Cobb

The Death of Punk

Like I said, there are no generations. But there are memetic tribes, some of whom do battle. So it occurred to me, as many things often do, that the entire problem between guys like me and guys like SJWs is not generational so much as it is experiential. And of course I'm smarter and wiser, but let's not belabor that point. Let me put the blunt point on it. The problem with today's cutups and rebels are that they are not Punks. 

You see I can recall very well what was fascinating about the 1980s. In addition to the fact that we lost our fascination with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Dianna Ross we were beginning to be fascinated by their opposites. This is as any antithesis should be. The result musically was the eventual synthesis as discovered by ATCQ and Soul II Soul, some of the greatest spanning of the period of the 90s to come. But what was the antithesis of the Motown R&B thesis? It was Sid & Nancy. It was Malcolm McLaren. It was Joey Ramone and Billy Idol. It was The Clash. It had something to do with abandoning romance. It had something to do with accepting exile. It had something to do with having absolutely no expectations of society and instead reveling in the satisfaction of the entire punk aesthetic. It was liberation from all convention. It was bad. Not bad meaning good, but bad meaning bad. Punk didn't care about the planet. Hell, punk didn't care about City Hall or even the college Administration Building. And there you have the difference between Punk rebellion and the cringe inducing politically correct temper tantrums we are experiencing today.

Some contingent out there wants Uncle Bernie and Cousin Yang to give us something that assures us that the world is going to be a better place. They are willing to do damage for the domination of their own neo-puritanical worldview. Banish coal. Banish meat. Banish hate speech. Banish patriarchy. Banish. Banish. Bash. It's all BS. They are the new Hollow Men, who accept their prefab imagination as the perfection of innocence in a world far too cruel. And yet what can they create that would stand the test of time like Punk? How can they even stand on their own two feet without arm-twisting some socialistic backsheesh from the polis? They are ready to sacrifice all mankind on a Malthusian alter to Gaia. All they need is their Leviathan. They clearly won't simply accept the Administration Building or City Hall. They want the totality. They want the tide to lift all the lightweight and anchorless above the height of all human skyscrapers. They seem completely incapable of self-improvement. 

That kind of attitude of self-denigration might be OK if they were Punks. Punks accepted the dark side of humanity. They lived below it and they were self-contained in their rage. They took their social isolation as a badge of honor and were ready to fight. Not for a cause, but for themselves. There was no ideal. Punks didn't even need to agree with each other. They were individuals to the extreme, even though within their aesthetic you could pick out a Punk from a mile away. They weren't trying to bring about the Apocalypse. They weren't trying to change your mind. They simply dared you to discover and explore the Punk in you. That was something I could respect. In fact, that was something I could mosh to. 

It would be a nicer world if today's contingent of unfunky ubervictims could make peace with their inner demons. But I respect enough of the true spirit of the Punk not to expect too much of the world. I just flip them off and go my own way. Speaking of which, would you agree that we have a Punk for President?

 

Valkyrie: Joe & Skippy Adventure #9

Valkyrie by Craig Alanson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ahh yeah. This is the one we've been waiting for. And the conclusion is absolutely devastating, and that's about all I can tell you. All of the thrills chills, antics, close calls, near misses and odd historical moments dredged up into a soup whose recipe we have all come to know and love.

There's some ass-kicking. There's some name taking. New friends, old enemies and a lot of, shall I say, wrapping up of loose ends? Yeah that's kind of what's going on. Well, now that I think of it, I might as well spoil the whole thing. Ready?

Nah. I'm not going to do it. I can't. You just have to read to the end because it's a great mind-blowing kind of thing you deserve to experience, you filthy monkey.

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The Cobbian Mental Universe

I've got to do at least one essay per week to continue my plodding journey to famousity. I've neglected this for some time in order to deal with a multiplicity of family problems. You don't want to know, moreover I don't want to tell. Nevertheless, I am quickly regaining my balance and it feels good. It has been some time since I've taken an assessment of where I'm going and what I'm doing in concert with you, my readers and fellow travelers on the road to continuous enlightenment and ultimately to wisdom and realization of 'thou art that'. 

Strategery

In the largest sense of my current intellectual pursuits I am moving sideways in my career. I think I have struggled through the last year in dealing with my difficulty in dealing with the fact that I am not coding on a day to day basis. There has been something of a hole in my soul missing the sense of accomplishment that comes with building elegant, logical spaces for my customers to work through their decisions. So I'm stepping back from that with the tacit acknowledgement that it's a two edged sword. I love to code just as I love to write compelling paragraphs in prose. But I need to do other things to make the enterprise of my business perform as it should. Others can code. I am uniquely situated to do those other things. So I will. 

Secondly, my journey through Stoicism continues. I feel very strongly about the gut sense I have developed over the past few years. And so I continue to be refreshed in this, not only by my own work but in concert with the LA Stoic Meetup group, led by DK. Beyond what it means to me in releasing myself from the tyranny of political gossip and blather, it is an important way to engage fellows and the public. I see it as part of my civic duty. In close proximity to the Stoic is the IDW participation that I have attached myself to. My aim in this is to establish and maintain a space for that part of me which is a combat epistemologist. I rigorously parse what people say and am determined to be honest in my feedback. I practice the Abstention Principle in politics, and yet I feel the need to be compellingly disconfirmatory in my political speech. In other words, I don't care who is right. I care what is right. I expect people to be logically consistent as they are capable of being and intend to bring that context right up front, doing so without any particular ambition or agenda other than letting people know there are dispassionate ways to be correct. The difficulty in all of this is that there will always be a temptation to follow too much of my curiosity. I can get bogged down. But I'm also not particularly trying to make friends or make nice. I'm trying to achieve a command of civility in truth telling and sense making. 

Thirdly, I'm aiming to expand the imaginative aspects of my life. Tangential to my desire to clean up my health (which is kind of a barbell effort, live on the border of injury while making myself harder and harder to kill) I'm learning yet another dimension of cooking, eating and drinking. My aim here is to both lose the remaining 22 pounds and to become a master of cooking fish. Check back with me after the summer. 

And finally I am changing my reading a bit. The same informative and entertaining habits are likely to stick, but I want to spend less time putting other people's ideas into my head. That means Blinkist. That means less Audible and more Kindle. It means less Science Fiction and more History. And I'm going to add poetry into the mix. I forgot how satisfying it is to write that way and I haven't in much too long.

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Practicality

In the realm of the technical and professional I a convinced that the future is the Apache Beam framework and that the world of data will approach the realm of IoT. Everything is a data stream, and all applications are the tactical management of these data streams. Operationally this will all be some Kafkaesque future. Confluence are the masters. So we will be replacing databases with streams, and the world of data will be the fast sort and the slow sort. Hmm. I should map Kahneman over that. In the meantime, I'll keep my head above the code and try to start thinking in terms of service products that involve wrangling those streams and sending them where no man has gone before. Also this should be the guiding light for the LOGOS Project that will be my side gig, with a helping of Smart Cities. 

The Stoics and IDW are mostly driven by my primary podcaster Eric Weinstein. So I may very well continue what I've started in putting answer context here and elsewhere. It's coming naturally. The stuff of Weinstein gets my attention, and I think he's broad enough to keep it. So far it's not difficult to keep up, but it has certainly put others, particularly Peterson, on the back burner. I'm sticking to Sam Harris because he too gets my goat in a certain compelling way. But I'm definitely coming around to recognize his way of thinking about meditation. I think we'll have to come up, in toto, with a new religion. I will continue to write here and over at Quora, because Quora is the precursor to LOGOS. Also I expect to do a bit more American Wag. I just dont' have the rhythm yet.  While I'm at it and thinking about a new religion let me give you this aside with regards to my high level look at university. H/T Bryan Alexander:

Aside on the University

I think the university should be in charge of pedagogy and research. I think that scholarship should be exported. I primarily I think that the university is oversubscribed. There are too many of them and we don't need them to be entry level employee generators. The cost of training employees should be born by business. So the entire debt to society universities are costing should be shifted away from the current economy. Trim university systems and make them excellent at pedagogy, scholarship and research.

The matter of pedagogy has the common sense benefit of preserving the culture of academics who perform for academics. We can have a great deal of confidence that will work without much change - but it will only work if scholarship is exported. I want the province of fact checking of the entire realm of knowledge to be shifted from journalism to a kind of partnership of publication. In other words, academics should be paid not so much to train some selection of undergraduates but everyone, and especially global media networks through the same mechanisms they use. I don't want the editorial board of the NYT curating the truth about New York City. I want scholars at CUNY and Colombia doing that. It is therefore the priority of pedagogy to have more integrity than mere publication.

Scholars will do journalism better than journalists will do scholarship, so they must because the incentives for scholars is to be correct and comprehensive. The incentives for journalists is to be first and topical.

The university fails because it is not responsible for the ignorance and lies that are promulgated more rapidly than their pedagogy. It makes the university insular and only responsible for its own truth rather than a truth which should be accessible to the world. If the university cannot reach the world then it will exist in isolation and ultimately be reduced to monasticism.

I am pessimistic that universities can make this change before they are forced into the monastic position. Rather it will be visionary individuals who will do so. I think it will be a long time before the traditional philanthropists admit the necessity of endowing great podcasters. Although there is something to be said in defense of Mercatus. https://www.mercatus.org/

I will write more poetry, so expect more stuff from the Eruditorium. My flirtation with returning to Cobb the Comic is too near realtime and I can't keep all of those characters up to date on things worth remarking on. Twitter speed is what it is and I don't have the patience for it. I could have followed Gen. Q Soliemani into Heaven, but nobody really cares any longer. Comics need to be fast and I don't have a system that's fast enough. 

Exercise, diet blah blah. I'll take pictures and post them on Facebook. I won't mention it again until I lose another bowling ball. I will continue to post reviews on Goodreads, and reblog them here (which I haven't been doing).