recently i was stuck somewhere and read through over 20 years straight of a single newspaper comic. newspaper comics are an interesting medium because theres simultaneously zero continuity (its 9000 isolated incidents) while also being one single line: one massive narrative

...

https://twitter.com/robertlasagna1/status/1816088362786144518

this particular comic started in the 90s. this means you're about... 80% of the way in, the world and characters are established, and then tech world kicks in - suddenly they have phones, social media exists, it just opens up into their world. just like it did in real life.

i didnt read all this or watch the video. you can just look at the first paragraph.

the next big front, one of the next big things - at least online as a hot topic, will be the nexus of medicine, therapy, parenthood, and the state.

here is why its an extremely difficult topic:

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1813611464617492722

my prediction is that most people will engage with this upon typical culture war lines, as you see above. perhaps this is correct or incorrect, its irrelevant to what i have to say - because, maybe uniquely, this confluence of issues really defies that sort of analysis, at all.

heres some genuine esoteric psychology advice (for entertainment purposes only):

you have a job. we say “have” so, you think its “just there”. its something you got, and now you possess it. thats wrong. if you “have” something like a job, you are creating that job.

…

https://twitter.com/karasmarsh/status/1797687625589133711

things dont just exist eternally in a static state in this sphere: so, every day, you are creating that job. you don’t realize it, but you are. if you weren’t, it would just decay or go away or be destroyed. so, youre creating your job every day without realizing it.

next:

van dusen (psychologist who worked with schizophrenics and read swedenborg) eventually adopted an energy vampire model of the voices his patients were hearing, he claimed explaining this to the patients consistently resulted in the voices telling patients to physically attack him

https://twitter.com/tomchivers/status/1792948364759236926

he basically claimed that he could sit (at least a significant percent of his) patients down in a room and go through a script, like “i am going to start explaining something to you - here’s what the voices are going to tell you to do”: first they would tell patients to leave.

tech interfaces used to be much more actively customizable. you could just poke in and make everything green, pink, anything. this is much less of a thing today. this probably stems from a kind of allergy to sincerity - someone might see your interface and see how much you cared

https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/1782100995788455954

jordan peterson really got his whole thing locked into a single meme: "clean up your room". whats lesser known is what the second step was: make it beautiful. the idea was that by trying to make something look nice, you would then be forced to be open to harsh personal criticism

'medical mundi' is a term i started to use, internally, at a time in my life when i was often in and out of hospitals.

the 'medical world' really is 'a world'. it is a realm. it has its own way of being, its own paradigm, and its self-contained.

thats medical mundi.

... you dont really notice when you enter medical mundi. something happens, and you go to the hospital. thats just what you do. you're just there.

but, you notice when you leave. you're back in the parking lot - hours, days, weeks later. like a stone, you hit the earth. you're back

[esoteric baby semiotics]

it is difficult to imagine something more wholesome than a baby. children are, in a way, the benchmark for what wholesome is. likewise, if you were asked to think of content that was unwholesome one subject that would immediately come to mind is sex

… it seems noteworthy then for those interested in symbolism, cosmology, religion, or sociology (life in general) to observe that these are only oppositional concepts when it comes to practical day to day terrestrial life. on deeper level, they are more than directly related.

one way to conceptualize mormonism historically is that it re-orients the christian system around the family unit, as we might say that at other times (possibly now, i cant say) it was organized around groups of monastics. this allows them to make statements like this one:

https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles/status/1778248518731198522

most american christians intuit that there is something essential about the family and marriage - but they lack the theological basis to say its essential. in my opinion they really feel that its “the whole point” and talk this way, but its hard to square in their big picture

one time, years ago, a guys dog brought fleas into my house.

the experience of having fleas goes like this: you see a tiny dot. you poke it, then its gone: the flea jumped when you touched it.

cycle: the visual stimuli, the suspicion, then the confirmation. over and over.

… this happens to you somewhere between one hundred to one thousand times, at random moments, all the time, until you get rid of them (which i did). then, you still think about it after. youre poking random black dots you never would have noticed before, just to check.

one evangelist wrote something like, "out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks".

this is a great principle for cultural analysis: whats really in a heart just comes out of the mouth.

one example: no one really thinks the point of public school is to make you smarter. im around a lot of parents, people with kids: that means people discuss homeschooling a lot. this discussion is also found online now, virtually everywhere

when the topic surfaces, if someone objects, sometimes people will show data about homeschooled kids generally doing well

lyotard characterized postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. modern man lives via provisional signifiers: aware of their arbitrariness as he freely chooses or creates them. this state and one potential exit from it is documented in 'harold and the purple crayon'. previous readings of the text have characterized harold in terms of eastern metaphysics, for example (most commonly) seeing harold's free construction of an empty yet tangible reality as an enacting of shunyata, the doctrine of emptiness of inherent existence found in nagarjuna.

any current mainstream conversation about our culture is dominated by a particular concept: the unconscious bias. said more philosophically: the unchecked presupposition

the idea that there are these hidden threads deep in the cultural mind, that affect how we see things

[...] it would be impossible to participate in any cultural discourse at this time without understanding this concept. its a kind of fascination for this time period. luckily, its also very intuitive, so everyone understands it.

everyone knows what this is, and they have examples.

many years ago as an exercise i got the largest notebook i could find and tried to record everything i remembered about my life until i left high school, all the way through, start to finish, in a few sittings

one huge issue i encountered here was impossible event sequences

.. i kept hitting these walls while trying to fit it all into a narrative. not misremembering - an inability to stack what i knew to be facts in a logical order.

i went to ohio with bryan. but then we stopped being friends after this other event. but then, we went to vermont.

i am obsessed with the concept of addiction.

i have a job where i can half watch things while im working, passively, in the background. there are documentaries about people throwing their life into something that ive watched hundreds of times. sometimes every day, for months. at a certain point i obviously began to wonder if this was unhealthy. thats a separate subjective question. the more interest question to me was: why?

at first, i thought it was autobiographical. i was raised by addicts, i had addictions, kind of just makes sense. at first.

intellectual western fine artists in the 20th century really adopted the attitude of “its your fault if you dont get it” and “you get what you bring to it”

if im bringing my own “art” to the art museum and its my job to understand it, we have to ask: uh whats the artist job then

https://twitter.com/giordkat/status/1769720798258843929

instead of just admitting that some art is mostly for other artists and intellectuals this type of painter puts themselves into the position of being somewhere below a build a bear workshop (do these still exist). the audience shows up to make it happen themselves, for themselves

of course this will be bad, but i feel the need to comment specifically on why, pre-emptively.

although it reads like the 'to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ' rick and morty post, its easy to misunderstand king of the hill.

its not a sitcom, or a comedy.

[...]

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1766516978833907720

theres a joke online that "KOTH is a slice of life anime". this intuits something true about the show. the inspiration for king of the hill was 'do the right thing' by spike lee, specifically the way in which that film depicts daily life in a specific neighborhood and place:

many read about elaborate subtle social rules from the 1800s back to the dawn of civilization and think people were going along with all that because they were timid or dumb. in reality participating in a hyper complex set of social signaling rituals is just aesthetic and cool.

https://twitter.com/ChrisChipMonk/status/1768745561140912287

people understandably had a naive perception that doing away with all that would be an uncaging of the human spirit, that it would be liberating. turns out that with even a slight amount of historical hindsight this was backwards. you can only act smoothly within those confines.

just learned about phantom kangaroos

https://twitter.com/DisputedCDV/status/1767684499029078130

huge moment, im already in with the leading authority on north american kangaroo sightings

(unironically a great scholar whose work has benefited me in the past many times)

time to revisit the topic of ANGLISH.

anglish is an umbrella term for a style of english that tries to remove as much foreign influence as possible. prefixes, suffixes, nouns, all of it. it sounds unintuitive, but you pick it up very easily. here's some of my favorite examples:

https://twitter.com/echrell/status/1765834989017452624

here's a table i took from anglish dot org (yes, that many people have been invested in this - but the real payoff is reading passages in it. i'll post a few examples below.

it's very cool that once you start reading longer pieces of it, it becomes slightly intuitive.

it is almost spring, winter is ending

i would like to briefly provide a small field report. ive heard people discuss this online, but i would not have known how real it is unless i was "on the ground"

"snow days" are functionally over. i did not know. here is what i have seen: A) it's over

I have seen many posts online about people doing virtual learning with kids on snow days. like you, i would have assumed this is just isolated pockets, but it seems like its basically everyone.

this also goes down into extremely low ages, like first grade. npr:

in the video game that came closest to perfection, grand theft auto 2, one of the gangs are modern hindu ascetics: hare krishna

few remember how big an impact hare krishna had in the post 1960s west. there was even a subgenre of hardcore punk music based on it: krishnacore

...





hare krishna is basically a modern hindu (vedic?) movement led by the international society for krishna conciousness (ISKCON). if youve seen people like this at a subway station, thats the hare krishnas

people like this doing public sanskrit chants: dont see that much anymore.