Feb 16
“On Contact: The Power of Political Cartoons with Mr. Fish”
This bit articulated a very important issue, and that’s how the oversimplified on-demand clickbait media we thrive on these days reinforces stereotypes due to the need to use shorthand to churn out more links. Since most online media relies on link clicks for ad revenue, this incentivizes them to put as little effort into the quality of the content and as much effort into the attention-seeking and panhandling. It dilutes the internet by making dozens of links for every trend, in hopes of scooping off a percentage of traffic to line their pockets. It’s insanely lucrative, big businesses both online and off spend billions each year on ads and even create false publishers to spread their label through coercion. It shouldn’t be legal if you ask me, but I’ve read the actual theories on crowd psychology and mass marketing - it’s cynical stuff that made the theorists (Edward Bernays most notably) a LOT of money.
The acquisitions market has made that far worse when you take a sickening look at just how many companies groups like Bain Capital or Newscorp or Disney own (there’s 6 major conglomerates). What better way to mass-produce content than to parrot a dumbed down form of establishment politics and major trends then recycle them through all your networks for targeted user-bases? The loss of focus on the actual depth of real issues in favor of pleasurable money-centered practices is a great contributor to the myopic apathy you see among young people and the uneducated. We’re all in cultural bubbles reinforced by economic algorithms, and pathetically small bubbles at that. This is a serious issue to me, one easily approached in terms of genre.
You can call much of the media we’re exposed to under the genre of “Establishment” or “Corporate,” not just by the content and its sympathies but also by the way it’s all structured to be delivered to you and what the juxtapositions are via websites and news stations. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 6 conglomerates control 90% of the media being outputted (Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6). It also shouldn’t surprise you that up to 90% of the radio channels a group like Newscorp owns play the same things day in and day out like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Breitbart or Alex Jones among others. It then shouldn’t surprise you that owning enough media stations to flood certain areas with certain ideologies will greatly influence politics in that region. It’s a collective effort, too. The “competition” is a mere petit-bourgeois myth when there’s only a few hundred people at the very top all sharing lavish dinners and private getaway while they throw endless amounts of cash into politics to get political favors.
I hate when we assume people’s beliefs are somehow geographically innate (i.e. “Southerners”) and not taught, and that society isn’t always the third parent. It completely alienates others from discussion and fuels the divide, as dumb as the “civil” versus “savage” arguments of the colonial days up to today with how a lot of Israelis view Palestinians or how a lot of Americans view Muslims and now all this Liberal vs Conservative nonsense. It goes both ways of course, and this “alt-right” crap (white nationalist sites get far more traffic than ISIS sites fyi) is really scary with the assertions of “Cultural Marxism” and the calls for more militarism and privatization in response. That particular narrative was manufactured by the likes of Andrew Breitbart and his team, and now it’s everywhere to make white nationalists sound clever because Breitbart is now the White House’s propaganda arm (something made legal again in the 2013 NDAA). Obviously militarism and privatization primarily helps those already on the top when you look at who’s objectively benefitting more, but many still pretend as if this economy is a blank slate for participation when it never was, and the poor and needy (and everyone else) only get their feelings and livelihoods stepped on and manipulated over and over and over again. The vast majority don’t or can’t do anything about it.
We are in a seriously dangerous time, society has decayed somewhat via our inability to de-fragment our thoughts and agree on a discourse that doesn’t fit into slogans, pop-art posters, 2-line memes, 3-minute youtube videos, 5-minute news segments, or even a two page article. Real back-to-the-roots politics is only basic face-to-face interactions that are about bettering ourselves and our surroundings as earnestly as possible, not the 100 layers of economic, political, and yes sexual gaming that are producing our socializations, and our “knowledge” or “alternative facts” of current events, only created to meet somebody’s bottom line.
You don’t receive an actual worldly education without first understanding the infinite (and up-to-date) depth of the ground and mind you stand on, and that’s worthless alone unless you freaking acting like it. This obsession with efficiency has not always been about optimizing well-being, but more often money and time for the rich. We’re so far into that way of life that it’s not even an option for many people to slow the hell down or they can’t even meet their own or their kids’ survival needs. That’s the real effect of poverty wages. Instead they default to socially-reinforced pleasure-seeking since they get maybe an hour or two of respite a day, and that programs people to be even more complacent about external affairs. This is a cultural epidemic, I assert that. You don’t have to look any farther than the White House to see the result of that type of complacency.
It’s just… a mess. What a mess we’ve made. A society that needs mass-therapy like ours does is a largely destructive society with a painfully short life span if we keep it up. I do hope we get it together, I’m certainly doing my best to push my imagination for these issues.
Super cheese but I love it, the movie it’s from is so pure.
Feb 17
Here’s a pretty good lecture on how modern psych thinks by UCLA professor Dr Dan Siegel who runs his own research institute. It’s completely relevant to writing. This is the cutting edge of scientific thought (without leaping into the realm of pseudoscience, like quantum woo woo) and it’s beautiful, and so simple you might find yourself saying “duh”: Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human
I learned yesterday that the Romans would manufacture gods for conquered lands and force worship because Roman worship mandated that you give money and belongings to “appease the gods” that would funnel back to the empire’s coffers.
The manipulation of religion or spiritual sensation is something we always need to watch out for. We have real extremists in office right now, from the top all the way down. How do they get there? Well one of the primary functions of ideology is to be motivational, so they’re usually a bit better about playing the game than you or I. Then they repackage and sell that crap in a way that disadvantages everybody else. People with God complexes deny their own machinations, so they’re the least reasonable yet the best at psychotic dis-integrating populist doublespeak. Looking at you, Paul Ryan.
If you read Chomsky you find out that people like Bush Sr. and Reagan had handlers so they wouldn’t let loose their insane conspiracies at diplomatic meetings. We always downplay the role religion plays in global decisionmaking, but that only makes us unconscious of it. This is a lot more present in modern “Western” politics than we think, which developed out of 18th thru 20th century Continental (read: Christian) philosophy and neoliberal economics rather than, say, middle eastern politics where it’s economically and tribally motivated, or “Eastern” politics where you have a merger of Western economics with ancient authoritarian and interdependent traditions. What differentiates the “West” is how we approach hierarchy and organization, classical liberalism was a serious policy achievement in this respect.
Those who believe and know they can’t convert you to their insanity by conventional means, they may try to make you functionally (rather than cognitively) believe through any kind of suggestion - especially economics and violence. Sophism was the freaking school of this and it’s 2700ish years old, does it occur to you we’ve done a LOT more thinking since then on how to use words for power? There are some insane leadership schools out there now, too, especially in the military. We just really have to know who we’re empowering and where that knowledge is coming from, that’s the real power of a liberal or liberated society (for better or for worse), just look at the narcissist and his white supremacist lackeys we have running the executive branch now - that’s a failure of a discourse that ideally favors multiplicity in governance (which the extremists call “Cultural Marxism”). Knowledge about knowledge is power as an MIT Artificial Intelligence professor once said, I really can’t emphasize it enough. Hell I even wrote an essay about it. To rip the starter quote from it: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut
“Integration made visible is kindness and compassion, and these are the days more than ever that we have to have a distributed empowerment of young people… and all of us… because we are all responsible for each other, we are all responsible for the planet. And it’s a win-win-win situation, because when you start promoting this kindness and compassion, everyone will benefit… Literally, we need to work at every level of human experience. When you start realizing that you can collaborate together across the platform of humanity, then you start realizing instead of greed we have something called empathic joy... That’s the ultimate outcome of integration… And remember integration is the base of regulation.” - quote from Dan Siegel, from that talk I posted at the top of this day’s post. He means both self-regulation and social regulation. There’s soooo much more in that talk that y’all need to hear, he stands on real neuroscience even though it sounds a bit like self-help woo-woo at times.
Another interesting segment that came out today. This juxtaposes well with the neuroscience-based opinion in the above quote. Abby Martin is one of my favorite journalists today.
“Not just in Latin America, but in the world in the 21st century, poverty is not caused by a lack of resources or caused by natural disasters that result in famine, etc. It is caused by perverse, exclusive systems. It is a moral obligation to fight against exclusion.” - President Correa of Ecuador
The theme is: integration, networking, systems, etc. Now get with it, these are the times.
Week 6. Feb 20
It gets real deep, makes a convincing claim to the definition of consciousness (with mention of recursion) and expands on the integration theme. I strongly recommend it.
I was poking around random groups on the internet.This one called the Middle Way Society is interesting, drawing from the Buddhist Middle Way. They have a poorly-viewed podcast that’s fairly interesting, but here’s a quote I found on their site that was quite awesome: “Power is the ability to make people do things they would not otherwise have done.” Simple and pure, always good to have the most intuitive definitions available for ideas like Power since it’s so omnipresent in our world.
Here’s a segment that demonstrates all the points I made in my political rants earlier that just came out: Medicare for All with Dr. Margaret Flowers … Ha.
Feb 21
One of the lessons of the media-centered world: If you’re socialized by Hollywood and marketing teams, you’re gonna act like it. I think this is more apparent in a place like Alaska where we tend to spend more time indoors with our flashing boxes. I’m totally cool with that, I can’t be bothered to leave my room half the time when it’s freezing or sweltering outside, but you gotta be mindful of how it affects your cool.
Feb 22
THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA
THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA
THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA
HEEHEE HOHO HOOHOO
You know you laughed, I heard you laugh,
You laughed and laughed and laughed,
And then you left, but you know now I’m udderly mad.
Woke up with that stuck in my head
And now for something more serious and important, this came out today and I recommend the entire series: Global Empire - Afghanistan: War Without End by Tariq Ali
Feb 23
Another excellent segment that doesn’t get watched enough.
Feb 24
Here’s another issue I care a lot about, USAID spending. It’s currently set up to favor profiteers and, yes, even Israel’s walls. My aunt can’t do her work establishing national parks in Brazil because all the funding has been diverted or ”cut.” Disaster capitalism is a plague, places like Haiti just became sponges for NGO “administrative costs” and selling bad contracts to more unaccountable profiteers. The real power of language is our ability to convolute it so much you can legally lie and steal.
Another talk from that Dan Siegel guy (2012), this stuff is popcorn: Dr. Dan Siegel: Time In: Reflection, Relationships and Resilience at the Heart of Internal Education
Feb 25
Best Journalist ever? Best journalist ever:
“On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses the corporate state’s assault on the arts with theater director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines calls to defund the National Endowment of the Arts.”
I also remembered this neato 2011 TED video on the actual functions of the left and right brain: https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain
I hate how prevalent the popularized version of left/right brain still is, this video shows how way more sophisticated the functions of the divisions of the brain are and what that implies for all of language and culture. I need to become this articulate in my life, I’d say I’m 10% there. I believe the best writers today are those who account for the human experience and history via every “Genre” of thought available, and that’s because some of the best works I’ve read come straight out of the highest levels of the sciences. Besides, how else will you really know what hasn’t yet been dreamt unless you’ve pushed yourself to the edge of collective thought? You won’t be the only one out there, that’s for sure. This TED talk cuts straight to the core of all that. “Rationality, we know from Gödel’s theorem, and we know from what Pascal was saying hundreds of years before Gödel, that the endpoint of rationality was to demonstrate the limits of rationality.” - Iain McGilchrist
Maybe it’s pretentious, but Myth Today by Barthes, as well as a great number of obscure academic psychology and physics papers (some linked throughout my weekly) I’ve read have been probably the most stunning, adventurous, beautiful works I’ve ever read. I tend to apply as much intuition into theory as I can, meaning I let the sentences take my mind on rationally-informed rides, sometimes for hours before I can flip the page. It only seems right to me, especially when it comes to language and psych theory, since it all applies to every waking moment I’ve ever had.
With theory, if it’s well written at least, the language is only as opaque as your imagination since it’s only meant to be an abstract framework for a cluster of examples. I didn’t get very good at thinking that way from science classes so much as in art (though I can’t really differentiate science and art anymore, at least from what I consider “good” art nowadays) and my most constructive friendships. I blame that on the regurgitative nature of a lot of my classes, more worried about standards and prestige than engagement and creativity, but I don’t get to draw the line on how I want to be educated in most classes I’ve had.
That makes sense for professional fields, especially in medicine and engineering, but perhaps not to the degree they’ve made it. Nursing programs are so intense I have no envy, but I also know that the super habitual robotic-type people fare way better which doesn’t actually translate to better professionals. That intense culture of rapid book study and achievement certainly stopped me from going the engineer route, where I expected more hands-on and better pacing.
At Cal Poly I was expected to do something like 230ish quarter credits over 4 years (like 18-20 credits per quarter of ultra-difficult classes), and the price of the school was damn prohibitive to pace that out for myself. People can do it somehow, but I felt that type of education was more to market to the extreme pace of the tech industry, so it was less about instilling some professional wisdom and more about appeasing market demand. That makes perfect sense on a vocational level, but you’re doing this to non-fully formed humans. The school was primarily about getting hired out of the gate to top level positions as a tech school, so it was quite in bed with corporate culture with all the banality and egoism, mute insecurity and baked-in advertising that comes with. Something just really put me off about all of it, and I wasn’t alone in that sense. Maybe if the cost was reasonable I’d have been able to enjoy it more, I could have actually paced myself plus San Luis Obispo is freaking paradise with perfect weather.
Me quitting that life was also because the aerospace industry is almost all militarized, and I have a lot of beef with groups like Boeing for their role in all this globalist tax-evading/appropriating nonsense we’re dealing with. They’re a “deep-state” player just like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, two companies most people have barely heard about. It’s just how it works, where the tech industry informs politics (because it’s the outer extent our collective abilities), but the incentives are all jacked up and just lead to more violence overseas and lately at home with police militarization - using our taxpayer money. You can’t sell more equipment unless the old stuff gets used up somehow, y’know, or politicians get so wet at the sight of new shiny weapons they just have to buy more. It’s definitely a strange mix of kleptomania and bad budgeting. I got to see a lot of the results of this during my time at NASA running around the military bases. F-35’s and F-22’s are pretty sweet, though, I will give them that.
Computer science is a lot more progressive but I really couldn’t be bothered with the degree program after a point, mostly because I found out how specific and alienated my interests were from the main courses offered here and online. Again, it came down to the industry. Psychology has a lot of backwards things about it in this way, too, which is also a slog, but I tend to redirect the conversation my professor is having if I’m really bored so it becomes more constructive. I’m really sly about it, mostly because I don’t want any attention on me.
I’m actually just trying to build up my willpower and self-study resources so I can drop college altogether to pursue my more creative interests, though I think I’ll just take it really slow and finish eventually. I want a technical major because it opens a lot more doors for grad school, and I’m basically doing graduate level studying at this point - thus this petulant boredom I’m having with my undergrad program. I dropped a couple classes this semester since I’m studying machine learning so intently now. I’ll only get something out of it if I go all the way, and that takes a lot of time. If only there were apprenticeship programs for machine learning or psych so I could study formally on a way more personal level… I don’t want to leave Fairbanks which is half of my problem.
Once we’ve learned how to learn it ought to become a much more creative process for students, and there ought to be a much louder culture about doing that. You haven’t really learned how to learn unless you’re integrating as much perspective and rigor as you can into your skill-building, and better standards of practice only evolve out of this realm - so you can expect integrity from these sorts of students. My fellow NASA interns and our mentors were all this way, it was really inspiring. Montessori in middle school was the best for teaching me that, too. I barely had to try in high school - except in calculus because I was so dense at math. I ended up taking way more classes than I needed to graduate because it was so easy, and I enjoyed the free education. I had to work really really hard to build up my abstraction muscles, though, as with calculus.
Now I’m 2 years into this linguistics and neural net stuff I’m studying and I’ve still barely scratched the surface because of how dense and abstract the concepts are. How hard you have to work with ideas tends to correspond to how well you’re able to articulate them in the end, though, so I’m pretty sure I’m on the up and up on that front.
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