reid/write



home // about
shitbloggin with reid scoggin

link roundup 4

Published:

a minor announcement: moved this blog to my new domain after some deliberation.

a loose motif for this week – world in flux.

reading

Hikikomori now dances around concepts of counter-culture, hermitage, a sort of sweet awareness of being adrift as much as around the sphere of potential psychological disorders. The word redefines the borders of previous understandings of isolation. So self-inflicted painful isolation becomes a confused extension of spiritual practices and the hyper connectivity that comes with computers nullifies the idea of isolation as degree zero of experience. It is in these juxtapositions of concepts that are apparently not in dialogue, that lies something crucial to unlock such a specific contemporary sensitivity, one that goes well beyond the extreme cases making the headlines. While tackling issues of revolt, the philosopher Julia Kristeva underlines “when revolt exists our spectacle oriented society marginalizes it as one of its tolerated alibis.”

As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged. The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground - our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!

With enough of these gaps, where is American or French culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.

The Ural branch of Russian Academy of Science says that thawing permafrost is a suspected reason for the cause of underground gas bubble formation. ‘An early of gas bubbles was discovered during a summer 2016 expedition to Bely island,’ said a spokesman.

Our pictures and video of this remarkable gas release are seen here, although this phenomenon appears different to the exploding pingo events. These bubbles - such as one seen in our video on Bely Island - have been called ‘trembling tundra’.

‘Their appearance at such high latitudes is most likely linked to thawing permafrost which in is in turn linked to overall rise of temperature on the north of Eurasia during last several decades,’ said a spokesman.

How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

Unconditional accelerationism rejects simultaneously the right-accelerationists’ Yudkowskian concern with control and evaluation, with shaping the explosion of modernity, with guaranteeing its heterogeneity, with exploring the possibilities of a supposedly ever-improving transhumanism. The aggregate improvement of humanity’s condition is, to be sure, a fact to which the traditional left seems incapable of responding. But beyond the nostrums of race and nation, the right-accelerationists seem all too anxious over the tearing-apart of humanity that this process has increasingly entailed. Despite their claim to a radical and ‘dark’ identity with acceleration, they model with bureaucratic pedantry forms of government within which they hope the explosion can be moulded and recuperated.

The interesting thing about our time is that however radical the message in your art, if you do your criticism through self-expression, you’re actually feeding the very power structure you’re trying to overthrow. The power structure you’re criticizing also believes in self-expression as the ultimate goal.

Capitalism is about self-expression; art is about self-expression. Art is far from being a radical outside movement. It’s at the heart of the modern conformity. That’s why nothing ever changes, because the radicals have gone to a form of expression at the very center of the power structure they disapprove of. So they’re neutered.

  • Tears – meltingasphalt.com

Tears, in this theory, are a political act, in the same way that tattling, gossiping, and whistleblowing are political. As such, we need to be constantly monitoring and evaluating them, to make sure they aren’t being abused. When people cry in situations that strike us as disingenuous or manipulative, our anger and disapproval are ways of policing the signal. People can’t just “cry wolf” (or “cry bully”) whenever they want and get help from third parties.

So this account is plausible enough. But at least one important question remains: Why did only humans evolve this particular signal? Why doesn’t it make sense for any other creature (e.g. chimps)?

The answer is fairly simple. Humans, unique among all animals, have an instinct to resist aggression even when it’s directed toward other members of the group (even non-kin). We have strong social norms against aggression, coupled with a unique eagerness to support the underdog. Our hearts go out to the oppressed, downtrodden members of the group, and our behavioral instincts follow suit. This whole suite of attitudes and reactions is called a reverse dominance hierarchy, and it goes a long way toward explaining some of the more distinctive features of human social behavior, especially our instincts around social status and cooperation.

related: signaling theory wiki