Tag: Anger

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1852 and The Nothing

I did not have a good weekend. I feel the emotions of humanity’s current transitional phase too keenly. There are the wondrous upswings of hope and deep darkness that consumes anyone who bears witness.

I feel compelled to bear witness. Even though I know it harms me. Even when I know I am staring into a war, purpose designed to push me into or out of the myriad conflicting agendas of state, corporate, faith and cultural powers. A thousand agendas who wish us submit to their will.

I wish I had the guidance of the generation who led the world through modernity’s war torn emergence into our current networked age. Without knowing our future, would they be able to use their past to help us see through the fog that clouds our present?

I find solace in the children’s literature made by artists who lived through brutal dehumanizing totalitarian regimes. They told stories with truths so clear a child could grasp them.

I return to the works of Tove Jansson and Michael Ende again and again as I try to make sense of what it means to be human. Ironic that I should find human truths in authors who wrote of fantastical worlds filled with whimsical trolls and flying luck dragons.

And yet truths that seem crystalline in fiction distort when I apply the lens of my present. I recall Corinthian’s 1 “Through A Glass, Darkly” and know I am not the first to have such troubles. I will not be the last.

Ende wrote a fictional formless entity called “The Nothing” in The Neverending Story. The people of the realm Fantastica voluntarily leap into The Nothing. It has an irresistible pull.

Worse still, the destructive phenomenon changes the Fantasticans who become lies in the human world. Fantasticans who are destroyed by entering “The Nothing,” don’t just vanish. They reappear in our human world as false beliefs, deceptions, and propaganda that people mistake for reality. The symbolism is clear.

When we suppresses imagination and our inner life, our “lost” fantasies don’t disappear. As in shadow theory, they return as toxic narratives, distortions, and myths that make people “blind” to the difference between reality and illusion.

I do not wish for any of us to kill who we are. We walk into The Nothing and whatever version of ourselves comes out the other side is not the truth. I can only pray that I am not willingly walking into The Nothing as I bear witness.

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Community Politics Travel

Day 1840 and Firm Planning Over An Abstract Constantinople

A friend of mine James Pogue published an opinion piece long in the making about a new kind of Democratic. He deeply investigates the subtly misunderstood Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

I was really moved by his sincere engagement with a new kind of Democrat who is really an old kind of Democrat who spoke to America s who lived closer to the land and took pride in a type of communal and conservative stewardship of our country.

I felt it very deeply as someone between two worlds. I sense the grief and loss I carry everyday. If the nation had chose a different path, I wouldn’t have been shunted up and out in The Sort.

Maybe I’d have married to my high school sweetheart. He’s an EMT, didnt go so far from home and is a passionate outdoorsman. We were on different paths as is clear from where I landed but my respect for the life he leads endures.

I live an amazing life with a loving dedicated husband with whom I pursue a deeply aligned set of life goals. The blessings that have been showered on me by the Sort have been substantial. We we have almost maximum freedom to pursue our lives while.

I thank God that despite the changes that have ravaged much of the America, I grew up in most of what I know is incredible agency and comfort.

But there are other Americas who are not so lucky. I hold that William Gibson saw Cyperpunk as science fiction rooted in Appalachia. I see how he writes the near future and it’s one where the past still exists but some of us have been sent forward to the future.

In his almost present maybe I’d have in-laws I grew up with and maybe I’d have my parents nearby because we’d never have lost the house in Boulder and staying close would have made economic sense. Hippies really did want that world.

Maybe a world where “right to repair” has been enshrined would have allowed me to build and own the work I could do on the farms that surrounded our defense industrial focused land grant university. It’s hard to imagine what I would do in that other America.

I’d manage the organic school farm I worked to gain permits for that my mother built from the first year. It mostly existed to produced fruits and vegetables for those who worked it. Itd a fantastical idea that has little basis in economic reality but it’s a life that would make sense to almost anyone.

But instead I was off to acquire an enormous debt that was hard for me and my family to fathom to take huge gambles that I’d be a winner. And I was.

But I’ll never have my family, childhood house, or my town back. That America is gone. And when I wanted the pickup truck of the past I had to import it from the fucking Balkans. It’s expensive to be able to repair what you’ve got.

I’m writing this from a hotel in a trade capital where Alex and I are working while doing our yearly “firm” planning for the family because it was the best place to meet up based on his travel and mine as we run the ancient trade lines that have always ruled the world. That we can plan is a dream.

We aren’t aristocracy but agents of them. And if they ever tried to take our trucks or our guns what else would we have left but being “in service” and tut tutting over a lie of moral superiority for having achieved high rank by serving our betters.

I’ve never felt more America than in this moment, even though I’ll never ever get back the American whose logic forced me into achieving a bigger life than I’d ever imagined.

I just happen to know that it was achieved at the expense of my home and my family and a future that would have also been a life of beauty and meaning close to the land and a town that has benefited from an American government that worked a little bit more for the people around me.

Just because I have thrived doesn’t mean the cost wasn’t great. That would be a dismissal of the material reality that I know to be true. But isn’t it nice that I will be treated as a respected trader representing capital interests in some great capital. It’s freedom most certainly, but not the freedom that America promised. That one might be a little less grand. It’s a little bit firmer. And I am in the realm of the abstract.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1839 and Take A Load Off Fanny

I pulled into Nazareth was feelin’ about half past dead. I’m not actually in Nazareth, but I am feeling the weight of my travel and I do feel half past dead.

Laying in bed I’ve got The Weight’s classic on repeat along with remixes and algorithm recommendations. For what it’s worth Buffalo Springing is a mood that leads to Jefferson Airplane for me.

So I quote my way through today and encourage feeling my moods as I try to come down. There’s something happening here but what it is ain’t entirely clear. It was true then and it’s true now and I know it’s hard.

You can put the load back on me and go ask Alice if you need. But if you go chasing rabbits and you know you are going to fall, remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head.

The playlists of my parents and of the Silicon Valley counter cultural era can help guide by turning to the past to make sense of the present. And if it starts for you well, as I said go ask Alice what the dormouse said.

Logic and proportion have indeed fallen sloppy dead. And I am working to feed my head. But maybe Alice would encourage feeding my heart if any of us had thought to ask. So I am taking a load off. And I’ll put the load right on you. We can make it if we all stick together.

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Politics Travel

Day 1838 and Tractor Protests of the Mercosur Free Trade Deal In Greece

As I continued my journey through southern Europe yesterday, I encountered one of the most striking protests I’ve ever seen. At every major intersection and city limit there were hundreds (if not thousands in instance) of tractors lining the streets.

From enormous modern combines to Jeremy Clarkson style esoteric speciality vehicles, I saw more tractors yesterday than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. It was majestic. And it continued for my entire drive through the country from border to port to border.

Mind you I drove a tractor before I drove a car, and I live in farm country so trips to the local John Deere dealership are a monthly ritual for us. And I’ve never seen such a variety of tractors. It made quite the spectacle and was deeply emotional seeing so many of them empty and lined up in a row in quiet dissent.

Crossing an intersection over Greek Farmers protesting the Mercosur trade deal

The tractors flew flags and banners indicating their disapproval of the signing of the EU-Mercosur Trade Deal. The European Union will be trading with the Mercosur bloc consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is set to create the world’s largest free-trade area covering 700 million people. 

European farmers are not happy about it. Yet the protestors did not disrupt traffic at all. The roads were open and passable. A blessing given that in many areas it either snowing or had recently snowed and the temperatures were below zero.

Mediterranean olive land covered in snow on January 11th.

The snow is not a very common experience for an area that farms olives and grain. And yet on top of changing weather patterns, the Greek farmers I saw protesting (along with 27 other European countries who are signatories) must now contend with farmers in 4 Latin American countries that do not have their standards or rules.

Economic collaboration and global ties were touted in all the press from Brussels as they condemned America’s retreat from trade. And the part of me that is a committed free trader wanted to agree. But the part of me that struggles with illness and the American food system was on their side.

And yet Europe is saying damn their own farmer’s opinions, stick it to America and our government’s trade wars. Ursula von der Leyen will let in Brazilian fruit and glyphosate saturated grains come to Europe.

I am no stranger to protest movements from the Battle of Seattle to EarthFirst! I picked up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a child. I remember the era where organizations like the WTO were criticized and concerns about trade and agriculture were front and center. We forgot along the way and the politics went horseshoe theory but the problems remained.

I don’t farm or ranch, merely keep chickens, garden and maintain our land in Montana, but my husband’s beloved electronic free Deere is practically a family member. We are sympathetic to farmers and care about topics like soil earth, permaculture and the endless glyphosate lawsuits.

I’d rather America be trading with Europe than Europe be trading with Latin American countries. The land some of them work is meant to be rainforest not grain fields.

I’d be furious too if I were a Greek, Irish or French farmer under restrictions my competitors didn’t face knowing that they produced a better product on land cared for under high standards and almost impossible conditions. They know what they yield is destined to move on their ports somewhere. Thats what their ports do. But protest they must.

The Thesolonikki Port as seen from a hotel

And yet here the farmers were, placing their precious equipment on the roads silently condemning the entire lot of politicians who care neither for the people or the land.

Seeing like a state means we are just numbers to them. I couldn’t count all the tractors I saw. There were too many. At every crossing I saw there were more. And that’s the point. It will affect all of us in the local and global balance of the land and the people it feeds.

The land and its stewards ultimately don’t matter where no matter what Brussels says. Neither does America’s politicians and their economic foibles. It’s all a numbers game.

So the farmers showed them their numbers every where I turned. I noticed them. And I hope others do too. What we can do is not for me to say. I see them and am sharing so you can too.

A gas station stop in the middle of nowhere
Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1834 and Oops All Reactionaries

A running joke personal joke I have when frustrated by humanity is that every movement compelling enough to reach any scale reveals itself eventually to be “oops all reactionaries” The bigger the thing or the deeper down you go and eventually with fractal consistency “oops, all reactionaries!”

Anytime I have really hard contact with reality this turns out to be true. Reality has been particularly harsh over the last couple decades insofar as materialism has gone for the species.

I have been shielded from reality by the gracious people of the United States of America. And even then if you look too closely “oops all reactionaries!”

I think “oops, all reactionaries” turns out to be a decent lens for assessing our past, present and probably future. If it’s any good it has a core that should concern if you take it too literally. You then have to decide how seriously to take their literalism. If you get it wrong you might wake up dead.

Which I don’t love. Most people just want to go along to get along. Which isn’t to say that getting along in America is easy. We are a surprisingly competitive place for the richest nation state to have ever existed among a bizarre republic of slowly expanded frontiers and boomtowns. So we’ve got plenty of pockets where reality has always been all reactionaries.

We’ve hit our limits a million times and still have shockingly low density. Being an industrious people who enjoy markets this has worked out relatively well for the “empire” and it’s people.

America! It’s not bad and I recommend it even if we do functionally have feudal lords in the form of capital, labor and land managers at various levels of public and private parcels. But being civilized people trying to make a buck we really don’t like it when the shock troops are deployed at home.

We do seem to be ambivalent about it being deployed abroad. This has been my Ted Talk on homeland security. Really though beware the politics of wealthy heiresses.

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Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

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Culture Travel

Day 1824 and The Logistics of A New Year in A New World

I get out of America with as much frequency as I can manage. I juggle this with an intense patriotism not only for America but for my home biome in Rocky Mountain west. I am proud to say I am from Montana when I am abroad.

My interest in being regularly abroad began as an effort to source deals and understand different technical ecosystems, but has ended up being my barometer of what reality is being played for what channels. Deals get done where the founders are and it will remain so.

Yet if I didn’t see other economies and live outside of the news ecosystems of America I’d have an understanding of reality that was incomplete.

The projections of your interests as an American are in constant tension with the ex monica and cultural attacks on it from its adversaries. America has quite a few and it is extremely dangerous now to be blind to their impacts.

I don’t think our world will be as open in the future and this saddens me. When I visit a young formerly communist city in Europe I mostly see enterprising young people who see an. American and have positive associations.

The vibes Zoomer Eassyerj Europeans have towards a middle aged American from Montana is surprisingly positive. I am feel lucky that is their emotional connection to America.

And we shouldn’t take that good will for granted. We want America to be a good friend to them. Capitalist Zoomers who experienced totalitarianism and socialism are good friends to Americans.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1812 and Highlander Political Power Sharing

There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?

There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.

Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia

This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.

These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.

Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.

We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.

Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.

The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.

I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.

Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?

But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.

Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.

Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.

Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.

Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1808 and The Secret Sauce is Strongmen

Without getting into too much detail about my travel schedule I will say I’ve visited a few places with a lot of construction this year.

I’m talking about cranes on every corner level construction. If I did a full rotation as if I were Michael Bay getting an action shot, I’d see a half dozen cranes putting up major construction projects.

In some European cities (not the western ones) I saw entire neighborhoods being rebuilt from old multi-family buildings to massive mixed used developments. Cute streets and courtyards be damned, the millenial families want Instagram housing from Tallinn to Tirana.

Their elders are confused but new families need new condominiums. Let’s just hope they remembered to plan for water, power, and other infrastructure needs like new roadways. I’ll admit I’m skeptical in many cases. Maybe it’s good that they are just building willy nilly as it’s not like we get infrastructure investment without the pressure of new families demanding it.

Americans don’t see this amount of construction regularly and it is both inspiring and also a mess of pollution from debris to noise. It’s pretty miserable if you happen to enjoy walking. It is also miserable to live with.

It almost makes me sympathetic to the whines of older residents who want their homes to be worth more and use the chaos of new developments as a cudgel to stop new housing from being built.

There was a time in New York City when I first arrived there when it felt like new buildings went up all the time. You’d complain about jackhammers, trucks, and the ugly protective sidewalk sheds that are meant for safety.

I even knew a venture capitalist who left his job to make a classier sidewalk shed as the damn things almost never come down in a city under constant improvement.

I went through ULURP or Uniform Land Use Review Process hundreds of times in just a few years as an appointee in the community board system.

All anyone can do is complain about the lack of new building and construction. And who can manage to overcome the slog to build let alone turn a profit. American processes for building are more “cranky man tells at clouds” local meeting hell than Robert Moses.

Maybe the YIMBYs (I myself am a yes in my backyard sort) are barking up the wrong true with red tape reform efforts. The strongmen cut the Gordian knot of land reform by simply not giving a shit about process.

The Zoomers are ready to rage for radicalism with their reactionary political entertainment industry. It’s unclear to me if those types would remember to incorporate waste water treatment in their plans. It’s not hard to go from bullshitting to being covered in shit. So that’s worth considering too before we get too excited about a new round of futurism.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1799 and Thucydides Middle Income Local Maxima Traps

I have been catching up on Odd Lots which is the one podcast I listen to with any consistency. As all discussions about economics boil down to great power discussions as of late. The times they are indeed a-changing.

I noticed that both hosts brought up their collegiate studies of international relations across two back to back episodes. First on the Thanksgiving episode with Graham Allison of Thucydides trap fame.

I just caught up on it today and then the subsequent interview with Ray Dalio on his five forces episode. Joe and Tracy brought up international relations studies in both episodes as it does seem to be the current mood.

Dalio is always an enjoyable listen but I’m much more interested in Professor Allison as (to prove the joke Joe made) in the introduction that “a substantial portion of our listeners are really into ancient Greek history”

And indeed Joe is right. I’m a huge Thucydides fan, I went on a Peloponnesian War tour and am a regular visitor of the Balkans and its ancient Mediterranean and Roman history.

So naturally I have followed Allison’s work on rising power and its threat to established ones.

The US and China are in a “Thucydides Trap,” whereby the risk of war is heightened when an established power is threatened by a rapidly rising power. This is the framework that’s been popularized by Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Professor Allison has been writing about China and the US-China relationship for decades

I guess all millennials grew up thinking we’d study these historical concepts in an eternal Pax Americana only to find the end of history wasn’t here to stay and we might fall into the trap. It’s just hard to imagine America feeling threatening to anyone at the moment.

As I listened to the episode, I happened to be walking through a neighborhood on the outskirts of a city that is keen to tear down some of its older homes to make way for new roads and denser apartment buildings. Much of those changes were clearly already in motion, as I saw cranes and construction crews.

The older homes looked multi-generational, but not in that wealthy polished way, so much as the middle income stalled economy compromise.

And yes you see it even in first world nations. In America and Europe, many conditions would benefit from more of a longhouse “in it together” approach. As elders stretch on in years and millennials go into middle age with few markers of adulthood. You’d think we’d want more of these style of homes.

I wondered if a city carving out the old construction through imminent domain tactics and buyouts, would make this outskirts neighborhood more vibrant. It would certainly bring in new buyers of condominiums. Consumption must go up.

I wondered about the families inside of the homes that looked more like multi home construction. Gates and other obstructions made it hard to tell, but the impression I got was more middle income local maxima family compound trap.

China rising, while the first world learns it may be more second world than it realized, makes me wonder if we’ve got it all wrong. More of the planet is in the middle income trap than the World Bank realized.

What if there is no Thucydides trap to fear as other powers sputter and stall. We long for an artificial intelligence boom to launch the globe into a high earning high efficiency world.

Sociologist Salvatore Babones and political scientist Hartmut Elsenhans call the middle-income trap a “political trap” as economic methods to overcome it exist. However, few countries use them because of their political situation. They trace the causes of the trap to the structural problems and the inequalities generated in the early development process.

According to them, the wealthy elites then follow their interests by bargaining for a strong currency which shifts the economy’s structure towards the consumption of luxury goods and low-wage labor laws, which prevents the rise of mass consumption and mass income.  Via Wikipedia

That sure sounds like a lot of the problems we see in America and Europe. All we are doing is getting gummed up in Baumol’s Cost Disease as we try to reinvent new ways of living that consume what remains of the old without the new going as fast as is needed.

But old multi-generational homes blocking the expansion of a city won’t get anyone to mass affluence. So it’s time to bulldoze old neighborhoods and make luxury boxes in the sky.

Not sure that ended well for China either. They popped their real estate bubble. And they wisely tamp their currency to export all their consumer goods. They might be stuck in a local maxima middle income trap too. Maybe Thucydides isn’t the framework here. Or maybe war is the only reset humanity knows.

I myself am hoping we choose to go to space instead but the South China Sea sits waiting. The only currency that matters in this strange moment is GPUs and that’s a different trap entirely.