It’s been a weird couple of days for me. It’s been a weird couple of days for just about everyone. At least all of my electronics are intact and no one has tried to kill me right?
I was hoping I’d be on the mend for this pneumonia like thing I’ve had for a few days. I took a Z pack on advice of my doctor. It’s a bit better but I’m still coughing. I’ve got my voice back at least. I keep hoping better medicine will arrive but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I’m going to lay low. I’ll keep it short. Maybe tomorrow I will have more to say and better lung capacity. I’ll keep it light. Lightening up. It’s better than lighting it up.
Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.
I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.
Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n
We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.
If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.
It was nice to see a big budget Chinese film with some modest Warrior Wolf diplomacy but it was mostly interesting because of the immense engineering projects and the scope of the thing.
Remember a time when NOAA scientists could be heroes? Yeah it didn’t work that great. Trust the science. Alas we don’t have the same respect for government scientists in the era before Covid. I wonder what it would take to save the world.
I am so grateful for the access I have to understanding my own body. It used to be considered quite rude to question doctors but as with any profession some are better at it than others.
Thanks to the work of the open internet and the tooling of artificial intelligence I cross check an astonishing amount of medical information. With a little work and the right questions and intelligent person can do basic differential diagnostics using Claude and Perplexity.
Networking together public papers, handy upper funnel content strategy of the Mayo Clinic, and the database of Drugs.com has been a real boon to involved patients who want to double check things.
Be skeptical of credentialism and gatekeeping in medicine. While everyone wants safe and responsible medical care there are plenty of well entrenched interests that don’t want you to do more for yourself. We deliberately keep the population of doctors limited in America. Professional organizations exist to protect themselves. But everyone deserves the tools to be healthier.
I am sick. I am unsure how I got it or even what it is but I’ve got an intense dry cough, I lost my voice (I’ve been pitching so it may be strain as it doesn’t hurt) and the pain in my left intercostal muscles and rib cage is so bad it making it hard to rest comfortably. It’s been an overstimulated kind of year.
My hope is that I recover enough by Monday that being ill won’t affect my work but I am throwing a Z pack at it in case it turns out to be bacterial pneumonia. I won’t get into the details but I’ve got reason to suspect staphylococcus infections.
If it’s viral then oh well but if it’s bacterial better safe than sorry when it comes to autoimmune patients. I’ll never turn down a chance to nuke my gut biome. Doxycycline is my preferred antibiotic but a macrolide antibiotic has its place.
Being stuck in bed and too uncomfortable to even move has at least giving me time to pick through my reading list and look over the remnant trends of the month’s cultural detritus. The human body may have autophagy but I’m less sure the body politic does. It’s all history repeating.
This New York Times trend piece covering stylized flat lays of TSA security bins insists on it being a fun new trend gaining prominence in the last six months. I find this “new” framing comical as it’s anything but new. Instagram launched in 2010 my wee Zoomer friends.
One of the experts quoted in the trend piece, Hitha Palepu (who is fantastic) was regularly featured together with me as far back as 2015 when I was something of a travel aesthetics expert myself as the CEO of a travel cosmetics brand.
Everything old is new again. I myself can barely manage the nostalgia riffs of Blackbird Spyplane let alone the regurgitation of a ten year old trend. I’d like us to try something new every once in a while. But I suppose we can’t even get a new presidential candidate so why would I expect Thursday Styles to have anything fresh.
I don’t know where I picked it up but the back to work and back to school season seems to also mean back to petty respiratory infection season. I’ve got a bad dry cough that is so intense I feel like I pulled a muscle in my left intercostal rib area.
I don’t feel terribly sick and all of my biometrics are within normal range. It’s just this horrible rough dry cough that seems to have tweaked my side so badly I’m contemplating wrapping my rib cage with a bandage.
I haven’t had a broken rib in sometime but this is as close to the feeling as I recall. I’d lost my voice a bit yesterday (been doing a bit more taking than usual as it’s fall) and pushing through it might have been a poor decision.
The other possibility is that the left intercostal pain is related to my inflammatory condition and it’s moved from its normal residence in my spine. I have very low pain in my spine at the moment so anything is possible.
I’ll lay low this weekend and hope it goes away on its own. Maybe the antitussive cough syrup will provide some relief.
Recently I have the misfortune of paying too much attention the American election season. I feel overstimulated.
I remember the 2020 campaign being stressful. I was naive during 2016. Now I find myself shunning information on polling and discourse on Twitter.
Americans have jobs, families and the problems of real life during our elections. And yet we spend billions and unleash a torrent of information, some of it propaganda, across all our public information spaces.
Every newspaper and Twitter feed and Subreddit is ready to stoke that anxiety that perfectly targets your worst and basest fears.
It’s natural to feel overstimulated by the deluge of noise. There is little signal to be found. I’ve written twenty times about propaganda because we are in a chaotic age. No one knows what’s going on. Together we piece together what we can and find reality together. Help someone make sense of the reality and maybe they pass it on. We can find out more together.
Riling up the people (the proletariat if you are nasty) is a time honored method of keeping us under control. Socrates did it. The Roman emperors did it. The New York Times and the Walk Street Journal do it.
Not getting all caught up in being stupid and reactive is a huge responsibility. And not everyone wants to hand “the people” the type of responsibility that staying free entails.
Freedom at scale requires some surrendering of responsibility to others. We outsource what we can’t possibly know to people we trust. It’s clear some of us have forgotten how to trust. And who can blame us. Institutions rise and fall. Priests, Lords and Kings fell to the people.
We then promptly built up new ways to assign authority. For a while we trusted academics, reporters and politicians. Perhaps a few celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs retain some authority now. I honestly don’t know. The lone man with his own opinion can scarcely compete.
I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an individual could have a “good bead” on reality. The mythos of the American post World War 2 GI Bill educated mass media literate Baby Boomers sure thought they had a grasp on reality. Being directionally correct about Vietnam and Nixon helped I’m sure.
That’s the fantasy I miss most from my childhood. I read “Manufacturing Consent,” Howard Zinn and AdBusters. I thought it was possible to see around the machine. Maybe and I are both Noam Chomsky kind of simple minded. At least now I’m only certain that I’m part of the machine. Perhaps there was never any separation from it.
Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.
If women worry more about competing for resources than men because their social competitions are zero sum (versus men who must be more cooperative for group defense) than I can see how if you get to fear being a driver of inferiority. If you are struggling with poverty or resource constraint you might be living in fear. It’s hard to imagine that there are infinite games. Maybe too many of us can’t see beyond limited zero sum “us versus them” resources competitions.
When I grew up young women experienced rather pervasive fear and shame on becoming pregnant. Now we see more women convinced to pull back from the risk of children entirely.
What I can’t quite square in these theories is how much actual resource constraints play into this versus the subjective differences in resources we see in our social groups. Is it all a comparison game?
You may be doing objectively better than any of your ancestors but still feel inadequate next to a lavish Instagram feed of an influencer. If you don’t think you can live up to the high standards of parenting required in American life maybe you’d worry yourself into a smaller family.
Or as many are choosing you’d worry yourself into no children at all. Last week the Surgeon General said Americans were in a crisis of parental stress. Who wants that? I’d say that women should worry less but if our biology says “only the paranoid survive” the future of humanity will take more than just our evolutionary instincts. We need to want to live.
He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.
Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.
It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.
It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.
The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.
As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.
It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.
Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”
I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.
Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.
