Ran Prieur

November 28.

2016-11-28T16:00:22Z

November 28. With all this buzz about the alt-right, last week on the subreddit there was a piece trying to define an "alt-left", but this comment goes through it point by point and explains why it's more right than left. If I defined an alt-left, it would explicitly take no position on race, or on racially charged subjects like immigration.

You could say that's easy for me to say as a white guy, but in my experience, nobody is more obsessed with race than self-identified whites. I don't even identify as white. I mean, I check the "white" box on bureaucratic forms, but if I listed a hundred things that define who I am, "likes rhythms that emphasize the one-beat" would be in the top twenty and white wouldn't even make the list.

The core of my alt-left definition would be economics. Libertarians want a "level playing field" but I want a playing field slanted so hard that trying to turn a lot of money into more money would be like climbing a mountain, and being content with just enough money for basic dignity and comfort would be like coasting downhill on a bicycle.

Related: a new essay from Aeon magazine, What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

November 23.

2016-11-23T23:10:46Z

November 23. Over on my misc page I have a few Thanksgiving recipes, and I've just developed a recipe for unsweetened fresh cranberry sauce. You need a food processor or a powerful blender, and then it's a pound of berries, two apples peeled and chopped, and a cup of tart cherry juice. For the big meal I plan to wait until Friday morning and try to find a $50 turkey marked down to $10.

Of the three books I mentioned a week ago, the one that keeps pulling me back is suprisingly the most difficult: Ellen Chen's translation and dense commentary on the Tao Te Ching. Chapter 52.3 has a line that perfectly applies to recreational drugs: "Use the bright light but return to the dim light."

November 21.

2016-11-21T21:50:00Z

November 21. Posting will probably be light this week. Thanks Gabriel for this link, The Court of Values and the Bureau of Boringness. A lot of people have noticed a problem with democracy: that ordinary voters focus on what the candidates symbolically represent, and don't know or care about how the government works. The author's solution is to divide government into two branches, one where boring nerds set actual policy, and one where "outrageous charismatic buffoons" argue about values.

November 18.

2016-11-18T18:20:11Z

November 18. More fun stuff for the weekend. In this absurd man-on-the-street interview, a guy says that Trump will raise Atlantis by completing the system of German idealism. I found the video on the Sorcery of the Spectacle subreddit, which... I don't even know what it's about.

On the self-improvement front: Do you ever catch yourself doing something that's supposed to be purely for fun, but you're not having fun anymore, just continuing to do it out of habit? I'm working on noticing that more often and more quickly, and this completely painless practice has raised my happiness baseline.

I also noticed something about meditation. I've seen it described as watching a stormy sea, and trying to still the waves so you can see to the bottom. But the waves are not in the "sea" -- the waves are in the watcher. Now I finally understand the value of observing the breath. I remember a metaphor about a guy who tames a demon by giving it a curly hair and telling it to make the hair straight, so the demon just runs its fingers over the hair again and again and can't do anything else. When you can focus your attention finely enough, observing the breath is exactly like that, because you're no longer observing a whole breath but running your attention carefully along it.

By the way, I never budget time for meditation -- I just budget plenty of time for sleeping, and whenever I can't sleep, I repeatedly still my thoughts and follow my breath. Either I succeed in putting in meditation practice, or I succeed in sleeping.

And more music. Lora Logic was a minor figure in the British post-punk scene in the late 70's and early 80's. Personally I find her jumpy rhythms almost unbearable, but her music is raw, complex, and inspired, and it needs a bigger audience. If you only listen to one song, try Brute Fury.

November 16.

2016-11-16T16:00:53Z

November 16. I'm tired of politics. We've all chosen our positions for emotional reasons we're not even half aware of, and then we argue over tacked-on rationalizations. The smartest people are the stupidest, because their rationalizations are the most inpenetrable, so nothing can break through to the level where the real action is.

I haven't read many books lately, but now I'm trying to start again with three books, all of which I've read or started reading before: The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings by John Keel, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and Ellen Chen's Tao Te Ching.

Moving on to fun stuff... how cool is it that the Oakland Raiders are good again? Their quarterback, Derek Carr, had an older brother who flopped in the NFL because he couldn't perform under pressure. Watching this unfold on TV was so painful for Derek that he was motivated to become one of the best quarterbacks at making throws under pressure. Last week the Raiders dominated the defending champions, and one of their linemen made this awesome quote: "We ran the same running play ten times in a row. We kept wearing them down with double teams. They knew it was coming. It didn't matter. That's when you take somebody's will."

Last week I linked to my favorite songs page, but I want to call out one song that I'm especially into lately, from 2002, Broken Social Scene - Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl. It's like the twee Stairway to Heaven.

November 14.

2016-11-14T14:40:23Z

November 14. Over on the subreddit there's an interesting discussion of why I have so many alt-right readers. Sometimes they annoy me and I want them to go away, but where there's annoyance, there's always an opportunity for learning.

Anyway I have more to say about the election. If you watch UFC, you know that everyone talks trash before the fight, and during the fight they hit each other, and then after the fight they embrace. Donald Trump understands better than I do that politics works the same way. For the general election I thought he would reinvent himself as a lovable moderate, and instead he doubled down on being dark and divisive -- and it worked! Then, the moment he was declared the winner, he suddenly pivoted to making peace and bringing America together. So I'm wondering, how much of Evil Trump was a performance? What's under that scary clown mask?

I barely considered the possibility that Trump would turn out to be basically the same as every other president. I said he'd be a great ceremonial president, but I might have underestimated how much the presidency is already ceremonial. When the whole Bush family endorsed Hillary, I was sure the oligarchy feared Trump. Now I think we all fell for a deep con.

Imagine you're the secret ruler of an America that's been hollowed out. All the power is in the cities now, and the peasants want a revolution. But there's nothing you can do for them. The manufacturing jobs are lost forever to automation, the immigrants will keep coming in, old-time white culture is dying -- but you still need those people to work at Walmart and maintain the infrastructure, and they have a lot of guns.

So you let them have their messiah, a big city billionaire who talks the language of the rural working class, and he pulls a shocking upset. Urban liberals are genuinely horrified -- they don't even know they're part of the show. A guy waves a confederate flag over a sign saying "Accept it, you lost," and he doesn't even see the irony. And Trump does his best. He gets eight years, because the charismatic ones always do, and he gets a few symbolic victories. But on a deeper level the world continues on its inscrutable path, and Trump serves to pacify the right just as Obama pacified the left.

I don't really believe in sinister rulers who consciously planned exactly whatever happens, and that we make a better world by overthrowing them. I really believe the weirder thing I said last week: that our subconscious minds go deep, and they're connected down there on a scale we haven't imagined. And if you want to get out of the audience and join the circus, the locked door is inside you.

November 11.

2016-11-11T23:10:35Z

November 11. Taking a break from politics for music. Tuesday night I slipped in a YouTube link, but now I want to link to it explictly, because this classic punk song from 1982 is exactly how America feels to me right now: Fear - Let's Have A War. Related article: Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being.

I've been having some email conversations about the occult nature of Trump's win. (It would take several books to explain what "occult" even means.) So it's stunning, but not surprising, that the next celebrity to die was Leonard Cohen, because there's some weird, dark stuff around him. If you have a couple hours, it's covered in this crazy two-part podcast from last year, The Liminalist 31.5: The Guerrilla in the Room. My favorite Leonard Cohen song is Teachers.

Believe it or not, my main project over the last week was putting together music playlists. I've been wanting to merge the songs of my favorite band, Big Blood, with songs by other artists, especially my second favorite band, Hawkwind. Yesterday I finished the core list, 13 songs over 72 minutes [update: now 21 songs and almost two hours], starting with folk and getting increasingly heavy. It's at the top of my favorite songs page.

November 9.

2016-11-09T21:50:44Z

November 9. After sleeping on it and hearing some reactions, I have a new story: Trump's victory is the 9/11 of the American left. The Tarot card for both events is The Tower, a sudden shocking catastrophe in which something that appears secure is brought down. Also both events were centered around New York City, and both events had a much milder precedent: the 1993 bombing, and Bush's victory over Al Gore.

In both 2000 and 2016 (and 1980) Republicans nominated a gunslinger, a candidate with great political instincts who inspired the base and didn't care about his own flaws. In both of those years (and 2004) Democrats nominated an uptight, awkward moderate who tried to avoid the appearance of having any flaws, but the result was that smaller flaws got magnified, voters were apathetic, and the Republican won. And in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, when Republicans nominated a dignified moderate, they lost. The only reason Bush Sr won in 1988 was that Dukakis was even more of a dweeb.

Remember in 2004 when Howard Dean lost the Democratic primaries after making that weird scream? Compare that to the ten thousand worse things Donald Trump has done in front of a microphone. My point is not that Trump is bad but that this is what a winning attitude looks like. Dean was loose and impulsive and raw in a way that general election voters actually like -- but Democratic primary voters fear it.

The American left has been on its back foot since the 1980's, and I'm not sure why. My guess is that in the decades before 1980, they were so successful working within the system that they lost the skill and confidence to work outside the system. You need that confidence to not be afraid to lose, and you need to be fearless before you can nominate and stand behind a flawed candidate.

This is a dark night of the soul for a lot of Americans, but it's also an opportunity for us to organize in new ways and reinvent ourselves politically. Last night I mentioned disassociating from society, but that allows us to reassociate in ways we might not have imagined.

November 8, late.

2016-11-08T20:41:08Z

November 8, late. Shit just got real. A few notes...

If you're unhappy about this, just disassociate. You're not a part of this nation, this culture, this planet, just some kind of alien visiting to observe and have a good time. This attitude is both a cause and an effect of social collapse. A comment from earlier today: "I kind of hope this is the last election, however it turns out."

I do not trust voters to say why they really voted for Trump, or even to know why. I think there's a lot going on subconsciously (see below).

I think everyone who voted for Trump would have voted for him anyway, even if James Comey hadn't resurrected the email scandal at the last minute. But the FBI director was clearly angling to be a close ally of President Trump, and I expect him to be important over the next few years.

On the left, the big winner is Bernie Sanders, who would have won a lot of the votes that Hillary couldn't win. When will the Democratic party stop being afraid of popular excitement? Is it too late?

If Trump wants to prove he can cut through red tape and get shit done, while making even liberals happy, he should start by abolishing daylight savings time. Seriously, why is it so hard to make such a simple change that everyone agrees with? If we can't even do that, how can we hope to make bigger changes?

If Hillary had won, I was going to mention conspiracy theories that Trump's whole plan was to throw the election to the Dems, or that he wanted to remain an outsider populist without having to prove anything, or that his whole candidacy was a distraction. We can throw those away now, as well as the idea that the oligarchy controls the whole thing.

But I have a new grand conspiracy theory (thanks to marijuana, which won big in this election). Did you ever get in a totally baffling conflict, and years later you looked back and discovered a subconscious level on which it all made sense? So there's an example of one single link where the subconscious mind is in control and the conscious mind is just along for the ride. What if these links can form networks? What if they form a global subconscious civilization that is secretly running everything? Never mind the Reptilians -- the enemy is within.

November 8.

2016-11-08T20:40:42Z

November 8. Here's an updated Chance That Your Vote Will Decide the Election. In New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania your chance is at least as good as 1 in 2 million. [New update: it was zero.] And you might be surprised at your results on the ISideWith.com quiz. I just took it and got 99% Jill Stein, 78% Gary Johnson, 73% Hillary Clinton, and 22% Donald Trump.

November 4. Continuing on the election, maybe I've misunderstood the mass consciousness. I was thinking that Hillary is the most bland and safe candidate possible, while Trump is a ball of lightning, the most obviously flawed and scandalous candidate ever to lead a major party ticket. Why is he now within a polling error of being president? Ordinary Americans aren't going to bed hungry -- by medieval standards of material wealth, they're living like kings. But they're bored, depressed, starving for "meaning" (a word with hidden depths). People are voting for Trump because they feel suffocated by society and they want to fuck shit up.

This makes sense to me. When Trump promises to "turn Washington upside down," I can feel liberating excitement. But my head overrules my gut. I'm not going to be like that guy who is so afraid of being alone that he marries the first woman who hits on him. I'm not supporting Biff from Back To The Future 2, just because he's the first chaos candidate who happened to come along.

We're in the age of chaos now. I used to think collapse would happen for technical reasons, and those do play a role, but when I look around I see it happening for psychological reasons. Sarah Perry has a new post, A Bad Carver, that explains in detail how technology has made us miserable by breaking up our world into functions and components that no longer fit together. So we have enough food, but the process of feeding ourselves is no longer part of an integrated whole like it was for our ancestors.

Nobody knows how to fix this, but the popular urge to do something about it is only going to get stronger. So I'm thinking, let Hillary kick the can down the road another four years, and we'll have a whole new crop of chaos candidates, some of whom might be curious and competent and able to build consensus for smart radical changes.

But here's what I don't understand. People keep describing Hillary as "scary" and "dangerous". Are they projecting? Because from where I'm standing she's a boring status-quo candidate firmly allied to global interests that demand stability. I'd like to see a step-by-step, cause-and-effect argument, based on accepted facts, for how Hillary will create more danger than your average president.

The only thing I can see is that I'm being too optimistic about future chaos candidates, and if we wait another four years, we'll get someone worse. Trump is channeling the same kind of mass-consciousness uprising as Hitler, but Hitler was a serious utopian ideologue, while Trump just wants to party with Berlusconi and Putin. He might be too lazy and incompetent to do any catastrophic damage, and in the long term he'll serve stability by setting a bad example of what happens when voters go off script.

November 2.

2016-11-02T14:40:42Z

November 2. This election is getting bizarre. As scandals go, Hillary Clinton's email thing is chicken feed, and it does not begin to explain Trump's surge in the polls over the last week. It's like those people were going to vote for Trump all along and as the election gets closer they'll take a smaller and smaller excuse. And why has Trump fallen in the polls when he's been most in the public eye, right after the conventions and debates? He's like that thing you do that you hate and you always promise yourself you'll never do it again, but then as it fades in your memory it becomes more and more attractive.

I'm not endorsing Hillary. She's a political dinosaur, a predictable synthesis of 1970's liberalism and 1990's neoliberalism, and she's on the wrong side of my favorite issues: unconditional basic income, drug legalization, copyright reform, and retooling the economy for zero growth. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a crazy hybrid of 1950's conservatism and a 2050 post-crash warlord, and he's on the wrong side of everything except metapolitics.

I see Trump as a correction, bringing together two things that have grown too far apart. On the one hand is how our civilization really works, a vast and inhuman network that is best managed by competent and dispassionate technocrats. On the other hand is the show, the public perception of how it works, that it's all about the personalities of human "leaders", like the tribal leaders of our ancestral memory, and if your life sucks then we just need someone strong and decisive to straighten those folks out.

I appreciate Trump as a performer, and I agree with his instinct that the political show has become a farce and deserves to be played like a farce. But if he actually becomes president, people will learn in the most painful way that their primal view of politics is bullshit, that you can't fix your computer by getting the most confident person to smack it with a hammer.

Trump is not even a good businessman -- he has less money than if he had just put his dad's money in an average investment fund. His positions and his personality are completely authoritarian, and I would expect him to make so many more things illegal that people I know would go to prison. He's an enemy of the poor and I would expect economic desperation to create more crime, which would be used to justify more brutal central control. Ironically his own supporters would be worst off, while blue state liberals could soften the federal trainwreck with adjustments at the state level.

Another irony: Hillary Clinton's most extreme position is her hostility to transparency, her belief that ordinary people shouldn't know how the government really works. If you live by keeping people stupid, you die by keeping people stupid.