Late Boomer's Den

  • On the positive impact of reaction videos

    I’ve been following these guys for a while. It’s fascinating to see how much they’ve changed. Just listening to a lot of different types of music can open your mind that much.

    It’s been an interesting phenomenon, seeing the way reaction videos have proliferated on YouTube.

    You have rap fans listening to rock, rock fans listening to rap. People from tribal cultures listening to techno. People reacting to stand up comics. Classical musicians listening to self-taught punk artists, young people checking out classics, old people checking out new bands way outside their comfort zones. So many possibilities.

    At first I thought it was a bit much, but eventually I couldn’t help it. I got addicted. What will people who are different from me think of my favorite music, comedian or movie? Seeing someone discover them makes them feel new all over again.

    It occurs to me that these videos are doing something very positive, opening people up to different cultures, points of view. There are some channels I’ve watched on and off for a few years and I can tell they’ve grown as people, simply by listening to a variety of music over time.

    Ren, reacting to the reactors posting about his “Hi Ren” video. Ren is all about opening people’s minds and bringing people together, has encouraged reaction videos as a way to advance his career. They don’t have to worry about copyright strikes and it’s paying off.

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  • The Rapture Machine

    Ren – Money Game Part 2

    I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.

    The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.

    A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.

    My name was called.

    I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?

    The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.

    I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.

    I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.

    There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.

    Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.

    U2 – Until the End of the World

    What it meant

    That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.

    It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.

    The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.

    The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?

    The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.

    I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.

    Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.

    I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.

    I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.

    Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.

    Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take

    It’s not just a Christian thing

    What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.

    It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.

    Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.

    The Machine

    The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.

    I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.

    Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.

    The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.

    The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.

    Premonitions and Predictions

    Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.

    I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.

    Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

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  • More cultural awesomeness from Algeria

    Just discovered another amazing bit of culture from the Adrar region of Southern Algeria. I’d like to know more about this tradition. Looks fun as hell.

    The polyrhythms with the clapping remind me somehow of Flamenco dancers in Spain. Hard to do. Looks like there’s a competitive element to the dancing.

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  • To the only slightly racist grandpas who might have been

    I am so lucky. And sad. And pissed off.

    Just read about Craig Robertson, the 70-something man in Utah who got killed by the FBI as they were serving a warrant. Based on his social media content where he threatened to assassinate Biden and other officials, it looks like the FBI did what it had to do.

    On one level, he got what he deserved. He asked for it and he got it. But I got to thinking, what would this man be like today if America hadn’t made this lurch to the right?

    Would he have been bragging about his sniper rifles and Ghillie suit. I imagine he’d be your basic, slightly racist grandpa. Maybe not the greatest guy, but fewer guns and a good Santa for the grandkids.

    Or maybe I’m wrong and he just was what he was. Who knows.

    It got me thinking about how shitty it is that a sophisticated propaganda machine decided to weaponize people like that guy. Most old men, even those with a shit ton of guns, would never do something like that.

    But a lot of them have gone far enough right to alienate their children and grandchildren. Which is a tragedy in itself.

    Why am I lucky? Because I was born right in that generational sweet spot. Too young to get hooked on Fox News, too old to get sucked into the Manosphere on social media. Aloof enough to avoid parasocial attachments to my favorite entertainers who decided to catch the wave of crazy, for the money or the crazy.

    Old enough to remember Walter Cronkite and actual journalism. Young enough to enjoy the Internet, when it was a place to open minds rather than close them. Old enough to get a college education, while that was still in reach.

    Lucky I had the teachers I had, read the books I read, had the parents I had. Lucky I was able to tell the Republican party was a runaway train and jump off early enough so I can sleep at night.

    How much of what makes you a good person is luck?

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  • Peering into the psychroscope

    When I was 12 years old my dad bought me a microscope. Nothing fancy, but solid. I spent hours at a time with my eyeball glued to that thing. I kept a Mason jar full of water from the nearby stock tank or the mud puddle in the driveway.

    I looked at all the obvious things first. Salt, sugar, leaves. But nothing was better than a dropful of muddy water. So many little dramas going on that we can’t even see.

    What must it be like? One second you’re munching on a protazoan or a blob of algae and next thing you know, you’ve been sucked down some rotifer’s gullet. None of them know about fish, or people, or air, or the stars. Not much thought going on down there, just pure survival.

    And the poor things are so tiny they can’t even tell they’re on borrowed time. They’re battling it out in a drop of water and they’re all going to die when it dries up.

    I’ve thought about getting a new microscope for years, but it’s a lot easier to watch YouTube videos. Besides, my interests have broadened. I always wanted to be an inventor, for example. Unfortunately, I am the opposite of technical.

    But I didn’t give up. A while back I started getting into mysticism and psychology, read a bunch of philosophy books bought a couple of Tarot decks and I invented something: a psychroscope.

    It took a long time to come together and it’s still not perfect, but I’m seeing more all the time. It’s like a microscope, but pointed outward, toward the psychic medium. And what did I see?

    Same thing I saw in those drops of pond water. Life. Creatures of thought, Unaware of what they are or where they’re going, swimming through unspoken thoughts and little kids’ dreams. Narratives nested inside nested narratives, meta meta meta narratives.

    Entities that live both inside and outside of us. Gods or monsters we all create together. Moving images we project onto the world, filtered through our fears and desires. Are they real? Depends on how you define real. If enough people think they are and act accordingly, they might as well be real.

    I think they’re a bit like the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about. You might call them “Elder Gods” but they’re not older than us. We made them. They’ve grown up with us. Whether they are evil or benign depends on us.

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  • Finally, some real dating advice from a man that doesn’t suck

    This is some of the best common sense dating advice for men that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s good to see someone from the progressive side step up to the plate.

    And I think guys need to hear it from a man. There are so many grifters out there, looking to take advantage of lonely men for money and clicks. I heard a lot of Red Pill terminology in those questions.

    Being unwillingly single sucks, a lot. You want it to end. It’s easy to make a buck by pretending women are just a puzzle to solve rather than individuals who want different things. When every problem gets distilled down to “one weird trick” how are they ever going to learn?

    I like the question from the guy who followed all the steps and became a “high value male” able to attract all the beautiful women you could want – only to realize they were also shallow and stupid. The kind of women who respond to gimmicks.

    I could have used some of the advice Beau gave as a young man. My father was a good man, but wasn’t able to help much because he also had trouble dating – he just happened to get lucky when he found Mom.

    Dating is hard for some guys and the quality of off-the-shelf advice wasn’t much better pre-Internet.

    Like my dad, I got lucky when I found my wife – at 47. I wouldn’t have wanted to wind up with anyone else – probably would’ve wound up stuck in a small town with an ex and inlaws who hated me. But I could’ve led a less lonely life up to that point.

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  • That time my dad beat up a 7th grader

    One afternoon, I was playing on the jungle gym on school grounds while my dad caught up on some work. He was a band director and there was a playground nearby.

    Suddenly a couple of Cedar Chopper boys showed up, pushing us off the equipment, threatening to beat us up. The meanest kid was a 7th grader. I as the oldest and I was only in 2nd grade, so I stayed there while brother number 2 ran to the band hall to get help.

    Pretty soon Dad came walking up, saying, “Leave these kids alone.” The boy started cussing him and then took a swing at him. Dad, being a full grown man, grabbed his fist and bent his arm behind his back, saying “Go home!”

    The kid ran down the street, yelling “I’m gonna suuuuuueee!”

    And that was it. Dad never got sued.

    A couple of days later Dad was driving us kids and a friend of his was riding in the passenger seat. I wanted to brag about my dad so I said, “My dad beat up a 7th grader!”

    And Dad goes, “Shhh no. No I didn’t!”

    I didn’t understand. I thought Dad would be proud. 7th graders could be dangerous.

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  • What makes us humans so loopy?

    Kristen Schaal is a Horse gag. I originally included the one from the RadioLab episode, but the user privated it. The one I saw in her special was wayyyy longer.

    Ever get so high you get caught in a loop? You just keep reliving the same moment, over and over. At some point you realize that’s happening and you start trying to escape it.

    If you can just do or say one thing different this time, it’ll stop and time will move forward again. But still you get to hear, “You already said that” a million times. Feels like forever, but eventually you sober up and break out of the loop.

    I am fascinated by the fact that the human minds can do that. I remember listening to a Radio Lab episode about that years ago. The one where they talk about the Kristen Schaal is a horse gag.

    Radio Lab referred to these as fugue states. Sometimes it’s a permanent condition, one I hope I hever have. It’s such a strange concept, because short term amnesia, that I get. Your brain doesn’t encode the new experience, so you can’t remember it. That makes sense.

    But… so you just live that moment forward again. Why do it the same way? Why say the same things? That part’s crazy to me. Like you were destined to do those things. That idea is unnerving. To what extent are we a computer running software?

    My current theory of what happens is your brain probably tried to divide by zero. Or the language equivalent.

    We’re already living out loops anyway, they just happen to be longer than 15 minutes. Don’t you get in ruts? Don’t you find yourself telling your wife the same stories you’ve told her a hundred times?

    I don’t know about you, but it kinda bothers me to feel like I’m just a set of code. That was destined to do things a certain way because of that code and I have no say in it. I think that’s why I’ve always been a contrarian and tried to experience things that will force me to change.

    I think that says something about time travel stories that have loops. As common as the fantasy is of going back to fix the past, you know it doesn’t make sense. So you’re not surprised when efforts to change things don’t work in the plot and the same mess comes around again. You’re technically still breaking physical laws, but nature corrects itself.

    Still, we really want to believe. That’s why time travel stories that do break out of that loop and change things are more uplifting than ones where there’s nothing they can do.

    The idea of getting stuck in an intricate loop for eternity is a pretty horrifying concept. It’s not a spoiler to say Predestination is a good example of that. The name gives it away. I still get chills thinking about that “ending.”

    Mark Twain said “History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme” and I agree. But rhyme is at least a slight improvement over repeat.

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  • Gen Z understands: Rules follow usage

    I thought this was an interesting interview. I knew what she was going to say and I what the comments would be like.

    It got me thinking about language and how we use it to rank each other, sometimes without knowing it. Dialects are judged to be “low” or ignorant. As informal writing proliferates, the same thing happens with written language.

    Elitists and old people are like, “No! Stop! You’re doing it wrong!”

    I have a BA in English, so I learned a lot about the rules, how English “supposed” to be.

    But I took one Linguistics class in college and that changed everything. I learned how languages change and evolve. And I learned something my grammar nazi mother absolutely hated: Rules follow usage.

    When enough people do it, it’s the new rule. I also love language. I like playing with slang & doing it wrong on purpose if it works. Gen Z is treating language exactly as you should expect. Adapting it to their environment.

    It reminded me of the NBC video clip I saw a while back about Gen Z doing away with the period. I had the same knee jerk reaction as a lot of people: Damn kids, learn how to write! But after watching the video I’ll be damned if it didn’t end up making sense. It’s texting. I don’t end texts with periods half the time.

    It’s adaptive. They’re learning how to make a notoriously unexpressive media convey emotion.

    I love language. I love the way you can mold it and shape it. I love how it adapts. I only know a little Spanish, enough to read signs and packages, but if I could go back in time, I’d learn a dozen languages. I bet I was a linguist in one of my alternate dimensional lives. I wonder how many I learned.

    Language is almost metaphysically important if you think about it. The language you speak determines what you can even think about, what you think is real or possible. How mindblowing is that?

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  • Acceptance – last stage of grief over Christianity

    Julian Cope – Saint Julian

    I’ve been thinking back on the “edgy online atheism” phase I went through in the early ’00s and why I quit doing it. Not that I became religious again, but spiritual isn’t a dirty word for me anymore.

    In fact, some form of spirituality could be very healthy.

    The angry phase lasted for a few years after I completely lost my religion. I had already abandoned my cognitively dissonant fundamentalism and was hanging onto the idea that God had a plan and I was in it.

    Then life circumstances walloped me upside the head and made that impossible. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy and no “mysterious ways” argument can ever justify it. Disasters happen because the world and the universe have no morals.

    So I went hard on the atheism. I spent way too much time virtue signaling to other atheists online. I got into people like Richard Dawkins and Matt Dillahunty.

    Whatever you think of him, Dawkins deserves a lot of credit for coining the term “meme”, long before anyone ever made one online. Funny how memes as we think of them now illustrated his point about the replication and evolution of ideas.

    Back then I had that edgy online thing going. I thought I was so smart. I had figured it all out (again). I was in my 30s, too old for that kind of attitude. But I realize now I was just angry. Not “angry at God.” Angry because I’d been lied to.

    Angry because I was grieving.

    It’s a phase you have to go through when your worldview gets yanked out from under you. Pissed off and betrayed. You want everyone to know what horseshit it all was.

    But ultimately the fire burned itself out. I support and agree with atheists most of the time, but that can’t be my tribe. I needed to move on. Atheist felt like a description, not an identity.

    That’s all it really was. Grief.

    You probably know about DABDA, the stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. You don’t always go through it in order, but I went through all of that when I left Christianity.

    If you can make it to the last stage of grief – Acceptance, you can maybe acknowledge it wasn’t all horseshit. You probably got something of value out of it or you wouldn’t have grieved over it. That’s where I am now. I don’t believe it, but I’m not angry. If anything I’m sad.

    It occurs to me that grief could also explain why Christians seem to be angry these days. Why get so angry when others won’t believe what you do? Why do you wish so hard that they would just STFU?

    Could be because they’re in the first stages of grief: Denial. Deep down, maybe it’s not as meaningful as it used to be. They’ve got some causes and some firebrand preachers to whip them into a frenzy, but maybe it’s not enough.

    Folks who weren’t raised religious might not understand, but having your world view ripped out from under you is a terrifying prospect. Even if you know deep down it’s something you have to face if you want the truth.

    I’m beginning to understand that science and rationality, while important, are not enough to hold a society together. Westerners – Americans in particular, are suffering from a lack of meaning and it shows.

    I’ve been afraid to read Nietzsche because of his fans (adding him to the list), but now I understand what he was trying to warn us about. Christianity was the glue holding Western Civilization together.

    I’m never going to back, but I no longer want Christianity to disappear. After all it’s where I got my values. I want it to change, into something that plays well with others and still provides a sense of meaning and community.

    Perhaps go look at some of the early Christian sects, when the influence of Neoplatonism was stronger, see what might have been discarded that could be brought back.

    Lately I’ve been a big fan of Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke. He’s been talking to a variety of thinkers in various fields. He hasn’t disappointed me yet.

    He published a 50-episode YouTube series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” where he goes through the psychological developments that underpin Western Civilization. I’ve already learned a great deal. Not even halfway through yet, but I’ll get there.

    He also has some interesting and frankly ominous things to say about Artificial Intelligence and the massive ways it could impact our society.

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