Boeing Says It’s Open to Name Change for Grounded 737 Max.

I have some suggestions:

The Groundpounder
737 Deep Impact
The Crater Maker
737 All Systems No
737 Crash Right Into the Fucking Ground Edition
737 Pinto

All those would work pretty well, yes?

Western liberalism (in the broadest sense*) is probably incompatible with any chance of dealing with the climate crisis.

The question then becomes, is anything else, any other ideology or method of organizing society adequate to the challenge? And if so is there a way from this metastable peak to the one over there somewhere?

I have no idea. I suspect the answer is no, but I’d love to be wrong about this.

*Western liberalism here includes Republicans, nearly all Christians, and all people who call themselves liberals, libertarians, etc., because they all basically think the same way, have the same minds.

Reading some philosophy tonight (Greg Anderson’s The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History, if anyone cares) and thinking about so-called polarization.

I don’t think it’s really polarization as we conceive of it through the lenses of our past perception. It’s more of a lurch to positions to deal with increasing destruction of knowledge heuristics that no longer function, or that input nonsense and also output the same.

Let’s look at some Anderson.

In short, we see in Athens nothing less than the “total suffusion of…society with the gods and their concerns.”

All of this is common scholarly knowledge. And as such, it presents significant challenges for mainstream historians, who, it goes without saying, do not readily accept the reality of Greek divinities. How exactly can one account historically for a past world where the primary actors were apparently unreal, ahistorical beings, pure figments of the imagination?*

The reason I quote this passage is that society is undergoing an enormous phase transition now and the prior decades are becoming just as illegible to many as the Greek method of sense-making Anderson cites. This transition, unrealized by nearly all and denied by many, is intensely fascinating to observe because these society-wide sociopsycho-epistemological (apologies for this word, but there literally is not a word for what I mean in English) transformations only occur once every few hundred years. The last came about as a consequence of the printing press, and I was not around for that one.

It’s intensely difficult if not impossible to truly understand these metamorphoses as they occur. Foucault attempted this and he only got it less than half-right. He didn’t experience much of the internet, which vastly intensified what he’d already observed in more unhurried form. So I’m reading all I can about old worlds of nous, now departed and nearly incomprehensible, to try to grasp something of the new.

Back to polarization and the world being built now — or the one that is constructing itself. I’m considering surveillance and self-surveillance in a loop of recursivity. I’m thinking about how algorithms have replaced state actors at many levels. I’m pondering that information is now as solid (which it say, not) and shifting as Saharan dunes reconfigured by a samoon. As a result of this, what we see is not polarization, but performative certitude that is just as likely to mutate not due to new evidence but because of the results of algorithmic proddings, self-surveillance and that recursive spiral, and the nature of shame in an intensely-surveilled culture.

*p. 134 of the OUP 2018 edition