My long-running Random Thoughts series has continued, randomly. Here we are at Part 24, which I'm happy to announce includes Random Thought 666! And there are also memes, because why not? Enjoy!
644. Please know that whenever I have to say “no” to anyone for almost anything it deeply hurts the core of my being.
645. One thing about being a weirdo is that I don’t expect other people to be any particular way—I don’t take my weirdness as normative. I figure I should be open to other brands of weirdness.
646. My life vastly improved when I stopped trying to be cool. It wasn’t going to happen, anyway, and it’s so much more fun to be my own bizarre self.
647. “Oh my God, I’m a freaking giant!” – Me when I see a picture of myself standing next to normal-sized humans.
648. A lot of dogmatic extremism and rigidity of thinking is caused by fear of uncertainty and discomfort with the unknown. One path is to pretend to eliminate this fear and discomfort through belief despite the evidence, often in bad faith (or “faith” in the bad sense!). Another path is to dissolve this fear and discomfort through a radical acceptance of uncertainty and the unknown as part of the whole deal of being alive in a vast, unfathomable universe. I think maybe the second path is best, but I’m not sure.
649. The recent rise of nationalism, fascism, bigotry, and so on is, I think, a result of most people understanding deep down, even if they can’t articulate it, that human life in the early 21st century is scary and uncertain. Any way forward to a more democratic, just, and sensible world for all of humanity must start by recognizing that the roots of this fear and uncertainty are reasonable, even if misguided, and then offering better solutions beyond this fear, or rather, dissolutions of this fear. For example, fear of immigrants is in itself horrific and unjustified, but part of the root of this fear—along with the inherent xenophobia and racism, anyway—may be a misplaced anxiety about living in an economically unjust society. The trick is to constructively redirect this fear toward making a more just and fair society for all of us.
650. Few things are more exhausting than listening to libertarians explain why a Star Trek future is impossible.
651. I’m not a fancy economist or Marxist or anything, but it’s obvious that a big part of capitalism – or any hegemonic ideology, really – is its ability to justify its own existence as natural and inevitable.
652. Discourse about generations is like astrology in that, yes, when you are born and stars and planets, like all things in the universe, have some effects on us, but not nearly as much as or in the ways that their proponents think.
653. It’s not that the cultural milieu of your formative years doesn’t have a big effect on who you are as a person. Obviously, it does! it’s just that this is one of many other causal factors that make you who you are: family, genes, environment, experiences, class, race, gender, and all the little streams of causation that flow into this thing we conventionally designate as a “person.” The construct of a “generation” simply can’t capture all that. Besides, there are weirdos in all generations.
654. AI-generated text often sounds to me like a robot produced by engineers who haven’t read a novel in 20 years unsuccessfully trying to mimic an Adderall-fueled undergrad at 3am who is unsuccessfully trying to mimic the narration of a nature documentary they halfway paid attention to last month.
655. In addition to all the ethical reasons to be suspicious of AI-generated art and writing, there is an aesthetic reason: most of it is just bad.
656. A weird thing about gender concepts—and maybe the inherent trouble with most of them—is that many people expect them to be normative. It’s not just the (demonstrably false) claim that all people of a gender are a certain way, but that they ought to be a certain way.
657. Dear academics: Contractions are a part of natural, readable English. If we actually want people to read our stuff, we’d be better off making it more readable.
658. Why do so many people drive like assholes?
659. I don’t really understand the ambition to dominate others or the desire for revenge. This makes a lot of narratives difficult for me to relate to, but I’d like to think it maybe also makes me a better human being.
660. These days a lot of entertainment is about ambitious people driven to succeed at all costs to their relationships, lives, mental health, etc. Sure, it’s interesting to watch the pursuit of excellence (as defined by whom, I’m not sure… capitalism maybe?). But I kind of miss the slacker culture of the 1990’s. Slackers also understand something important about human nature.
661. A lot of Culture War outrage about “wokeness” (or “CRT” or whatever the derogatory replacement for “political correctness” is this year) results from a basic failure to understand that some people actually do care about people different from themselves. Sure, sometimes this care can be merely performative or cynical (e.g., “rainbow capitalism”), but imagine thinking that nobody could possibly actually care about others of differing identities! When you think of it this way, it’s actually quite sad.
662. Sometimes “academic rigor” induces rigor mortis.
663. “This is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever written” and “This is pure bullshit and a waste of everyone’s time, including my own” are the two poles between which I fluctuate while writing most things these days. But mostly I’m somewhere in the zone of “this is mildly okay.”
664. If you get an email from me before 10am, it’s almost certain that I wrote the email the night before and scheduled it to send in the morning.
665. House of the Dragon is all Team Black versus Team Green, but since this is fantasy, I’m Team nonviolent peasant revolution to abolish the monarchy and get all these rich assholes out of power and then egalitarian anarcho-socialism for everyone.
666. Cackling with delight at the hilarious kills in a horror movie is the most fun way to confront one’s mortality.
667. For decades people have worried that AI will cause the end of the world. I’m more worried that AI will make us all dumber. Maybe this amounts to the same thing.
668. An observation of the zeitgeist: These days almost everybody is angry about almost everything almost all the time. To some extent this has always been true (as the Buddha observed in the First Noble Truth), but as recently as about a decade ago, you’d occasionally meet someone who seemed more-or-less content with most things.
669. Perhaps my most unpopular opinion: Unless you’re on the highway, there’s really no reason to drive more than 25-30 miles per hour. Even slower if there are pedestrians on or near the road.
670. One nice/sad thing: When you hear loud booming noises during the week of US Independence Day, they’re more likely to be fireworks than gunshots.
671. Do people really think US Presidential elections are only about your feelings about two individual human beings?
672. People sometimes assume that because I have an agreeable personality that I must agree with everybody, but in fact I usually disagree with everybody about something all of the time. I just don’t like to make a big deal about it.
673. I genuinely do want to understand people who support far-right nationalist politics. They are, after all, my fellow human beings. But doing so is not opposed to working toward defeating these movements politically.
674. I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow “mainstream” political discourse in the US has gotten even stupider since 2016—and more dangerous.
675. INT. Gas station in a small town in North Georgia
Cashier: You look familiar.
Me: I live in Chattanooga, if that helps.
Cashier: You look like this guy I know in Murphy.
Me: There must be another person who looks like me.
Cashier: You look like this guy named Ogre.
Me: Ogre is probably a lot cooler than me.
Cashier: You sound like him, too.
LATER: INT. Car driving through Murphy, North Carolina
Me: Maybe I should stop and ask around for my doppelgänger, Ogre...
676. You can find the beauty wherever you are. It’s usually there if you open your mind enough to notice it. I don’t know how people live otherwise, but apparently, most people do, so they put significant energy into rearranging themselves and the world to fit their preconceptions of beauty rather than appreciating what’s right there in front of them. It sounds dramatic and pretentious, but I’ve come to suspect we all suffer when people are unable to find the beauty in this vast, diverse universe.
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