Ran Prieur

January 14.

2015-01-14T12:52:51Z

January 14. I have another thought on the whole Charlie Hebdo thing. Pundits have been arguing that it was or was not about free speech, and I've just realized that it's totally about free speech, but not in the way people are thinking. In the western liberal view, free speech is a moral issue, so a culture with free speech is morally superior and more democratic. I think a culture with free speech is strategically superior, and arguably less democratic.

Whenever there's a protest in a non-western nation, and the rulers violently crack down, I always wonder: why don't they just ignore the protest like they do in America? One possible answer is that there's a cultural difference: in primitive authoritarian cultures, the state is viewed like a strict-father family, where if the children talk back to the father, he has to beat them or he loses all respect. So in Syria, if Assad ignores a protest, it's a sign of weakness, which encourages more and more dissent until he's thrown out of power. But in advanced authoritarian cultures, if the rulers ignore a protest, it's sign of strength, that their power does not depend on your opinion, and the protesters eventually give up and go home.

My college history professor told an anecdote about Frederick II of Prussia. He came upon an ugly caricature of himself that someone had set up in the street, but someone else had knocked it down. Frederick set it back up and said, "I let them say what they want, and they let me do what I want." Whether or not this actually happened, the message is that tolerating symbolic dissent was a new idea, and an upgrade. If a nation or culture can build a tradition of being unshaken by symbolic expression, then it is stronger defensively against internal criticism, and stronger offensively (pun intended) against competing cultures that are still vulnerable to symbolic expression. So free speech is not a delicate flower that we must protect -- it is a rising ocean in which everything must eventually swim.

Footnote: if people don't have enough food, protesters will not go home and the government cannot ignore them, and this is going to happen a lot in the next few decades. Tragically, hungry protesters tend to believe they're angry about some silly idea and not about lack of food.

January 12.

2015-01-12T12:06:36Z

January 12. A few more thoughts on Friday's subject. Two of the big framing narratives are to view the killers as criminals driven by mental illness, and to view them as operatives of Islam. I'm interested in where these stories intersect: Islam is serving as a catalyst to inspire terrible people to do terrible things. Now, I think resisting the economic domination of the west would be a good thing. But the Charlie Hebdo massacre is an attempt to impose domination. It's a petulant, authoritarian act. If you know Game of Thrones, Islam wants to encourage people like Rob Stark and instead it's encouraging people like Joffrey. How embarrassing!

It's like cultures and ideologies have resonant frequencies that increase the vibration of certain personality types. If my own writing were music, I've changed it over time to be less like metal and more like jazz, because I don't want to wake up and find out that some sullen fuckup has killed a bunch of people while quoting one of my essays. But it's a lot harder to change a whole religion. And as the global economy collapses, there will be even more demand for stories that make clumsy violence feel heroic. So not only do I not expect Islam to change, I fear that it will be left in the dust by competing ideologies that are equally angry and humorless, and more in tune with the 21st century.

Also, here's a comment by Slavoj Zizek. After spending an hour trying to understand it, I think he's saying that the dominant left is stupid because it only stands for bland comfort, Muslim fundamentalists are stupid because they secretly envy the western lifestyle, and we need a radical left that stands for freedom and equality in a way that feels exciting.

Brief new subject: a few years ago I wrote that, in the public discussion of climate change, nobody is talking about leaving oil in the ground. Well, now they're talking about it! From the Guardian: Leave fossil fuels buried to prevent climate change, study urges. And from FiveThirtyEight, How much fuel we need to leave buried to beat climate change. The answer, of course, is way more fuel than politically possible. But maybe it's becoming possible to not burn all of it.

January 9.

2015-01-09T12:15:50Z

January 9. This week's big news was the mass murder at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo by people claiming to represent Islam. Here's a good commentary with some humor: Norway's Christians didn't have to apologise for Anders Breivik, and it's the same for Muslims now. Anders Breivik is probably the right comparison here: unhinged losers seeking glory, rather than an international conspiracy. But if you want to credit the killers with some savvy, this short piece in the Telegraph suggests that they were not actually offended by the Muhammad cartoons, but were making a calculated strategic move to turn the world against moderate Muslims, who will then be driven to extremism.

I don't use the word "terrorist". It's a propaganda word, value-loaded and poorly defined, which leads to sloppy thinking. I prefer to call these people fanatical ideologues. They have overreacted to the meaninglessness of modern life by finding meaning in a very simple story of absolute good versus absolute evil, which justifies exciting and extremely selfish actions. And if they can get other people to join them in the same story and similar actions, then their lives feel even more meaningful. Worst case, you get a popular war with millions of people on both sides who see the other side as cartoon villains, and a lot of really stupid murders.

I think there's an antidote to this, and it's not love. Fanatical ideologues feel strong love for whatever is at the center of their value system, and they might even tell you that love is their primary motivation. What these people are missing is the ability to have fun, to let go, to be playful. If you really know how to have fun, then the moments of your life feel meaningful without having to tell some grand story to make yourself important. And if, within a culture, there are too many people who don't know how to have fun, it's like a dry forest that only needs one spark to go up in flames.

This subject reminds me of the thing that turned me away from the critique of civilization: the novel The Day Philosophy Dies. It's the meanest thing I've ever read, about badly damaged angry people who bring down civilization like it's some kind of grim and stressful duty. I didn't want to keep feeding an idea that could feed that kind of emotional state. But if there's a way to crash the system by accident, while having fun, I might be on board with it.

January 7.

2015-01-07T12:29:48Z

January 7. Here's something you don't see every day, a critique of left-wing academic culture from the left. It's titled "Able-bodied until it kills us" but I would title it Disability as class power. The idea is, when dust makes poor people sneeze, they have to tough it out, but when dust makes rich people sneeze, they can get diagnosed with an allergy and make everyone take it seriously so they don't have to do any work. There are even students who can get ordinary bad writing diagnosed as dyslexia so they can still get good grades. On "ableism":

If ability is now cast as an unfair advantage, then what is the qualification for academic and professional employment beyond a background of wealth and privilege? When rewarding students on the basis of "ability" is reconceived as a form of oppression, then the only mechanism that prevents the academy from being purely an instrument of class reproduction is made taboo.

By the way, I avoid the word "privilege" because there's usually a hidden meaning that doesn't make any sense: "You should be grateful for this thing that has made you stupid." The deeper problem with the word is that it blurs together two things that are nearly opposite. One is something that is good for you, something that everyone should have but not everyone does, like world travel or a healthy diet or not being harassed by cops. The other is something that no one should have because it's bad for everyone, like being able to command others without their consent, or being protected from the consequences of your own selfishness.

Of course, in a society with entrenched social class, higher class people have no idea that they're being selfish and being protected from the consequences. The way to fix this is not to make them feel guilty for an advantage that's never clearly explained, but to change the system so that lower class people (including nonhumans) are permitted to push back.

January 5.

2015-01-05T12:19:05Z

January 5. Thanks Gannon for sending this strange essay on cryptoforestry. The style reminds me of Fredy Perlman and Crimethinc:

Cryptoforests are sideways glances at post-crash landscapes, diagrammatic enclaves through which future forest cities reveal their first shadows, laboratories for dada-do-nothingness, wild-type vegetable free states, enigma machines of uncivilized imagination, psychogeographical camera obscuras of primal fear and wanton desire, relay stations of lost ecological and psychological states. Cryptoforests are wild weed-systems, but wildness is equated not with chaos but with productiveness at a non-human level of organization.

Related: a reader and some friends have a new online magazine called the FC journal, with stuff about deep ecology and critiques of modernity.

Also related (thanks Alex): Is depression a kind of allergic reaction? Evidence suggests that depression is more physical than psychological, and that it could be caused by inflammation -- and inflammation can be caused by many things including some features of modern life: trans fats, sugar, stress, and social isolation.

January 2, 2015.

2015-01-02T12:26:40Z

January 2, 2015. Music for the weekend! Leigh Ann has made her best of 2014 playlist. It's around 70 minutes, and 17 songs: 1) Eagulls - Possessed, 2) Moon Hooch - Bari 3, 3) Your Friend - Tame One, 4) The Wytches - Carnival Law, 5) Fujiya and Miyagi - Artificial Sweeteners, 6) Swans - Screen Shot, 7) Kasabian - Bumblebeee, 8) Cult of Youth - Empty Faction, 9) Jungle - The Heat, 10) The Shaolin Afronauts - Lagos Chase, 11) Lisa Gerrard - Adrift, 12) To Rococo Rot - Classify, 13) Ought - Pleasant Heart, 14) Tobacco - Father Sister Berzerker, 15) Demob Happy - Succubus, 16) Girl Band - Lawman, 17) Timber Timbre - This Low Commotion. I've added YouTube links for my favorites.

Also there's some great stuff on this page: 20 essential psych albums of 2014. Leigh Ann wanted to put Lay Llamas and Wreaths on her playlist but it would have been too long.

Finally, thanks Mind Over Media for a $30 donation, and here's another video I made for my favorite band, a spooky trip-folk song from 2013: The Mirror Like Sea.

December 31.

2015-12-31T12:28:35Z

December 31. Three biology links. What if obesity is nobody's fault? This is one of my favorite subjects because I've always been skinny without even trying, while other people fight hard to lose weight and are still fat. It's like the popular idea is exactly backwards, and being fit is correlated with using less willpower. Anyway, in a new study, two groups of mice ate the same, exercised the same, and even pooped the same, but a genetic difference made one group fat. They still don't know how to reconcile this with the laws of thermodynamics. [Update: I've had several emails from readers who think they know more about biology than the researchers in this study and the answer is easy. Maybe they're right but I'm not qualified to judge this.]

The benefits of being cold. This doesn't explain the mice, but there is evidence that "obesity is only in small part due to lack of exercise, and mostly due to a combination of chronic overnutrition and chronic warmth."

Why broken sleep is a golden time for creativity. It's about how we used to go to bed early and have two sleeps separated by doing fun stuff in the middle of the night, and electric light has tricked us into staying up late and having one big sleep which is not as good for us.

New subject: The other day there was a subreddit post arguing that homelessness and unemployment make us unhappy because of a social stigma, which is there to prop up the economy. And there are several good comments.

December 29.

2015-12-29T12:47:46Z

December 29. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day, when I bunch all the negative links so I can stay out of that mindset the rest of the month.

The Unidentified Queen of Torture. Most of the article is behind a paywall but you can get around it in many browsers by right-clicking the link and opening it in a private window. The big media will not identify her, but this wikipedia article does: Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

A study confirms something completely obvious: A bad job is harder on your mental health than unemployment.

Toys are more divided by gender now than they were 50 years ago. Related anecdote: Leigh Ann and I were in Seattle for Thanksgiving and she was looking for a coloring book to keep her occupied on the long drive home. Almost every book was either Disney princesses or male action characters. She finally found one with animals, but they were zoo animals. Welcome to the human zoo, kids!

Because of traffic congestion, London cars move no faster than chickens, or about the same speed as horse-drawn carriages. Thanks Jack for the link, and here's something related that I've posted many times: Ivan Illich's critique of cars.

Related: a redditor bashes the libertarian dream of private roads, using his experience in the logging industry to explain why private roads on private land are a logistical nightmare.

Finally, from Cracked.com, Five creepy ways your town is designed to control your mind, including the constant feeling of surveillance, benches that don't allow relaxation or fun, how the suburbs force you to have a car, how shopping environments confuse you into buying stuff you don't need, and how urban planning segregates us by race and class.

December 26.

2015-12-26T12:57:30Z

December 26. I'm still on vacation from original thoughts, but here are three links about practical politics. Global Guerrillas has a lot of good stuff this month, including posts on how an open source insurgency can take down Uber, why the Sony hack worked, corporate disruption using Snowden style moral warfare, and drones dropping caltrops.

Earlier this month I posted two links about how modern police are unnecessary and historically strange, and here's another good one on the same subject, Origins of the police, arguing that "the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action", not to crime.

And a nice article about squatters in Detroit.

December 24.

2015-12-24T12:26:05Z

December 24. As usual for Christmas, I'm posting my favorite funny Christmas song, The Abominable O Holy Night. Also here's a video by the singer, Steve Mauldin, proving that he sang the original and then singing it again.

And my favorite serious Christmas song, Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.

December 22.

2015-12-22T12:01:08Z

December 22. Two happy psychology links. Addiction study shows mindfulness intervention boosts brain activation for healthy pleasures. Basically, noticing and appreciating life's little pleasures is a learned skill, and learning it makes you resistant to drug addiction.

How deprogramming kids from how to do school could improve learning. It's about a teacher who made several helpful changes, including more collaboration and allowing students to keep trying until they master the material.

And this week's PostSecret has lots of good Christmas-themed stuff.

December 19.

2015-12-19T12:01:02Z

December 19. It's not uncommon for me to check email in the morning and find that two readers have sent me links. Yesterday it was the same link: The Toxoplasma Of Rage. It's about how the biggest news stories are the ones that divide us the most, and also about PETA's strategy to enrage people to get attention, and about reblogging wars on Tumblr. The author uses a metaphor of parasitic disease to talk about how people get worked up over opposing ideologies. One thing I would add is that the big goal of activists and journalists, "raising awareness", doesn't even work. We already have too much awareness and too little power, so when the nation gets perfectly divided over some police shooting, it's like two sides of a football stadium cheering for different teams, and none of us are allowed on the field.

And something fun for the weekend. Existential Comics is an internet comic strip about philosophical subjects, and last week's strip, Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd, is really good. By the way, the guy who sent me the link is named Aristotle.

Finally, my favorite song disappeared from YouTube when the submitter had her account revoked, so I made a new video out of some footage, shot by someone else, that looks like the song sounds to me: Big Blood - Song for Baltimore. I also found out that Big Blood released a new album, Unlikely Mothers, last spring. It does not yet appear on their free music archive page, but here's a soundcloud stream, and one of the best tracks is on YouTube: Leviathan Song Pt. II.

Update: I've made two more Big Blood videos, their prettiest song, Oh Country, and my favorite from the new album, Away Pt III.

December 17.

2015-12-17T12:45:29Z

December 17. I seem to be taking a break from heavy thinking. Here's a new article, Policing is a dirty job, but nobody's gotta do it: 6 ideas for a cop-free world. And a 2001 article that goes into much more detail on the invention of modern police, Are cops constitutional?

New subject: Future cities lit by beautiful bioluminescent trees. I found this on Hacker News and here's the comment thread. It reminds me of one solution to Fermi's Paradox: we haven't noticed aliens because their technology is so advanced that it's indistinguishable from nature.

December 15.

2015-12-15T12:21:08Z

December 15. Stray links. The vagabond subreddit is "the internet home for hitchhikers, hobos, vagabonds, and backpackers".

Related: Wild things: More 9-5'ers undoing domestication.

Shimer College: the worst school in America? It's actually a really good school with a radical teaching method that challenges students and leads to a lower graduation rate than conventional colleges. I don't like the whole "great books" thing because I don't trust the cultural process that decided which books are "great", but everything else sounds fascinating and it's a smart article.

And something for the season, an excellent article about how Christmas lights are wired and how to troubleshoot them.

December 11.

2015-12-11T12:40:42Z

December 11. Some personal stuff for the weekend. Leigh Ann moved to Spokane about 14 months ago, and she didn't find any work until last spring, when she got hired as a subcontractor for dog walks and pet sits. A lot of these are in remote suburbs where the buses don't go, and even in the city the buses don't run that often, and their policy on transfers is not as nice as Seattle's. So I ended up driving her around a lot.

I hate driving. In normal life I'm always bumping into things and knocking things over, and maybe I'll break something that costs ten bucks, so it's no big deal. But clumsiness in a car can easily cost thousands of dollars, so I have to fight my nature and really focus my attention to drive without crashing. I can do this, but it takes a lot out of me -- the more I drive, the more I feel generally tired, the more sleep I need, and the harder it is to motivate myself to do anything else. I've only been able to keep up the blog this year by doing it in the morning before the driving. Also, the hectic stop-and-go motion of driving is a nightmare compared to the relaxed and elegant motion of almost everything else in the universe, for example this famous video of San Francisco traffic in 1906.

So I finally did what I should have done six months ago and threw money at the problem. Leigh Ann has a car now that she enjoys driving, her name is on the title so I don't get stressed by the rsponsibility, we're going to split the cost of insurance and registration, and I'm going to sell my truck in the spring. And she's eventually going to pay me back. We learned a lot of stuff buying the car:

1) Everyone knows that the sweet spot for a used car is around $3000. It's almost finished depreciating, there's probably nothing seriously wrong with it, and you have a great chance to drive it for a few years and sell it for good money if you take care of it. So cars in this range are rare, while they're plentiful under $1500 and over $6000.

2) Toyota and Honda, because of their reputation, are more expensive by a wider margin than they're more reliable. Just like when I bought my truck, we started off looking at Toyotas and ended up looking at Fords.

3) We really wanted a late 90's Geo Metro, but good ones are rarely sold. We almost bought one with a stalling problem that seemed like a cheap fix, until I found this forum thread explaining how the exact model we were looking at had a basically unfixable problem, because GM patched a different problem with a strange part and then stopped making it.

4) If you transfer a title in Washington state, and there is anything crossed out or whited out anywhere on the paperwork, even on something trivial, they make you go back to the seller, fill out a new bill of sale, an odometer disclosure statement, and a document explaining the alteration which has to be signed and notarized.

5) Spokane Teachers Credit Union doesn't really offer free notary services for members, unless it's the member's signature on a document related to their own financial services. They wouldn't even let us pay for it, and we had to go to the seller's bank, Mountain West Bank, which is more generous with their notary services. I wonder if credit unions are on their way to being worse than banks, precisely because everyone assumes they're better.

6) Emissions testing has little or nothing to do with smoke belching out the tailpipe. It's almost entirely about the "evap system" around the gas tank, and these days the test is usually done purely by reading the car computer. If the "check engine" light is on it's an automatic fail, and a clean-running car can fail just because the gas cap isn't tight enough. Even if you replace the gas cap, you don't know if you fixed the problem because the car computer requires an unknown combination of cold starts and driving before it notices that the problem is fixed. In our case it took about a day.

7) If a Washington State title says "not actual miles", and you sell it to Idaho, their title will not tell you this, but if it's sold back to Washington, they find it in their records and put it back on. Idaho might be the reasonable state here, because Washington's regulations are so draconian that a title can easily get tagged "not actual miles" for purely bureaucratic reasons. That's probably what happened with our car but it will still lower the price if we sell it.

Anyway, it's a red 4-door 2007 Ford Focus, like the one in this photo.