degringolade

Romanticism / Maxim Vorobiev/ By an Old Mill

One of the things that getting old brings is the loss of friends. The last couple of years has been pretty grim in terms of the completely foreseeable and inevitable die off. Such is the way of the world where a person or a generation gets within spitting distance of three-score and ten. (good old psalm 90).

You get to carry on regardless. But you get to carry on with a hole in your heart that takes a good while to heal.

Post-Impressionism / Paul Cezanne/ Pyramid of skulls

I have been refraining from commenting on the shitshow on the Pontic Steppes. The reason is simple. No one is telling the truth. Now, you might think that this statement is delivered with an air of high dudgeon, but nothing can be farther from the truth. Telling the truth is just not done in a wartime setting. People who think that they “know” the “truth” in today’s social, political, and military realms are just plain fucking stupid or are selling something.

Oh granted, there is a plethora of folks out there on either side who claim to have ferreted out the “truth” and who are willing to write about it (for a fee of course), but truthfully, I think that the best that can be said about these self-proclaimed “prophets” is that they might, just might, be one step closer to an understanding of the situation than I am. But seeing as I am several removes (I am guessing my information is no better than four derivatives from what is really happening) from an accurate account, reading an account that is only marginally closer (minus one remove) to the actual truth is at best, dicey.

So, I am proceeding with this piece, but I am also offering the following Caveat Emptor to whoever displays the poor time management skills required to read this screed. This is a best guess analysis. I have no privileged sources feeding me uncorrupted data. I read folks who seem (to me) to know what they are talking about. But I have no means of verifying information that I use .

Now, let’s talk about verification. Some folks seem to think that if they read an article online, then read another article that agrees with the first article, that constitutes verification. Nope…..sorry…..thanks for playing our game and try again soon.

The hard part is trying to figure out which of the two primary conflicting narratives going on is actually closer to the actual state of affairs in a war going on halfway around the world. If you are reading only one specific news source and are relying on that news source to give you an accurate appraisal of the true state of affairs, then I have a strong hunch that you will be disappointed at the end of the conflict.

I try hard to make certain that I at least listen to both sides, but that is getting harder to do. Both sides are ramping up their propaganda organs to full bore and are pushing hard to disseminate a version of the ground truth that suits their narrative more than it reflects a complete and accurate picture of actual events.

I think that the war will be around for a while. I think that the US and NATO have no problem running the war for a while to test out weapons and tactics using Ukrainian labor. I think that the Russians will just sit and let the Ukrainians come at them in poorly supplied and poorly planned attacks and just attrit the hell out of the poor bastards.

In the state that the world was in before 2021, the population of Ukraine was around 43.5 million. It is around 36.7 million now. In my world that pencils out at around a 16% population loss. Now, a lot of that is folks cutting and running to Western Europe. Smart move, but I would love to see how many well-off men of military age made that run. From what I have been hearing is that Ukrainian conscription is now between 16 and 55 and they are having trouble feeding the blood pump.

Russia has a population of around 135 million, nearly four times the size of Ukraine. They can afford to lose some kids. But the truth of the matter seems to be that the casualty ratio thus far is around 3½:1 in favor of the Russians. I came to this number by taking the numbers from both sides (Ukies say 1:1, Russians say 7:1), with the larger population and the lower casualty rate, that simply means that the Russians don’t have to hurry.

So, with all the non-verified bases covered above, I tend to think that the Russians will spend quite a chunk of time beating the Ukrainians about the head and shoulders. They will continue their inchwise assaults and push forward to the East bank of the Dniepro River (give or take, probably give a buffer around Kiev on the East Side of the river and will carve out a lane to Transnistria to leave the rump of Ukraine landlocked).

I figure that since the Russians have no real need to hurry, they will just spend a bunch of time blooding their troops and setting up a completely veteran army to deal with the possibility that NATO might see itself as a peer to the Russian military and continue on their current stupid path.

Pay attention, Vietnam was decades, Afghanistan was decades (us and the Russians), Iraq has been decades. Syria has been a decade. Wars take time. We here in ‘Murca want things done now so that we can move on to the next short-term obsession. Wars don’t work like that.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t believe that the American idea of how self-determination works is in any way close to the mark. In my mind, we are in the same position as Great Britain in our own civil war back a while ago. A mercantilist power who is trying to maintain control of resources in an area where there is an opportunity to create/exacerbate divisions for whatever reason. In our civil war it was Britain trying to keep afloat their investments in American cotton. In the Ukraine it is American hedge funds buying up Ukrainian land and trying to control Russian gas flows across Ukraine.

So now we approach the chance of this war going big time more closely each month. We are barely one year into the conflict. The original plan, based on astonishingly incorrect estimates of relative power, has fallen apart. Don’t let the press and the administration tell you otherwise, Plan A did not work.

So what I see is another three or four years of flailing around. The West needs to come up with Plan B, the Rooskies need to build up and get their war industries running smoothly and finish integrating their economies with China and India.

Work needs to be done on both sides.

And don’t worry about it too much, the only people paying the price are the Ukrainians.

Current Location: Kitchen Table:and Happy Lamp
Current Music: The Byrds: Mr. Tambourine Man

Expressionism / Wassily Kandinsky/ Improvisation 4

I have an expression that I use a lot when discussing Art: It isn’t very good but I like it anyway.

As a riff off of this statement, I tend to recall a conversation that I had with my sons concerning music. They had just stated that I grew up in a time where “all the music was good”. I disabuse them of this fantasy, but they persist.

Then the other day I found these website. Pretty straightforward, just the most popular song each month during the decade. Take some time to listen to them. I was amused by the number of completely mediocre songs that topped the charts during the decade.

The Sixties

The Seventies

But even more telling is the songs that didn’t make the list.

Romanticism / Frederic Edwin Church/ Twilight in the Wilderness

I am almost to the point of just purging theautomaticearth from my reading. Used to be quite a good piece of work and quite informative. Now it is on the verge of becoming a one-trick pony with nothing but COVID bitching 24-7. I started this blog nonsense in 2006, had my brief moment of fame, and then proceeded to lose readers and interest in keeping them over the last handful of years.

I guess that is because I have realized the futility of thinking that a blog has an extraordinarily small chance of having an effect.

In a sense, this realization came at the same time as the realization that the internet itself wasn’t really all that useful. Oh granted, it made the gravy flow smoother into the corporate coffers, so it was touted as a game changer, but for the day to day for “everyman” it is nothing but a way to pander to your current obsession.

I kinda think that I don’t want the internet to go away. But I also think that there is a lot of maturing needed by the denizens of this weird land to actually make it useful for things. Ilargi has fastened on an obsession and is going the way of the dodo with his one-trick pony.

Photorealism (Super-Realism, Hyper-Realism) / Claudio Bravo/ Lilium tingitane

I’m thinking that yesterday’s post kinda hit a nerve. Interesting. I am going to post up some e-mail responses from yesterday and spend some time pondering and writing. Might even play hookey to relax and soak in the summer heat while pondering.

The nature of the past and its relationship to the present is a dicey thing. The old saw about history not repeating but rhyming has both flaws and merits.

I posit that the big problem with this is our current societal habit of thinking that the people in the past were unlettered barbarians. We paint the past as primitive and obsolete and only as a series of mistakes that are there for us to learn from. The contempt of the past is nearly palpable.

Now, the previous statement is kind of a broad brush and the layer of pigment it lays down is more of a spectrum than a monocolor. But I think that the past and the actions and intentions of the people in the past aren’t that alien. For some odd reason, the dream of American exceptionalism and the extremely pleasant life that we have led thus far seems to give us the impression that this is the way that it should be.

But we live in a society of contradictions. We live in a society that is Balkanized and angry and we tend not to realize that the world is a lot more zero-sum than most of us care to admit. I tend to think that the angry nature of the archdruids comments and my heartfelt need to make my point clear is part and parcel of this.

I’ll be working on this during the week. Be well.

Current Location: coffee and open windows to cool the room

Under the Trestle: Milwaukie

Playing hooky from work today. Since I have only about 100 weeks remaining in my time at the salt mine, I am now making the effort to burn up my sick leave that I have squirreled away over the years. I will be taking a sick day off every 12 working days for the next two years (the bastards don't give you anything if you don't use it). So y'all are the first project of a lazy day.

Portland is clearing up. A couple of days in a smoke cloud (Air Quality Index (AQI)>500) was kind of a downer, but at least the riots have settle down. Cabin fever is rampant and everyone is itching to move around. But today the AQI is less than 300 and there is a chance of rain.

Now, onto the main show. I hope that folks aren't offended if I cross-post this essay over at my place, but there you go, My habit on the blog has always been to do a little chatting up front and then follow with what passes as the "formal" esaay following.

Screed

Language is always a slippery beast. One of the recurring themes in our written and oral histories is the distrust of those whose livelihood is centered on rhetoric (and that is the formal definition of the word as described by Martianus Capella and the folks back during the fall of Rome and earlier). There is a reason that Shakespeare's cooked up this little gem:

DICK. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Jack CADE. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, that parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings; but I say 't is the bee's wax, for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2

Because you see, it is my belief that the "control of the narrative" has become the principle use of language at any level beyond that of immediate family. The need for control of the narrative increases as one moves through the increasingly complex layers of human interaction. By the time one starts interacting at more than the level of a smallish community, it becomes coercive in toto. I think that (and I do consider it a) fact is what people are starting to realize and push back against. As an aside, this was a minor e-mail that was sent last week in one of Mike and my back and forth's.

I am thinking that the real problem is that of complexity.

We tend to think that we have to communicate all the subtleties of a fucking weird planet and make other people understand it I am not certain that this is really possible.

Whether one likes it or not, we are an extremely young species. I think that language came about (and I am sorry about this Mike) because it gave us a survival advantage when we had simple tasks being critical to our survival. Communicating the intent for these simple tasks was critical and language gave us an edge.

Examples of these would be:

"hey, I think that we can eat that: Lets kill it" or

" watch out, that thing looks like it can eat us. or

"run motherfucker"

I found my most effective and understandable communication using language was when I was an infantryman. Communication within an infantry squad is easily within the useful limits of language.

So language as symbols is kind of a problem without a solution. Simple ideas have traction and means of effective transfer. I am kinda thinking that the linguistic problem we are talking about is the same as the problems faced in digital compression of music. Since I have a tin ear, I won't pretend that I can hear what people are talking about, but people who have trained their senses to hear such things assure me that as as the music is compressed, subtlety and complexity are lost. The compression algorithms are just not up to the task.

SO maybe, just maybe we can consider language and it's ability to convey symbols as something akin to digital compression.

As i spoke earlier, language itself is only capable of transmitting simple symbols. As in my snarky little bit above, it appears to be pretty effective in relaying such things. Now, lets look at the other end of the complexity spectrum. I trust that Mike won't mind me rehashing our email back-and-forth about evolution, but that is a prime example.

Consider the complexity displayed by the following symbols/terms:

evolution
darwinism
survival of the fittest

When you sit down and unfold those terms, you begin to realize that they are so freighted with history and that they can be used any way that you wish. Love 'em or hate 'em, they are the linguistic equivalent of a multitool. They can be used to do what you wish in conversation.

Symbols are dangerous things. The can either conceal of reveal. The more complexity in the symbol and the greater the compression the more dangerous such things become.

I hope that everyone is well. Take care of yourselves. Live a good life.

John

Current Location: Kitchen Table and Grey Sky
Current Music: Derek and the Dominos: Bell Bottom Blues

The Sun: Milwaukie, OR Sept 10, 2020

Early morning coffee and writing on a Saturday. Number two son is snoring on the spare bed after waking me up at 01:30. As he and his soon to be ex still haven't moved apart, he came to get some sleep and some solitude. I was happy to provide both.

The hardest part about being older and more settled is that one has time to think about all the shit that one ignored due to expedience and youth. Couple that with all the seeds wisdom scattered carelessly in the general education classes of the long ago and you have a pretty good field to plow after letting it lie fallow so long.

You will not reach the essence of the [Way] by merely looking at this book. Think that what is written down here was done just for you, and do not consider simply looking at it, familiarizing yourself with it or trying to imitate it. Rather, you should consider these principles as though they were discovered from your own mind, and continually make great efforts to make them a physical part of yourself.

Miyamoto Mushashi -- A Book of Five Rings

I am wondering if the thoughts I am thinkin' are being echoed anywhere else but in the odd corners of the internet that I frequent? I think that the problems we are facing are deeper than the oft-trumpeted meme-ish mini-homilies that so pollute the politica/moral discourse.

I am thinking that a lot of the many discourses sloshing around in my brainpan are related. As I said, the atomization of science/philosophy into what could be referred to as Species (Speciaities? Professions?) and have created a taxonomy of thought that generates incomplete memes** I really think that the incessant narrowing of expertise by the educational industry in the past thirty years might be a major factor in the mess that we find ourselves in. Truth be told, I think that the marketing and the bureaucratization and the ruthless self-interest of the educational elite are the reason that we are in the pickle that we are in.

So, where and how do we start digging our way out of the mess that we are in? The big question for me is what part of the process do I need to be involved in? One of the biggest fallacies in the last thirty years of intellectual solipsism is that an individual matters. So, how does one go about asking the hard questions and raising the questions about authority and groupthink that got us to where we are today?

Right now I am just laying groundwork, chopping wood, and carrying water. I have to come up with a role and a plan. The first step in that long and possibly fruitless process will be to establish. The first step will be to try and jam the idea that it if fruitless to think about things in themselves—only about my perceptions.

________

** I use that term in it's original sense as defined by Dawkins (before he started to be a dick about religion) one could do a lot worse than reading and thinking about The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 978-0-19-286092-7. As for his anti-religion dickishness, he does seem to have a great sense of humor (see picture)

Current Location: In The dark in the kitchen
Current Music: Grateful Dead: Touch of Grey

Pictured above is another step toward my life in twenty-five-some-odd months. May not seem like much, but you have to start somewhere.

The evil empire sent me a notice that one of the item I was interested in was on a never-to-be-repeated sale, so I acquiesced and forked out forty bucks for a ready to go solar panel with a spiffy design that seems like a dandy test bed. Folds up nice, it is lightweight, and you can plop it down wherever there is a patch of sunlight and draw from the inexhaustible bounty of the sun.

Now that the sales pitch is over, I will but down my thoughts and spend the next week or so explaining how this thing, my current musings about the nature of magic and polytheism, and the inevitable decline of the west all tie together.

So the thing is pretty low-power. 2.4 amps isn't a whole bunch of power. Best thing that the thing an pull is 3 amp total.

So, when I think about this kind of thing as a working proof of concept, it makes a lot of sense. I am not going to cook a meal with this thing. This is for the odd things that make life easier. Cell phone for communication, LED lighting for remote use. Ebook for reading. Music player for tuneage. Right now these are the ancillary uses that I have for low-power systems. Once I can provide for these, then I can stary expanding out into other possible uses and then maybe break some coin for a bigger solar cell.

Overall, gotta think about energy use for the future life of hermitage.    Overall, I am thinking that my energy needs are pretty spare. Once the Rona starts ramping down, I can cut energy use significantly by dropping the use of Bessie. What I am thinking for retirement is a RadBurro or similar electric tricycle and the solar system to have it available for once a week. Heating and cooking is next.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Coffee
Current Music: R.E.M.: Its the End of the World

Ugh... First day back wake up. I'll be fine, coffee hasn't taken hold yet is all.

Had some thing written and lost it it. Now having thought about it, I am OK with that as it appeared to be nothing but whining on my part. There is enough of that going around that I don't think that it is necessary to add to the pool.

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee

Art Nouveau / Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva/ Barge

Heading over to The Dalles to look at it as a roosting spot. A CBOC there and a pretty nice area. I wish that there was a bar open so that I could quiz some of the locals. SO today is just sight-seeing and other such fripperies.

Spent yesterday pondering and waiting for something to gel in my head. Well, that didn't pan out the way I wanted, did it? I am just as stuck on dead center as I was when I started. Sigh.

In the past I would have surfed this wave just fine. Truth be told, I will surf this one just fine as well. There are options open to me that there are a bunch of folks would love to have. All I am complaining of is the first world problems of how to ride out the storm.

Other than that, I am not really planning anything of note. Gonna drink some coffee, gonna drive a little too much, gonna think.

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee
Current Music: Damien Jurado: Ochoa

Abstract Expressionism / Taro Yamamoto/ Abstract

Up at 04:00 again. Get ready to walk down the max to catch the second run. Yesterday there were perhaps 9 people in the car. I have seen over eighty in the same car. Social distancing works. Early tram the same maybe seven or eight people on a capacity of seventy five.

Hospital is pretty damn near empty of walking patients. Good. Will try to get an idea of current bedcount today.

Plans are flailing. Mostly is is because people want to pretend that things are going back to normal quickly. While that is a possibility, it isn't one I would place a lot of faith in.

So today is finish up the sorting of the wreckage and figure out where I will be used if this thing starts to get some traction. I honestly feel like I have to do something to help. Talked to the lab manager. I know the language down there.

Current Location: early morning happy lamp

Neoclassicism / Abraham van Strij/ Two goats in a yard

Glad the week is over, this week required too much work and dedication.

Look, I am not at all certain that the response to COVID is appropriate to or in line with the severity of the disease and the mortality and morbidity outlined by the dataset being presented.

That being said, public health in this country being what it is (a fucking mess presided over by oligarchs) maybe an excess of caution is in fact appropriate.

So this week I was jerked away from my comfortable niche in the bureaucratic nightmare that is a socialized health system to do my part in containment. I really didn't mind the work at all, truth be told, it is the best part of my job talking to my guys.

Us old white guys on the lower end know how the deal goes down. When I call them and talk to them to ask them how they are doing, they seem genuinely pleased that someone is trying to keep an eye on them.

So this weekend is resting after fighting the good fight. My guess is that it will step up a notch next week while the bureaucrats scramble over themselves to preen for their future promotions. My good work will be augmented with work designed to load a mid-manager's spreadsheet that is their job justification.

Just the nature of the beast. The good fight will be there next week.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Coffee
Current Music: Ahmad Jamal: You Don't Know What Love Is.

Maximalism / Li Huasheng/ The Wind Blows, the Willow Trees Sway

A day of shit yesterday. I got through it just fine, and now I am just trying to remember how little impact I have on the situation and how nearly all of the shit that I get "all het up" about really means jack shit in the grand scheme of thing. Was planning on a day of fasting, but after the end of the day, is said fuck it and went to my comfort food locale ((Pizzacato at the base of the tram) and had two slices of pizza and two sixteen ounce cans of Widmer Hefe and life didn't seem all that bad after all.

Seems to me that the world is getting ready to go into a period of collectively losing it's shit. Not a damn thing I can do about it. I find it interesting that folks are freaking out at nearly every level and every situation. I am working at resisting the siren call of the herd freakout and am just trying to go my own way. Can't really say that I am all that successful, but if it were being graded on a curve, I would have a solid "A".

I am thinking that this is going to be one of the posts where the diary portion of the post bleeds into the screed, For the last while, I have managed to compartmentalize the household and the workplace and the world in a moderately successful manner. But lately the walls around things have been breaking down and the little universe of my life is becoming painfully and annoyingly unitary.

Such is life. But I think that I need to work harder to re-establish those boundaries. I am not yet done with the world. I currently have no driving desire to begin Sannyasa, though I am moving that way. So I have to come to grips with maintaining the different portions of my life in a manner that will allow me to flow toward the goal.

So today's mission will be to go in and try to take things just as seriously as they need to be taken. Not one iota more. Chop wood and carry water and bail boat.

Current Location: happy lamp, resignation. and coffee
Current Music: Yo-Yo Ma: Misty Moonlight Waltz

Romanticism / Gustave Dore/ The Enigma

I am getting my groove on for the week. This is a five day week, only punctuated by a dental and an ophthamology appointment. Heavy week for maintenance and preparation. Moving forward much doesn't seem to be a great option. Maybe downtime and routine maintenance is the way to go.

Went over to Vantucky yesterday to hang with the eldest and the ex. Interesting times ahead for those two. Contentment means being good with your person and your relationship with the world. Not certain that those two have that fully in hand. But in their defense, no one does and they are both working on it.

Came home last might and read (surprise here) talked with friends on the phone a lot. This time of year going out and hanging is done inside. I much prefer being outside to hang. So this is my backup plan during the rainy season.

Screed:

Maybe Marshall McLuhan had it right. The medium is the Massage. The medium is just about everything when it comes to communication. Content sometimes seems to take second place. That is a bane.

In a sense, the internet is now making me suspicious about the long term project of Democracy. Not that Democracy ever was going to last. Not that it ever really had a decent chance of lasting forever. Anacyclosis most certainly is a real deal and we aren't immune to its charms.

What the internet does is diffuse the ideas of the elite and the would be elite in a manner that almost ensures contention. Look, the stream of bile that passes for political thought today is primarily due to a sampling error. Well, maybe not a samling error, but maybe a too fine-grained approach to the issue of giving voice to political thought.

When political thought seemed more rational (and there is more than a decent chance that it never really was rational, I just imagined that it was so), there slowness and narrowness of the channels of dissemination made for a de facto means of "averaging" political thought. Large circulation newsprint and television were conservative enough and tried to be liberal, but the conservative nature of the organizations kept thought clustered around an average. Radical thought of any stripe was force to the edges, delivered through the mail in plain envelopes with contents reeking of mimeograph fluid.

The edge to edge democratization of thought allowed by the internet, while intellectually sexy, doesn't appear to be working that well in the real world. Having access to the full range of political thoughts and beliefs on an expansive, full-spectrum, basis just seems to force folks into "gated communities" of thought, with heresies being shut out in an attempt to make sense of the constant conflicting opinions being presented 24-7.

I have no idea how to fix this. We seem to be fragmenting into a bunch of virtual societies intermingled with each other. I can't for the life of me see how this will end, but I have my fears.

Podes, Stephan. "POLYBIUS AND HIS THEORY OF "ANACYCLOSIS" PROBLEMS OF NOT JUST ANCIENT POLITICAL THEORY." History of Political Thought 12, no. 4 (1991): 577-87. www.jstor.org/stable/26213908.

Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: America: A Horse With No Name

Tosa Mitsuoki: Illustration of the Genji Monogatari (Asagao, The Blue Bell)

Sitting in a bar in downtown Vancouver at noon on a beautiful Sunday, sucking down beers and mentally preparing for a family get together. Brutal duty but I think that I can handle it. Two beers and a pint glass of chexmix are the current body-count. Better get back to work.

Today is Michael's turn on the Soap Box. I think that I raised his hackles a bit and here is his response. As always, well thought out and cogent. Can't say that I agree with him, and that will follow tomorrow, but his response is well worth a think and discussion

Michaels Screed

Blind Spot

Living according to a desire to be left alone removes the possibility of one being a negative to society, but this begs the question: should one not pursue the idea of being a positive? If things on balance are heading downward, then perhaps everyone in society should stop pursuing the idea of being a positive. Where one man’s meat is another man’s poison, the result is poisoned men.

A huge blind spot is located behind this idea: that a system providing the means for the mass-communication of ideas is a good thing - or could be a good thing. Imagine a world with such a system where every transmission is intended to bring joy to another. If this seems like a nice world, you have lost sight of the joy of hating.

Imagine instead that every transmission is intended to bring no joy whatsoever. This would remove the joy derived from hating and loving from the system. This impossibility would be survival mode; but everyone will not shut up. Somebody has to fight for what is right.

Current Location: The Low Bar in Vancouver. My New favorite Watering Hole in the 'Couv.
Current Music: OutKast: Ms. Jackson

Not exactly playing hookey today, but taking the whole day off to hang with the eldest and to get started on the physical process of rebuilding the teeth after years of neglect. I think that today is planning and cleaning. should be the usual joy. Dentist is a third year student at OHSU. Good kid. Pudgy conservative Mormon from Southern Oregon. Good Kid, I like him, he makes me laugh, he reminds me of all my high school buddies in the long ago back in Clearfield.

I just finished going over what I just wrote below, in the olden days of yore, I would have written this as a postscript, but in these modern days, I can warn you in advance that this is a bit "ramble-ey". I will probably work on refining this in the next couple of days, but for now it is a start.

Today's Screed

I think that the problem that Mike discusses in his essay goes to the core of why the US will eventually fail. Because we have always and forever have been an extension of the caste system of the United Kingdom. Any caste system worth it's salt has sumptuary laws. The sumptuary laws in the UK and its spawn were not meant to keep the rich from flaunting it, but to keep the poor from aping the rich.

Whether one likes admitting it or not, the hipsters and their predecessor, the grunge crowd of the Seattle scene 25 years ago are the disaffected rich kids and their toadies. They follow in the same path as their forebears.

I think that you have to take a longer view of all this. Zoot Suits, car-culture, hippies, yuppies, grunge, hipsters are all just the current iteration of a youth that senses the failure and sterility of the underlying culture and are trying to rebel within the boundaries provided them by the culture.

Michael is correct in identifying the idea of "Here one’s identity requires a continuous effort to exhibit individuality/uniqueness and, importantly, nothing else.". But when one dredges down into this, it is a rebellion against the idea that one is part of society and as such, one must submerge a major portion of ones identity to allow others in the society to recognize you as one of their own.

The hipsters and their alt-world counterparts are making an attempt to Balkanize the overall society into not-that-friendly camps where capitalism and the camp signalling allowed by the various sub-tribes of purchased apparel are facilitated.

Current Location: Looking out at grey skies
Current Music: Bastille: Those Nights

Emporor Huizong: Pigeon on a Peach Branch

Hangin' on to the edge of Middle Class.

Doesn't sound fun, does it.

Well, truth of the matter is that there are a lot of folks just like me out there.

And I am still in pretty good shape in the grand scheme of things. As Jason Isbell sez:

You should know compared

To people on a global scale

Our kind has had it relatively easy

I can't say that the future holds anything particularly fearsome for me. I presaged 4:20 last evening when this post found it's incept, and sometimes when in that particular state I start looking at the state of the world a little too closely and the possible bad outcomes stretching out before me start to outweigh the possible neutral/good outcomes by a significant margin.

Day to day, one cannot spend too much time on this kind of navel-gazing. Whether you like it or not, the actions of the actors of the world are as remote to us and as inscrutable as the actions of Tyche were to Athens and Plataea.

I will spend some time with family today. When I get home I will spend some time developing my magic gummi bear recipe and chilling.

Current Mood: 衝突
Current Location: Kitchen Table
Current Music: Jason Isbell: Relatively Easy

The difficulty in making this kind of analysis is that one is always trying to batter square pegs. Things don't fit exactly right. I do realize that my taking liberties with Mr. Toynbee's magnus opus would probably set some scholar somewhere a-spinning at my complete misreading of the text and my subsequent misapplication of the theory.

Well, fuck him.

I painted with some pretty broad strokes during my discussion of the proles. When you walk up to a person on the street that might be a prole, he/she could be in either camp or in the middle ground between the two. The proletariat is a spectrum. Right now the uniting factor is that they are getting progressively more annoyed at the shenanigans being played out in D.C.

Toynbee's concept of the internal and external proletariat is useful only in the sense that it gives you a mental framework to hang things off in a manner that allows you to make better sense of the problems and structures of a failing state. What I found useful is the actual titles and the overall descriptions. My feeling is that Toynbee, in his separating the internal from the external was merely trying to portray the physical/economic/belief distance from the political elites.

Post WWII, what I defined as the internal proletariat had the best deal of any proletariat in the history of the world. Since our military and air forces took the liberty of blowing up all the competitors industrial base, the need for workers was such that the elite could afford to actually provide their workers a living wage and decent working conditions without cutting into their luxuries. What we are seeing now, with the rebuild of industrial base in other countries and the subsequent offshoring of jobs, is that the elite have decided that the proles will just have to suck it in order for the elite's taste for luxuries to be fully explored.

Thus my identification of the internal proletariat tends to resemble that of Toynbee reasonably well. It is my identification of the 47% as the external proletariat that will probably send the aforementioned scholar into gibbering fits. Well, fuck him again, here we go.

My opinion is that, in a country/society as physically large as ours, the external proletariat does not need to be outside the borders as Toynbee envisaged, but one could simply say that the external is just the portion of society furthest from the elite political core.

It is my thought that the political elite have always separated these two. Oh, it was never actually written down or anything, but we bought off the majority of the white proles and a minority of the minority's. The very existence of the "war on poverty" and other such underappreciated programs in the post war period shows that even in 60's the distinction was there.

The minority population of the US and the lower rungs of the white underclass are the external proletariat. The increasing closeness and camaraderie of these two sectors (which, by the way, I heartily approve of) are binding the class together.

The internal proletariat is more homogeneous. It really does tend toward the deplorable. It is probably the most dangerous right now. It is heavily armed and moving down the ladder pretty fast.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Kitchen Table

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Degringolade

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A Sorta Public Diary and Comment

Entries tagged with hexagram 06

(no subject)

Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone

Songs

Obsessions

working on it

Symbols

Micro-Homily.

Powers

nadadone

Fripparies

Grind

Ephemera and Vacations

Not Exactly Sannyasa

Marshall's Way

Obligations

Sung / Conflict

By my fingernails

Comparing and Contrasting and looking at my own theory