Cobb

Twelve Simple Words to Destroy White Privilege

The term ‘white privilege’ is so powerful and consequently so pathetically useless and subversively dangerous, because it is so stupefyingly broad.

It would be much more useful and accurate to say, ‘trustworthy, experienced, educated, attractive, overachieving, affluent, confident, intelligent, social, conscientious, tall, healthy privilege’ and then everybody would say, duh that’s obvious. Instead, you just use a racial stereotype and say well all that is what ‘white’ means, (and 'black' means the opposite). Then it would be completely and totally clear that the use of the term ‘white privilege’ is based on a theory of race. That’s the racial profile.

Those listed are some of the virtues of our society. They are what we want to be. Of course people who demonstrate such virtues are privileged in our society. That’s the whole point of having a society. Society gives human experience value and meaning. And of course racists want race to have value and meaning, which is why they want you to say ‘white’ and ‘black’ instead of talking about virtue and vice.

If you believe in individualism, then you must judge individual character and you must discriminate based on the virtues and vices individuals demonstrate. The more you use racial concepts and stereotypes, the more you empower racists to define value and meaning in our society towards race and away from individual character.

 

Human Memory is not Computer Storage

Steven Pinker is my go to authority in this. He explains something I now understand about how memory is ‘retrieved’. Part of intelligence is the way you organize information in your mind. The better you organize it, the easier it is for you to remember.

In fact, ‘memory’ is not memory, it is the active re-creation of ideas and events based on the way they were organized in the first place.

This has a great advantage so that you can abstract ideas and events and then deal with them as somewhat different versions of a basic concept. So if you become, say, a baseball play by play announcer, you don’t have to remember the path of every ball from the mound to the plate (which might take a ‘gigabyte’ of visual storage), you just say the pitch was a ball or a strike. I can say ‘baseball game’ and immediately (if you understand baseball) you have the context for a class of events. When you’re watching baseball and you don’t understand the game, you have to store a lot more information. When you understand baseball, it’s easy.

Another example is you are talking to a stranger vs you are talking to a friend. With a friend you have context, therefore less storage required. This is why two people who were at the exact same party will remember the same conversation differently. They hear the same words and sentences, but they make different assumptions about what the person speaking was trying to say. So you could have a third person describe motivations and then suddenly have an aha moment, “Oh that’s why they said that, I thought they meant..” People remember differently because interpret and organize context differently, and thus they re-create events differently.

The more associations you give a particular event or idea, the more ways it is accessed in your mind. If you associate songs, or smells or how your body was feeling, you remember better. If you have an experience with a framework of theories, you remember better. If somebody keeps telling you the same story and you can hear their voice telling you, you remember better.This is (simplistically) the way that the mind works with the brain being the apparatus. If an old person has a healthy brain, then nothing changes. But if they have a disorganized way of creating memories, it won’t make sense coming out.

So it’s really not about how much storage, but how efficiently ideas and events can be re-created based on their intelligent way of contextualizing such ideas and events. This is why intelligent people seem to have better memories or *more* memory even though their brains are the same size. Their context for performance of certain things is better, they can get ‘in the zone’ quicker. And scatterbrained people remember crazy stuff all the time. Same ‘memory’ different organization, different re-creation.

 

Respect them Humanities

Modern society is weak in handling emotions largely because modern society is materialistic and does not respect the Humanities enough.

There are excellent benefits to modern society. The idea of modernism means, essentially, that people are all the same. That in some way anyone on any part of the globe can live by the same rules, have the same needs, demonstrate the same skills, enjoy the same rights. This is all to the good. The idea that all can be equal is a good idea. But how institutions can deliver the same rules and defend the same rights is massively complex. These are the higher order benefits of civilization. It is much easier to know that people can all use food, clothing and shelter. It is therefore much easier to deliver such things.

The Humanities is the area of study in which we can look at history, art, religion, philosophy, politics and try to understand how people have lived throughout the ages. Everybody has the same emotions, but what made the Roman people happy in 22BC? What made the Indian people angry in 1857? What made the German people fearful in 1930? The Humanities can teach us how to answer those questions and apply lessons to our current circumstances.

But if we spend more money on institutions that reinforce consumption of goods and services, then the Humanities can suffer. Obviously human psychology is the same, so a company that sells peanut butter will show a happy mother feeding her happy children peanut butter sandwiches. Eat peanut butter and be happy. An insurance company will show somebody angry that he got into a car wreck and got bad service. Change your insurance company and you won’t be angry. Buy this security camera and you won’t be fearful. And of course these products and services are easy to mass produce and can be available to everyone equally. That’s the modern way.

But what if those simple goods and services do not deliver the proper emotions? What then? What if you expect nothing from the Humanities and expect everything from modern social equality? Then what will you actually learn about art, religion, philosophy and politics, not only in contemporary times but in history? What if you compare yourself to other people in terms of whether you have insurance, security cameras and on what kind of food you eat? You know very well that people believe eating one kind of food will make them a better person. Is that really true? It cannot be for everyone.

Modern society can produce goods and services in abundance for everyone, but today’s modern societies are not doing a good job in teaching the Humanities. So people are confused about what should make them angry or happy or grateful or proud.

The traditions of society that delivered the context for understanding emotions has not been able to keep pace with modern consumer institutions. There must be balance.

 

Martin Mphele Mortigan - The Sickle: Origin Story

Martin Mphele Mortigan was born on Earth in 1989 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Karl Mortigan a research biochemist who worked at the Karistaadt Institute in South Africa, was poisoned in an industrial accident when experimental biochemical blood agents infected him. Mortigan, a white haired, green eyed man, who was vain and proud of his striking appearance was devastated by the possibility that this infection might hinder his ability to have children. His assistant, Ava Mphele, a striking beauty and an agent of Wakanda nursed him back to full health. Despite her tender care, Mortigan still felt defective. He couldn't bear the idea of making the white haired, green eyed woman of his dreams pregnant with on the chance that any lingering effects might be passed on. He had previously flirted with Ava, but was in fact racist. She took none of that, but cared for him after the incident, still working undercover to discover secrets of Karistaadt. They married under false pretenses. He to cover the lie of his profound insecurity, and she to stay undercover. Neither felt any great love until their son Martin was born.

Martin showed no signs of illness through his youth and in fact was preternaturally curious and quick. He inherited his mother's kindness and concern for all people and her dedication to healing people and his father's emerald green eyes. He graduated high school with high honors in chemistry, following in his father's footsteps and was admitted to John's Hopkins University in the USA. In his freshman year he came across many racist Americans who had not undergone the bloody strife of South Africa. His biracial heritage caused a constant state of confusion to his classmates.

His roommate, a black American, Kevin Smart an upper middle class suburban, became radicalized by the racist rantings of Big Malcolm Johnson aka BMJ, an ex-felon who grew up in the ravaged ghettoes of Baltimore. The riots over police brutality set things off. Kevin Smart encouraged Martin to join the All African Union a student group, into which Martin's intelligence gave an aura of respectability. One day, running track, which was Martin's best athletic skill, he started feeling weak and collapsed. He was admitted to the hospital at Johns Hopkins where the doctors suspected Sickle Cell Anemia. He reluctantly took the test, feeling it to be a racist diagnosis. But the results were positive. It was the one thing his father never checked for.

This great betrayal struck him to the bone. He confronted his father on Spring Break and learned the truth about the industrial accident. His father now completely contrite and unable to face the truth commits suicide leaving his family broken, his mother's heart and his son's optimism. Martin returns to John's Hopkins with a fierce determination, assisted by his mother, to cure all bloodborne illnesses. Over the next few years he becomes one of the greatest biochemists the school has ever seen, developing new theories about blood, curing himself in the process.

One day Martin developed the courage to search the labs at Karistaadt and discovers a deep secret passed on to them by the Nazis who successfully copied the Super Soldier Serum - Type B, which was a prototype of the final version. This was the secret that his mother had worked many years to find. She reported back to Wakanda, but still never revealed her identity to Martin. Ava Mphele was racked with guilt after Karl Mortigan's suicide. She was the only family Martin had, and could not tell him her marriage was just part of a spy mission. The Type B serum was not permanent, plus it had a unique side-effect that produced hallucinations. These visions were desired by the Nazi scientists who sought to bring occult powers to the Third Reich. Martin experiments on himself, frustrated that he cannot improve on the serum that develops super powers lasting only a week then fade. But his unique blood chemistry has the side effect of rage and paranoia that accentuate the hallucinations. In addition to the super solider strength he has the ability to instantly identify any sort of disease, virus, germs and chemical contamination anywhere. But he fears this power and abandons work on the Type B Serum. Instead, he develops his own genetic splicing with mammoth and walrus tusk DNA to create super bones. These bones are extra tough and generate more blood. He now has the power never have broken bones or to bleed out. Purely defensive.

In all this time, Martin never considers that he might want to be a hero. He is wary of police and does not wish to be a violent hero. Still, his mother grows wary of his secret experiments and sees in Martin worse aspects than his father. Eventually, they have a falling out. He returns to the US and meets with his old roommate, Kevin Smart. He now sees that Smart and BMJ are idiots and have no idea what they're talking about. He says their minds are polluted and their blood is probably polluted. Smart caves and admits that he doesn't know and accepts that he is polluted and self-hating. BMJ challenges Martin to a fight, which he is losing until one of his paranoid episodes kicks in. Martin kills BMJ in a paranoid rage.

As he serves time in prison, Martin is a loner and is once again beset by the racial divides. The black prison gangs won't accept him because of his green eyes. The white prison gangs won't accept him because of his dark skin. He calls them all inferior and challenges them all to fight. As many times as he is stabbed and beaten, he never looses enough blood to blackout. After only two months behind bars he becomes even more tough and cynical. Now having killed four inmates, he is transferred to a super max facility. He escapes by overpowering guards and runs overnight to the exurbs of Baltimore. He hides out in a barn and overhears the news that his mother was murdered in a crime. It breaks his heart and his spirit. Seeing everything around him as filthy and contaminated, he lives in the dirty streets near Johns Hopkins, and works in the labs stealthily reproducing the Super Serum Type B. He takes the permanent dose.

Martin is approached by the evil Baron Zemo and recruited into the Masters of Evil by revealing that his grandfather ran the laboratory that originated Serum B and promising Martin access. Baron Zemo reveals to Martin that his mother's murder was actually not random but an assassination by the CIA. Martin is stunned as he suspected and never knew that his mother was a Wakandan agent. He is betrayed again and falls into a paranoid rage again, almost killing Zemo. Zemo recognizes that Martin must be controlled and set on the path of a super-villain. Martin now feels betrayed by the entire world, but has no focus as a villain. He is haunted by his hallucinations and wants to burn the world of its impurities, and so Zemo placates him and helps him build the Sterilization Protocol, a chemical agent under the control of Martin's mind that can be injected into any living being and transform their chemistry.

Martin recalls his cure of Sickle Cell Anemia that used (secret sauce) to change the shape and functions of blood cells. He generalizes this in Zemo's laboratory and then develops a delivery system built into his own hybrid bones. He now has fists that can inject the Sterilization Protocol into anyone he punches. He is now the deadliest brawler ever. He wanders the backstreets of Berlin and goes into dive bars picking fights. He flies into a rage and destroys his opponents leaving them with festering wounds and deformities. Finally he meets up with Berlin police who try to arrest him. He will now target all police in the world. He is THE SICKLE.

Thoughts About the Crossover Kid

It's an interesting observation. I've been thinking about re-titling my autobiography 'The Crossover Kid', and I'll think a bit more about that as I go to my 40th high school reunion. But it was a very big deal in the mid 70s to consider assimilation and integration at length. It was clear among myself and my peers that we should not suffer for those social issues that seemed irreconcilable to our parents. It was, in fact, easy enough to understand (both, multiple) mainstream cultures and fit in. What was the point of having a foreign language requirement if you weren't going to speak? What was the point of having black literature if you didn't expect everyone to read it? What was the point of having black music on the radio if you didn't expect everyone to get up and boogie? And the fact of the matter was, there were many (overenthusiastic) white liberals who were also down for the formula. So there was a kind of pressure to accept Lionel punk-ass Ritchie as a role model even if you preferred George funky-ass Clinton. So even a partial and false semi-integration was preferable to isolation and segregation. Not everyone was liberal or willing to share culture, but wasn't that the same problem that they had at Animal House? The difficulty was and remains that the mainstream liberals aren't sure themselves if they are accepting inferiority or superiority. Ultimately, Howard Cosell called Muhammad Ali by his proper name and accepted his superiority. And it rolls like that. Now you have open competition and an opportunity to raise the flag with your own hands, no matter where they came from.

 

In all cases, you cannot be beating somebody over the head with your self-righteousness, because if you were all that, why bother with the mainstream at all? If you can't give, then you can't take. So what's the difference between your self-righteous discrimination and anyone else's?

 

Of course the (knee jerk) answer is power, but nobody wanting mainstream acceptance is really playing a power game. They are playing bourgeois crossover games, and the American bourgeois has no real power. Which is why nobody really cares about married gays and the country hasn't changed because they exist.

 

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I don't think anarchists or atheists have the benefit of hitchhiking on a crossover archtype like Lionel Ritchie. I think they are just inter-sectional out the wazoo and wind up being ultimately individuals. Thus they have to get along on their own merit without having a round hole to hide in. It's courageous as anything, but at some level you have to represent something larger than yourself, or be Muhammad Ali.

An Introduction to Physics

God is the professor who left the universe as an exercise for you to figure out on your own.

We know he introduced quantum mechanics to make it unpredictable.

So there is a chance that He doesn't know all the answers.

Therefore there is an equal chance by studying the universe, that you are doing God's work.

Peasant Theory and the American Meritocracy

Meritocracy does exist. You’re just not in that league. It is a non-trivial matter to get there.

First of all, as any parent should understand, you don’t have to have a perfect house and a perfect kid to have an excellent family life. So meritocracy is not something everybody needs. In fact, I would argue that meritocracy is only needed for overachievers. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

I have something called the Peasant Theory. It works like this. There are only three classes of Americans. Rulers, Peasants and the Slice. 90% of all Americans are Peasants. The only thing they control is their own family, maybe.

The Rulers are those people in society who have the power and prestige to give you power and prestige. They are few. You do something for a Ruler because only they can give you something you cannot give yourself. They are the motivation of America. They are not all good, nor are they a club. Some of them are men like Steve Jobs. Some of them are women like Mylie Cyrus. The bottom line is people will run to be associated with them. These are the 1% (which means there are about 3 million of them)

The Slice are those people in society who make things work so that the Rulers can actually rule. In other words, they keep the electricity on. They build and arrange the lights and microphones so that you can actually see and hear Mylie. They design and build the batteries so that your iPhone actually works. These are the 9% who actually know WTF they are doing, all the time.

Now there’s an interesting dynamic between the the top edge of the Peasants and the bottom edge of the Slice. In that realm is the meritocracy. It’s not for everybody.

There is a highly competent realm in the American Peasantry. You know that brilliant computer programmer who refuses to work for Apple. You know that master mechanic whose hot rods can beat any supercar. You know that guy who grinds his own coffee and absolutely hates Starbucks. These people do not care about meritocracy. They’re not trying to sell out. They are not trying to appease or work for the ruling class. They therefore have not power nor prestige. They are amateurs. They are not professionals. Some of them are rebels. Some of them want revolutionary change and know they can never get it given the current ruling class. I call these people the ‘Alternative Slice’.

So let’s slice up the Slice for a moment. Right now, the man in the Oval Office, definitely part of the Rulers, has some broad choice (perhaps getting narrower by the moment) of highly competent members of the Slice to push the buttons, and pull the levers, for the power and prestige of working for the President of the United States of America. That means other members of the Slice are sitting on the bench right now. And the second stringers have a third string too., and the Alternative Slice knows just as much as all the rest.

So what is incredibly important about the US is that our Slice is so large, and manifestly competent. We have a deep bench. One guy gets fired, there’s somebody else ready to go. Always. Why? Because we have a meritocracy. What did I just say?

We have a meritocracy.

If you are not a board certified gynecologist, the ladies of the ruling class in NYC’s upper west side are not going to give you a second look. They talk to each other. America has a Top Ten for every friking thing under the sun. And the Rulers are always spending time and money to put those best things to use. Goods, Services, People. So when you get to be the private pilot for the CEO of Goldman Sachs, you know WTF you are doing, all the time. When you get to be the host of the Tonite Show, you’re at the top of a very large pyramid. Meritocracy.

Now of course, it is absolutely true that there are Rulers who don’t care about your competency, they just want your absolute loyalty. That’s the difference between a Leader and a Boss. It doesn’t matter. They still enable the Slice. So if I’m the scumbag lawyer for the Hollywood producer or the weed carrier for the decrepit aging rock star, dude, I’m still getting paid and on tour with the stars. Slice.

The overwhelming majority of Americans drink beers they don’t know how to brew, wear clothes they don’t know how to sew, eat vegetables they don’t know how to grow, watch crap movies that still look better than anything they could ever film themselves and consume news that literally makes them crazy, yet they are incapable of writing a rebuttal worthy of an editorial column. Most Americans live in the Comments Section. But. Who cares? It’s still a good life.

Here is what we do in America, and it is the right thing to do. We have leagues. We are all amateurs and Peasants, and none of us, EVER want to compete in basketball against LeBron. None of us want to get on stage in front of 20,000 people and have a dance off vs Mylie Cyrus. EVER. Few of us can even stand the humiliation that an average math teacher at an average high school can deal. Who among you would debate your minister? Most of us are mostly specialized in our little jobs and wish. But we get along fine, because we are not subject to capital M Meritocracy. We have leagues. We want to compete at our level.

When you win in a fair competition, at your level, you can be completely satisfied.

If you’re not satisfied, then you become an overachiever, and then you start asking yourself tough questions. Then you get aggressive because you want to dominate. You want not just competence, you want mastery. You want to know as much about that thing as anybody has ever known in the history of mankind, and you don’t give a crap what anybody thinks about it. To hell with them, I’m friken doing this. Or die trying.

These are the people who make the meritocracy. They always have been and they always will be. And the reason they play fair is because they want to KNOW, and the want to DO. Understand that this is completely different from the motivations of the people who want to RULE. Because when you want to be the Boss of Everyone, the ends justify the means. You don’t need to play fair. Playing fair is for little games like basketball and dance contests and college calculus. Rules are for followers. Rulers will break rules to become Ruler and make new rules. And life isn’t fair, and they want to rule in life. The unfair game of life.

Most people are not psychologically prepared to be Rulers, and they are not competent to be in the Slice. But there are many Peasants who take care of their own business, and a few whose desire to become ultra-competent puts them in contact with America’s deep bench.

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What is the cost of corruption, and all other kinds of evils? What is the cost of racism. First of all, if you cannot whip the competition and make them like it, then you’re not trying hard enough to be in the Slice. Do you want to be Ice Cube and be a superstar entertainer ultimately worth $150 million? Then you don’t walk around with picket signs or sign petitions against racism in Hollywood. You fight and risk everything to be Ice Cube. You want to complain about the deprivation of civil rights? Well, sister, you have to get that law degree, clerkship and become the best civil rights attorney in your state. Slice. Working for the Rulers in the capitol.

You want to fight against class? Then you have to become more appealing in every way than the Ruling class. That means you have to steal the Slice away from them and get them to work for you. You want revolution? Are you ready to die? No of course you’re not. You don’t even want guns in your neighborhood. You just want things to be nice, maybe 20% nicer than they are. That’s a good Peasant ambition. Move up to Cadillac from Chevy. (Cadillacs designed by the Slice).

At some point in everyone’s life, they have to figure out what it is that they expect the world to deliver to them and ask why they’re not getting it. Ultimately and for most of us, it is because we haven’t found anything worth fighting and dying for. The overwhelming majority of us are satisfied with a 20% raise, and we are not willing to break a lot of rules to get more.

So will a meritocracy be better for you? Are you really ready to overachieve and become ultracompetent? Well, guess what, there is a Meritocracy out there in America. It’s just not easy to get into it. Be happy in your league. Your league is for you. Play fair. Have fun. Enjoy life. But if you can’t have fun and enjoy life because you know you deserve better, you know which way to go. Right up the side of that mountain. We sincerely wish you the best of luck.

12 Steps from Chaos

About 10 years ago, I purchased Meg Meeker's 'Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters'. It was one of the few times in my life I found a sense of purpose from an expert writer that I could immediately use in my life. It was, quite frankly the best self-help book of the decade. I'm sure my daughters are better for me having read it and followed its expert advice. Prior to that, only Sowell's Ethnic America and Bly's Iron John come to mind. I was inches from but never did take Campbell's ride into ancient mythologies. At the time I was into all things Japanese and found the Tao instead. This time with Jordan Peterson's latest book '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos', Western Civilization is square in the frame. My brother Doc is reading it. I bought a copy for my son. I have a Kindle edition and I'll probably get another hard copy to put prominently on my shelf. 

For all the years since 9/11 I have been trying to find a way to understand and defend this Western Civilization, and I find it slightly ironic that it is being best done by a man from a small town in Western Canada. Just listening to him speak is like hearing something both intimately familiar yet markedly unusual yet uncannily consistent. He quotes the Bible. He quotes Dostoyevsky. He puts Neitzsche in perspective. He understands the past. He understands people. He is fierce and calm at the same time. He is the transparent opposite of Woody Allen, and he's not trying to be funny. He is, as he says, surfing a 100 foot wave. 

I immediately put Peterson on my T50 list, and am opening myself up to Jung and his heirs because of him. When I talked with Doc over the weekend, he mentioned alexander Solzhenitsyn asking himself, as told by Peterson, what he had done to deserve this Gulag? And he replies with the understanding of himself, he was once a fervent communist agitator. He owned this part of himself. His prior self jailed his current body. So, if I am cursed with memory, I will have plenty to consider for the rest of my life.  So I have even opened a new category here in the blog. 

What is remarkable about Peterson's book is that the 'self-help' angle goes all the way to the top. It's not just about getting over your particular bad vibe, it is a categorical and canonical framework for taking one from the bottom to the top. That's not the point however, it's not a makeover or shift that gets you into overdrive. It's more like a complete set of tools from which you can, over time, carve out the most perfect sculpture possible. Nothing drives this point home more clearly than his coda at the end of the book, without which I think we might all just be happily informed. No. We are challenged to be our best selves cast as we are in Western society. That makes Peterson more than clever, but wise, and willing to show how a wise man questions himself. Oh but it's difficult. 

Peterson understands suffering. Life is full of it, for all of us. And we must ultimately face it. We fail when we do not face it and challenge it. Peterson does not allow us to cower and say that we are weak or undermined or victimized. He steadfastly refuses to allow us to lie to ourselves, and that means there is so much to unwind. Our conventional wisdom has allowed us to assume it to be our nature to be weak. No. There are so many times, having listened to the audiobook where I hear Peterson's voice saying. "That's wrong!" He doesn't elide to the conventional wisdom by making sly references or jokes. Instead he tells us that there are many things that we don't know and that we don't understand, and that we must push ourselves to have faith in Being and in Truth, and in the absence of facts we must engage the eternal. We must deal with our archetypal models of self. We must understand the mythical which shapes our emotions, because facts don't help, or as Eric Raymond says, 'The universe doesn't care about motive'.  What makes us suffer? We don't understand cancer. We understand the pain that cancer brings. Facts will not help us face the pain. So what does? Character. Our character informed by the accumulation of wisdom over the ages, and it is ever the job of men like Peterson to show us. 

I say men like Peterson to show us rather than scholars like Peterson to teach us because this is the business of living. And I think that's the best compliment I can give. These are rules for life which are both obvious and profound. They are to be applied to keep chaos at bay, because it is always with us. So we must look to our friends, to people we can confide in, to help us on our journeys. This is what Peterson does for a living, to assist others in living. What a responsibility.

 

 

 

 

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Ready Player One

This is one of those rare situations in which a very good book is about equally good to a very good movie.

So here's my movie review. I give it 4.5 stars. I read the book first about two years ago and the film does a good job of making an epic story just epic enough, like cartoon pirates on a worldwide heist. Epic is scope but not in the detailed telling. It hits all the high notes and doesn't get bogged down. In the end, the film is much more believable than the book. The book is an encyclopedic tribute to the 80s with an overload of trivia that no teenager could possibly absorb, much less make world-class sense of. There is nothing about RPO's world that suggests Idiocracy in play, so when it comes down to it, a global corporation of researchers will win against a teenaged kid, who might hack their way out of a few situations, but not as many times as the protagonist. In that regard the compressed element of time in the film makes for a much more entertainingly believable romp, which is just right.

The film got the romantic dynamic just right. It was slightly more well done in the book because the book made a much stronger case for, in the end, living in reality. Speilberg's visual awe moment with the protagonist winning the final prize didn't quite work well. That's because the creator of the great game, Halliday was cooked too long in the geek stereotype sous-vide and came out like a skinless soggy chicken. It's as if Spielberg forgot his own young energetic genius and just painted Halliday with too much store bought geek sauce. The psychology was all wrong for pretty much every adult in the entire film, which had to be purposeful but went a little too overboard. I'm going to have to watch Ferris Bueller again just to see. But I was talking about teenage romance, and yes that seemed quite nailed. Maybe just a bit too facile, but there are only so many awkwardly tender moments that can be done in an action adventure film.

There hasn't been this much dynamic CGI in massive scenes since the Lego Movie. And I have to say that there has never been a King Kong as brilliantly rendered as the one in this movie. It is simply magnificent to see this creature ripping through New York City. It's rather jolting like with "I Am Legend" the first time you see really fast zombies, and suddenly you're like, why aren't all zombies this fast and scary? That's how awesome RPO's Kong is.

The number of videogame references in the film, well we're just going to have to buy it and play it back in slow motion. I get the feeling that the film itself will have an uncanny number of easter eggs itself aside from the obvious ones in this video, very few of which I didn't see. Spielberg must certainly get that. But I'm also thinking that the Iron Giant was sandbagging a bit in his battle, a full ballistic Iron Giant would have wiped MechaGodzilla off the map. Still, I think all respect had to be paid to Gundam all things considered.

I expected a lot more 80s music, but I get the feeling that licensing issues would have broken the bank. But I gotta tell you there is one scene where the music is so perfect for what's going on that you just have to laugh out loud. Speaking of which, the movie does a great job turning one character completely on his head and making him pretty much all of the comic relief in the story. That's the character of I-Rok. Best lines of the movie, perfect comic timing and delivery.

So anyway. Go see it. I'm sure the extras and deleted scenes and all that will be worth it. I'm putting some of those numbers into my code.

The Center of Gravity of the Self

So I'm beginning to get a vague picture of evolutionary psychology and the first thing that struck me as totally new was the idea that all of evolution happens on this planet at once. Sex is not just what humans do, it's what large sections of the animal kingdom do. Sex evolved in all manner of creatures and so what sex is is not for humans to suggest only involves Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We big headed primates may like to live in the Matrix and believe what we want to believe about sex, but we're ultimately wrong. Sex is what it evolved to become, across all creatures that do it. It is not for us to redefine. We're not responsible.

So as I came in sideways to a discussion about abortion and .. well this:

A reminder: The conservative anti-choice crowd's rhetoric makes a lot more sense if you see it less as "saving a child's life" and more as "pregnancy is the punishment for having sex".

To which I said: Pregnancy is the inevitable consequence of having sex. It is what sex is, the result of the way of the universe, ie evolution. If conservatism were genetic, would you give eugenics a second thought?

Of course there's the obvious homosexual angle. But is homosexuality eugenic by design? I doubt it. I think most people simply get their rocks off in different directions, some of which will be rewarded by evolution and some which will not. My concern here in using the term inevitable is me weighing in against the amount of chemistry devoted to stopping pregnancy in order to enable a sporting amount of sexual profligacy some of which is just as greedily obtuse as obesity. I could belabor the point, but suffice it to say that if the Rubenesque were all that in yesteryear, and skinny bitches with green hair are all that today, then our taste in sex is unmoored from any particular path. Which is to say what's sexy in the Matrix is random. There is no reason nor rhyme behind it. It's just what you wanna do. Therefore you should have no moral pretense about it. I shit on your sex life. So what? Again, the universe doesn't care about motives. It simply rewards what it does and you have no say.

But what if we are actually capable of being smartly in tune with our nature? In other words what if we build houses with door frames that are the right size for the overwhelming majority of humans. Then we're doing something right. That's all I'm going to say that we do right, for now.

How about a man with no legs? Say he has lost them in combat. Has he lost some element of his humanity if he will never walk again?  Is he as human as the man who has run all his life? Is walking and running a fundamental part of being human? I say it is. I say we recognize that loss no matter how much wheelchair basketball he plays. No matter how he fulfills himself playing piano, he is still handicapped. That doesn't change his rights under government. That doesn't change his status in society. But he is handicapped. If he wasn't, then nobody would have ever invented the wheelchair. Everyone would be just as happy crawling as walking. Walking is fundamentally human, those who cannot or do not are handicapped and have lost some element of their humanity.

So too is childbirth fundamentally human. 

Oh. You're scared now, aren't you? You see where I'm going with this don't you? How could I not go there? I'm just building the door the right size for the overwhelming majority of humans. That's doing something right. You see I don't want to live in the Matrix. I want to live in harmony with nature, with an eye for understanding what humans have evolved from to be what we are. Isn't it strange that when we talk about sex with kids for the first time, we mention the 'birds and the bees'? How we do it is much more like the dogs and the horses, or quite frankly the monkeys and the chimps. Sex evolved without our thinking about it.

Pregnancy is not a punishment for having sex. Children are a reward for having sex. Psychologically I understand this as a parent who has raised three of those dirty blighters. And I love them. Illogically. I don't understand exactly why. It goes against my logic to put up with them as long as I have, and yet I do. And I'm also happy, illogically, to please my old ass parents. I know this is an experience central to humanity, and I don't really understand why. But some of that understanding is unnecessary. When I'm happy, I'm just happy. I don't need to explain how or why. I just enjoy that thing. When I'm suffering, I don't need people to explain it. I don't want to hear explanations of why and how. I just want it to stop.

This is me talking psychology. Get used to it. It's my new category.

 

Left and Right

Q: What turned you from liberal to conservative?

Seeds were planted all through my life. I noticed contradictions and lapses in Left politics. Having grown up with both my parents as cultural Marxists and social workers, I was right in the middle of the vanguard.

The first blow to that thinking came in the form of the work by Thomas Sowell whom I read in college. This was about the same time as the second Reagan presidency lead the country out of inflation. So by the mid 80s I was definitely pro-business and while not a supply-sider, definitely mindful of all economic aspects of political thinking. Having worked in a bank in the early 80s, I understood that people could not game the market and had no misgivings that capitalism was rigged against the people.

The second thing that happened was I came to understand the limits of Affirmative Action, having written the algorithms of the Balanced Workforce Model of Xerox Corporation that won awards from the Business Roundtable as the most progessive organization. From that I started to understand the actual supply and demand as well as the impact of political thought on meritocracy. Basically Affirmative Action is little more than a planned economy. In that way, it can never work and never not be controversial.

Thirdly, I came to recognize the ego-driven mendacity of the ‘activist’ world. I did so by participating in that smushy landscape of performance poetry and bohemian self-righteousness. It was fun, but it was not productive. Around that same time I began to sense that which was best described by David Graeber (the man who coined ‘we are the 99%’) as the ‘bullshit economy’. I ran from it and started taking money more seriously. Well because I got married and had kids, quickly. I moved to the South from NYC.

Then in quick succession several things happened to me that pushed me over the edge. Of course there was 9/11. Then I finally read some real history about the Soviet Union and learned (in my 40s!) how evil Stalin was. Enron collapsed and cost thousands of people their jobs, but Stalin murdered that many people every week. I had a fairly large payday and started to personally experience how it felt to be envied and hated for being rich. I found myself shopping at Walmart and immediately recognized the actual diversity of people that low prices and competitive capitalism serves. I completely lost all contempt for the working class. I found out that only about 3,000 people were ever lynched in the entire history of the post-civil war era.

So ultimately I saw where I came from as childish and self-serving and I was determined to grow up. I decided to understand the Right as well as I understood the Left. It was very surprising how much intellectual depth I found. It was right in front of me all the time but I never paid much attention or took it seriously. It took several years for all of this to gel, and ultimately I abandoned political conservatism but I came to respect a way of thinking that I had never participated in. I walked the miles in conservative shoes.

After I tired of political conservatism (it took about 8 years), I began engaging in what I call my ‘martial education’. At the same time as I recognized the divergence between Progressivism and standard Liberalism, I recognized how Identity Politics as well as a fanatic ideological puritanism struck Conservatism in the mainstream. So I see a wide variety of threads in these ideologies, few of which have clarity to their participants and partisans. I gradually adopted Stoicism which ultimately was fairly simple. These days I am fascinated (still) by history, and newly by psychology which as a computer science guy is fairly rare. Also behavioral economics and Taleb’s Incerto is fascinating to me and I really hope to square the circle by understanding the philosophy of religion. I expect big things from Aquinas, Nuemann, Jung, Spinoza and a few others.

I think the biggest matter of political philosophy that faces Western Civilization is that of relativism and shallow atheism. There is an essential lack of discipline of thought that only a certain element of ruin will adjust. Our ruling classes are currently not threatened by the nihilism they tolerate and are easily able to retain power in a lazy way. It seems to me that on certain conservatives perceive this threat, while the rest appear content to Let It Be. It’s not worth it to me to pledge any fidelity to any cadre of political philosophers. My way is to be Stoic and let things fall apart, but with a stubborn streak of public engagement of this sort...

High and Low

Q: Is it true that there's a huge difference between rich black Americans and poor black Americans with regard to their politics, tolerance, character, etc.?

A: It is absolutely true.

One of the saddest aspects of the lame mainstream media is its inability to convey any authentic detail of black American life in anything more than stereotypical fashion. The result is that anything that doesn’t appear ordinary gets interpreted as ‘white’. Right now I’m thinking about movies. There’s nobody in my family that doesn’t love The Princess Bride or Woody Allen movies, and none of us like Tyler Perry. Just a simple example.

When I paid a lot more attention to this subject I looked at class, particularly class differences within black America. I came up with five categories. {Sticks/Projects, Ghetto, Hood, Burbs, Hill}. If you ask black academics, they will talk a lot about ‘hypersegregation’ which specifically means how poor blacks live in both very poor and very racially segregated places . Such people have very particular difficulties in that advice that works for the average American does not work for them. However some of this is made confusing by the actions of many black folks across the spectrum to make the classic liberal stand in solidarity with their plight. For example, Spike Lee will make movies about the displaced from Katrina, and the gangs of Chicago, and sell these movies to people who are from neither place. Wealthy music producers will seek out hypersegregated kids who want to rap, mostly gangsta rap about being rich and dangerous and sell those records to youth across the country who are neither rich or dangerous. This is actually a worldwide phenomenon. So there is that fraction of ‘authentic black culture’ that appears to be more widespread than it actually is.

The big subject of racism makes for interesting conversation. What you almost never hear, when successful black people encounter racism is how much it affects them. There are individuals who may have been detained by police officers and cuffed on the curb, and for them it is the most humiliating experience ever, but they walk away and return to their professions. And yet there are black families who deal with the reality of visiting brothers, sons and husbands in prison. That’s worlds apart, but it’s called the same racism. And clearly in recent years it has been popular to assert that ‘unarmed black males’ are endangered by gun happy police. If black lives matter, why concentrate on 400 dead instead of 193,000 that serve in the US armed forces? What about the 34.9% of 18–24 year old black Americans who are enrolled in post-secondary education? When is the last time you saw a movie including black college students? Well a 1/3 are there.

Of course the point of people bringing up race is to highlight inequalities for the political purpose of making them all appear to be injustices, but it blinds people to the greater reality. The greater reality is that black Americans themselves are highly diverse and unequal themselves. What destroys one strengthens another. Inequality is not equal to injustice. And what is actual injustice against a few black Americans does not dim the prospects for the many. But with racial inequality being the focus of so many people, it ultimately distorts the truth. The truth is that black Americans live everywhere and do everything and it is stupid to compare what they do to anything other than what they want to do. In other words, if I improve my self and my life, then it is only proper to compare me now with me before, not what some English king did or what some ghetto drug addict did. (Unless of course, my aim is to be a ghetto drug addict or English king).

So hopefully that explains that the very process of trying to categorize people by race and compare people by race distorts the truth about what people actually do and who they are.

So how are rich black people different than poor black people? How are Democrat black people different than Republican black people? How are Christian black people different than atheist black people? How are black people from Texas different than black people from Massachusetts? The black doesn’t matter. The differences are just as obvious and simple as you might guess.

What’s different and unique about the difference in class and politics and tastes of black Americans goes particularly to the relationships within black America. That is to say how do black Americans of different backgrounds and situations choose to regard each other and what do they consider to be their obligations to each other? This is a question that is a proper study of Black History, the broad outlines of which should be mostly familiar. In other words, black Americans deal with the same divisions of all humanity, but have some history in trying to overcome those differences for the sake of a greater goal for all within the context of America.

I will skip all that and assert that in the wake of the success of the Civil Rights Movement there is no exceptional predominating concept that unites black Americans. Black Americans recognize, some more slowly than others, that they do not and cannot decide the destiny of other black Americans. The fact is that, as William Julius Wilson and others have noted, the significance of race has declined over the years as black Americans have successfully integrated into the American mainstream in every dimension. The clearest evidence of that is the extent to which black organizations like the Urban League and NAACP have declining political influence, membership and economic backing. Neither of those is as powerfully effective as the NFL as last year’s kneeling controversy proves.

This leaves people in a quandary. The invention of the term ‘African American’ in the 1980s was established partly because people recognized that there was no monolithic ‘black community’, and people were getting tired of being cast that way. And yet the dissolution of a prior sense of unity, whether real or imagined, now leaves many people with a sense of longing for the good old days when parents and children listened to the same music, cooked the same recipes, attended the same church, pledged the same fraternities and sororities and voted for the same candidates.

—

As I look at my extended family I recognize that many of us have achieved great success, but that these successes are particular to the context of our generational ambitions. There were big leaps I can identify in retrospect - but that’s how families look at themselves, with survivor’s bias: “Look what I did, I must know what I’m talking about.” But some of that is chance and beyond our control. And still we can look at our grandparent’s graves and stand there with pride knowing we’ve fulfilled and surpassed. Nevertheless we have our own unique challenges for which there are few blueprints.

My grandparents were married during the Great Depression. My grandmother survived polio. My grandfather worked troop trains in WW2. They lived in the projects in New Haven, CT. My other grandparents lived in New Orleans, LA. So both of my college educated parents joined two very different families. Here is their wedding picture from 1959.

As a writer and father and entrepreneur, I am dealing with issues that have very little in common with those of my parents or grandparents. I have close family mostly in the American upper middle class, although one or two of us might be considered rich, none of us is wealthy. I think I’m fairly typical of certain men of my generation, getting my kids into and through the military and college, empty nesting (almost) and taking care of my parents affairs (somewhat). I have nieces and nephews living in multiple timezones and one abroad now. I myself have lived all over the US and have worked abroad as well.

So for a personal conclusion, I would say that the biggest difference between myself and other black folks I have known throughout my life is the extent to which I have traveled and worked all over. From Milan to Minneapolis it has been a great privilege to work in many different industries with all kinds of professionals. My disposition as a writer has been enhanced by the fact that my work has given me lots of extra time and money. Since my late 20s I’ve been able to afford all of my middle class necessities without much trouble, a place I might have stayed until I got a taste of six figure entrepreneur’s living. So I have been freed, not by theory, but by experience from the ordinary things that define ordinary folks. And I hope do learn to walk with kings without losing the common touch. These days, I’m looking forward to the next step, and then maybe I’ll be the third somewhat rich person in my family. Fingers crossed.