Words to Remember

Came across these words in two differfent podcasts, Collective Effervescence and Absorption

On Straight White American Jesus they used Collective Effervescence to describe the unifying feeling people have in a church where people are swept up in the ecstasy of the moment.

And Absorption I heard on I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist in a discussion about why some people go all in for with the pentacostal features and others don't.

Google Definitions

Absorption is a disposition or personality trait in which a person becomes absorbed in their mental imagery, particularly fantasy.[1] This trait thus correlates highly with a fantasy prone personality. The original research on absorption was by American psychologist Auke Telleg

Collective effervescence (CE) is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action.

ChromeBook Ubuntu

Googling Your way to Success

A while back my old-ish Chromebook kept telling me it was out of date, so I found on the internet how to wipe the Chrome OS and install some linux version on it.

Long story short, I had that for a while and it mostly worked but thinking I was smart I decided to try a different version (going from Lubuntu to Xubuntu)

Whoops...I found the install went well and fewer problems than before, until I discovered if listing to any audio for more than a few minutes it would be interupped by a minutes long monoton horn sound. You could not mute or stop it.

Much Googling I finally found one person who said to try thing

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

And then add this one line...

options snd_sof sof_debug

Then the minutes long "horn" stopped, and all was well
I just didn't want to forget this

DVD Subtitles

I can't believe I never knew or learned and then forgot, but IF you have a DVD and you want English subtitles you can use Closed Captions. Assuming Handbrake has been adapted to rip DVDs (that you personally own)

Simply add the subtitles as a track from the Closed Caption option.

Why Are People Doing This Crazy Stuff!!

Just trying to understand the society around me and thinking about people who believe "the Big Lie" as a rationilztion for even more crazy beliefs and actions...Came across this reseracher, Karen M. Douglas, and found this article online by her and some other people about why people believe in crazy conspiracy stuff (NOT theories in their minds)

Social Motives

Causal explanations, conspiracy explanations included, are also informed by various social motivations, including the desire to belong and to maintain a positive image of the self and the in-group. Scholars have suggested that conspiracy theories valorize the self and the in-group by allowing blame for negative outcomes to be attributed to others. Thus, they may help to uphold the image of the self and the in-group as competent and moral but as sabotaged by powerful and unscrupulous others. If this is the case, we can expect conspiracy theories to be particularly appealing to people who find the positive image of their self or in-group to be threatened (Cichocka, Marchlewska, & Golec de Zavala, 2016).

These findings suggest that conspiracy theories may be recruited defensively, to relieve the self or in-group from a sense of culpability for their disadvantaged position. In keeping with this defensive motivation, conspiracy belief is associated with narcissism—an inflated view of oneself that requires external validation and is linked to paranoid ideation (Cichocka, Marchlewska, & Golec de Zavala, 2016). Conspiracy belief is also predicted by collective narcissism —a belief in the in-group’s greatness paired with a belief that other people do not appreciate it enough (Cichocka, Marchlewska, Golec de Zavala, & Olechowski, 2016). Groups who feel that they have been victimized are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories about powerful out-groups (Bilewicz, Winiewski, Kofta, & Wójcik, 2013).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721417718261

And also this

"Conspiracy theories tend to be particularly prominent in times of crisis," said Prof Karen Douglas, a social psychologist at the University of Kent who specialises in the psychology of conspiracy theories.

"People are looking for explanations that help them cope with difficult situations when there is a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. They might also be looking for simple answers that make them feel better, and conspiracy theories might seem to offer those simple answers."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57369349

Escape from Reason

I was thinking about how our brains work and we (all of us) are prone to think emotionally and it takes effort to override that to make reasoned deciscions. And as the Repulican party is the most obvious example I Googled the pschology of ex president and found some old articles.

Emotions are powerful motivators of behavior. For most animals, emotion, not rational thought is what drives behavior, and this remains true for our esteemed species, self-christened as Homo sapiens—“the wise one.” But our decisions are not made solely by reasoning. In fact, in the most complex and momentous decisions we make we rely on emotion—gut feelings. Whom to marry, where to live, or even what entrée to select from a dinner menu, are decisions we make not by reason, but rather by how we “feel.”

Most of these circuits are deeply engraved by evolution in the brains of our primate and mammalian ancestors. A mother’s instant reaction to respond with unlimited aggression if necessary to protect her child is a familiar example. The human brain shares this same neural circuitry with other animals, and that circuit is separate from the neural circuit that launches us into defensive aggression in response to another type of danger, facing an intruder for example. To understand this election you must understand the brain’s threat detection mechanism.

This neuroscience perspective explains the seemingly incomprehensible situation of a privileged billionaire becoming the champion of working class men and women who are feeling angry and threatened. It is boggling to provide a logical explanation for this improbable hero of the working class, but his appeals to the anger, fear, and frustration that many feel—an appeal to the brain’s limbic system—is perfectly consistent with how the human brain makes complex decisions by relying on emotion when faced with momentous decisions. Perfume is not sold by describing how it will make us smell; it is sold by how it will make us feel. So it is with selling real estate. And rationally we know that all cars travel at the same speed on our roads. How then can we rationally explain the need to purchase a 500 horsepower Corvette, when it will ride the bumper of a jalopy in traffic, but cost 10 times as much? Marketing skillfully manipulates emotion—tapping into how we feel—to nudge our purchasing decisions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/trump-s-victory-and-the-neuroscience-of-rage/ Another surprise victory is unlikely to happen again if this election is looked at from the same perspective of neuroscience that I used to account for the surprising outcome in 2016. Briefly, that article explained how our brain provides two different mechanisms of decision-making; one is conscious and deliberative, and the other is automatic, driven by emotion and especially by fear. Trump’s strategy does not target the neural circuitry of reason in the cerebral cortex; it provokes the limbic system. In the 2016 election, undecided voters were influenced by the brain’s fear-driven impulses—more simply, gut instinct—once they arrived inside the voting booth, even though they were unable to explain their decision to pre-election pollsters in a carefully reasoned manner.

Trump’s dismissal of experts, be they military generals, career public servants, scientists or even his own political appointees, is necessary for him to sustain the subcortical decision-making in voters’ minds that won him election and sustains his support. The fact-based decision-making that scientists rely upon is the polar opposite of emotion-based decision-making. In his rhetoric, Trump does not address factual evidence; he dismisses or suppresses it even for events that are apparent to many, including global warming, foreign intervention in U.S. elections, the trivial head count at his inauguration, and even the projected path of a destructive hurricane. Instead, “alternative facts,” or fabrications, are substituted.

Anyway I wanted to save these links

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuroscience-and-psychology-suggest-no-surprise-victory-for-trump-this-time/

And to tie it to some other thoughts I see this along the lines of Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3671847252

I just want to remember this...

"We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up." - Donald Trump , December 2019

Carzy Trump Rant

There is a bunch of wacky stuff this guy says but this must be at the top of the crazy pile

I assume a trump supporter would would ignore the incoherence and try and distract with Solyndra or imply I hate birds, but keep the eye on the prize, this one is crazy

And to answer his question, yes, I know we have a world.

Changing the Lenin

Another Bookmark for a future post.."Conservatives" as true Leninist

Since hearing Steve Bannon's claim in an interview to be a Leninist, I wondered what he meant but until now had not followed up on it. I've been reading Democracy in Chains and there are quotes in there by founding members of libertarian think tanks like Cato and Heritage that also claim to be be leninist

So when reflecting again on the Bannon quote now, I assumed he meant political actions as multi faceted attacks on all aspects of politics and culture. Basically not just win votes or change minds but to control all possible avenues of influence. I may have puzzled out part of it but this googling found article seems convincing and has a bit more to it.

Sephen Bannon, President Trump’s chief political strategist and, after Trump, the most powerful man in Washington, once declared proudly: “I am a Leninist.” He was talking to a New York university academic who had written extensively on communism and the former Soviet Union. “What on earth do you mean?” the professor asked him. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” replied Bannon. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
............
Two days after Lenin seized power in Russia almost exactly a century ago, he began an assault on the press – and his successors in the USSR did not let up for the next 70 years. In the few months between the overthrow of the tsar and Lenin taking power, a relatively free press had sprung up, almost all of it vigorously opposed to Lenin, who was written off as a dangerous demagogue. When his Bolshevik party mounted a successful coup and Lenin made himself, in effect, dictator of Russia, one of his first acts was to censor the press, which he called “a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or guns aimed at us … Why should we place it in our enemies’ hands?”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/06/lenin-white-house-steve-bannon

But maybe the underlying connection is simply your political opponents are the ENEMY and you use what ever means in your power to conquer them. And THAT is what the modern conservative movement is about. They are the virtuous and as many of those virtuous warriors love to quote..

Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue..
.B Goldwater

Compassion and empathy are at best ill advised (even though well intentioned) but wrong and at worse a desire to pervert the soul through a culture of dependency. The fact that the rich no longer have to give money to the poor or helpless is a natural by product of their virtuous nature.

---

Lenin would very likely have identified 2017 as a revolutionary moment. He matters today not because of his flawed and bloody answers, but because he was asking questions similar to those we are asking today. In his quest for power, Lenin promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex issues. He lied unashamedly. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything; the ends justified the means. Lenin was the godfather of post-truth politics. Powerful people have learned depressing lessons from him.

i can see why Bannon and Cato like him

kak·i·sto·cra·cy

kak·i·sto·cra·cy

[kakəˈstäkrəsē]

NOUN

government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.

"the danger is that this will reduce us to kakistocracy" ·

•a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

"the modern regime is at once a plutocracy and a kakistocracy" ·

"the man on the street must share part of the blame for allowing such a kakistocracy to entrench itself"

Time Again for a New New Beginning

Well, another birthday and another year closer to death. Now on the 11th year of this erratic blog. I suppose there are still other blogs out there but you just don’t hear that much about them anymore. So much easier just to tweet I guess.

Here is my 11th year status check...

So I’ve been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari after listening to him interviewed on Russell Brand’s podcast. Between the podcast and what I have read so far I gather one of his main points is that the thing that makes us homo sapiens so successful is that humanity can take collective actions because all the things that motivate such cooperation is the use for “fictions”. Like a legal fiction, as in corporations are people, to the very notion of nations and states and corporations, and a bunch more. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20873740-sapiens

I don’t want to go into what may be wrong or right about his thoughts, but just provisionally accept it as true. Interestingly it echos the stuff Nathan Gill was saying with his “non duality” stuff. Like the bit where there is no history or future, only “NOW” only “being” (https://youtu.be/9Wo99sa8C4Q). Even though we spend so much time thinking about what we did wrong, or good, in the past, or so much worrying about what we will do and what we might do, those are all just stories we tell ourselves as we live..NOW. We carry all of that with us at each present moment. But really we are already living in the NOW! We are already enlightened and it would be clear if we could just drop the stories that drown out our true vision. Really it is these stories that are the internal Virtual Reality goggles that we wear in our brain.

So both past and future are fictions of a sort. Yes stuff happened and will happen and there are consequences to actions and karma is a bitch, what goes around comes around, all that kind of thing. BUT...LIFE LIVED happens now! And it is only because we carry these stories along with us to each present moment that these fictions (stories) have such power. If we could let go of these stories, assholes could stop being assholes at once, but those stories overpower us.

So the thing that makes us modern humans are the stories we tell ourselves. The good and the bad of it is that we live by and cannot escape this story telling, it is what makes us human (and that is not an all good thing).

Some of the stories are horrible and enduring, as exemplified by Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2059048703

Or how we as a people can’t deal with Climate Change… explained in Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1350742534 where basically climate deniers have more effective stories that take advantage of humans natural short shortsightedness.

How financial wizardry rules and ruins the world as told in I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1721638422 it only works because of the stories bankers tell themselves.

And of course our our brains are wired to react to stories and not actual evidence…

But against all this negativity is the idea that there is also a strain of compassion and empathy buried in our DNA. Part of which I get from The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1481801657 Like there are situations that draw out empathy in the great apes and we humans can also be drawn into compassion IF we work to encourage those situation in our society. IF we did that of course.

AND there is science behind it like in studies of Vagus nerve where compassion starts BEFORE the brain so we feel compassion first and the impulse is then sent to the brain after that. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forget-survival-of-the-fittest/ .

Sooooo...humans have both an impulse to disorder but also a tendency toward cooperation and compassion and it is up to ourselves to construct a society that encourages the good over bad...IF we wanted to, but mostly we don’t.

But the galling thing is that all the suffering is simply driven by dumb stories.

End part 1.

Ludwig von Mises was a D!CK

Ludwig von Mises is a hero to conservatives and Tea Party types, even though I seriously doubt any of them actually read his books. He may very well have some sort of brilliance but if you write this letter to Ayn Rand and say...

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

...you say that?...THEN, you are a D!CK !

You know who the "masses" are, EVERYBODY! Definitely me and definitely anybody who isn't an Austrian economist or hack novelist.

Remember when conservatives went bananas when Obama point out, correctly mind you, that businesses did NOT build the roads and bridges they use? Well this is WAY worse.

So according to von Mises and Ayn Rand no matter what you have done in your business or as an employee of a business, your effort is just crap because you can't get a bunch of bozos to worship your elitist economic bullshit.

Oh yeah, Ayn Rand was a D!CK too!

Book about von Mises quoting this letter

Interesting article by the "PaleoLibertarian" Murry Rothbard called The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult .

Faust and The Mandela Effect

I happened across this article by Wendell Berry from 2008, wherein he address the then pressing issue of "the end of the era of cheap fossil fuel". An now in the era of Elon Musk, Trump and the Libertarian faith based economic world view, it seem like a throwback to values long gone. Remember when greed was a bad thing? Or is that just an imagined memory along the lines of the psychological phenomenon known as the Mandela Effect*.

From the essay
The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible — the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed — and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens.

*MANDELA EFFECT: a theory that a large group of people with the same false memory used to live in a parallel universe (the name comes from those who fervently believe that Nelson Mandela died while in prison). [Essay] | Faustian Economics, by Wendell Berry https://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/faustian-economics/

The Consequences of Lies...

Under things to remember...

Or as Arendt told a French interviewer in 1974:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/

Degrees from Anarchy

A popular saying is that “every nation is about three/six/seven/nine meals away from anarchy/revolution.” That is, hungry people are desperate people who will topple any government. “It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had” was cited in print in 1896.

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” was said by writer Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914) in a March 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine. “It’s only nine meals between men and revolution” was cited in print in 1943.

Wikipedia: Alfred Henry Lewis: Alfred Henry Lewis (January 20, 1855 – December 23, 1914) was an American investigative journalist, lawyer, novelist, editor, and short story writer.