Ran Prieurhttp://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b2017-11-13T13:10:59ZRan Prieurhttp://ranprieur.com/ranprieur@gmail.comNovember 13.http://ranprieur.com/#4914fcb0bf7ede7f0f2443c95277e9729b12170d2017-11-13T13:10:59Z
November 13. If you want to keep up on all the sexual abuse stuff that's coming out, there's a new subreddit, The Weinstein Effect. I like Louis CK's apology because he understands that the core issue is power (even if his new movie fails to understand that). One thing the accusations have in common, is that if someone in a lower position tried the same shit on someone in a higher position, they would be fired.
We imagine these people are bad because they crossed the line between consent and coercion. But when almost the entire world is under authoritarian culture, where it's normal for some people to tell other people what to do, where it's normal for us to do what we're told even if we don't feel like it, then the line between consent and coercion is crossed so often that it basically doesn't exist.
Once a culture has crossed the line into normalization of hierarchy, it's a constant temptation to cross the next line, between using a position of power for the good of the whole, and using it selfishly. And once that line has been crossed, it's tempting for selfish use of power to veer into sex acts.
I like to think, in a few thousand years, human culture will be so much improved that one person having any power over another will be a scandal.]]>
November 10.http://ranprieur.com/#70fcfb7a43edc30e530b6996dc08afb7e32e8ebf2017-11-10T22:40:10Z
November 10. On yesterday's subject, there's a subreddit thread with some good thoughts, including a link to this scientific article, Running Amok: A Modern Perspective on a Culture-Bound Syndrome.
A more poetic article on the Amok phenomenon, which I've linked to before: Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere. And an article on how anti-terror urban design can also make cities more livable, by physically blocking vehicles from pedestrian spaces.]]>
November 9.http://ranprieur.com/#37bcf82e96c6d19a4b9d05e05e937328aa04508b2017-11-09T21:30:56Z
November 9. Just a quick thought on the latest mass shooting. Despite the gunman's long history of violence, he was not in any FBI database. Meanwhile, I'm sure their database is full of harmless Muslims. The mistake they're making is to see the world as an ideological battlefield, in which the danger comes from beliefs. Really the danger comes from mental illness, and ideologies are just tacked-on rationalizations for crimes that people are going to do anyway when they get deep enough into pain and anger.
It's an easy mistake to make, because ideology is easier to track, to pin down, to wrap your head around. Mental illness is getting more common and more severe, and I'm not sure why. But it wouldn't surprise me if mass shootings become so normal that the deaths are almost invisible, like car crashes, and we only hear about the really big ones.]]>
November 7.http://ranprieur.com/#ec7fa867d26e737b9fe91ca10f06e9cf4c9ea2162017-11-07T19:10:30Z
November 7. I just spent four days in Florida for Leigh Ann's brother's wedding. Her family is fun, we had a good time, and I did not bring my computer. Catching up, I see there was a lot of action on the subreddit, including this thoughtful article about Ted Kaczynski, Waiting for the End of the World.
I read two books on the trip, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by Cabeza de Vaca, and Earth Abides, the classic 1949 postapocalypse novel by George R. Stewart. It was ahead of its time in many ways, but Stewart makes a choice that seems strange to me: the protagonist is the only character in the entire novel who wants to rebuild civilization. Everyone else is content to live off abundant canned food and wild game, and human culture shifts toward the people you find in anthropology books, hunter-gatherers and horticulturists who have never encountered civilization.
To be fair, I believed this myself until around 2008: that our paleolithic ancestors were an evolutionary attractor, as stable as sharks. Now I think they were a stage in a steady and accelerating movement toward greater social and technological complexity, which has brought changes in human nature. So even after a global hard crash, given all the surviving materials and books, we would rebuild a high-tech society much faster than we did last time.
But just lately, now that I'm thinking in terms of a collective subconscious, I'm wondering if that's what it wants. Maybe part of our motivation to build this world was its novelty. Now if it crashes, we'll be like "been there, done that," and instead of doing the same kind of thing again, we'll turn our big brains to something so different, that when space aliens do it, we see no evidence of their existence.
There's another thing in Earth Abides that never occurred to me: even the survivors of a deep crash might die out from shock, because they just can't wrap their heads around a post-crash world. But in this way, we're much better off than our grandparents, because we've all seen postapocalypse fiction. We'll be like, "This isn't what I expected from playing Fallout or watching The Walking Dead, but it's close enough that I can figure out what to do."]]>
November 1.http://ranprieur.com/#a14458d86a132acddb669a9855d62ce6136300ed2017-11-01T13:10:33Z
November 1. I will probably not be posting again until the middle of next week. Today, a bunch of stray links.
Critical Shower Thoughts is a subreddit for ambitious questions and answers on various political and philosophical subjects.
And a few more from reddit. This comment tells the story of how Keith Jarrett recorded a classic solo piano album when he was forced to adapt to a crappy piano. It reminds me of another musical story, from the PBS Rock and Roll documentary, where some other band found the exact mixing board that New Order used for their landmark hit "Blue Monday", and they expected it to be intuitive and easy to use, but it turned out to be painful and difficult. There's a saying, "Genius emerges from constraint."
On the subject of how much room there is for the world to get better, The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets, showing how winning trust works much better than torture. I think the reason there's still so much torture, is that the torturers enjoy it. Also, in a dictatorship, the dictator enjoys the thought that his enemies are suffering -- and in a democracy, sometimes the public enjoys it.