Peg Tittle's Blog, page 3

John Kerry on Trump (on Bill Maher)

“Trump responds more to his Twitter ‘likes’ than his briefing books and the Constitution of the United States.”

(And that was about his first term.)

“He has the maturity of an 8-year-old boy and the insecurity of a teenage girl.”

a few bits from John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

(a collection of pieces from his “Whatever” website at https://whatever.scalzi.com/)

“They don’t really advertise that they kill people,” said marine reservist Stephen Funk, about why he refused to report for active duty. “I didn’t really realize the full implications of what I was doing.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/2/03

responding to that, Scalzi says “You have to be a really interesting sort of ignorant not to know that the Marines kill people from time to time. Your first hint: The big rifle so many of those Marines carry around. …” p177

Agreed.

“This is what you get when the President of the United States is a man who has a level of self-introspection that is best described as canine …” p355

Love it. (And he was talking about George W.Bush)

Mania, Lionel Shriver – VERY HIGH RECOMMENDED

This is a brilliant novel.

And not at all an exaggerated prediction for a near-future.

The whole Mental Parity thing (no one is smarter than anyone else) is in line with the whole trans thing (sex is a social construct, not a biological reality; I’m female if I think I am), faith-based science, postmodernism (there is no objective true and false; there is ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’), The Death of Expertise, anti-intellectualism that goes back at least to the 1950s, Idiocracy …

Normally, I excerpt exceptional quotes, but I have too many … p5, 10, 14, 21, 69, 71-4, 99, 109, 115, 125, 138-143, 181, did I say 181?, 245-248

Read it. Just … read it.

from New Model Army, Adam Roberts

“… none of the so-called democracies in the world today are properly democratic. They are, rather, rigid hierarchies, whose oligarchs consent, every few years, to punctuate their routine with a single mass reality-TV-show-style plebiscite. That’s not what democracy means.” p3

or, said better, in my opinion, “We don’t have democracy, in the world of politics today; we have oligarchy punctuated by occasional contests to determine who has the most effective control of the media.” p8-9

” … looking too deeply into the causes of war may encourage you to try and tease out right and wrong. That’s a mistake … because if the rights and wrongs could be easily sorted out then people wouldn’t have gone to war over them in the first place.” p60

“In four out of five possible situations war is simply too costly an option. … you [New Model Armies] came along, and you made war affordable again.” p195

New Model Armies are mercenary armies of technologically enhanced-and-connected soldiers (and because of that connection, which enabled anyone to put forth a proposal upon which everyone could vote, near instantaneously, were, unlike conventional armies drowning in hierarchy, truly democratic) but I wonder if his point is applicable to drones, as well.

And why were so many joining NMAs?
“these people were not joinging up for the money, or for the austere pleasures of putting in place effective military strategy. Three quarters of them were young men. most were not even particularly committed to the ideologies of democracy. most were joining up because doing so gave them the chance to smash shit up, and to ensure that nobody fucked with them.” p197

These fires brought to you by …

Watching the weather network, with the ads: the fires in Turkey brought to you by Mitsubishi’s new crossover SUV, the Outlander. Literally brought to you by.

It’s exactly like an ad for guns showing right after news of a school shooting. See the problem?

How can they, the people behind the weather network, can be so fucking clueless? Why would they agree to advertise the very product that causes the disasters they cover?

Because the disasters depend on those products, and their website depends on disasters. Disasters are exciting. People click on disasters. People stay on disasters. And so the website gets more money for the ads.

Somewhere along the line, the horse got put before the cart: it’s not that ads enable websites anymore; now, websites enable ads.

And, ho-hum, in the U.S., money trumps morality. So I waste my time suggesting that ads for harmful products should be banned. Seriously. And fossil-fueled cars, and guns, are so much worse than, say, cigarettes—given that the harm done goes waaaaaaay beyond that to the person who voluntarily chooses to use said products.

Nietzsche on natural death

“Under certain conditions, it is improper to live any longer. Continued vegetation in cowardly dependence upon physicians and prescription, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, should entail the profound contempt of humanity.” Nietzsche

“Natural death is death under the most contemptible conditions. It is involuntary death, death at the wrong time, a coward’s death. We should desire a different kind of death—voluntary, conscious, not accidental or by surprise. when a man does away with himself, he does the noblest thing in the world. By doing it, he almost proves his right to live.” Nietzsche

“Natural death is destitute of rationality. It is really irrational death, for the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel shall endure. … [T]he enlightened regulation and control of death belong to the morality of the future.” Nietzsche

This Changes Everything changed nothing.

This Changes Everything is the most important book ever written. Because it changed nothing.

You need to read the book in order to understand my point. And therein lies the problem: people don’t read anymore. Almost half (48.5%) of Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year. And, surprising to me, the U.S. has the highest average (according to the survey I consulted—see below). And so, people are now, by and large, stupid. (And by ‘stupid’ I mean both unintelligent and uninformed.) (Because if one is intelligent, one tends to become informed.)

One typically needs, at a minimum, a long paragraph in order to make an argument (that is, present a claim with evidence and/or reasoning), let alone also consider objections and present replies. What people read now, typically single sentences on social media, cannot therefore be arguments. Single sentences can be only claims. Without the supporting evidence/reasoning, how does one judge which claims to accept and which to reject? Not with any intelligence, that’s for sure. One can accept or reject only according to what one likes, according to what resonates best with whatever one currently believes (for who knows why).

And most people won’t listen to, or will have trouble following, a whole paragraph presented orally. Consider that even on podcasts and interview/discussion programs, on which intelligent people discuss issues, participants present, typically, only one or two sentences at a time.

What Klein does in her book, her 576-page book, is make an airtight argument for leaving the rest of our oil in the ground; burning more from this point on (well, from that point on—2014) will be catastrophic. Fatal to human life on Earth.

This is no exaggeration because we cannot change the molecular structure of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (to name perhaps the most important three chemicals), and, so, we cannot change their interactions and the consequences of said interactions. Nor can we change the temperature range at which the human organism can survive (or the need for a certain amount of water and food).

That the book changed nothing proves that most humans are either stupid or selfish. Or both. Stupid in that they don’t know what they’re doing when they continue to use fossil fuels, for example. Selfish in that they do know what they’re doing, but choose (let’s say) personal power, wealth, status, and/or employment over the common good (the survival of the species).

Note that I say most humans are either stupid or selfish. Because many people knew, even back in the 1980s (probably the more accurate time after which we should not have burned more oil): David Suzuki, Guy McPherson, Bill McKibben, and many others. And they did act for the common good. But there has never been a critical mass of those neither stupid nor selfish.

And that’s the problem with democracy: it’s government by the masses. Which are stupid. Or selfish. Or both.

What we needed, back in the 1980s, was a ‘benevolent dictator’—more specifically, a knowledgeable dictator motivated by the common good. We needed someone like Klein or Suzuki or McPherson or McKibben to say ‘This has to stop now’ and to fire or even exile (to the tropics, perhaps) everyone who didn’t agree to ‘make it so’.

Now, it doesn’t matter. Predictions about temperature (to name just one indicator of our impending death) for 2050 are ‘coming true’ now, in 2025. Which is to say we’ve already jumped over the cliff and are ‘just’ on the way down.

There have been relatively slow changes, but unless you know better, they are not considered alarming, and so no action is taken, and there have been abrupt changes, but unless you know better, they are dismissed as anomalies, and so no action is taken.

And so everything will be normal until it’s not.

US Book Reading Statistics (National Survey 2025)

https://worldpopulationreview.com/cou...

Hacks (feat. Jean Smart) – highly recommended

If you’re not into it, at least watch episode 8 of season 1.

(on Crave TV)

A brilliant observation by Kierkegaard from 1838

“People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of expression as compensation.” Kierkegaard (1838)

from Fraternity Gang Rape, Peggy Reeves Sanday

“Rape [is] rare in 47 percent of the societies studied and common in 18 percent of them. … In the more rape-prone societies there [is] greater sexual segregation, male social dominance, interpersonal violence, and the subordination of women” p4

“… in the United States, which is in all likelihood one of the most rape-prone societies in the world.” p9

“… the attitudes, language, behavior, and literacy levels of these [i.e., American] fraternity members are identical to those of young, underprivileged criminals” p23

“According to a recent study of adolescents, aged fourteen to eighteen, ‘more than half the boys and nearly half the girls thought that it was okay for a male to force (that is, rape) a female if he was sexually aroused by her'” p54

What? What? Parents, teachers, are you fucking clueless? Or just incompetent?

“… compassion for women implies castration” p63

And they say men are the rational ones.

And re “working a ‘yes’ out” … it’s not that women are so weak-willed; it’s that men have the patriarchy behind them because/so they speak with such authority. So ‘You know you want it’ is as convincing as ‘You need to replace the exhaust system’.

And on that note, ‘You know you want it’ suggests that they think consent is important, while at the same time, using alcohol, drugs, and intimidation suggests that they think consent isn’t important.

Again, they say men are the rational ones.

“Only once in these discussions with fraternity brothers, which spanned a two-year period, did any group of brothers mention love in connection with sex.” p143

Women, take note.

“The responsibility always belongs to the woman, never to the brothers [referring to things like ‘she brought it on herself, by the way she was dressed or acting…’] … Such attitudes display an infantile, concrete perception of responsibility [and I’d add one inconsistent with the view of break and enter and theft and vandalism, none of which become suddenly acceptable if someone leaves their door unlocked] … These men are not reflective; they are primarily reactive …” p145

“The price female students pay for their passive acceptance of the inhumanity of casualization [of sex] is an even greater sense of low self-esteem. … [W]hat women students think of as reckless freedom is in reality acceptance of t… gender inequality …” p218

“… she was surprised at the amount of time girls devoted to ‘primping’ starting at 6pm on a Friday night to leave around 10:30pm for a fraternity party” p204

Seriously? How shallow and superficial do you have to be to spend so much time on your appearance?

“Primping four hours before going to a party is flight from authenticity in the expenditure of capital to sell the self through the body.” p218

Okay, it’s that too.

“Verbal consent is neither prudish nor puritanical. it can be highly erotic.” p233
Yes. Yes.