Politics as (Un)usual

08:36 Wednesday, 18 May 2016
Words: 770

There are some people I follow on Twitter that I simply have to mute, because two-thirds, or more, of their tweets are about politics. And it's not anything insightful, it's just the usual nonsense about nonsense. It adds nothing to anyone's understanding, and it's fatiguing. I mute them for a month, and it's amazing how fast a month goes by, and how little anything has changed.

So, mute again.

This is the most bizarre election in my lifetime. The two oldest candidates, each disliked by over half the electorate. One wonders how either of them could be elected. One of them will be, though.

I'm in the unfortunate position of knowing how bad Trump is for the country, but having no love for Clinton whatsoever. The difficulty Clinton is having with Bernie Sanders and his supporters is due to the "failure" of the Obama administration.

Obama was supposed to be a transformational leader, "change we can believe in." It turned out that his style of governing involved compromise and pragmatism, which is hardly transformational; and he encountered a Republican opposition that was transformational after the 2010 mid-terms. Instead of changing his style, and leading a national debate, he kept trying to do the same-old-same-old, with predictable results.

Nothing got done.

The Republicans couldn't repeal Obamacare, or stop "executive overreach." The Democrats couldn't get anything passed.

So the partisans in both parties got very angry; and now we have Trump, and Bernie Sanders spoiling the coronation of Hillary Clinton.

And let me say a few things about Obama's speech about compromise and purity in politics. It's being used by Clinton supporters to bash Sanders supporters. It seems to me that this is Obama's blind spot. He campaigned on "change we can believe in," but didn't change anything.

Yes, the economy got better. It was always going to get better. One can make the argument that it didn't get better enough, fast enough, because Obama was too eager to compromise, in the expectation of some kind of reciprocity from his opponents. Yes, we got the Affordable Care Act, but we abandoned the single-payer option too quickly, out of this pragmatic, vain hope of winning some Republican support. But Gitmo is still a prison. The rich got even richer, the middle class smaller, the climate got warmer, and the executives in charge of the big banks avoided prison and collected their outrageous salaries and bonuses. And, oh by the way, we're still engaged in two conflicts in the Middle East.

And look at his latest Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Another solid, moderate, middle-of-the-road, pragmatic pick that, in ordinary times would have won bipartisan support and easy confirmation. One can make the argument that Garland was picked to illustrate a point, but it's also emblematic of his whole administration.

"If you can keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs, perhaps you're not looking at the situation properly."

Obama has been a massive disappointment, because he failed to read and respond to the Republican right's reaction to his administration. He should have been using the presidency as a bully pulpit and led a national debate on the role and size of government. He ducked the fight. And now we have the two factions even angrier, and they're fighting it out with two candidates that the only thing the majority of people can agree about is that they don't like them!

I believe that whoever is elected in November is going to be a one-term president. This is an emotional spasm, and nothing good will come of it.

Trump will be perceived as, and may actually be, a transformational leader. That will energize the angry right. Clinton has the support of a solid minority of Democrats, and has to hope to turn out a large anti-Trump vote. For the time being, the Clinton faction seems content with doing their best to alienate Sanders supporters, so good luck with that.

If Clinton somehow wins, I still believe she's going to face a Republican majority at least in the House, which means years of investigations and inaction. If she manages to take the House and the Senate, she's going to be Obama II, and try to engage Republicans who will hate her and oppose her anyway. My guess is she'll avoid the fight as well, and will lose reelection, and may face a strong challenge from the left for the nomination again.

Anyway, at least we've turned a page. I believe we can now stop saying "It's Bush's fault!"

It's Obama's fault.

My Dinner With AI

11:11 Thursday, 18 May 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 82.85°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 281

I started an account at OpenAI.org and I've installed a couple of apps on my iMac and iOS.

It's pretty cool!

Now, I don't know if AI will usher in the apocalypse or not, I suppose it probably could, but it's here so I might as well play with it.

What I've enjoyed so far is that you have a very patient, very "smart" interlocutor. One of my conversations recently was about trying to understand the physics of greenhouse gases. The degrees of freedom available in certain molecules, like CO2, that afford greater vibrational energy, and how that relates to interactions with heat in the atmosphere. I really had no idea about vibrational energy, but it makes perfect sense after discussing it with AI.

I've also discussed Maxwell's equations and discovered that it's not very spontaneous in terms of what it brings into the conversation. It discussed Maxwell's equations in Oliver Heaviside's form. I had to prompt it to talk about Heaviside. I haven't finished that conversation yet, I want to ask it about quaternions.

Now, I'm aware that it's often wrong, because the LLM may have been polluted with bad information. But I think these kinds of "pure" physics topics are less subject to that kind of distortion or noise. I could be wrong. But it certainly gives me other avenues to explore in more conventional sources.

So far, I'm kind of encouraged. I know there are vulnerabilities and defects and maybe those lead to unacceptable risks. But for exploring somewhat obscure or abstract topics in a conversational way, where you can keep kind of asking the question in different ways without pissing off your teacher, it's pretty cool.

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The Marmot Speaks!

11:31 Thursday, 18 May 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 84.29°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 630

I nuked my Twitter account last night. Well, I guess it has a delayed fuse. The account will sit there, frozen in carbonite I guess, for 30 days before it is actually deleted. And who knows if they actually delete it?

Seems I may be in good company, according to this Pew Research Center report.

I was gratified to see so many people ask me to stick around before I left. It's nice to feel appreciated. But it brought something else to mind as well.

One of the reasons I left was because of the radioactive toxicity of the site. My "spiritual DNA" was accumulating damage that might one day result in a cancer of hatred of many of my brothers and sisters. (Tortured metaphor. Sue me.) Even with blocking and muting, I was still seeing far too much "alarming" content. And I know I contributed more than my share as well.

So there was "alarming" content that prompted an interior state of constant "arousal." There was also constant exposure to hatred, bigotry and ignorance; not from the people I followed, but from the bigots and fascists who were being "exposed" by people I followed. Or in news reports from people I followed. Or in the replies to tweets I'd look at. (Pro tip: Never read the replies.)

It's too much for me, and it was becoming a habit. I'll miss the locals and their takes on local events, but it's impossible to filter out all the other stuff.

I've started looking at my mastodon timeline now, and it's kind of the same thing there too. Though I follow far fewer people, so it's not as relentless. I'll need to carefully curate those accounts if I wish to avoid merely replicating my experience on Twitter.

But I must return to the "something else" I alluded to earlier. While I genuinely appreciated all the compliments that people valued my thoughts and opinions, I wondered to what extent receiving all those "likes" and affirmative replies validating my opinions kind of made me more tribal. More fixed in my thinking.

The problem is, I think, you seldom encounter good faith criticism on Twitter. You get kind of reflexive responses. And then when, or if, you do receive an honest, good faith critical response, am I open to it? Or would I automatically discount it?

I seldom engaged with people I disagreed with on Twitter, even the ones I followed. I used to engage with former Jacksonville mayor John Delaney, because I thought he might be a good faith actor on the platform. Mostly he's just interested in preserving his popularity, and conflates criticism with cruelty.

He once accused me of being "mean," which I guess is understandable since he's accustomed to an inordinate degree of deference from occupying the top spot in every org chart he's been a part of since his mid-30s when he was mayor. We're about the same age.

He disagreed, saying he always "welcomed" criticism.

How would he even know? Even a critical subordinate is going to couch their criticism with some degree of deference. And how many never offered criticism because, well, he's John Delaney, Jacksonville's most popular mayor. He can still quote his approval ratings when he left office three decades ago.

Anyway, that's all irrelevant now. But it did make me think that there may be downsides to getting positive feedback as well.

Getting lots of my time back, too. Rode my bike and walked this morning. 84 minutes of exercise. Formerly, Twitter would consume about 40 of those minutes in the morning, as I reflexively trolled for the latest outrage.

Now I've got to get that meditation practice re-started, and try to regain my sense of equanimity to my fellow flawed human beings.

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A Glitch In The Matrix

11:38 Thursday, 18 May 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 84.56°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 190

Okay, having some weirdness here. Marmot Speaks didn't post with weather data. Trying to figure that out, I moved it into and out of the May folder, changed export templates, looked at prototypes. Couldn't figure it out. Couldn't get wx data to appear in the note.

Wrote My Dinner With AI. Weather data appeared. Weird.

Played around with "cutting" Speaks from the outline (copying it to the clipboard) and trying to paste it back into the outline. Somehow managed to screw that up.

Used "Undo" enough to get it back, but now it's not in its proper chronological order. Tried to Revert to a previous version of the document, but that didn't have Dinner With AI.

Tried to view all the attributes via the Attribute Browser to look at those, and got the spinning pinwheel of infinite futility. Force quit.

So, I'm going to quit while I'm behind and re-export this thing and hope for the best. Two posts out of order aren't the end of the world, but I have no idea how that will affect the RSS ingest at micro.blog.

A lot of moving parts here.

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The Demon of Unrest

08:53 Saturday, 18 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 79.02°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 251

I'm reading Erik Larson's latest, The Demon of Unrest. I owe it to a classmate to hurry up and finish it because he's already read it and wants to discuss it.

Alas, I'm a deliberate (slow) reader, and often distracted. I am making progress though. I'm reading it in Apple's Books app, which was probably a mistake. At least with a paper version, I'd have a clearer idea of how far along I am. I'm only about halfway through Part 2, so maybe a quarter? I keep getting distracted by looking up people and words (Larson does seem to enjoy throwing in the occasional archaic term.)

But I love the book, because it's a Larson book. This is a very detailed look at a short period of history, so it's full of fascinating events and people I'd never heard of before.

Because of it, I've started watching Ken Burns' The Civil War again, and I have a really hard time tolerating Shelby Foote this time. And the limitations of Burns' approach are more manifest as well, but it does give me something additional on the subject.

I'm trying to highlight all the passages with dates, hoping to manufacture my own timeline when I'm finished. We'll see how that project goes. It is very frustrating and disappointing that publishers of ebooks don't take advantage of the format to create a timeline as a supplement to the text and the index. It's also unfathomable.

Anyway, highly recommended, as are any of Larson's books.

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Going Broke Saving Money

09:17 Saturday, 18 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.69°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 206

Mountainsmith has a sale on. I ended up buying three bags on clearance. Bags that I don't need, though one of them may become part of my daily walk, which may soon become a walk/run.

I figure that, if nothing else, I can give these to my kids at some point.

My magnet doohickies are supposed to come in today. Looking forward to playing with those.

I removed the Maxpedition logos from a few of my pouches. I'm not a huge fan of logos, and in a couple of instances, these also are sewn to half of the velcro closure on the net pocket on the front of the pouch. I don't care for that velcro, because it actually makes it more difficult to use that pocket. The pouches are usually full enough to keep anything secure, and I really just want to slide something in and out, and not screw around with velcro.

I'm also not a huge fan of the large "patch" area, but it may come in handy for some other purpose. In the customer reviews you find that they are apparently used to express one's political views, or to express some form of violent masculinity or tribal identity. Not my jam.

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Change the World?

08:33 Monday, 18 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.17°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 7.05mph
Words: 659

At yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, something came up about the nature of our present circumstances, and the necessity to "change the world."

In recent years, I've had little cause to reflect much here on "the world" and our role in it. That may seem incongruous, given the number of posts I've written about "the world." But few of those, that I can recall anyway, had anything to do with "our role" in particular.

And we do have a role. It's just not what most people probably think of when they think about it, which is why most people think about "changing the world."

The epiphany that came to me many years ago, grappling with my own "existential crisis," is this:

We are not here to change the world. The world is here that we may learn to change ourselves.

This realization came as a consequence of shedding the illusions of "magical thinking." That external factors were responsible for my suffering or happiness. For much of my first marriage, I was profoundly unhappy. But I would cling to the idea that "it'll get better when..." (Some change of circumstances.)

I learned that "it" never "gets better" until you get better.

We have responsibilities to "the world," but our main responsibility is to ourselves. It's hard to live up to that responsibility if you focus all of your attention outward. This is why I say that Marc Andreeson is a fool when he says that he doesn't "believe" in introspection. Or he's simply declaring his abdication of any responsibility for his own actions. Possibly both.

Much of how we regard technology is also a form of magical thinking. The internet triumphalists, "small pieces, loosely joined," the Cluetrain™ crowd, and all of the folks that have come after them, who believed and believe that "this changes everything" promoted magical thinking for the attention rewards. The prophets of a new "golden age."

Bullshit.

Technology changes how we do things. In general, it compresses them in time and expands them in space. It does not change what we do. Our problems lie in the areas of human behavior. Human nature. What we do. Technology does not alter that.

We recently witnessed the Supreme Court of the United States dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Nullify it. They have legitimized racial gerrymandering to disenfranchise minority voters and to secure the power of white supremacists.

Why? Because laws (a form of technology) can't change the human heart. They can mitigate some of its worst defects, but they can't change it. And when you have a majority of members on the highest court in the land harboring those defects, then the law is meaningless.

Bigotry, hatred and ignorance persist in the world, because the people harboring those toxic, misguided notions have little reason to interrogate them. Our culture hasn't found a way to instill the values of tolerance and understanding that isn't perceived as some form of scolding, or self-righteousness.

Anyway, you may have heard the aphorism, "Become the change you wish to see in the world." It's often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. Because we have the Internet and we're a cynical, skeptical lot, we have a web site devoted to investigating the origin of quotations.

There you will find this quotation from Gandhi, which captures everything if not as succinctly:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

You're not responsible for "the world." You're responsible for yourself. If everyone lived up to their own responsibilities, the world would likely be a much better place.

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