Tag: Culture Wars

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Chronicle Politics Preparedness

Day 19 and The Anticipation

I’ve been hit hard by the sudden (lol) realization of the chattering classes that “it can happen here” both with the discourse surrounding the pandemic and America’s democracy crisis. Clearly anyone who deals in nuance has been concerned about our institutional capacity for sometime. But that realization becoming mainstream freaks me out.

I don’t mind being seen as a bit of a Cassandra. I think about doom precisely because I’m naturally optimistic. If I didn’t look at worst case scenarios I would live in a perpetually Pollyanna-ish state where I exude complete confidence that it’s all for the best. So I’d rather my public persona be one of concern and worry as I think it’s tactically more worrisome if I’m perceived as being overly bullish. Bulls never get the best prices. Please continue to think of me as one of your favorite bears.

So because I’m a bull hiding in bear clothing I really loathe when the zeitgeist tips into fear for everyone. I don’t know if that means I need to dial in my personal meter to greed to take advantage of the fear. Because if everyone is fearful then I need to go against that grain and be a bull. Contrarianism pays the bills right up until the second it fails spectacularly. The thing is I don’t actually believe anyone is fearful. We are talking a mile a minute about the threat to democracy and the rising death tolls but the entire upper class is riding the rising prices to greater and greater wealth. In a sign that I don’t have a particularly diverse social class everyone I know has has very good earning years. Everyone is rushing to invest and brag about their good fortunes. While simultaneously belly aching about how unfair it all is but really there is nothing they can do.

So what can I possibly use to temper my own temperament when it’s not at all clear where the zeitgeist lives? Is it fear? Or is it greed? is it possible that we are just petrified fat cats the entire lot of us? That would probably explain the banner year for gun permits. I quite honestly haven’t the slightest idea how the midterm plays out. All I can do is anticipate the second order effects. So I did a grocery order before inauguration and I looked at numbers for the spread of the nee covid variant. Only time will tell.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 15 and The Wolf You Feed

A perennially popular “just so” story newly reborn as meme is The Two Wolves Inside. Not to be confused with the also excellent three wolves howling at the moon tee-shirt, this parable has a bit more payoff.

You can find endless “graphic design is my passion” variants of the parable from charming Etsy shop hipster versions to deeply weird mashups of Corinthians and Lanape culture. Thanks Art of The Christian Ninja Pastor dude. I’ll pick the firefighters training blog variant as beefy bros that save us from fires seem as good as any to own up to existential food demon metaphors. It’s not the best of the bunch and missed key elements like the wise grandfather telling the boy a story. But it absolutely captures the spirit of heinous layouts and type treatments meant to inspire you to greater things. Which is probably more core to the meme. As from there it reduces itself to further derp.

Why all this lead up? Why am I showing a badly executed meme that isn’t even the full story. Be patient good reader. Bad to the wolves. Well obviously we want to feed the good wolf. But also starving a part of you that isn’t socially acceptable also seems like a real asshole move. Why would you treat yourself so poorly? Or anyone for that matter. It’s like saying to a date “if you can’t handle the worst of me you don’t deserve the best of me” and then wondering why you get treated like a child. Bitch everyone needs to parent their screaming inner child. Blackmailing a potential partner into doing it for you is called codependency.

But I digress. I recognize the need for my own darker impulses. The tendency to swear (makes me relatable), the yawning almost never ending need for love and attention (makes me good at making things people want) and a litany of other bad wolf behaviors all serve a purpose. So maybe feed both wolves but recognize one of them can also kill you. Nurture it but keep it on a leash. Be the alpha of that pack. Oh god it’s been three wolves all along!

The tricky bit here seems to me where we extend out the metaphor to others. We want to be with friends and colleagues that are not fucking over their own wolves. Eating disorder wolves being starved out of fear. Ignored wolves. Misunderstood wolves. God it’s a parade of the kind of bullshit you have to empathize with daily as we grapple with the intrinsic sin and frailty of mankind. To say it makes the workplace a mess is an understatement.

It’s currently on my mind because I want to spend my time with people who are feeding and training their wolves for the best possible outcome for them. Genuine engagement with your faults and talents is a joy. It makes you better. It makes others around you better. And it’s just more fucking fun. People who refuse or are unable to engage with the sum total of their humanity just aren’t as interesting as those who are committed to becoming the best version of themselves. They also don’t tend to win as often, as limiting yourself out of fear is a finite game with only so many options to be seen as a winner. You either win a definite sum or you don’t. Evolution and bigger games and more interesting problems never arrive. I’ll just wholesale quote Alex Danco here.

First, finite games are played for the purpose of winning. Whenever you’re engaging in an activity that’s definite, bounded, and where the game can be completed by mutual agreement of all the players, then that’s a finite game In contrast, infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing to play. You do not “win” infinite games; these are activities like learning, culture, community, or any exploration with no defined set of rules nor any pre-agreed-upon conditions for completion. The point of playing is to bring new players into the game, so they can play too. You never “win”, the play just gets more and more rewarding. “

So ask yourself are going spending your time with people who are balancing out their wolves in a never ending game of joyful interaction? Or are you spending time with folks trying to kill off parts of themselves in order to win a prize that is simple and understandable. It’s not exactly a value judgement. Winning is good. Harmful behaviors towards others is bad. But I hope that we can all agree that a truly great life is a lot more nuanced than a scoreboard and a morality checklist. And yes this is me encouraging us all to spend time with better people who will support that.

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Chronicle

On Being Extremely Online

Many folks find social media to be overwhelming. It’s a constant barrage of sensory inputs. It’s not necessarily the most pleasant unless, like me, you live for large information loads. It provides me an emotional comfort get data points. One of the few things I could do when sick was scroll Twitter and read news (longer form not so much) so I have become as they say “extremely online”

I follow shifts in opinion like a rancher can sense a change in the winds. Being extremely online skews your politics in some ways. I can recite minutia in history and policy. Which makes it harder to form firm opinions. It’s all simply too nuanced to be partisan. Then I speak to family members who are dead sure of their position who can’t answer a basic question about how they decided to hold the opinion. It’s not so much that they are low information voters so much as I’m a saturated voter. If a pollster tried to talk to me they couldn’t place me. Which is how I ended up being the token white conservative that voted for Clinton that Frank Luntz brought to Oprah. So being a saturated voter does have its perks.

This saturation effect isn’t just true for politics. I swim in economic data. I follow petty feuds and undercurrents in venture capital. I have entire magazine mastheads committed to memory. I know what stories writers wrote a decade ago. I probably know CV of some editors better they they know themselves.

This also makes it relatively easy for me to move between different types of communities. Code switching isn’t just for race. Online it can be the difference between getting ratio’d or being promoted. And thanks to the constant scrolling and consumption I can talk just as easily to size proud chronic disease communities as I can the swol bros who insist being jacked is a moral authority. Which I find to be genuinely additive to my life. Diversity of opinion makes you smarter. It makes you kinder.

And holy shit does being in the information flow of diverse communities give you an edge. My favorite thing to do on Twitter is to ask someone to explain a controversy or event and nine times out of ten I get a nuanced thoughtful answer…from the source. Just this week I was feeling overwhelmed trying to parse the Bret Weinstein controversy at Evergreen college. It’s one of the original culture war battles on campus but I’ve never understood it. Media was intense and wedded to their priors. I couldn’t make heads or trails of it. So I asked. And within hours Bret himself took the time to point me towards sources so I could become informed. I still don’t know exactly how I feel about it but I do know if you seek in good faith the internet will provide. If you can find a way to intake more media and don’t let it overwhelm you being extremely online will make your life significantly better. Or it will melt your brain. No guarantees.

Media: In which the venerable conservative George Will loses his shit on the venal craven fuck nuts that are senators Hawley and Cruz. I also reread the interview I mentioned above with Oprah and I have to say I was spot on in my predictions.

Julie Fredrickson being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2016 about the election of Trump.

Food: I was out of pour over coffee so I acquired a latte from Spruce Confections. Ok I’ll also admit I got a ham and cheese croissant too. We then made a trip to Costco and acquired quite a bit of meat and vegetables so I don’t repeat that nonsense too often.