Late Boomer's Den

  • Reading philosophy for fun

    I’ve decided to quit putting it off and explore a little Greek philosophy. One thing I’ve already decided is I really like Socrates.

    I’ve only read a few of Plato’s Dialogues, but I’m getting a sense of Socrates’ personality.

    He was humble, funny and brave. I like how he stating how he doesn’t know, the way he insisted he wasn’t wise despite what the Oracle said about him.

    It’s funny how time and time again, he starts out saying he doesn’t know a subject, then leads these people who claim to be experts down the primrose path, till they’re forced to reveal that they don’t know either.

    He makes a good case that much of what we think we know slips away once we start to define it. You can’t have too much ego if you want to root out the ways you’re fooling yourself.

    I can see why he wound up in trouble. Bruised too many puffed up egos. I find it very moving the way he refused to escape prison or knuckle under to save his own life. The way he refused to give up philosophy. He loved wisdom that much.

    In your 50s is awfully late to start getting into philosophy, but I want to make sense of this thing called existence while I still have it.

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  • The reason why zombies are everywhere

    Just watched another zombie movie last night, Zombieland. Not an extremely serious movie as most of them are not.

    I’ve seen some genuinely good zombie stories and shows, played for camp or otherwise – Last of Us, 28 Days Later, Sean of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead.

    But mostly Zombie movies were just silly fun for me. Night of the Living Dead cracked me up, not sure if intentionally. “They’re coming for you Barbara!”

    Philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has taught me to look at zombies in a more serious light. The fact that they’ve been so prevalent tells us that Western culture is undergoing a meaning crisis.

    Zombies in Western Culture A Twenty-First Century Crisis, by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic laid out the case pretty well.

    The zombie is a mythical creature that represents meaninglessness. They don’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter you have to escape them. They shouldn’t exist and yet they do. They’re mindless. The wander about without purpose or agency.

    And what do zombies eat? Brains. Interesting symbology. They have no minds of their own, but consume and destroy the minds of others. Pointless. Like trying to learn by eating a book.

    They’re also a perversion of the Resurrection, which seems to signal a loss of belief that Christianity can explain the world. They rise from the grave, but they’re still dead. It’s an apocalypse where the world ends, but nothing is revealed.

    I think it’s a good diagnosis for what’s wrong with the world. So many incompatible world views, arguments over definitions, unable to agree on what’s right or wrong, good or bad.

    It might be a prescription for how to fix it. I’ve discovered several people on YouTube who seem to be working on the problem, reverse engineering Western Culture to find useful wisdom paths, from the likes of Socrates that may have been lost.

    They’ve been having discussions they call Dialectic into Dialogos to tease out deeper levels of truth from one another. They’re fascinating to watch. Kind of like something we all used to do called have conversations, but collaborative.

    This is an example of how Dialectic Into Dialogos works. I’m not sure what will come out of what they do, but I respect them for trying. At the very least, I find their discussions enlightening and inspiring.

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  • Rapture of the screen

    It’s been one hell of a coke binge so far hasn’t it? Smart phones, social media wars, Silicon Valley tyrants rearranging our lives as they try to squeeze out every last second of our attention. When will it end?

    I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m feeling rather strung out at the moment.

    There’s a phenomenon scuba divers have to watch out for called nitrogen narcosis. Below certain depths, the nitrogen in your body becomes an intoxicant.

    Rapture of the Deep, they call it. You can get so out of it, you’ll try to offer your regulator to a fish, swim down, when you need to swim up, etc.

    Not that I ever went scuba diving, but I think it’s comparable to what we’re all doing here on land. Doomscroll Narcosis. Rapture of the Screen. You’re in too deep, but you just keep diving deeper and forget to come up for air.

    I’m as guilty as anyone. I tear myself away from the phone, take icons off the home screen, set alarms and rules, try to instill a little self-discipline then I find myself doing it again. From content to content, switching between Facebook, YouTube, Mastodon and back again.

    By the time I snap out of it, half the day is gone and I can’t string words into a coherent sentence.

    “This is your brain on technology… Any questions?”

    I am seeing some signs that we might overcome this mess. I’m seeing some really substantive YouTube channels that seem to be growing, slowly.

    All this dopamine seeking behavior isn’t giving any of us the meaning we seek.

    I have a hope that enough people have enough of the mindlessness and go looking for the real deal. The stuff that helps us figure out who and what we are, that make a hard life worth putting up with.

    People like John Vervaeke with his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series on the development of Western philosophy, Damien Walter with his thoughtful critiques of science fiction storytelling.

    I think they’re onto something. It takes effort to explore their work, but it’s worth it. There’s spiritual food to be had online from people not obsessed with overnight success. Eventually people will quit binging on internet candy and go looking for it.

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  • Capitalism’s evil shadow

    Just watched all seasons of Peaky Blinders and it occurs to me: Society and the criminal world are really mirror images of one another. They have a symbiotic relationship, all of it to do with avoiding the tax man.

    The underworld tries to transform dirty money into wealth, and the system tries to make sure dirty money stays dirty and wealth stays at the top.

    Where people can’t find jobs, there will be dirty money. If the only money you have is dirty, the only way you can build wealth is by washing it. You can’t buy property if you can’t pay taxes.

    That’s why organized crime exists. Organized criminals are better able to wash their money through seemingly legitimate ways and get away with it. It allows them to turn dirty money into wealth. Witness all those glass towers in Miami.

    Peaky Blinders is set in England, but it puts me in mind of Gangs of New York. Different factions of the underworld fighting over slices of the pie. I think just about every ethnic group in America has had some kind of mafia.

    The mainstream and its favored tribes are less likely to need a mafia because it has the police and the law. The legitimately wealthy get to use police to fight their battles with the ambitious poor and keep the illusion of clean hands.

    Gangsters tend to get themselves killed or thrown in prison and don’t get to taste the aristocrat’s life for long, but as long as their operations are running successfully, they’re paying the guy who took the deal and that business hires people.

    That’s where the real trickle down happens. The slow conversion of dirty money into small amounts of clean money.

    People have been gambling, paying for sex and doing drugs for as long as anyone has kept track. People at the top, and just below the top, and every level below the top will find a way to get those things no matter what the law says.

    Where there is dirty money, there will be laundering. Where there is laundering, the system will try to stop it. By cracking down harder or by seizing the means of corruption. Then all that vice starts with clean money and produces clean tax money.

    It may capture the means and turn it into something taxable. That’s why we have state lotteries instead of the numbers racket. It’s why Vegas and all those mini-Vegases exist.

    It’s why everybody uses plastic now, instead of folding money. The system got tired of all that papermoney disappearing off the grid and producing wealth outside the system.

    But capitalism’s evil shadow always finds a way. Now we have cryptocurrency, so the black market can convert those digital ones and zeros into clean currency.

    The system can “declare war” and crack down harder, but that raises the price, which just makes it easier to bribe people. With enough money and potential for violence, every means of enforcement can be corrupted.

    Like Tommy Shelby says in Peaky Blinders, “Everyone is a whore, we just sell different parts of ourselves.” Some people sell their bodies, some sell their integrity.

    Why wouldn’t it go that way? These are our values. Wealth trumps everything. We don’t mind when billionaires thumb their noses at the law and get away with it. They’re our heroes. We watch them on TV.

    We don’t want to stop them. We want to be them.

    Which is why capitalism’s shadow won’t go away no matter how strict our society gets. All that wealth stuck behind that logjam at the top. All the rest of us who can observe that with a good work ethic, you’re lucky to pay the rent, much less get wealthy.

    All that mess is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he said “money is the root of all evil.” We’ve made the act of getting rich into a virtue in itself, so what else should we expect?

    ….

    BTW, if you think the above is a conspiracy theory about a shady cabal making all that happen, you don’t have enough imagination. I’m way crazier than that. I’m saying the system has a mind of its own. I’m saying it’s alive. And we live inside it.

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  • Procrastination

    Sidewalk Trip – Procrastination

    Currents of noise and potential sweep past in the accretion disk. Might be’s and might-have-beens. Glittering distractions.

    And occasionally, an insight.

    This is important, I think. This could lead somewhere. This could lead to the truth. But it’s bigger than me and it will take time and effort.”
    So I put it down, just for a while. And scroll through the feeds till I’m ready to take it on.

    When I reach for it again… it’s gone like a dream.

  • Clean money, dirty money

    Antibalas – Dirty Money

    Interesting concept, isn’t it? Dirty money? It starts as an innocent dollar bill, or digital dollar. Use it in a crime and it becomes dirty. It gets laundered through various trickery or seized by law enforcement and suddenly it’s clean again and goes back into the system.

    It made it past the gauntlet, the system gets to count it. Clean, dirty, clean. It’s the same dollar. If it was digital there weren’t even any germs involved.
    Then on the other side, legitimate parts of the system don’t have to be moral, just legal.

    A large corporation can do all kinds of harm, exploit people, destroy the place they live. But because it was legal, it’s clean money.

    I wonder how it would feel to be a dollar with a conscience? Pretty confusing I imagine.

    BTW, sometime read A Simple Plan, about a regular guy who thought he could handle a duffel bag full of dirty money. Gave me nightmares for days. Interesting now I think of it that his family had lost the farm to the bank. The Edge always goes to the house

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  • Cloverfield and the psychology of 9-11

    When I saw Cloverfield for the first time, I knew what it was really about: 9-11. Something deadly and totally incomprehensible happened and there was nothing the characters could do but fight for their lives.

    The illusion of safety collapsed and upended reality. Exactly the way I felt when I saw tower two fall. I woke up in the back of the newspaper office where I was staying till I could find a place to rent. I heard them talking about the World Trade Center on my clock radio and couldn’t understand what was happening.

    I went into the little room where they sold satellite TV subscriptions. And saw the tower, smoke billowing out. I thought, what kind of angle is this? Where is other tower? Then it collapsed. Then a plane struck the Pentagon and another one crashed when the passengers overpowered the hijackers.

    It was like in that movie. Things just kept coming at us that just didn’t seem possible. I was like everyone else, in shock, angry, confused, not knowing what to expect.

    Notice in Cloverfield how you can’t really get a bead on what kind of creature is attacking. It’s like a mish mash of monsters from different movies – Godzilla, Alien, War of the Worlds.

    That’s how 9-11 affected America’s psyche. We had this threat that we never expected, that wasn’t supposed to be possible. Reality got turned on its head and the country behaved like a wounded animal.

    For a long time after that, most of my news coverage involved various events by country folk showing their patriotism. So many American flags. Any other time I would have thought it was over the top, but I understood.

    We wanted to feel like we had some kind of power. It was something you could do: Be super patriotic, and ready to support whatever might prevent something like 9-11 from happening again.

    I remember how it felt. I never displayed any yellow ribbons, but I supported the wars we got into. Until I didn’t. Looking back it seems like pure insanity. Which in a way it was. 9-11 shook us up. Threatened our concept of reality.

    I don’t know if we ever really got over it. We found out we are vulnerable and we still don’t know the nature of the monster.

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  • I did a culture, I think…

    I’m one of those annoying people who always says the book was better than the movie, but sometimes I cheat and watch the movie if I want to get cultured without reading the book. That way I can at least talk about it if it comes up and pretend like I know something.

    Otherwise it goes to the back of my reading list, which is a lot like the back of my refrigerator right now. Not sure what’s back there at this point or if it’s any good. I don’t have a theater list.

    So I was talking to my wife about how Shakespeare had some good dirty jokes back in the day but got away with it because he spoke posh. And we decided to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which she saw in a theater and I didn’t.

    The one with the currently famous actors.

    I wanted to watch the actual play, so I don’t make a fool out of myself by talking about how people in Romeo and Juliet’s day called their guns swords. Then I realize it’s set in the 1800s and I start getting paranoid they were gonna go all Baz Luhrmann on us and make me lose English major cred.

    But they were talking Elizabethan English so I figured it was OK.

    Poor young lovers getting jerked around by those meddling fairies. It reminded me of when I used to play Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the dog when I was a kid. It really freaked him out.

    So anyway, I think I did a culture, but they have that wacky play at the end with Kevin Kline’s character. Was that stuff in the play or did they Hollywood it up? Made me suspicious. It was too entertaining.

    I’m the one who wanted to watch Shakespeare for the jokes. Was he really that funny?

    Now I’m gonna have to read the play dammit.

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  • Why Oliver Anthony went viral

    The internet squabble over Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” really got under my skin. I already wrote about him, but I wasn’t done. I couldn’t write about anything else until I got it out of my system.

    I’ve always been a contrarian. Sometimes I stick up for the wrong people and get egg on my face. Maybe it’ll happen again. But I’d rather be a contrarian for undeserved empathy than undeserved cruelty. I hate having to choose between mobs.

    “I Want to Go Home” really gets me in the feels, with that line about the grandkid selling the family farm and seeing “only got concrete growin’ around.” People in the country do get attached to the land. The system doesn’t like that.

    Instead of dwelling on what Oliver Anthony’s agenda was, I decided to take a deeper dive and see what I thought of him as a musician. I’m a fan of his type of music. Based on the dozen or so very good song he’s been uploading for the past three years, I don’t see an agenda. As far as I can tell he’s just been following the muse and got caught up in other peoples’ fight.

    This comment on his Facebook page doesn’t sound something a would-be culture warrior would say: “I HATE the way the Internet has divided all of us. The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.”

    I can’t help but notice he’s Appalachian. A culture that has influenced a lot of America, but doesn’t seem to get much respect. There are reasons why he and his fans think the way they do.

    This interview with author Barbara Kingsolver about her new novel Demon Copperhead, explains the frustrations of Appalachia pretty well.

    She talks about exploitation by the timber, mining and pharmaceutical industries.

    What I found interesting was her explanation of how money-based economies and governments try to urge people from land-based cultures into the city, and how that has resulted in a superiority complex among city dwellers and internalized shame among country folk.

    Oliver Anthony – Rich Man’s Gold. I like the tone of this song. “You weren’t born to just pay bills and die…”

    As for those lines about welfare… I watched his Joe Rogan interview and he said something interesting about “Rich Men North of Richmond.” He didn’t think it was his best song and was only half-finished when Radio WV chose it. He finished the second half in a hurry.

    So I think he meant what he said, though not necessarily with any ill intent. It’s pretty much middle of the road thinking where he lives. I had similar views as a rural Texan, and I was a lot more liberal than the average Republican.

    Why don’t people from Oliver Anthony’s demographic find progressives convincing?

    It comes down to something Kingsolver said. “We will only take information from people we trust…. so if you open a conversation with ‘you bonehead’ the conversation is over.” In other words, they don’t trust the the messenger, so they don’t trust the message.

    City culture is the mainstream culture of America. Most of our media comes from cities. But that’s not the only culture. People in the countryside don’t feel like city people aren’t on their side.

    So they don’t trust what the mainstream says. That’s how the rich men north and south of Richmond are able to fool them. They pretend to care. If those rich men won’t lift a finger to help, at least they’re on the correct “side.”

    What would it look like if progressives actually did care?

    In the South, there is a custom where you want to have a little conversation first, before you get down to business. You talk about your kids, your dogs, your favorite music. Anything to establish a connection. I think that custom would come in very handy on social media.

    If you dislike the messaging in “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and you find someone who likes it, what if you tried to make a connection instead of writing them off? You liked his voice, or maybe you like some of his other songs? Start there and maybe they’ll care what else you have to say.

    Oliver Anthony – Ain’t Got a Dollar. I can vibe with this song. There is value in living on the land near where you grew up, instead of moving all over to chase a dollar.

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  • Suede – British band that should’ve been bigger than they were

    Writer’s blocked at the moment. I’ve been writing, but it’s all been dreck. Spent two days working on something and decided I was talking out of my ass. Decided to chill for a bit and listen to one of my favorite bands: Suede, aka the London Suede.

    So unique and beautiful. I don’t know why they never made it big in America. Currently watching this awesome live concert video, Love & Poison, recorded at the Brixton Academy in 1993. I can’t think of any band that sounds quite like they did.

    I especially love their debut with its beautiful ballads like “The Next Life” and “Pantomime Horse.” Those get me every time. I need to go back and listen to their whole catalog for that matter.

    BTW, they have links to a bunch of other live concert videos in the description.

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