right and duty to rule. The theology changed from Calvinism to Unitarianism to Marxism and beyond, but the core belief in their superior understanding survived all such superficial changes.
“Recreational Marxism.” And also “bespoke Molotov cocktails.”
I would have posted this a few days ago, but I didn’t discover it until just now. (Via Amy Welborn.)
According to Mollie Hemingway, “a proper understanding of punk and its inherent rebellion would have everyone becoming a libertarian or principled conservative.” Today is the day for Libertarian punks. (Via Grim.)
Ross Grossman on Ozempic:
The modern environment floods us with things designed to hijack our reward systems. Junk food engineered for maximum craveability. Social media designed for maximum addiction. Pornography available in infinite variety. Gambling apps in your pocket. The world has become a casino that follows you everywhere, and the house always wins.
Maybe pharmacologically dampening those circuits is reasonable adaptation.
Maybe it’s surrender.
Maybe — and I’m not sure I’m ready to say this out loud — it’s the beginning of a future where we chemically modify our capacity to want things because we’ve built a world with too many things to want—and we’ve decided it’s easier to fix the people than fix the world.
I herded the church kids into the art room so they could play together. Twenty minutes later, I discovered them staring in complete silence at their phones.
The only kid without a phone was mine. She was drawing a picture of her cat surrounded by cat toys, colorful blankets, and bowls.
This is a new thing, by the way. I vividly remember kids playing and running around in the art room. It’s like in that fairy tale where an evil magician stole the children’s laughter.
No comment necessary.
A trillion here, a trillion there. Sooner or later, you’re talking about fake money.
According to a recently published paper,
A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.
(Via Eugene Volokh.)
Not quite as impactful as Alan Sokal’s classic paper, perhaps, but much more efficiently created. As the author notes, “All procedures followed the principles of academic transparency and surreal humor.”
… between facts and sites satirical
After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:
- Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
- Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
- Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
- Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
- Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
- Etc. etc.
It may not be a coincidence that I don’t watch recent movies either in theatres or online, don’t stream music or listen to radio, seldom read recent books, or listen to audiobooks. If Gioia’s schoolbus plunges off a cliff, it would be a net gain for civilization.1