Fogwalking

Bad Statue Removed

Typical Canadian Views Are Wrong

Female Worker Ban Totally Unofficial

The body of humanity.

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Tribalism and Phish

~~~

In the summer of '97, when I was thirteen, I somehow convinced my father to take me to see the band Phish for a whole weekend.  We drove to a decommissioned air force base in Maine, where tens of thousands of smelly travelers had convened to hear jams and hang out in the lot that was here a whole airstrip.  My mother didn't have any idea of the scene we'd find, else she wouldn't have allowed it.  My father rightly saw that it would be an interesting novelty for us both, and bless him for the effort.

The first sign on approach was one selling water pipes by the side of the road.  I didn't know what water pipes were, but I sensed I was entering another world.  Shortly that telltale stoner gave way to thousands of cars, and thousands more people setting up tents and meeting friends. 

There was a pervasive funk in the air that could not be avoided.  I learned years later that it was not the pot smoke I was smelling everywhere; it was the pot everyone was carrying in their pockets.  The word was "nuggs."

It wasn't just the drugs, though.  I can't remember ever seeing so many happy people in one place, and I know at least two of them weren't on drugs.  There was something more going on.  I was glimpsing not just a subculture, but an actual community, with its own economy, etiquette, and attitude.  It was a group of people cultivating a particular consciousness, and doing it not just with hallucinogens but with a shared sensibility.  I think the rot was just beginning to set in as it always does, but by and large these were peaceful, loving, unified and respectful individuals.

At one point Dad related to me a conversation he had with a woman with plates from some distant state.  She had seen her first show, and decided to hop into her car and start following the band for the rest of the tour.  Many people did that, suddenly leaving their square lives to relax on the road.  I sensed they were the ones who could afford to do so.  People sold food and jewelry and drugs out of their vans, but to even be in the position to drop out of society in that manner, one must have a certain standing in it to begin with.

There were surely a goodly number of trustafarians, but a lot of otherwise ordinary people too.  Young and old, hippie and normie, from every corner of America and beyond.  I saw a sea of people washing away from the stage after every set.  There were no fights, no bad vibes that I picked up.  Everyone was cooperating to create a spontaneous city of people with a taste for fun, surprising, eclectic music.  Phish as a band is musically omnivorous, contagiously sharing their love for different forms.  That kind of idiom can only welcome all kinds.  They studiously avoided politics or serious worldly concerns.  Phish was a safe space without judgment.

So what a twinge I felt when I got home and read an article out of Boston reporting on The Great Went.  One line stood out, a needle seeking to puncture that pleasant bubble.  The author observed, and then pointedly said nothing further on the matter, that there were almost no black faces in the crowd.  It just hung there, in the middle of the article, awkwardly interjecting itself as a non-sequitur.  What was the reader supposed to make of it?

Some people got together, and had a good time, and no one got hurt, and great memories were made, and happy songs were sung, and it felt like a rite of passage for me, but there weren't any black people there.  I should probably feel bad about that.  Why don't black people like Phish?  They play blues and jazz and funk music all the time.  Is that cultural appropriation?  Is Phish racist?  Is that why blacks don't like them?  Am I racist because I like Phish?  I wish more black people were there, so I wouldn't have to worry about this.

I had never seen a more cohesive and cheerful community, but the implication was that it must be doing something wrong.  I couldn't figure out what that was.

It should be said that Phish followed a cultural template from the Grateful Dead, who apparently trafficked LSD for the CIA.  Every rebellion of the last while has had an element of social engineering somewhere within.  I really don't think that Mike Gordon, the Jewish bass player, is actually the handler for three programmed stooges, deliberately removing good-hearted people from regular society where they might do some real damage, but it would be naive to pretend the mass movement of lots of people on lots of drugs listening to nonsense songs to escape from their privileged lives instead of improving their world is an unmitigated good. 

Nevertheless, however embarrassing, there is a fundamental sweetness to an unpolitised hippie.  Those who fall into the lifestyle of following a jam band, or who manage it on their vacations, find a fandom that could be called a family without too much hyperbole.  Certainly, they are a particular tribe, with symbols and chants that may move them more than those of their nation or town.  Phish doesn't have a constitution.  They don't have a foreign policy or a seat at the UN.  They do have singing, and dancing, and drums, and drugs, and lots of friendly, welcoming people, but apparently no black people, and that's a problem.

Intermediate Ideologies

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

"A good manner in the village"

In Malawi it is believed that a forty-something man with HIV being paid to have sex with 12-year-olds is an important cleansing to avoid the infection of the community by the girls' irresponsible ways.

Jewish Boy Deplores White Privilege

Now I realize that it’s quite possible to find 14-year old White boys who, having endured a standard American education, would deplore their White privilege — that they are “ethnomasochists” as John Derbyshire would have it. But it also seems to me that it’s more likely that such sentiments would come from a Jewish boy raised in the home of left-wing Jewish activists.

Muslims Reject Man's Best Friend

Leaflets are being distributed in Manchester requesting that the British people live up to their multicultural values by keeping dogs out of the public space.  Muslims do not like canines, because dogs are impure and chase away angels.  The Brits must "learn to understand and respect" Muslim culture, or else Muslims won't feel safe, welcomed, and accepted in the UK.

Augmented Reality Breeds Dysfunction

Players of the first big "augmented reality" game, Pokémon Go, have crashed a car, fallen off a cliff, and hopped a fence in the middle of the night to catch a digital nothing beside a tiger enclosure.  In the process, they have been forced to accidentally get exercise (much to their chagrin), while also blissfully signing away their data to government, law enforcement, and private parties.

Cop-Killing Cartoon Kosher

Facebook has decided that an image of a masked man slitting the throat of a police officer with the message "BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY" does not at all violate their Community Standards.

The Rape Culture of Lower Expectations

Left Party politician Barbro Sorman from Stockholm believes that not all rapes are created equal.  Rapes committed by foreigners are a lesser offense.  Immigrants should not be held to the same humane standard, because they don't have moral agency.

According to the tweet from her deleted Twitter account, "The Swedish men who rape do it despite the growing gender equality. They make an active choice. It's worse, imo."  She later clarified for Sweden's Free Times, "I’m not saying it’s worse, of course not!"

A Government Leader Is Not A "Person Like Me"

Those who have a college indoctrination, regularly consume mainstream news media, and make a lot of money, have become more trusting of institutions in the eight years since the financial collapse of 2008.  They are the "informed public."  Everyone else, the "mass populations," have certain questions and concerns.  This is corrosive to democracy!  They should have more faith in government, for the good of society.

The Truth Might Encourage Racism

24-year-old Selin Gören, national spokeswoman for the left-wing German youth movement Solid, was ambushed by three men late at night in a playground last January, and forced to perform a sex act.  Gören, who works in Mannheim as a refugee activist, went straight to the police and told them she had been assaulted by German-speakers.  They had in fact been speaking Arabic or Farsi, but conscious of the backlash following Cologne, she didn't want to paint migrants in a negative light.

She was convinced by her boyfriend to return to the police twelve hours later and tell what really happened, after another woman in the area was allegedly raped by refugees.  That accusation was eventually retracted, so it appears that a lying racist bigot bad person got a well-meaning lying leftist to tell the truth about the sort of thing the racist bigots have to make up because it doesn't get reported when it really happens.  Clear?

Swedish Police Fight Sex Attacks With Wristbands

“By wearing these wristbands, young women will be able to make a stand. No one should have to accept sexual molestation. So do not grope. And if you are groped, report it to the police.”

The Gynocratic Nobility

Men, fearful of female disapproval, hid from the discussion or overcompensated, accepting these irrational arguments. All the major movements of the era: civil rights, feminism and immigration, all had the strange consequence of increasing the number of both workers and consumers. Wages began to stagnate and then, in real terms, fall. When interest, debt service and taxes are considered, wages plummeted. That’s not a coincidence. Feminism is a mystification.

Lessons From Sacramento

The leadership and ideologues of contemporary industrialized leftist (including anarchist and communist) movements are Jews with a Machiavellian racial motive, as well as rootless cosmopolitan fad-chasing white bourgeoisie, and they feel those whites who do not share their affinity for kale and “Polyamory” are hopelessly inferior, or even a potential threat to their status and privilege.