Modern discourse user manual:

Its sequel will be Asking a Question To Understand Better: Why This Proves You Are a Racist Misogynist Nazi BernieBro Demon.

Yes, agreed with this.

The nudity in Game of Thrones has no raison d’être other than to perhaps attract a few more viewers, or to keep a few. It has nothing to do with the storyline at all.

However, the nudity in Westworld is disconcerting, dehumanizing. Creepy. It’s about as sexual as an autopsy — which is exactly the point. It’s necessary to the story, and to the world, to demonstrate that the corporation running Westworld doesn’t see the hosts as even quasi-human and that they have no human rights to dignity and to privacy — or even to be warm.

It is (as stated in the show) that corporation’s explicit policy that hosts when not in the park must be unclothed precisely so that the workers see them as programmable meat, as pieces of machinery or furniture. As not people. Because people wear clothes. It is one of our defining features (in many senses) and raiment of various types is one of the crowning achievements of human technology.

Therefore it’s very disconcerting to see the hosts driven around by a technician with a tablet, and strolling blankly past people in regular office attire while completely nude and utterly vulnerable. This is the metaphor of what’s being inflicted on the hosts’ minds and how helpless they are to prevent it — and it’s a damn good one.

Best screen use of nudity for actual story purposes really ever I think. (And no, it’s not just women though many of the host characters are women so you will see them naked. But if you want plenty of penises on a mainstream TV show, Westworld is also for you. But warning: it’s not sexy at all in either case.)

John Goodman was terrifyingly perfect in 10 Cloverfield Lane. He deserves an Oscar nomination.

I don’t really care about Oscar nominations, but both John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are perfect in that film. And I love that it pokes two fingers in the eyes of the lit realism camp (which is why it and Goodman didn’t get nominated, truly).

Even when you know mostly where the film is going, it’s still a great and chilling journey.

Many men got and continue to get I’d assume the message quite young that it’s wrong to be attracted to express any interest in women at all. I can’t believe this is just accidental, as it seems to have happened to a lot of us. It certainly was the message I received loud and clear from feminism even in a hick town in the early 1990s. Many other men I’ve talked with about this got the same memo.

Part of this is just both higher-class women and men’s policing of the “basket of deplorables” like me to avoid undesirable attention and mainly to delineate class and other boundaries.

I won’t go into the sociology further here, but what this sort of feminist messaging means is that the boldest, rudest and most sociopathy-tending men will continue to willfully approach women aggressively with no real consequences while those with some politesse and conscientiousness will restrict themselves from doing so. (For instance, I was in my 20s before I was confident enough to ask a strange woman for her phone number without feeling like I was sexually harassing her. Think that Caleb the Fratboy Rapist feels those same pangs? If yes, please explain why.)

I support feminism fully — but too much of Amanda Marcotte style feminism exists to bolster existing structures of power and to demonize undesirable men (while giving a pass to people like Caleb), and that is what I’m reacting against.

I know it’s not deliberate but in reality men who actually respect women or at least won’t rape them the first time they have a Coors or two get the message that “Desiring a woman or even liking her is evil and bad” while Caleb is implicitly supported in his realization that whatever he does is all good because he is the right kind of guy. Sadly it appears to me that this message comes in loud and clear from mainstream feminism as much as anywhere else.

If I ever open a restaurant, I shall call it Nom Chompsky.

Oh yeah.

Jill Stein spoiled the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton.

Oh, what a load of bullshit.

Know who has learned nothing and is going to lose again in 2018 and 2020? Democrats. Know who will they blame once again? Whoever is handy, but certainly not neoliberalism, running terrible candidates and/or bad campaigns.

Hillary in 2020, woooo!

Rationality alone is not enough for humans. Though the universe might be predictable in some narrow sense, it is not clear that it itself is rational. Too much just is, or is not, for no clear reason.

After all, isn’t just plain nothing more economical than all this? Irrational from the start.

Something that has bothered me for years in psychology and neurology are these ideas and this sort of construction and explanation of them.

Studies have shown that when people’s brains are stimulated in such a way as to trigger a physical movement, say, in the hand, the subjects report an intention to move their hand. The intention, “I want to move my hand,” which feels like the cause, is actually an effect of the beginning of the motor sequence.

Even worse is the one that goes “the signals that triggered a finger movement began a full half-second before any decision about movement” and that sort of thing — thus in the minds of the researchers disproving free will.

I’m not here to argue about free will and I’m trying to keep opaque philosophy terms out of this discussion, but here’s what’s wrong with all of this: it’s all you.

People think of the brain/mind/body in Cartesian dualist frames (oops, here come some of those terms, and yes I know that is a trinary) reflexively even when they think they have rejected it. There is no homunculus, no little being sitting in the cockpit somewhere in your pate just behind your dura mater issuing commands.

In reality, the brain is a motley collection of competing and cooperating systems that don’t have full monitoring capabilities of other system’s states. When someone stimulates part of your brain to move your hand, and nothing else seems to be wrong, the rest of your brain is like, “Huh, guess I meant to do that. I [meaning that motley collection of oddball systems] wanted to do that.”

Can you think of any evolutionary reason your brain would say, “That ain’t me moving my hand! Must be some researcher stimulating it with an electrode!” Seen many neurologists with electrodes on the African savanna a million year ago? No? I thought not.

The point I’m making is that your brain’s systems can’t really be decoupled. When you move a finger, it’s all you, even the nerve impulse that started half a second before you “decided” to move. (How can this research be this moronic?)

It’s all you, baby. It’s all you.

I don’t know what the future might bring specifically, but I do know this is the 1930s again and there will be war soon, and a lot of it.

It’s baked in. Didn’t have to be, but now it is.

In some ways it would’ve been a better world for me, though I don’t yearn for its return.

Here I am referring to the days of “computer girls” calculating and working out equations while others — usually men — played with the ideas and discoveries*. I will never have any ability in math and I don’t seem to be trainable in that area, but I’m a dab hand at connecting disparate arenas of science and thought, and understanding complex systems quickly.

In those ways, I’m more well-suited to the worlds of the 1930s and the 1940s than I am the contemporary milieu where getting into science basically means taking a math-focused IQ test regardless of your other talents or abilities.

Then, I could’ve contributed something. Possibly a lot. Now, I’d be written off because I’m not interested in becoming a full-time mathematician with a small side of science. Not only am I not suited to it, I am extremely, agonizingly bored by pretty much all math.

*I know that many discoveries were probably actually made by these “computer girls” because sometimes the only way to discover is by doing, but this is mostly lost to history.

This blog will is on hiatus as I gallivant about the land on a much-needed vacation. Expect posting to resume in approximately two weeks.

I think now examining the data and how people mostly react economically in elections that this was what really lost it for the Dems, though it’ll never be discussed because the Dem diktat is that Obamacare is unblemished, almost a miraculous, glorious triumph.

And not the failure it actually is.

2. The Obamacare Disaster. This was nearly as influential as Clinton’s reckless militarism. Most of the people I know who voted for Trump make too much money to qualify for a significant federal subsidy, and too little to be able to cover the endlessly rising cost of insurance under the absurdly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” They recalled, rather too clearly for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, how Obama assured them that the price of health insurance would go down, that they would be able to keep their existing plans and doctors, and so on through all the other broken promises that surrounded Obamacare before it took effect.

It was bad enough that so few of those promises were kept. The real deal-breaker, though, was the last round of double- or triple-digit annual increase in premiums announced this November, on top of increases nearly as drastic a year previously. Even among those who could still afford the new premiums, the writing was on the wall: sooner or later, unless something changed, a lot of people were going to have to choose between losing their health care and being driven into destitution—and then there were the pundits who insisted that everything would be fine, if only the penalties for not getting insurance were raised to equal the cost of insurance! Faced with that, it’s not surprising that a great many people went out and voted for the one candidate who said he’d get rid of Obamacare.

I understand why as formulated the individual mandate needed to exist. However, it was a terrible, ridiculous and punitive idea that has harmed more people than the ACA has helped and soured many people on the ACA who would’ve otherwise supported it.

Well, that and the double-digit premium increases and the giveaway to the insurance companies.

Forget Comey, forget the faux-whitelash and forget misogyny — my contention is that the Dems lost mainly because of the ACA and its harmful effects, and particularly that a large percentage of people who could least afford it received notice of large premium increases right before the election.

This is something Democrats will never discuss because the official wisdom is that the ACA is a huge win.

Most brilliant tweet of the year:

Bingo. This election sometimes just feels like a grad seminar in sociology being taught to angry economist https://t.co/YSuAwHYivb

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) November 17, 2016

And I’m not talking about the election.

With what.cd and other sites now shut down, the information genie has now been stuffed back into the lamp never to emerge again in our lifetimes.

I haven’t used what.cd in many years, but it was often the only place to find albums that were no longer for sale at any price — even used. It was an invaluable contribution to culture and to the world, destroyed for no real reason other than control rather than any true profit motive.

I’m actually kind of impressed at the Machiavellian efficiency with which media companies and the copyright lobby have successfully made the internet into cable TV, re-possessed and sold us back at a high price our own culture, suppressed dissent and convinced the ignorant masses that DRM is a good thing or at least the only way to do things.

It turns out that humanity is just not smart enough collectively to allow such unalloyed good to exist in the world.

If I hadn’t joined the military right out of high school, I likely never would’ve had quite enough money to feel safe moving out of Lake City, FL. Probable that I’d still be there now, possibly in prison or also likely dead.

I don’t even know why I joined the military, meaning at the time that it wasn’t a fully conscious choice. It was this frenzied desire to flee at all costs, to put the expectations and pain of my youth behind me with all the haste my situation allowed me. And it cost me a lot; the army is difficult and I made it even more so by joining tough units. I’m not at all social and I don’t like being around people and of course I generally don’t like men — but the army is all of these things and more.

There’s this phrase “of two minds” that is bandied about. The only time I’ve ever really felt that way was driving to and walking into the recruiter’s office. It’s not true to say that I joined the military on a lark; however, it’s also not true to say it was a well-considered decision. It was as if I was watching myself from above signing the paperwork and getting the details, all the while with a chant echoing through my head of, “What the fuck are you doing? You will fail.”

I didn’t fail, though. Probably the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life as none of the rest of my life would’ve happened without it.

There’s no single truth, nor single path, but the passage out of where I grew up for someone like me was narrow and risky and I’m still surprised I was able to walk it.