Seriously, shut up about Hipsters already. It’s done. It’s over. Shut up.

This sort of thing has happened before. Here’s the shape of it: some strange people start doing something. It’s misunderstood, except by a handful of people. That handful of people just happen to be “cool,” and so the whole thing draws more people, understand it or not. Eventually the strange people that started it get tired of it or the stuff that’s grown up around it, and they leave. The subculture stops evolving and turns into a historical edifice or parody maintained by people who mostly never understood it in the first place.

Everyone likes a bandwagon, and that’s why after the punks we have Punks¹, after raves we have Ravers, after hippies we have Hippies, after hipsters we have Hipsters. In all of these we have (occasionally very convincing) vestiges of the original philosophy, politics and attitudes that started the movements, but really, they’re just party scenes.

And hey, what is it that everyone hates about the Hipsters? The almost complete conformity under the banner of rebellion? The self-mockery? The shitty fashion? Wait, which party scene am I talking about again?

But to return to my original point: everyone accepts that it’s poor form to make fun of Punks, Ravers, and Hippies. They’re all adorable in a way, like lost puppies with strange hair. Hipsters are really no different, and if you leave them alone then all those negative attention seekers will move on and this mess will wind down to a niche just like every other dead party scene.

1)Yes, this is the same capitalization scheme used to discuss political philosophies, to distinguish followers a philosophy (like conservatives) from the party that forms around it (like Conservatives). It’s vaguely surprising how perfectly the distinction holds when talking about subcultures instead of political philosophy, until you grant that all of these movements had sound and subtle philosophical plumbing underneath them at the start.

Ben Bumhertz writes:

I’m a new driver, and I’ve heard that being passed by cyclists can strike you gay.  I’m scared, what should I do?

Well, Ben, you heard correctly.  Being passed by a cyclist while driving can strike you gay.  It’s only natural, as you sit there powerless in your car or truck, to imagine those powerful legs and glutes pounding your fleshy bottom (with prosthetics as required) for hours on end.

Researchers in the field call it queeralysis, and if you drive a large truck or sports car, you may be especially vulnerable.  And we’re sure you are aware of the downsides of being struck queer: constant discrimination, no longer being able to call everyone a fag, possibly dramatic changes in hygiene and style, and an enjoyment of TV shows that are only aired on expensive premium channels.

Fortunately, you can protect yourself. There are several tactics that you can use to delay or even avoid being struck queer.

1) Pass the cyclist as quickly as possible, even if it means speeding. It is very important that you also rev your engine as you pass, to signal to the cyclist that you meant to let them by, and that you could have overtaken them at any time with your powerful machine, and that you didn’t just spend the last thirty seconds imagining them filling every inch of you.

2) Shout at the cyclist. This technique has been used since the time of your ancient, lemur-like ancestors to reclaim dominance and heterosexuality.  ”Get off the road!” is one suggested line, since it gives an impression of authority, wisdom and straightness, but if you feel the strike coming and you can say it without a quaver in your voice, try shouting “Fag!” or “Dyke!”  Since this technique might lead to eye contact with the cyclist, we suggest that you clench your anus before shouting, in case they use witchcraft to teleport inside you.

3) Endanger the cyclist. Remember, the goal here isn’t to kill, only to prove that you’re not queer.  If they don’t survive the encounter, they will never know.  Passing them as closely as possible and then cutting them off is a classic; try stepping on your brake afterwards for a more powerful effect.  Again, we suggest clenching your anus to protect against witchcraft.

So there you go, Ben.  With the appropriate use of these techniques, you will be as well equipped as possible to resist queeralysis.  Good luck, and happy driving!

Hey, it’s nice to see positive progress in education once in a while. After all this time, someplace in Canada—and I’m so proud that it was my home province of Alberta—has picked up the debate that rages south of the border and seems poised to make evolution an optional topic, along with sex and sexual orientation.

I have always held that neither evidence, logic, reason, observation, math, nor any other liberal socialist propaganda technique constitutes a rebuttal of anything I believe based on supposition, gossip, superstition, illiteracy, or incomprehension.  Believing things that are verifiable has never helped anyone make good decisions, and there are studies that prove this [1, 2, 3]. It follows naturally that nobody should ever try to teach me anything unless I already agree with it or know it, and that goes doubly for any children I might have (because they’re chattel until they turn 18). It makes me so happy to see that the government agrees with me:

“This government supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education,” said Premier Ed Stelmach.

Awesome!

Now that we’re finally making some progress on denying the existence of evolution and homosexuality, there’s another issue that I’d like to raise again, because it’s lain dormant for too long. That, friends, is heliocentrism.

I’ve thought this for a long time, and had merchandise for it even.  But I think that the time to act has finally arrived.

We geocentrists have mountains of evidence to support the truth of our statements.  Even the scientamists will admit there’s nothing wrong with our view of solar mechanics: those lovely elliptical orbital equations of theirs still work if you make Earth the origin, they just get really huge and ugly.  And hey, you know what?  So’s your liberal heliocentrist face.

So let’s get out there and spread the word.  I want to make it as difficult as possible to teach that the Earth moves around the sun.  Write letters to your overpaid conservative wankjob bureaucrat!  March in the streets!  Spin fire poi while shouting, “This is the way the universe works, bitches!  Deal with it!”

1. Kiss
2. My
3. Ass

As we all know, print media is dieing the hard death.  There’s this vicious cycle: dropping circulation means dropping revenues, dropping revenues means staff cuts, staff cuts mean less fresh material and more editorial slips, those mean less interest, which drops circulation, and so it continues.  This isn’t the only problem.  Competition from TV news has been eating away at circulation for decades, and now the internet is accelerating that, with its wonderfully wide distribution and rebranding of wire-service propaganda drivel and that pinko – libertarian statist capitalist commie godsend, the blogosphere.

But what came to mind earlier today—thanks to this lies.com link (courtesy of blunt object)—is that print media, even with most of it on the verge of collapse, is probably the last actual home of investigative journalism.

Think about it: in a newspaper, a story can be 300-500 words, easily.  If it’s a big deal, it could break 1000.  That’s room to present a few things in some reasonable detail.  Print magazines can go even further.  For example, Rolling Stone recently did a detailed article about AIG and the wall street collapse.  It’s a really good one, and it’s long.  Some research and digging went into this.  Matt Taibbi had more access to the relevant information than your standard blogosphere hack.  He was also paid to do his research, which is something else that most bloggers don’t have going for them.

On the other hand, TV news and the blogosphere both suffer from an alarming flood of populism, because they have tremendous flexibility in their structure and what they cover in response to what’s popular.  Newspapers would secretly love to be in the same boat, because it’s great for advertising revenue.  But it has a price.  Check out the face of the new media:

Top WordPress.com blogs today

1. CNN Political Ticker
2. FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments
3. Celebrity Baby Blog – People.com
4. PEOPLE TV Watch

So we have a condensed version of a TV news network that uses almost exclusively wire-service material and sucks even more when it doesn’t, and then we have embarrassing pictures, babies and celebrities.

And hey, this publication already exists.

Alain de Botton’s books have amused me before.  I enjoyed Architecture of Happiness and Status Anxiety, and now, this article happens, and I suspect he’s reaching across the Atlantic to kick me in the nuts.

Jon Henley’s contribution is a pretty straightforward if timid-sounding look at our views and expectations of work and how they change in a recession.  I suppose the timidity is honest, and he seems to express how a lot of people feel.  It feels very superficial and fearmongering to me.

But then the voice changes dramatically, into de Botton’s unmistakable lulling pastel tone, and the article disconnects from reality, dropping into absurdly pastoral descriptions of office life that drip irony so thick and pure that Jonathan Swift would gasp.

Coming off of the tone of the first half, de Botton says the most ludicrous things without setting off many alarm bells. He talks of business cards as convenient definitions of identity, rather than having to discover one through contemplation.  He talks about the reversal of civility at work and at home: “How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no HR department to coax us into being more civilised.”  He talks about employers’ concern for their employees’ well-being, and how they demand contentment from them, instead of simply beating them into line like they used to.  He talks about the bureaucratic passive-aggressive organization, the attempts to obscure the workplace hierarchy… it goes on.  At the climax, he even claims that offices are sexy.  Right. It’s probably the most brilliant piece of satire I’ve read in years.

Reading this makes me remember the feeling of unemployment.  Yes, there was worrying about money and making rent, but more significantly there was a feeling of freedom, that the day was mine to seize or waste as I saw fit.  And it reminds me how many of them I wasted.

Office jobs are a tradeoff: your life for steady money.  Yes, there’s talk of people pursuing their passions in evenings and on their weekends, but how many people actually do that?  You come home from an office, drained, and once you’ve dealt with dinner and cleaned up a bit, you have one or two exhausted hours to attack your passions.  Let’s admit that it’s pretty much impossible.  No non-trivial pursuit can thrive on such slender resources.

It becomes a matter of what you want out of your life, and what you want to do with it.  If you can measure it monitarily, as houses, cars, TVs, vacations, fancy clothes, then an office job might suit you perfectly.  The last few years have taught me that I can’t do this, and they did it in a way that leaves no room for argument.  I’ve worked for jack all, I’ve worked for mad cash.  I’ve had the big TV and leather couch, lived in the posh urban condos and a beautiful house in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in the world, and I’ve lived in a small basement bedroom.  My ceilings have been between 7 and 20 feet.  It turns out that it made very little difference. If I’m not engaged, I won’t be happy. Repetition doesn’t promote engagement.

I think my office days are numbered, and the number is rather small. I don’t know what will come next, but I’ll be stronger, because the memory of office work will motivate me.

Wow, this is pretty impressive.  Let’s read some stunning examples of misleading statistics.

To begin with, the pope is certainly right about at least one thing: Condoms have been disappointingly ineffective in the fight against AIDS in Africa. In Cameroon, for example, the country the pope was flying to when he made his notorious remark, condom sales more than doubled from 6 million in 1992 to 15 million in 2001. Meanwhile, HIV prevalence tripled from three per cent to nine per cent. Botswana, one of the best-governed countries in Africa, was quick to jump on the condom bandwagon in the early 1990s. Its reward: about a quarter of its adults are infected with HIV.

It’s hard to even know where to begin here.  Condom sales in Cameroon more than doubled to 15 million in 2001 and the infection rate is increasing: the country had 16 million people in 2003, meaning that people were using about 1.88 condoms per year (two people use one at once, technically).  Botswana, a country of just under two million in 2003, bought about three million condoms in 2001.  That’s about 3 condoms per year¹.  I don’t know, maybe they sell reusable ones.  Maybe I’m just a huge slut and my idea of how often people have sex is hyperinflated.  Maybe priests are more in touch.  But clearly, condoms are a failure, and we should stop promoting their use.

Well, I wound up showing these numbers are stupid and misleading even before getting to the fact that they’re bad statistics, but they are: does promoting condom use cause an increase in infection rates, or does an increase in infection rates cause promotion of condom use?  Gee, that’s a hard one.

But wait, there’s more!  And “better”!

A shift in sexual norms? Partner-reduction? Hmmm, isn’t that what Pope Benedict is promoting? With, by the way, much enthusiastic support from African women who find the notion of faithful husbands rather endearing. And with some success. Uganda, for example, which has long emphasized abstinence and fidelity over condoms, has seen its HIV prevalence rate drop from more than 15 per cent to less than six per cent in 10 years. And campaigns to discourage multiple partnerships have also had encouraging results in Kenya and Swaziland, with corresponding drops in HIV rates.

Wow!

First of all, a “prevalence” rate is the percentage of infected adults.  Having the prevalence rate drop from 15% to 6% over a decade doesn’t mean you’ve stopped the spread of AIDS, it means one of two things:

1. 9% of your population has keeled over dead.
2. Your uninfected population has more than doubled.

I don’t know about you, but I’m leaning towards number two.

Also, over the period in question, Uganda heavily promoted the use of condoms.  And to boot, since they jumped on the abstinence-based bandwagon, the infection rate has risen again.

So seriously, for Chist’s sake (literally), learn some statistics.  Or, you know, go on deliberately misleading the general public at the expense of millions of Africans.

1) For amusement’s sake, looking for the numbers in Botswana brought up this article, which calls 3 condoms per couple-year “condom-flooded.”

Why does anyone live anyplace as crappy as Edmonton, Alberta?

I don’t know too much of the native history for the area, but from what I recall they were at least semi-nomadic large game hunters, so they were here because the things they killed were here.  That’s fine.  That’s sane, there’s a logic to it.  But what about the settlers?  What was up with them?

Just imagine this: you live in Europe, in a “developed country” with “civilization,” and it sucks so hard that getting on a long, uncomfortable boat ride to a different continent so you can trek across thousands of kilometres of wilderness to do some subsistence farming on a few hundred acres of frozen birch forest in the middle of nowhere was a step up.

So the fact that this area is even inhabited is sort of a telling proof of the scale of the inequality European society at the time.  While we had people living in lovely countryside estates exchanging repartée and poncy English poets dying of syphilis and the leisure class enjoying their tea, we had a lot more people thinking, “man, digging into the frozen earth in the middle of nowhere would be such a great opportunity.”

And the big deal was land ownership.  Yup, it might be a chunk of forest.  It might be a hundred miles from the nearest store, where an unbathed man with a raccoon on his head would sell you salt and medium-sized sharp rocks.  But it was your chunk of forest, and if anyone—even raccoon man—tried to take it you’d fuck them up.  And probably eat them, because it’d be a pleasant change from birch bark and turnips.

Strangely, everything around here related to settlers glosses over winter.  The Ukranian village has some stuff like a burdei, and in the summer there are costumed actors living in these places, but that’s only during the summer.  Once fall hits, they’re done, and seriously: look at that photo.  Imagine spending a winter snowed into that.  Yes, this was a step up.  Crazy.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about work—specifically, the nature of meaningful work—and hitting a brick wall. It feels like thinking about a koan, and I suspect that it secretly is one.

The crux of it seems to reduce to one question: “What do you mean by ‘meaningful’?”  Purposeful?  Satisfying?  Does it need to benefit society?  Would actually doing meaningful work benefit it anyway, by default?  I decided to settle for “satisfying,” which seems like it would be close enough, since if I was satisfied with my work, by definition I wouldn’t care too much about the rest of it.  And when I tried to think of what kind of work could be satisfying, I couldn’t think of anything.

So I thought I’d try consulting the blogosphere.  What else are people thinking about the idea of “meaningful work?”  Well, it turns out that most of what Technorati finds are management blogs.  “How can we increase employee engagement?  Make them feel like their work is meaningful.”

The only place that really touched on the question I was thinking of was the ever-excellent 37signals blog.  To quote their quote:

Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

This actually injects a touch of humour into the material from the management blogs, because if we go back and look at the history of management, the trend since at least Wealth of Nations has been to ever more rigorously remove these elements from all jobs.  In that masterful bit of work, Adam Smith described how to take the incredibly rewarding job of making pins and make it twenty times as productive by making it one twentieth as interesting: instead of making entire pins, workers would make pin heads, or pin shafts, or they’d sharpen the pins, or they’d attach the heads to the shafts.  In the years following that, management developed into a “scientific discipline,” eventually hitting Taylorism where people were deliberately confused with machines.  Since this is giving me flashbacks of a wonderful Sociology class, and since it’s directly relevant, I’d suggest reading Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century, if you haven’t and are interested in the history of jobs getting shittier.

That practice continues to this day, with performance reviews purely in terms of work units per time period, with workflows broken down to the tiniest tasks, and even “knowledge workers” reduced to doing short, repetitive tasks.  Interestingly, the job of management—extracting as much as you can from the people under you without getting caught breaking the law—hasn’t changed much at all, and they still get to do this rewarding task from beginning to end without any division whatsoever.

This really leaves me no closer to an idea of what would constitute meaningful or satisfying work, but at least it was interesting to think about why it’s so hard to find.

(from Wikipedia Brittanica, 89th Ed., published 3615)

(For historical reasons, this article refers to the first global collapse of civilization on Earth in 2018.  For subsequent collapses, or for the 2416 implosion of Mars from overmining, refer to “Great Global Collapse (disambiguation).”)

By the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the Earth had developed primitive, post-tribal civilizations¹.  These civilizations were oligarchical, with hereditary ruling castes that distinguished themselves with claims of wealth, or divine or popular mandate². These civilizations were primarily guided by mysticism; at the time of the first collapse, the two predominant forms were bibliomancy³ and economics⁴.

The Economists in particular supported and fought for increasingly opulent acts of worship, which resulted in a sharp rise in the consumption of natural resources and the emission of pollutants.  It also caused a worldwide reduction in well-being, which the clergy excused with claims that those who traded piously, in the name of  Growth and Profit, would be provided for after death⁵.

Some evidence survives that suggests a small but significant number of dissenters argued that this worship would cause the destruction of the earth, the destruction of the biosphere, the end of human civilization, among other things⁶.  Evidence also survives suggesting that many of these dissenters were followers of a cult of “Scientists” who worshipped observation, statistics⁷ and repeatability.  We also know that their religion was heavily ridiculed by both the bibliomancers and the economists⁸, who waged a decades-long propaganda war against it⁹ (it is noteworthy that, at the time, the average human lifespan was less than one century) on a scale not seen for several hundred years after the collapse¹⁰. It eventually erupted into violence, leading to the burning at the stake of several thousands of Scientists in “witch trials,” most famously at Salem, where Albert Einstein¹¹ was executed.

Records show that the collapse began in earnest in 2012. By this point, its inevitability was widely known and even admitted by the leading mystics, who suggested only renewed faith in their ideals would solve their problems. For reasons that are not now understood, they refused to expand their ability to generate electricity, and the power distribution system in north America failed completely after a July hurricane forced several power stations offline¹². As an emergency measure, the grid was broken into smaller regional sections and hundreds of dirty coal generating stations were brought to account for the shortfall of local supply.

The resulting rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is attributed to the unexpected collapse of the Greenland ice shelf later that fall, which spilled into the northern Atlantic ocean and stopped the mid-Atlantic conveyor current. Without the temperature balancing influence of the current, Europe suffered the coldest winter since the previous ice age¹³, leading to energy rationing and thousands of deaths, and the equatorial regions and southern hemisphere faced record heat. Previously fertile regions were flooded by savage tropical storms or seared with drought, resulting in massive crop failures in South America, and Asia.

In the resulting famine, the North American meat farming industry struggled to feed their stock, and decided to feed it to itself, mixed with effluent from the deforestation industry¹⁴. This, combined with widespread misuse of medicines and bizarre farming methods are widely attributed to the appearance of the Delinquent Bovine Pellucidum Influenza. Marked by visible symptoms similar to leprosy and causing extreme aggression in the week prior to death, this highly contagious disease would claim an estimated five billion victims by 2050.

The reactions to these combined crises are difficult to ascertain, as the information surviving this period was largely stored on delicate wafers of magnetic material or on reflective discs that were vulnerable to oxidation¹⁵.  The bibliomancers suggested inaction and prayer, in the belief that the arrival of a saviour was imminent.  Excavations in the 25th century¹⁶ discovered recordings of hymns that identify this saviour as the “Funk Soul Brother.”  Accounts of what the Funk Soul Brother was supposed to do are not clear, but the belief in his timely arrival was widespread.  The Economists suggested that the ruling parties “continue to aggressively infuse capital to promote growth in key industries.”  No records clarifying the meaning of this phrase survive.  In the meantime, surviving evidence suggests that the ruling elite in north America staged fights between donkeys and elephants for the distraction of the public¹⁷.  Exactly why this happened before any preventative action is unknown.  Other responses are even more inexplicable: one group called “The Church of the Black Star” suggested that plenty would be restored directly from the lower digestive tract of the north American emperor, Hope Obama.

After the collapse, there are no surviving records except for those kept by a group who referred to themselves as “The Foundation.”¹⁸ After nearly a century of violence, most of the population had reverted to subsistence farming.  At this point, the Foundation spread out from its headquarters in the Nelson valley in the former state of Canada in an attempt to restore technological civilization.

(more…)

I keep thinking that I have something to write about.  It keeps being wrong.  I get most of the way through something, or maybe even just started on it, and ask myself, “what do I have to say that hasn’t already been said to death?  Why would anyone want to read it anyway?”

These questions kill a lot of my output.  Really, the number of things I can call myself an authority on is shockingly small.  There’s a slightly less shockingly small number of things that I could say I’m decently well versed with, but I have a really hard time getting pedagogical on topics where I assume my readership—and I know all four of you—are as well versed as I am.

There was a time when I thought it’d be neat to be one of the thought leaders of the blogosphere, or at least an occasionally recognized contributor.  A B-list blogger.  Even C-list, maybe.  I was never thinking that I would make a living of it, but the thought of having some form of meaningful discussion was pretty exciting.  But I’ve slowly started noticing that there is no meaningful discussion, at all.

First of all, everyone really loves their ideas.  Libertarians, commies, free-marketeers, yogis, christians and other frightened masses: they all have their own ideas about how the world works, or how it ought to work, and they all have a sort of logic to them.  But they also have a big steaming lump of problems; issues that they ignore or assume would go away if their idea had its day in the sun.  As a result, most of the discussion I see involves chewing the news from different ideological standpoints or straight up preaching, and it’s very rare that something shockingly insightful comes out of the whole mess.

I’m also starting to think that a lot of the discussions are about issues that it doesn’t make sense for me to form an opinion on.  The last time I blogged was about the upcoming depression, and that news hasn’t really affected me yet.  I suppose people who put a lot of faith into “the economy” and “growth” and stuff are feeling it.  I’m sure we all have an opinion about the kerfuffle in Gaza, but how many of you has it directly affected?  I’m going to guess that among the people who read this, the closest it will come will be having a friend who has family in some other part of the region.

This is actually bringing me to a point.  I have an opinion on the events in Gaza: it’s none of my business.  I can’t take sides, because for the life of me, I can’t understand what motivates these people.  The history of the conflict is so full of savagery from both sides and so steeped in the arrogance of colonial Europe that I’d rather just leave it alone.  I do believe that the US should be acting as a peacekeeper instead of backing Israel, and that will probably happen now that Bush is out, but I’m not going to say either side is bad or good or better or worse because the issue is too complex for that kind of reductionism.

The modern world is full of examples where serious harm has been done because people who believed they were right stepped into something that was none of their business.  The imperial quest to “bring civilization to the savages.”  Every ostensibly religious war.  Banning drugs whose consumption doesn’t violate the peace (and oddly having no trouble with some that do).  Abstinence-only sex propaganda.  The list goes on.

I don’t know if there’s an evolutionary basis for not believing other people can form coherent worldviews and make sensible decisions based on them, but it seems to be endemic.  We have an almost striking inability to appreciate the subtleties of each other’s viewpoints, and we make strawmen of them just like we reduce everyone outside of our monkeysphere to a stereotype.  In fact, I would guess that the number of viewpoints we can appreciate in a detailed way¹ is considerably smaller than Dunbar’s number.  I’m going to guess it’s less than five.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was usually one, sometimes perhaps even zero.  I can imagine tribes of apes having a dispute and forming shrieking, chest-thumping groups to intimidate the others into submission.  For some reason, it feels like our current discursive tools are the abstract descendants of this.

Now, if all of our discussions are boiling down to ideological chest-thumping, I’d rather opt out.  There are much more interesting things to do.

1) Let’s call this Reid’s Number.