Sunday, November 15, 2015

Study Notes: Oct 25-Nov 15, 2015: "The Ethics of Respect for Nature"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 
Homework for the future:
  • Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
  • Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
  • Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
  • Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
  • Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.
"The Ethics of Respect for Nature"
  • "From the perspective of a life-centered theory, we have prima facie moral obligations that are owed to wild plants and animals themselves as members of the Earth's biotic community. We are morally bound (other things being equal) to protect or promote their good for their sake."
  • "Every organism, species population, and community of life has a good of its own which moral agents can intentionally further or damage by their actions. To say that an entity has a good of its own is simply to say that, without reference to any other entity, it can be benefited or harmed." 
  • "I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires or feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions." 
  • "According to the principle of moral consideration, wild living things are deserving of the concern and consideration of all moral agents simply in virtue of their being members of the Earth's community of life. From the moral point of view their good must be taken into account whenever it is affected for better or worse by the conduct of rational agents."
  • "It may be necessary for such agents to act in ways contrary to the good of this or that organism or group of organisms in order to further the good of others, including the good of humans. But the principle of moral consideration prescribes that, with respect to each being an entity having its own good, every individual is deserving of consideration." You may use life as a means, but not as a means only. The chicken may be farmed, but not forced to live in misery. Or, perhaps better-phrased and more practically in the following maxim: Treat all living things as Beings rather than as Resources. 
  • "The principle of intrinsic value states that, regardless of what kind of entity it is in other respects, if it is a member of the Earth's community of life, the realization of its good is something intrinsically valuable."
  • "Such uniquely human characteristics as rational thought, aesthetic creativity, autonomy and self-determination, and moral freedom, it might be held, have a higher value than the capacities found in other species. Yet we must ask: valuable to whom, and on what grounds?... It is not difficult here to recognize a begging of the question. Humans are claiming human superiority from a strictly human point of view, that is, from a point of view in which the good of humans is taken as the standard of judgment. All we need to do is to look at the capacities of nonhuman animals (or plants, for that matter) from the standpoint of their good to find a contrary judgment of superiority." 
  • "If all living things have a good of their own, it at least makes sense to judge the merits of nonhumans by standards derived from their goods."
  • "Even if humans are composed of an immaterial, unextended soul and a material, extended body, this in itself is not a reason to deem them of greater worth than entities that are only bodies. Why is a soul substance a thing that adds value to its possessor?" 
  • "The conception of individual living things as teleological centers of life simply articulates how a scientifically informed thinker comes to understand them as the result of increasingly careful and detailed observations." 
"The World Is Mad"
  • "I think a formative moment for any rationalist--our 'Uncle Ben shot by the mugger' moment, if you will--is the moment you go 'holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane.'"
  • "I on't think it's an accident that a lot of rationalists are mentally ill. Those of us who are mentally ill learn early and painfully that your brain is constantly lying to you for no reason. I don't think our brains lie to us more than neurotypicals' brains do; but they lie more dramatically, about things society is not set up to accomodate [sic], and so the lesson is drilled in." 
  • "Now, there are basically two ways you can respond to this. First, you can say 'holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. Therefore, if I adopt the radical new policy of not being fucking insane, I can pick up these giant piles of utility everyone is leaving on the ground, and then I win.'... Second, you can say 'holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. However, none of them seem to realize that they're insane. By extension, I am probably insane. I should take careful steps to minimize the damage I do.'... I want to emphasize that these are not mutually exclusive... Trying to minimize the damage from your insanity is, in fact, a strategy for picking up some of that utility on the ground and then winning." 
  • InferentialDistance, commenter: "The world is so complex that any concept short enough to fit into a thesis statement is going to be woefully oversimplified. By setting two contradictory concepts as anchors, one can respond with nuance to myriad situations by switching between concepts as appropriate. It does require a skilled user to pull of, however." 
"Steven Pinker is wrong about the Cuban Missile Crisis"
  • "People who talk about how awful the modern world is are generally just ignoring how much worse the past was. Pinker does a great job showing this with numbers on how violence has, on the whole, declined over the past several thousand years. It's not a straight-line decline. Things sometimes get worse in the short run. But the long term trend is very positive." 
  • Steven Pinker: "Mueller reviewed the history of superpower confrontations during the Cold War and concluded that the sequence was more like climbing a ladder than stepping on to an escalator. Though several times the leaders began a perilous ascent, with each rung they climbed they became increasingly acrophobic, and always sough a way to gingerly step back down." 
  • "Mueller's basic argument is simple: war was unlikely because neither side wanted war and both were working hard to prevent it... Focusing on the top leadership ignores the possibility that the top leadership could have lost control of the situation. More broadly, it ignores the possibility that other people could have been in power when the crisis, or a similar crisis, unfolded.
  • "If Castro and the US joint chiefs of staff had been calling the shots, we easily could have had a nuclear war." 
  • "During the crisis, Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets of a risk of a coup against the President, and Robert Pastor, McNamara's son-in-law, has claimed that the younger Kennedy brother wasn't bluffing--that some of the commanders involved in the crisis had been insubordinate." 
"Disrupting Urban Violence With Arts and Culture"
  • Harold Meyerson: "Like the rest of urban America, the Bronx cannot solve its most fundamental problems on its own." 
  • "The Bronx is not like the rest of urban America. Part of what makes it unique is the fact that it did resolve one of its most fundamental problems on its own. When gang violence reached peak levels in the 1970s, as a symptom of decades of racism and city-government neglect, Bronx youth came together and engineered a citywide gang truce. In December 1971, the gangs at the Hoe Avenue peace meeting decided that instead of fighting each other, they would compete through dance, graffiti, and fashion--a shift that basically midwifed the birth of hip hop culture." 
  • "[Afrika] Bambaataa changed the gang's name [from "Black Spades"] to the Universal Zulu Nation, and its function to preserving hop hop culture, which it still actively does today." 
  • "The 1971 peace summit didn't stop the violence, but it did presage a decades-long trend of violent-crime reduction in the Bronx--a trend that continues today, even though the South Bronx remains the poorest district in the nation... The Bronx is so much safer these days that there are plans to convert a former youth jail there into apartments." 
  • "A similar tale unfolded in New Orleans, where African-American Mardi Gras Indian 'gangs' had a long history of violent collisions. In the 1960s, Big Chief Allison 'Tootie' Montana, head of the Yellow Pocahantas Mardi Gras Indian gang, encouraged the dozens of gangs spread across the city to 'stop fighting with the gun and the knife and start fighting with the needle and thread.' Yes, that meant sewing. Much like what Bambaataa did with the Black Spaces, Montana led his gang, and other gangs, to battle through nonviolent, aesthetic competition. Specifically, Montana began the Indians' cultural shift toward designing elaborate masks and costumes. The tribes' members spend months, sometimes years, creating these ornate outfits, which they wear and display during the city's annual St. Joseph's Day celebration and during Mardi Gras season." 
  • The black Mardi Gras Indian culture dates back to the late 19th century, when the gangs were formed, in part, to defend themselves from the White League, a gang of ex-Confederates in New Orleans who were hell-bent on terrorizing African Americans in the city." 
  • "As CityLabs' Kriston Capps reported in August, a council of Mardi Gras Indian leaders recently secured a $500,000 grant to build a cultural campus where people can learn the history and see how costumes are sewn." 
  • "Meyerson was correct in pointing out in his American Prospect article that communities mired in poverty and crime need government intervention and investment to help raise them out of economic misery. The Bronx and New Orleans have demonstrated that its residents can organically develop armistice while enhancing quality of life for everyone at the same time." 
"Strange but True"
  • "A small but growing number... [are] element collectors--enabled by the vast marketplace of the Internet..."
  • "Elements-seller Dave Hamric of Metallium, Inc., says he has about 2,000 names on his mailing list. Using the periodic table as a shopping list, they gather elements used either in technical applications or compounds mixed with other elements or in nearly pure form, amassing collections that can be beautiful, instructive and representative of the fundamental components of our universe." 
  • "Some collectors still acquire a few specimens for the collection the old-fashioned way. They pull tungsten filaments from lightbulbs, cannibalize silicon chips, find sulfur compounds in pharmacies, chip magnesium from campfire starters, and buy neodymium magnets. Or, like Heather Harrison, a mechanical engineer in Salt Lake City, they extract radioactive americium from smoke detectors." 
  • "Harrison is a collector of old recordings, wine, and antiques... She began seriously acquiring elements three years ago and is currently about 15 specimens short of making her collection as complete as it can get...Harrison keeps her mercury, which is toxic, in a bottle cradled in foam and sealed in an airtight case. Her specimens of rubidium and cesium would ignite or explode with exposure to air, so she purchased them entombed within study acrylic blocks, Many easily available elements such as sodium and fluoride are dangerous if touched, inhaled or allowed to combine with others." 
  • Heather Harrison: "If I talk to people who are not scientifically inclined or are afraid of science, I might not want to say anything about it. They might get the idea that I'm a mad scientist who cares nothing about safety. I may be a mad scientist, but I'm far too safety conscious to be a real mad scientist." 
  • A list of elements that can be found at the store: Theodoregray,com/periodictable/elements/walmart/index.html
Let Me Tell Y'all A Little Bit About the Mohists..."

  • "Most of Chinese philosophy's core strains come from a time called the Warring States period, which lasted for about two hundred fifty years and started about 2,500 years ago... Basically the Western Zhou, the dynasty which sort of ruled a decent chunk of the land we now call China, split into hundreds of tiny city-states, and they all slammed against one another at high velocity until they glommed into eight larger kingdoms that then, well, warred." 
  • "Everyone was warring with everyone all the time, and life sucked. And since everyone was warring with everyone all the time, and life sucked, people started asking: why does life suck so much? Does it have to? Could we stop life from sucking? So they became philosophers."
  • "While we don't tend to think of this way, philosophy is a technology--philosophers develop new modes of thinking, new ways of organizing the state, new ethical principles, and so on. Wartime encourages rulers to invest in Research and Development. So in the Warring States period, a lot of philosophers found work in local courts, as a sort of mental R&D department. Scoff if you want, but this approach worked... The Legalists, who (massive oversimplification here) you wouldn't be far from the truth in calling 'Evil Daoists,' formed the bureaucratic and ideological tech that let Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor (sort of), field armies of one million (that's million) soldiers two hundred seventy years before Christ." 
  • "Warring States philosophy uses a range of argumentative strategies, some of which don't look like argument at all in the strict rhetorical-logical sense you'll see in Western philosophy. For example: Zhuangzi's philosophy relies on storytelling, wordplay, and paradox. You want Zhuangzi to set down and define his terms? He'll laugh in your face, because (a) your terms are linguistic artifacts without any inherent access or correspondence to truth, which, what is that anyway, and (b) he's really drunk right now, come back tomorrow... Discussion of the Analects [by Confucius] feels a lot like discussion of a gospel passage sometimes: here's a story told to a specific person in a specific situation. Who was that person? What was that situation? What can we learn from them?" 
  • Mo Di / Mozi "taught a philosophy of Universal Love, as in, Love everyone [caps sic] in the Universe Equally. He justified the need for this love to be Universal with logic which I'd be hard-pressed to reconstruct off the top of my head, but goes something like this: 
    • "1. Violence and war spring from partiality (liking My Team more than Your Team)
    • "2. There's no division in kind between small partiality and large partiality--and small partiality can become large partiality under sufficient force, or for no reason at all (e.g. the Prison Experiment)
    • "3. So the big problem appears to be partiality of any sort.
    • "4. In order to achieve universal peace, we must eliminate partiality.
    • "5. So, we must all love one another or die. (w/ apologies to Auden)"
  • "Mozi was a debating rock star. He was the KRS-One of philosophy debates in his day, because he'd use his propositional logic to codify his opponent's position, then break it to pieces. People refused to debate him after a while. That's cool, but that's not why he's the best. See, there's a problem with believing in Universal Love and Peace during, ah, the Warring States Period. Do you see it yet? It has to do with the name. It's hard to love someone when you're fighting them, so Mozi wanted fighting to stop... But how do you stop war?... Mozi's answer: you make war impossible."
  • "How do you do that? If you're Mozi: 
    • "You train your legions of devoted followers into experts in defensive siege warfare.
    • "You study the military technology of your day and figure out how to defeat each weapon--and then you teach your followers.
    • "You teach them how to detect people tunneling under city walls.
    • "You teach them how to respond to a zergling rush. (An 'ant rush' in the literature, but, same, basic deal.)
    • "You teach them how to see through misleading formations.
    • "You teach them how to detect spies.
    • "You teach them how to read an army from its smoke and dust."
  • "Once your followers are trained, you send them to any city under attack, gratis. City A attacks City B? Send your followers to City B. When City B counterattacks City A next season? You send your followers to City A." 
  • "So basically--Universal love. Gnomic pronouncements. Badass army-defying antics. Mozi founded the Jedi Knights. Hence: Best philosopher." 
"The Galileo affair"
  • "Heliocentrism was not discovered by Galilei. It was first proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus almost 100 years before Galilei. Copernicus didn't have any affairs with the Inquisition. His theories didn't gain wide acceptance, but he and his followers weren't persecuted either." 
  • "Galileo was only sentenced to house arrest, and mostly because of insulting the pope and doing other unwise things. The political climate in 17th century Italy was quite messy, and Galilei did quite a few unfortunate choices regarding his alliances. Actually, Galilei was the one who brought religion into the debate: his opponents were citing Aristotle, not the Bible in their arguments. Galilei, however, wanted to redefine the Scripture based on his (unproven) beliefs, and insisted that he should have the authority to push his own views about how people interpret the Bible." 
  • "For a long time Galilei was a good friend of the pope, while holding heliocentric views. So were a couple of other astronomers. The heliocentrism-geocentrism debates were common among astronomers of the day, and were not hindered, but even encouraged by the pope." 
  • "The Church didn't suppress science, but actually funded the research of most scientists." 
  • "The defenders of geocentrism didn't use the Bible as a basis for their claims. They used Aristotle and, for the time being, good scientific reasoning. The heliocentrists were much more prone to use the 'God did it' argument when they couldn't defend the gaps in their proofs." 
  • "This new theory (heliocentrism) had a lot of issues, because while it could explain the looping motions of the planets, there were a lot of things which it either couldn't explain, or the geocentric model could explain it much better." 
    • "Gravity. Why do the objects have weight, and why are they all pulled towards the center of the Earth? Why don't objects fall of the Earth on the other side of the planet? Remember, Newton wasn't even born yet! The geocentric view had a very simple explanation, dating back to Aristotle: it is the nature of all objects that they strive toward the center of the world, and the center of the spherical Earth is the center of the world. The heliocentric theory couldn't counter this argument." 
    • "Stellar parallax. If the Earth is not stationary, then the relative position of the stars should change as the Earth orbits the Sun. No such change was observable by the instruments of that time. Only in the first half of the 19th century did we succeed in measuring it, and only then was the movement of the Earth around the Sun finally proven."
    • Galilei tried to use the tides as a proof. The geocentrists argued that the tides are caused by the Moon even if they didn't knew [sic] by what mechanisms, but Galilei said that it's just a coincidence, and the tides are not caused by the Moon: just as if we put a barrel of water onto a cart, the water would be still if the cart was stationary and the water would be sloshing around if the cart was pulled by a horse, so are the tides sloshing around as the Earth moves." 
  • "The most interesting author in this topic was Riccioli. If you study his writings you will get definite proof that the heliocentrism-geocentrism debate was handled with scientist accuracy and rationality, and it was not a religious debate at all. He defended geocentrism, and presented 126 arguments in the topic (49 for heliocentrism, 77 against), and only two of them (both for heliocentrism) had any religious connotations, and he stated valid responses against both of them. This means that he, as a rationalist, presented both sides of the debate in a neutral way, and used reasoning instead of appeal to authority or faith in all cases... Galilei instead wrote a book where he caricatured the pope as a strawman, and instead of presenting arguments for and against both world-views in a neutral way, he wrote a book which can be called anything but scientific." 
  • Jonathan_Lee, commenter: "tl;dr The side of rationalist during Galileo's time would be to recognise one's confusion and recognise that the models did not yet cash out in terms of a difference in expected experiences... The initial heliocentric models weren't more accurate by virtue of being heliocentric; they were better by virtue of having had their parameters updated with an additional 400 years of observational data over the previous best-fit model (the Alfonsine tables from the 1250s)."
  • Jonathan_Lee, regarding the telescope: "Galileo is using a device which distorts his vision and which can only be tested on terrestrial objects and claiming to use it to find out stuff about the heavens, which contemporary physics says is grossly different [formed of aether]. Every natural philosopher who's read Aristotle recognises that this kind of procedure hasn't historically been useful... What Galileo does not have is a coherent alternative package of physics and cosmology... [Among other things] He doesn't have action at a distance, so he can't explain why the planets do their thing (whereas there are physical models of Aristotelian / Ptolemaic models)." 
  • Jonathan_Lee: "Riccioli is writing 20 years later, in an environment where heliocentrism has become a definite thing with political and religious connotations, associated to neo-Platonism, anti-Aristotelian, anti-Papal thinking."
  • Jonathan_Lee, saying more about the telescope: "Noone [sic] else ould see the moons [during a 1610 'star party'] and additionally the telescope produced doubled images of everything more distant than the moon. There wasn't much dispute about terrestrial applications. Under Aristotle's physics everything above the moon is made of different stuff with different physics anyway, so any amount of accuracy when looking at stuff of the four elements doesn't allow one to induct to accuracy in observations of the heavens." 
  • Jonathan_Lee: "Astronomy and epistemology aren't quite the same. Predicting where Saturn would be on a given date requires accurate observation, and nobody objected to Coperniucus [sic] as a calculational tool."
  • Douglas_Knight mentions that the Bible was also used by the Catholic Church. "Most of them did not consider the Bible infallible on temporal matters, but they did consider it powerful evidence, starting with Martin Luther, who condemned Copernicus by citing Joshua's miracle of stopping the motion of the sun across the sky... Copernicus didn't run into trouble because the Catholic Church was secure. He died before the Counter-Reformation." 
  • Douglas_Knight also points out that the Inquisition "is not just Riccioli!"
  • Douglas_Knight: "Galileo's greatest contribution was Galilean relativity, arguments about why we would not notice the rotation of hundreds of meters per second." 
  • Douglas_Knight: "You could take the position that only Venus and Mercury went around the sun. This was occasionally put forward in both Antiquity and the Renaissance." 
"Vegetarianism for Meat-Eaters"
  • "Eat Beef, Not Chicken... Suppose I get about a third of my daily calorie requirement from meat; that adds up to 250,000 calories of meat a year. Further suppose that it's split evenly between 125,000 calories of beef and 125,000 calories of chicken. The average cow is very big and makes 405,000 calories of beef; the average chicken is very small and makes 3000 calories of chicken. So each year, I kill about 0.3 cows and 42 chickens, for a total of 42.3 animals killed. Suppose that I stop eating chicken and switch entirely to beef. Now I am killing about 0.6 cows and 0 chickens, for a total of 0.6 animals killed. By this step alone, I have decreased the number of animals I am killing from 42.3/year to 0.6/year, a 98% improvement."
  • "The difference becomes even bigger once you compare levels of suffering. Chickens are probably the most miserable farm animals; they are mutilated, packed into tiny cages to the point of immobility, left to fester in their own waste, and bred so intensively for size that their bodies cannot support them and they likely experience severe musculoskeletal pain. Although cows' lives are also pretty terrible too, Brian Tomasik estimates that chickens' suffering is about twice as bad. Taking this into account, switching from 50-50 to all-beef reduces your contribution to animal suffering as much as 99%." 
  • "From a consequentialist point of view, 'is it okay to cause a good thing to happen even if...' always gets answered yes. Do you save the animals? Yes? Then what's the problem? The true consequentialist doesn't even understand the question." 
  • "Some evidence supports asking meat-eaters to cut down on meat as the most effective form of animal outreach." 
  • "I use the term 'kill' because it's a simple way of looking at things, but most of the moral cost of eating meat is causing the animals to spend years living in terrible suffering on factory farms. The actual killing is probably a mercy in comparison." 
  • "Someone who eats one egg with breakfast every day kills about one chicken a year; somebody who has a chicken dinner every other night kills about forty chickens a year. Although egg chickens probably lead worse lives than meat chickens, the difference isn't overwhelming. Avoiding incidental egg consumption like the eggs in baked goods is hard and probably not the highest-value pro-animal intervention given the low number of eggs involved." 
  • "This analysis neglects consideration of whether cows, being bigger-brained and more 'evolutionarily advanced' than chickens or fish, might have greater moral value. I don't know how to deal with that question, except that it would surprise me if they had more than forty times the moral value." 
  • In the comments: "I don't think creating normal lives counterbalances suffering lives." 
"NaNoWriMo Pep Talk"
  • "The novel is a big thing, a meaty thing, all the meatier if you're holding an epic fantasy or a literary magnum opus or pretty much anything by Neal Stephenson. It is big and it contains multitudes because at the end of the day, a novel is a bit like a machine. A machine is a working apparatus comprising several interlocking and often moving parts who work together with power applies [sic?] to accomplish a single goal. That is a novel. A novel is a narrative apparatus. It contains many moving parts: characters, plot, theme, words, sentences, ideas. These parts do not exist separately but operate together in order to tell a story and, ideally, make you feel stuff and think things. You power the novel with your own attention. Eyes scanning paragraphs. Fingers turning or swiping pages. Your mind drawing the story forward with desire. The novel is a machine, and a machine is meant to be meticulous in its design." 
  • "You know, though, I'm gonna call bullshit on that. Because really, a novel isn't like a machine at all. A machine is meant to perform a singular task and it is meant to perform it that way for most of the people who use it according to its design. A novel ain't that. A novel is a big, messy thing. It is a tangle of ideas. It is a subjective expression where the experience of one reader will [be] different from the next. It's a meth-addled Escher print. No, a novel is not a machine. A novel is a creatutre." 
  • "Striving for perfection is a fool's game. You can never get there, and frankly, you don't really even want it... As was said in Glengarry Glen Ross: fuck the machine. Fuck perfection." 
  • "Embrace chaos. Break the machine. Make some art."
"THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED."
  • "There was a very strange book written sometime in the late seventies by the science fiction writer Philip K Dick. It's called Valis, and it really is the oddest, most exasperating book I've ever read. On the one hand it is clearly autobiographical, containing details about Dick's own life, his failed marriage and his nervous breakdown, [and] on the other there are fantastical elements in it which might be describing something that had actually happened but might just easily be science fiction conceits." 
  • "He repeats over and over again throughout the book, always in bold, always in capital letters. THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED - he says, like that - THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED. He's talking about the Roman Empire." 
  • "In some form or another, the Roman Empire has continued to flourish, long after its apparent demise, taking on various disguises. In fact, he says, the time between the era of the early Christians in their on-going spiritual war with the Roman Empire and now--the time he was writing in, the late seventies--is false time. That era and this era are beginning to coalesce. These are--the times we are living in now--literally apostolic times." 
  • "It may not be literally true, but psychologically, spiritually, economically, militarily, you might say, THE EMPIRE really has NEVER ENDED. Or if it ever went away for a time, it has certainly returned with a vengeance." 
  • "The Empire is a psychological as well as a military state. It exists as a mental construct, as a psychopathic state of mind, as a system of control. It exists in all of us. All of us are infected with this thought-form virus. It's no use hating George W Bush, as the world's most prominent psychopath. In his position we would do exactly the same." 
  • "A psychopath is someone who thinks of everyone else as an object, a mere source of gratification. Not every psychopath is a killer. Most psychopathologies are controlled in a state of peace, since the first concern of the psychopath isto blend in. But in the state of war the psychopath is unleashed on the world... War is the psychopath's playground. Now all the rules are dispensed with. Now every human is an object of sensory gratification. Now power rules." 
  • "This has always been the case in a state of war. It's either self-gratification or self-sacrifice. The worst and the best."
  • Joseph Schumpeter, The Sociology of Imperialisms: "There was no corner of the known world were some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest--why, then it was national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs." 
  • "The other thing about the Romans is that they regarded all other nations as barbarians. Civilisation was the unique preserve of the Roman State and Roman society." 
  • "The empire that Philip K Dick is talking about is currently the preserve of the American state. Previously it was the preserve of the British state. Take a look at those borders, with their straight lines and their squiggles. The Iraqis didn't draw them. The Americans didn't draw them. The British did." 
  • "They invented the 24 hour day, the sixty minute hour, the sixty second minute. In a very real sense we still live within Iraqi time. They invented the seven day week." 
  • "Would the Iraqi Insurgency be blowing up Indonesians and Jordanians? Or Syrians and Iranians? Of course not. But then again, the idea that Iraq could be overseen by Syrian and Iranian forces is unpalatable to the oil lobby currently in control of the US government. Also, given the high degree of technical expertise in Iraq, who should rebuild Iraq but the Iraqis?" 
  • "All of this is done through the agency of the state for the profit of those who control the state apparatus. Capitalism is just a euphemism. It's a cover story. This is not a capitalist system. The capitalist system died sometime in the 19th century during the South Sea bubble. All that guff about 'enterprise' and 'risk-takers'. These people take no risks. They live in state-sponsored luxury. This is not a capitalist system, it is an imperialist system, the only difference being that instead of a single emperor you have a whole class of emperors who share the spoils out between them." 
  • Pgrundy, commenting: "There is a political dimension to the teachings of Jesus, and I see it as very close to what you describe in Dick's book. The Empire never ended, it never does end; in fact it repeats itself cyclically over and over throughout time, as does the whole drama of the birth of Jesus and his death at the hands of the Empire and subsequent resurrection in the hearts of survivors." 

"NaNoWriMO Survival Guide"

  • "I give the appropriate quantity of fucks. Meaning, I do not overfuck, but I do not underfuck, either. I do not care so much that I feel all the weight and pressure of the world pinning me between the shoulders, but I care enough to actually, y'kknow, do the work to the best of my ability." 
  • "I do not edit as I go." 
  • "I do one reading pass of the previous day's work--and here I'll allow myself minor tweaks." 
  • "When I end one day of writing, I write a few notes--a few words to a few sentences--that give me a clue as to what I need to write tomorrow. So, I open the file and there are some vague stage directions to get me going." 
  • "I let the characters lead the way. When I doubt, I ask what do they want in this scene, what do they want overall, and what is most important? I let them run with it. And this usually runs them into other characters who are either competing for the same thing or who want opposing things. Characters have problems. They use the fiction to confront those problems (often poorly). This is the engine of storytelling. Seize it, let it guide you. Do not let 'plot' dominate this core character-driven component." Consider building a story by assembling a cast of characters and simply letting them plot and plot. 
  • "I also like to let characters just talk. I'd say about half the time I keep it. And the other half of the time, just letting them talk still lets me know something about the characters." 
  • "I make sure I'm having fun when I'm writing. If I'm not enjoying a scene, or worse, I'm bored writing it, something is wrong. If I'm bored, you'll be bored... When I'm writing a scene or a chapter I also think very hard about if I'm giving you a reason to drop out. If I am, I try to reverse that trend and course correct then and there."
  • "When in doubt, seek danger... Seek danger that's physical, but also that's emotional, spiritual, emotional, social. Fiction is often an act of taking your plane and flying it right at the ground. Sometimes you pull up at the last minute. Sometimes you crash the thing and the story becomes what happens after the crash. But it's never about a few safe stunts."
  • "I try to always second-guess the reader. Every scene I try to guess where you think I'd go, then I try to do differently. Or, in rare cases, do the same just to keep you on your widdle toes." 
  • "I endeavor to write five days a week, and then don't write on weekends. I need that break. Every day that I do write, I write regardless of how I'm feeling--I write through illness, anxiety, life trouble. This is not saying you need to do that. (What did I tell you about comparing yourself?) You have to find your own pace." 
  • "Routines are valuable." 
  • "I post notes around my monitor or my desk. Little things--questions, plot points, plot holes. things of which I want to remain mindful." 
  • "I also jot notes at the beginning about my characters--never more than 100 words, and sometimes enough to fit on a smattering of Post-It notes. I write the things about them that I think are most important. These are usually character traits--even writing down three significant traits ('OBSTINATE, INCONTINENT SEX MACHINE') gives you something to keep in mind as you write that character." 
  • "I do not read the same type of thing that I am presently writing. It crosses too many wires, and the signal starts to bleed. Ideally, I read non-fiction. But key thing here is that while writing, I am also reading. Reading is a vital, revivifying act. Writing without reading is like running without food. Eventually, you're running on empty." 
  • "I ask myself, 'Is this making sense?' If not, I course correct." 
  • "My writing life is not a sprint but a marathon. I'm running a long con here." 
  • "Don't think about publishing, don't think about finishing, don't think about next week. Think about yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that's it." 
  • "Repeat after me: 'I am my own Muse.'"
  • "When in doubt, escalate." 
  • "I'm always comfortable with writing badly. Because that's why WRITING JESUS invented that thing called 'editing.' Thank you, Writing Jesus. Thank you." 
  • "If I'm stuck, I babble on the page until I am unstuck. Sometimes I blow things up."
  • "I am vigilant about protecting my time and my space for writing. This is my TERRITORIAL BUBBLE and none shall puncture it lest one be shanked by a broken coffee mug." 
  • "I write for me, not for you. I am my first audience. You can come later." 
"How to Write a Novel in 30 Days"
  • "Because I am incredibly lazy, it is very easy to convince me not to work, since I don't want to work anyway." 
  • "What my brain learned was not what it should have learned, namely that this sort of thing [procrastination and waiting until the last minute] is about as risky and dumb as huffing whipped cream canisters. My brain learned that there was no deadline it couldn't meet. This is a dangerous thing for a brain to know, and I recommend failure to meet deadlines to everyone."
  • "The key, really, is to never learn you can fail." 
  • "I really enjoyed timed writing--with deadline from without (editor) or within (online project, personal goal, etc). I think it's because I enjoy obstructions. Things created within boundaries, where the boundaries become part of the object, creativity fueled by restriction." 
  • "For 30 days, you are a genius. Everything that flows from your fingers is pure light. You do not have the luxury of not being a genius--not being a genius is laziness and sloth and you just can't tolerate that shit right now." 
  • "Make sure everyone knows what you're doing. This will provide the heady ingredient of shame to the proceedings, and I find that shame is an enormous motivator." 
  • "It's also important that your partner and social group knows not to expect you to be anything like human for the next month." 
  • "I rather think that no technique is better suited to beatnik-pomo-style crazy writing than this--let go of your internal editor, of the ways writing is 'supposed' to be (hint: it's not supposed to be done in 30 days), any ideas your English professors might have given you about literature, and just open your brain onto the computer." 
  • "Remember, this is blind faith we're talking about. You are St. Theresa, and you are here to be transfigured. This is radical, revolutionary trust that what you are creating is worth the world." 
  • "You don't have time to fail. You don't have time for writer's block. You don't have time to wibble. And if you don't fail this time, you'll never learn that you can fail, and every time you don't fail, your faith in your ability to not fail will grow until one day you'll wake up and you won't be a failure at all. It's kind of awesome, if you can manage it. But the key is not failing, and the key to not failing is stupid dumbfuck faith that you won't fail. Life is circular like that." 
  • "The reason I don't credit Nanowrimo is not because I don't think quality can be produced in 30 days. That would be a silly opinion, considering. It's because they don't think quality can be produced in 30 days. Their whole site is about producing crap and having it be okay to produce crap. It is okay. But I don't have time to produce crap. Life is too short to produce crap. And the only way I know how to do this is to be absolutely convinced that what I'm writing is gobstoppingly amazing. And I can only maintain that sort of conviction for short bursts. Say, 30 days." Find a story where you don't mind just writing and making a novel where you don't know what's going to happen in the next chapter, maybe even the next page." 
"Predator Novel Process"
  • "I've now written about thirty thousand words of the rough draft, some of it still in longhand, and I've been working from an outline the whole time. It's a very crude outline, in that I took the description in the synopsis and slotted it into a series of chapters, which are alternating points-of-view of four characters, with the Predator point-of-view as the wildcard, popping up whenever it makes sense." 
  • "The first parts of the outline and the last parts are the most detailed." 
  • "Yes, I know what I'm going to write about in terms of what's going to happen. However, I am finding I can give more thought to how and why things happen because I've already got this outline in place. In a sense, it is making me focus more in on scene, and how the scenes fit together, and in the process, it is changing my thoughts and theories about how to put a novel together." 
  • "Oddly, this experience is making me think more about the character motivation on the micro level, which may be creating more character variation. Plotwise, it's great inasmuch as I find myself thinking even more heavily than before about the character interactions, which is, after all, plot. I'm also finding dialogue easier." 
  • "As a result, I am averaging six to seven thousand words every morning that I have a chance to work on the Predator novel. This is three to four thousand words more than what I usually do when I'm on a roll. It's not a matter of speed in getting words down on paper so much as I'm not taking the mental toll I usually do when I have to concentrate so heavily not just on why/how things are happening but actually what is going to happen." 
"Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth"
  • "As the old saying goes, 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth'. But as the other old saying goes, 'I know some Trojans who would be a lot happier if they had.'"
  • "When I or any other normal-person random blogger complain about the social justice movement, we tend to worry about points like the following...:
    • "The level of social-justice-inspired bullying online and offline that can drive people to suicide for even slightly disagreeing with social justice orthodoxy.
    • "The chilling effect on research when science is subordinated to political ideology, and how researchers whose results contradict social justice orthodoxy can expect to be ignored at best and subject to death threats and harassment campaigns at worst.
    • "The trivialization of and hostile response to anybody who claims to be suffering in a way that doesn't fit the social-justice narrative, and opposition to attempts to alleviate such suffering.
    • "The use of social justice as a bludgeon by which sophisticated elites from top colleges can condemn all subcultures except their sophisticated elite subculture as being problematic, and credibly demand that they subordinate themselves to the sophisticated elites as penance.
    • "The conflation of the vitally important will toward political reform with the most trivial pop culture clickbait, so that instead of worrying about inequality and technological stagnation our brightest minds are discussing whether the latest Sex and the City episode contributes to structural oppression, or if people's Halloween costumes are okay or not." 
  • "Meanwhile, when important public figures and nationally circulating magazines complain about the social justice movement, they tend to worry more about points like... [trigger warnings at college]... These seem like different agendas. The only thing that elite SJ-criticism is really willing to take on is trigger warnings, which happen to be one of the pieces of social justice I really like and have defended at length."
  • "Notice that most of those elite mass-media SJ-critical articles above were written by college professors. Most of their complaints are about social justice movements on campus, even though anybody who's been off a campus knows there are some pretty scary social justice movements on this side of the walls too. And the story about the Halloween costumes happened at Yale. Hmmmmmm. I worry that the media, especially the online thinkpiece media, overrepresents an insular demographic of Ivy League academics and friends of Ivy League academics who are bad at worrying about things that don't affect them personally." 
  • "It's like the police beating up city council members with the truncheons they usually reserve for poor ghetto-dwellers; you can bet there will be a newfound concern about police brutality at city council meetings." 
  • "Any general knows that you want to hold the high ground, and it really really shouldn't be hard to hold the high ground against the sorts of people who continue to defend bullying someone to suicide because they drew a cartoon character differently than other people. Yet the elite professorial wing of SJ-criticism seems hell-bent on trying, ignoring the important issues where real people are suffering to re-focus the debate around 'Well, your triggers are dumb and you shouldn't get to feel safe anyway.'"
  • "I think this might be a wake-up call to worry about the role of academia in media more generally. A friend on Tumblr pointed out that Hillary Clinton's official list of campaign priorities include[s] 'ending sexual assault on campus'? [punc. sic] Why not just 'ending sexual assault'? Studies find that women are less likely to be assaulted on college campuses than off them. Isn't 'ending sexual assault on campus' the same kind of priority as 'ending murder in gated communities?' Every murder is a tragedy, and murders in gated communities are no exception. But wouldn't it reveal a lot about who mattered in a society if 'end murder in gated communities' was how they framed their anti-murder initiatives?"
Miscellany
  • Max Fisher, "How World War III became possible": "Europe today looks disturbingly similar to the Europe of just over 100 years ago, on the eve of World War I. It is a tangle of military commitments and defense pledges, some of them unclear and thus easier to trigger. Its leaders have given vague signals for what would and would not lead to war. Its political tensions have become military buildups."
  • Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard University's school of government: "Russia seems doomed to continue its decline--an outcome that should be no cause for celebration in the West. States in decline--think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1924--tend to become less risk-averse and thus more dangerous." 
  • Scott Alexander, "Links 10/15: Bride of Linkenstein": "Japan's Yakuza are famous for... well, many things, but one of them is having great trick-or-treating on Halloween. To the dismay of children everywhere, this year they have announced suspension of their operations due to an especially big turf war." 
  • Linda Nelson: "Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast." 
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." 
  • Jane Smiley: "Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist." 
  • Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: "So take a significant question you never hear asked despite this supposed 'Drug War' which has been going on for years and years: how many bankers and chemical corporation executives are in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses?... Or why not ask another question--how many U.S. chemical corporation executives are in jail? Well, in the 1980s, the C.I.A. was asked to do a study on chemical exports to Latin America, and what they estimated was that more than 90 percent of them are not being used for industrial production at all--and if you look at the kinds of chemicals they are, it's obvious that what they're really used for is drug production. Okay, how many chemical corporation executives are in jail in the United States? Again, none--because social policy is not directed against the rich, it's directed against the poor." Link to longer quote and footnotes, but check below too.
  • Nicholas C. McBride, 'Bill would regulate chemical exports": "A report obtained from the Central Intelligence Agency says that since 1983, there has been a sharp increase in Latin American imports of chemicals used to manufacture illegal drugs, among other purposes. It concludes that the imports far exceed those necessary for legitimate uses. Most of the chemicals are produced in the U.S.... 'Ninety-five percent of the chemicals necessary to manufacture cocaine in Latin America originate in the United States,' says Gene R. Haislip, a deputy assistant administrator for the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration. [ellipsis original]"
  • Scott Alexander, "Alinkxander Hamilton": "The new startup trying to sell celebrity meat may or may not be serious, but now that they mention it it's an obvious corollary of vat-grown meat technology and it's sure to happen eventually. Weird." 
  • Laurence J. Peter: "Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you hear it." 
  • Wes Anderson: "It is an extremely common mistake. People think the writer's imagination is always at work, that he's constantly inventing an endless supply of incidents and episodes, that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin air. In point of fact, the opposite is true. Once the public knows you're a writer, they bring the characters and events to you, and as long as you maintain your ability to look and to carefully listen, these stories will continue to seek you out over your lifetime." 
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)