Category: blog
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For Winter, Respect. For Summer, Contempt.
It is summer, which is a bad thing, I await the change of seasons, but things are not as simple as they once were.
There was a time when winter didn’t bother me in the least. Not only am I an introvert, and therefore already inclined to spend my time indoors, and therefore unhampered by the inability to engage in outdoor activities, but I also have a powerful aversion to heat and humidity.
This aversion is related to my distaste for doing things outside. In fact, it’s kind of a result of that distaste, and also an augmenting factor. Okay, it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
Let me try and sum this up briefly. I am and always have been extremely poor at sports and other physical games. Even lighthearted attempts at participation in these activities almost inevitably ends in intense feelings of humiliation, shame, self-loathing, and utter alienation. They make me feel as though I belong to an entirely separate and wholly unwanted species of semi-ape. This is on top of the physical discomfort: I am quickly exhausted, and my lack of skill and coordination are exacerbated by my psychological and emotional struggles, which cause me to perform even worse than I already would.
The outside also exposes one to the sun, which has never been friendly to me. I sunburn very easily, very quickly, and I find the application of sunblock fairly gross, so I don’t put it on every time I ought to.
This physical discomfort abetted by the sun leads to sweating. Now, some people like to sweat. it tells them and those around them that, hey, I am really playing hard here. This is not how it works for me. I find sweat, first off, simply icky. Of course, it also smells. There is no scenario in which I feel like a salty, oozy wetness seeping from my pores is favorable.
But in addition, the appearance of being sweaty is something about which I have become hyper-aware. This goes all the way back to gym class in middle and high school (doesn’t everything?), where the other boys, seeing me sweat in the pathetic performance of gym activities, would mock 1) how quickly I would break said sweat, and 2) the quantity of sweat I would produce, when they, so they’d boast, would have yet to do so. At the same time, I was also often ridiculed for my hair: I had no idea how to style or keep up hair in a way acceptable to late-80s/early-90s teenage America — indeed, I didn’t know how to keep it at all. My hair was often overly long, unruly, and mangled, despite my poor attempts to mitigate the problem. Add what sweat can do to even nicely-kept hair, and the problem is multiplied many times over.
So among the arsenal of weapons my very existence in gym class already provided to my tormentors, my sweat would serve as a physical, visible sign of my ineptitude, my awkwardness, my quasi-speciation. Things were already terrible. Heat, the outdoors, the sun, made it all much worse.
So, winter. Frustrating to many, particularly in my adopted home of Maine, for the unforgivingly low temperatures and frequent snowfall that keep regular Americans from enjoying the outside world over which God has given them dominion. (Hey God, if you’ve given us domain over all this shit, why do you make it so freaking cold that we can’t enjoy it?!?!) Not so for me. You can have your outdoors, I will enjoy the sight of the falling snowflakes and the accumulation of white over everything, happily barring us from vigorous activity, wonderfully sucking the heat from the air.
The cold is a state of cosmic neutrality, in a way. Though life requires sunlight and heat, the universe is a cold place. Heat is an exception to the rule, an anomaly that mostly secrets itself within stars and those objects within their orbits. Life may want heat, but Everything Else tends to cold.
Is it tougher to, say, drive to the store because of snow? That’s okay. I’ll go slowly, or I’ll wait it out. I work from home these days, but even if I didn’t, well, did the snow make me late for work? How awful. So bring on the winter! From my heated-to-comfort home, I will pass the season unbothered, barely aware.
Or so it once was.
Today, I am a father of two small, wonderful children, now aged 1 and 3 1/2. These two children require transport to daycare every weekday. They require transport to activities and doctors. Have you ever tried wrangling two struggling, grouchy small children into a car, while trudging through two feet of snow in the bitter cold? Also, these children require amusement at an incredible rate, and unlike their daddy, they are not satisfied by remaining indoors, even in the heat, even in the cold. No longer burdened by gym class or other obligations to outdoor activities for myself, my kids must play. The boy must run and yell and throw, the girl must crawl and explore and toddle. They can’t do that exclusively indoors.
In the summer, this is not a happy state of affairs by any means, for as much as they may enjoy galavanting in the sun, I am as miserable under its oppressive radiation as ever. I suffer for their delight. Fine.
But in the winter, when the temperature is too low or the ground is deluged with impassible mounds of snowfall, I can’t even do that much for them. Apart from brief stints climbing about the snow and slush for the boy, the winter forces us all indoors, which makes for stir-crazy, cranky kids. Stir-crazy, cranky kids makes for a raw-nerved daddy. (And mommy.) Mitigating my children’s discontent is now a greater priority than mitigating my sports-and-heat-related humiliations. Winter, in Maine at least, has become an enemy of my middle adulthood.
“Enemy” is too strong. Let’s say “respected adversary.”
Winter has another benefit I have as yet not mentioned. Really, this is more of an appreciation of its true power, which is exemplified by its keeping me and everyone else from being pummeled by the sun and humidity.
Winter’s true power, what makes it beautiful to me, is its place as a great pause button on the ecosystem around us. Apart from heat, humidity, and sun, I am also at odds with much of the rest of the natural world. Insects invade my home, violate my person, and attempt to feast on the blood of me and mine. Summer rains drench the ground and soil, bringing mud and a sickly haze. Moisture in the air makes the wood in my house sticky, leaves a film of condensation on bathroom fixtures and metal. Sun not only overheats my home, but blazes through windows causing glare on my prized electronic screens. Summer brings about a slime of life that I would do without.
Winter, a force of nature itself, puts a damper on, and often kills or makes dormant, the rest of nature. It is a respite from the summer miasma, which I so badly crave. It is necessary death so that life can start over.
So I will handle my kids. Winter is not the utter joy it once was, but it is still wanted. When it comes, though I will brace for new difficulties, it will also have my welcome.
Summer, meanwhile, can bite me. And so it does.
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Threats, Trade-offs, and a Tinderbox
Pratap Bhanu Mehta at the Financial Times compares American perceptions of threat and the liberty-security balance, which leads me to contemplate an unpleasant state of affairs coming our way. Mehta says:
How do societies draw the line on what constitutes an acceptable trade-off? The American debate is peculiar because the standards seem perversely different in different contexts. By all accounts, gun violence kills upwards of 20,000 people a year in the US – yet the trade-off between security and the right to bear arms seems doggedly to ignore considerations that would make society safe.
This is because we have a gun lobby that has taken an already machismo- and paranoia-prone constituency and convinced it that these guns are not a safety problem, but a safety solution. This is, of course, so they will buy more and more guns and make the manufacturers, represented by that lobby, richer. Simple.
Meanwhile, most Americans aren’t interested in the whole PRISM-spying thing. To Mehta, this constitutes consent from our society for the whole enterprise. Mostly true I think. He says:
[M]any would argue – though this is debatable – that casualties from terrorist violence have been limited because a full measure of methods have been used against it. But even if we accept these arguments at face value, is there something more going on? Why would a society so willing to ignore security in one domain embrace it so uncompromisingly in another? Is it merely because an exaggerated threat of the foreigner makes it easier to immobilise other considerations?
You have to understand exactly who the American people feel threatened by. Yes, they feel threatened by “terrorists,” but many also feel threatened by each other and their own government. Think of it; here we have a situation where most Americans don’t know or care about the NSA situation, largely because they fear terrorism.
But how’s this for a tinderbox: for those who are upset about the NSA, they have new reason to fear the government. These folks also overlap, I’d presume, very much with those who the gun lobby has convinced are under threat by, who else, the government–and minorities. And OMG! Both the government and minorities come together in the form of Obama!
Stock your bunkers, folks. Things might get uglier before the apathetic urbanite and mainstream Americans have any idea what’s going on.
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The Enemies of All Mankind
I am no libertarian. I find them, frankly, scary in their bizarre faith in markets and contracts to keep civilization from eating itself alive. And very often, libertarianism is used as a thin veil to disguise things like institutionalized racism.
Which is why this post from Jason Kuznicki at the Libertarian Party’s blog was so goddamned refreshing, at least on one important issue; the libertarian view of the Confederacy, declaring, “Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty.”
He then points out specific provisions of the Confederate Constitution that not only legalize but sanctify the practice of enslaving other human beings (and they are shocking), and says:
There is only one legal term that seems quite to do [these provisions] justice. That term is hostis humani generis: The founders of Confederacy were the enemies of all mankind . . . Anyone who cares about human liberty—to whatever degree—ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged. . . .
All friends of the Confederacy are my enemies.
Thank you, Jason, for spelling out so plainly what even many liberals are afraid to say for fear of alienating Southern voters (whom they will never win anyway).
I am no libertarian, but I sure do like how they so rarely fuck around with words.
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A Website You Can Talk Over: Assigning Responsibility for a Meaningful Blog
What do I want this blog to be? Perhaps using that very word, blog, assumes too much, imposing a definition. What to I want this website to be?
A little while back, I posited that perhaps the essay as a format was something that more bloggers ought to rely on, as opposed to, say, the hasty, knee-jerk missive. The reason, essentially, was to lessen the noise, the pointless butting of heads and scoring of points. To encourage more thinking and consideration, and to discourage an endless episode of “Crossfire.”
It turns out, however, that there is a contradiction. A lot of my feelings about essays stem from Andrew Sullivan, who led me to Montaigne, and on. But it is Sullivan who, in 2008, said this about blogs:
There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.
Put aside the question of physical medium for a moment. In blogs, Sullivan is describing a back and forth, not just a conversational tone (like Montaigne pioneered), but an actual discussion, a real chat. Is that in conflict with what the essay, placed on a website, would offer or imply?
“Uh oh” was my first thought.
That’s gone, though. It seems to me that the author of a blog post can hope to engender conversation that is substantive and respectful with a thoughtful essay-like piece. But the audience has to acquiesce, to buy into this approach.
On an episode of “On the Media,” Ta-Nehisi Coates describes in some detail how he manages comments on his blog at The Atlantic. He doesn’t simply allow anything to happen; he carefully curates, mediates, and if necessary, gives folks the boot who aren’t playing by his rules. I like that.
But this is about more than comments. Coates can’t control what happens on the wider Internet as a result of his writing. But he can choose not to engage with the activity that doesn’t suit his or her overall approach. As Pour Me Coffee has said, he can “ruthlessly curate [his] online experience.” I really like that.
So. The first part is to write in such a way, and with such a voice, that meaningful conversation (in comments, on Twitter, what have you) is encouraged, is exemplified. But then, second, the readers and participants have to play along in that mode. Third, the author then must manage his or her online interactions in such a way that incentivize substance over vitriol and snark for its own sake.
Good then!
But what else? Obviously, I’ve not limited this blog, by any means, to wordy essays. Like Sullivan, there are plenty of one-off links and a smattering of commentary. Does that dilute the site, perhaps? It doesn’t for Sullivan and The Dish, but I think that’s because his site never stops generating content. One can skim through the shorter bits, and stop and pause to read his longer pieces (or as he calls them “keepers”).
John Gruber at Daring Fireball works in a similar fashion: The norm is that a post will be a “link post,” where Gruber highlights a bit of news or commentary, throws in a sentence of his own, and even has the headline’s link lead to the originating source, not is own post. Then he sets apart “keepers,” longer essays, by marking them with a star before the title of the post. He also has no comments section on his blog, and lets all conversation happen outside and around his blog, but not on it.
But again, Gruber is more prolific than I. He and Sullivan, of course, make their livings doing this, while I am lucky to find the time and energy to blog regularly, as much as I would love for it to be my main occupation.
So can I ape their styles in an effective way in order to make Near-Earth Object what I want it to be? I’m not sure. I’m not convinced that irregular and sparse posting makes that style work.
I may have to experiment, to blog more often than I am initially inclined, to get the machinery in my brain working at full power. I’d also have to accept that, at least for a while, I may post a lot of garbage. (Would anyone notice?) I may want to retool the look of the site so that “keepers” can be easily spotted (in a sidebar?). I’m going to think about it, and more important, start acting on thoughts.
Back to physical medium, briefly. Sullivan, in the above quote, distinguishes between the reader’s behavior based on what surface they are reading content off of; a screen or a piece of paper. That was written in 2008, and I have to imagine that he’d rethink this today. There was no iPad then, and the Kindle was an expensive novelty device. And no one had heard the term “Retina display.”
Today, we have those technologies that encourage and facilitate deeper, longer-form reading, such that Instapaper is an indispensable app, and so I think that today it’s not about screens and paper, but about presentation of content. And the onus for that is, yes, firstly on the author or outlet, but now just as much on the reader. If one opts to read a piece on their lunch break at a desktop display, the attitude and mindset may be very different than if that reader has saved the piece in Instapaper, and now reads it in a comfy chair from an iPad or Kindle, free (or freer) from distractions, windows, and notifications.
It is like jazz. You can, in fact, talk over it. But you can also buy the remastered CD, put on your pricey Bose headphones, and savor every note. Your call.
I like that, too.
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Rewarded for Cat Pictures (and Whatnot)
All Things D interviews Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Labs, home of the online virtual world Second Life. I have tried out Second Life a number of times over the years, but never stuck with it, for a multitude of reasons: my connection was too slow, my processor too weak, or I realized that true immersion in the game would require a level of time and energy investment I simply could not spare.
But Humble had one point about what makes his company’s game-world so unique, and what it might bode for the future:
Game makers are always trying to stay one step ahead of content creation, so you get these bigger and bigger budgets, trying to make more and more polished content. Second Life and YouTube are both rewarding their users for what they create. I believe there will be a day when you’ll log in to your social network and see, “Oh, I got five bucks because I posted my silly cat picture.” What I’m trying to do is position our company to take advantage of that and facilitate people being rewarded for the time they put in.
Now, the last time I remember anyone trying anything like that was with early-aughts browser plugins and homepages like “iWon” that encouraged you to click on ads in order to build up a virtual gambling currency which would be applied to drawings for prizes. But the idea that the content I put up on Facebook, Twitter, or Zod help me, on my blog, might actually generate real, actual, usable money? Now where have I heard this idea before?
Nah, I’m just being cute. I know where. Jaron Lanier:
The thing that I’m thinking about is the Ted Nelson [early Internet pioneer] approach … where people buy and sell each other information, and can live off of what they do with their hearts and minds as the machines get good enough to do what they would have done with their hands.
I did a whole post about that. Anyway, I think maybe Humble and Lanier should talk.
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To Be a Species is to Be Special
John S. Wilkins considers the argument that humans are somehow more than “just animals.”
The evolutionary view of human capacities is that they have precursors in ancestral traits, and these precursors can be found in other animals. Dogs, corvids, cetaceans, primates, and a host of other animals display moral, cognitive and conscious behaviour. Humans are special indeed in their capacities. But, and this is what what Tallis [a proponent of this view] overlooks, so are all other animals. The word “special” is merely the adjectival form of “species”. To be a species is to be special. Sure, humans are special in their own way. So is a cat, a mole or a mouse. If the target of your explanation was a mouse, then you would explain it having its abilities and social behaviours in terms of evolved dispositions inherited from ancestors. You may as well say a mouse is special in ways other animals (including humans) are not. Otherwise we couldn’t even tell it was a member of a species, by definition. Unless there are properties that mark it out from other species, it would be folded into other species.
So too with humans. If we were not different in our traits from other primate species like chimps, then we would be chimps. But we have our own special traits, and so we and chimps are distinct species. So the argument is a kind of fallacy (affirming the consequent). Humans can be special and yet be animals, just like every other animal species.I get it. Yes, we’re just like all other animals in that we’re essentially bags of meat consuming and excreting and multiplying, but then again we also have cities and symphonies and iPads and literature and universities and corporations and spaceships. But all those things, they are our eagle’s wings, our bat’s sonar, our cephalopod’s camouflage.
And with them we rule the universe!*
*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA just kidding.
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Scrooge McGroove on the Moon
My new favorite YouTube star, Smooth McGroove has fulfilled what he told me was a very popular request (and one of my requests as well): The Moon theme from DuckTales, the 1989 NES game based on the Disney cartoon.
I remember as a kid playing this game, and being really impressed by this piece. Most of the game’s music, as I recall, was pretty standard happy-Disney-video game fare, and then Scrooge McDuck gets to the Moon, and this oddly moving and nuanced piece of 8-bit symphonics hits your brain (and my 11-year-old brain).
As always, Mr. McGroove, well done.
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Stephen Fry and the Paradox of Loneliness
Stephen Fry, one of my heroes, recently tried to commit suicide, and has since told the whole tale of his battle with depression in such a way that only he can. One passage in his latest post stands out to me, a very familiar paradox concerning loneliness, especially considering he and I are both performers, stage performers even, who prize our wit and can seem on the surface to be gregarious and light:
. . . perhaps I am writing this for any of you out there who are lonely too. There’s not much we can do about it. I am luckier than many of you because I am lonely in a crowd of people who are mostly very nice to me and appear to be pleased to meet me. But I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.
Loneliness is not much written about (my spell-check wanted me to say that loveliness is not much written about – how wrong that is) but humankind is a social species and maybe it’s something we should think about more than we do. I cannot think of many plays or documentaries or novels about lonely people. Aah, look at them all, Paul McCartney enjoined us in Eleanor Rigby… where do they all come from?
The strange thing is, if you see me in the street and engage in conversation I will probably freeze into polite fear and smile inanely until I can get away to be on my lonely ownsome.
I’ve chosen to be more open about my social anxiety at this stage in my life because I simply don’t always have the energy to fake it anymore, smile inanely, etc., and I also feel that I’m at an age where, goddamn it, I have to be able to stop pretending at sometime. This latter principle, however, rarely holds outside the abstract. In real world meatspace, the inane smile finds its way back. Anyway.
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We Asked for This
The NSA snooping story is fishy. Here’s Ed Bott at ZDNet:
. . . a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to [The Washington Post‘s] story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story.
Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”
David Simon, meanwhile, gauges the reaction:
You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.
Nope. Nothing of the kind.
And how is that then? It appears that an already-existing, already-controversial program has been given a Hollywood style treatment. Bott again:
The real story appears to be much less controversial than the original alarming accusations. All of the companies involved have established legal procedures to respond to warrants from a law enforcement agency or a court. None of them appear to be participating with widespread surveillance.
So what went wrong with the Post?
The biggest problem was that the Post took a leaked PowerPoint presentation from a single anonymous source and leaped to conclusions without supporting evidence.
And now back to Simon, who tries to put things into sane perspective, reminding us that the collection of call records and the scraping of emails is not the same as surveillance and recording, if for no other reason than that there’s not enough human and computer power to take on such a massive task.
There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.
But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks. After all, we as a people, through our elected representatives, drafted and passed FISA and the Patriot Act and what has been done here, with Verizon and assuredly with other carriers, is possible under that legislation. . . We asked for this. We did so because we measured the reach and possible overreach of law enforcement against the risks of terrorism and made a conscious choice.
Simon does acknowledge in a later post that there is a substantive difference between the Verizon phone records being given to the government, and the kind of monitoring that PRISM does to Internet activity, which requires more oversight than it currently has. But this is still not really news.
I’m trying to keep my own apathy about this in check, as I imagine what my reaction would be if there were a Republican administration running the executive. I assume I’d be presuming guilt and nefarious intent. I hope the fact that I am far less freaked out by the current administration running such an operation (which, again, turns out to be nothing new anyway) will inform and mitigate any future knee-jerks.
We simply can’t each have ubiquitous presence and expression on the Internet and also expect airtight privacy for all of our activity. We just can’t. As Simon says:
We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing. Of course we do.
Of course we do. So let’s pick which one is more important to us, or more accurately, let’s adjust the dials to the mix of privacy and security that better suits us — based on what this thing actually is, not simply as it’s portrayed. We asked for this, and maybe we don’t like what we got. So let’s ask for something else.
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Bernanke on Oxen and Parasites
Ladies and gentlemen, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, at Princeton:
This is indeed an impressive and appropriate setting for a commencement. I am sure that, from this lectern, any number of distinguished spiritual leaders have ruminated on the lessons of the Ten Commandments. I don’t have that kind of confidence, and, anyway, coveting your neighbor’s ox or donkey is not the problem it used to be . . .
I spoke earlier about definitions of personal success in an unpredictable world. I hope that as you develop your own definition of success, you will be able to do so, if you wish, with a close companion on your journey. In making that choice, remember that physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites.
pav alexander 