The typical estimate, derived from the Diocletian’s Price Edict (and thus dating to the Late Roman Empire, so this is with the system of Roman roads; take those away and things get even worse for land transport) is that the ratio of the cost of land, river and sea transport was roughly 20:4:1, with sea transport thus being four times cheaper than river transport and twenty times cheaper than road transport for bulk goods (like fabric). It should thus be of little surprise that regions involved in major textile production for export were often concentrated either on coasts or on rivers that were navigable to the sea (one may map the regions Pliny lists as major wool and linen exporters to find that they are all accessible by sea). While the sheep themselves may be grazed part of the year up in the uplands far from the coast, one of the great advantages of transhumance is that the sheep may transport themselves under the care of their shepherds to villages and lower pastures not too far from coastal towns which may serve as centers of textile production and major points of sale.

Wool produced in Britain (which was a major production center) would be shipped either as rovings or as undyed ‘broadcloths’ (called ‘whites’) to the Low Countries for dyeing and sale abroad (though there was also quite a lot of cloth dyeing happening in Britain as well).

Dyeworks (and fulleries in the medieval period) tended to be located just outside of urban centers, in part because of the smell (both kinds of work tend to smell quite bad). Because both dyeing and fulling made use of bad smelling mixtures, older scholars often assumed that the workers in these occupations were low status individuals and looked down upon. And while it is true that there does seem to have been some sense that these places were not terribly sanitary, more recent scholarship tends to show little evidence that the people who worked there – particularly the skilled, professional dyers and fullers – were low-status themselves.

Alum was often used; in the Middle Ages it was sourced from Asia Minor and so needed to reach Europe via Mediterranean trade (although Italian sources of alum were found in 1462; it was only produced domestically in England in the 17th century and after). In other cases, as with the use of dyes produced from wood, tannic acid might be used as the mordant.

Finally, the cloth would be ‘napped’ (also called ‘raising the nap,’ ‘rowing,’ ‘teasing,’ or polishing), which may have actually been the most labor intensive part of the process. Cloth would be brushed first, to raise the nap (the fuzzy, rough raised surface on woolen cloth), which would then be sheared to leave the cloth smooth. This stage also provided an opportunity for burling (and now you know why the coat factory is in Burlington), the inspection of the cloth and the manual removal of burrs, knots and other defects. Flohr (op. cit.) argues that this stage in the process consumed the bulk of the time and labor of fulling (a point on which J.S. Lee concurs for the Middle Ages)

Various chemicals might be added to aid in the bleaching process. By the early modern period in Europe, we know that alkaline substances, typically lye, were used to aid in the bleaching process and there is some indication that the Romans may have used a sulphur treatment where cloth were stretched over a frame beneath which was burned lump-sulphur, with the sulphur dioxide (SO2) bleaching the fabric (though on this process and its misunderstanding, see Flohr, op. cit. 117-120; this sulphur process seems to have been done in Rome by fullones and sulphuring, like chalking, may have often been an extra treatment to bring out the luster of already bleached garments).

The process, as done in the ancient and medieval world, was generally fairly simple: fabrics were immersed in a solution with a cleaning agent in a large basin and then trampled underfoot by a fuller. The actual act of mechanically treading the cloth underfoot was called ‘tucking’ or ‘walking.’

indeed, loose fitting clothing, with lots of extra fabric, was often how one showed off wealth; lots of pleating, for instance, displayed that one could afford to waste expensive fabric on ornamentation

Utagoe coffeehouse (歌声喫茶, utagoe kissa) refers to the type of coffeehouses that featured the customers' joining in singing songs together, which was very popular in Japan in ca. 1955–1975. Utagoe coffeehouses were usually associated with the leftist movement at that time, called the Utagoe Movement, supported by the labor unions, backed up by the socialist and communist parties.

My shoulder pain is getting really bad. Might be time to ditch my old keyboard and get one of these fancy ergo split keyboards. ErgoDox EZ is crazy expensive but looks repairable/durable and if it lasts nearly 20 years like my current one, I can justify it…

It was against this (eerily familiar) background—a “revolt against the modern world,” as the title of Evola’s 1934 book put it—that demagogues emerged so quickly in twentieth-century Europe and managed to exalt national and racial myths as the true source of individual and collective health.

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

W.B. Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the “Ancient Self”

AdvertisementThis new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. The East, and India in particular, turned into a screen on which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about the Indian’s timeless—and feminine—self.

Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.”

Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited.

If there is one line we surely will never hear uttered, even in these times, it is any variant of this statement: “I grant that the Nazis committed excesses, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be said for Fascism.” While there certainly are groupuscules of neo-Nazis around, they do not get a polite reception on campuses, let alone tenure. Watered-down versions of Fascism do not emerge in the manifestos of mainstream political parties in the West.

One recurring experience of modern living is unlocking the old smartphone and catching a glimpse of the future, or possible future, as the increasing pace of digital technology unifies global culture and whisks us ever onward into a world our forebears would have considered magical. A dispiriting aspect of this experience is that the magical new world inevitably looks dumb — not dumb in the sense of trivial or easy, since in most cases these new technologies are lobe-shrivelingly difficult to understand, much less invent, but dumb in the sense of deadening and inert at best, and at worst actively annoying, like the world’s most advanced synthesizer with a hamster running across the keys. This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life.

It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.

As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.

I see this ~Publishing Feeling~ as somewhat more wholesome than the one I get when someone retweets me or faves a post on Instagram.

My next automatic assumption is that if they were just organized better I might go through them more

It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage. 

But it’s also really clear to me that most people take notes about a few kinds of things:

The [[Battle of Seattle]] was the start of a global civil society.

numerous examples in pre-Roman Italy (interesting age seems to have been a factor, with younger individuals more likely to have weaver’s sets, while older individuals were more likely to be buried with a distaff; Lipkin suggests quite plausibly that burial with a distaff and spindle was the clear marker of the mater familias – the female head of house).

Perhaps the single most common compliment given to Roman women on funerary inscriptions was the simple but ubiquitous ‘lanam fecit’ (“she made wool

Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies (though commercial textile production was often done by men in pre-modern societies, something we’ll discuss next week) was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title. (There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete.

Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.

English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold (the English population declined during the period due to the Black Death).

spinning tends to take up around 85% of the labor time of textile production, see below for figures). And textile production was a major activity (indeed, the major activity) for probably around 40% of the population in most pre-modern societies

thread or yarn (the distinction between the two is purpose; any kind of spun fiber is yarn – though the term is often used particularly of wool – while thread is technically yarn intended for sewing, although even in technical writing, often all yarn is called ‘thread’)

Markets in textiles, as we’ll see next week, were a major part of the economies of the pre-modern world and so the commercial production of cloth is something that appears fairly quickly as agrarian societies grow more complex; almost any society with a significant degree of urbanism is producing at least some cloth for the market.

Moreover, it is too often forgotten in Europe that the West African Economic and Monetary Union is in some ways more advanced than the eurozone. For example, in 2008 it introduced a directive establishing a common corporate tax base and obliging each country to apply a tax rate of between 25% and 30%, which the European Union has so far been unable to agree on.

On the basis of the historical elements at my disposal, the ideal society seems to me to be one where everyone would own a few hundred thousand euros, where a few people would perhaps own a few million, but where the higher holdings (several tens or hundreds of millions and a fortiori several billions) would only be temporary and would quickly be brought down by the tax system to more rational and socially more useful levels.

On the other, we would have an integrated system of progressive income tax, social contributions and carbon tax — with an individual carbon card to protect low incomes and responsible behavior and to concentrate efforts on the highest individual emissions, which would be heavily taxed.

In many European countries, particularly in Germany and Sweden, the trade union movement and social democratic parties succeeded in imposing a new division of power on shareholders in the middle of the 20th century, in the form of co-management systems: elected employee representatives have up to half of the seats on the boards of directors of large companies, even without any share in ownership.

Scoured wool would need to be re-oiled after it was dried to lubricate and protect the wool; typically olive oil was used for this purpose (both during the ancient and early modern periods) although J.S. Lee notes (op. cit. 45) that in the earlier parts of the Middle Ages, butter might be used instead in parts of Europe where olive oil was difficult to obtain in quantity.

The most common scouring agent was urine, something that pre-modern communities had in abundance; the ammonia content of urine allows it to break up and wash away the greases in the wool. Alternately, in the ancient period, the soapwort was sometimes used, as soaking its leaves in water could create a form of soap.

Scouring could also be useful for wool that was going to be transported; in some cases the lanolin and other impurities might amount for up to 40% of the total weight of the raw wool

The process for this is called retting and changed relatively little during the pre-modern period. The term ‘retting,’ related to the Dutch reten shares the same root as English ‘rot’ and that is essentially what we are going to do: we are going to rot away every fiber that isn’t the bast fibers themselves. The first step is to dry the stalks out, at least to a certain point. Then in the most common form of retting (called ‘water retting’) the partially dried stalks are submerged in stagnant or slow-moving waters (because you do not want too much water-motion action on the flax washing it away). Pliny (NH 19.17) notes the use of weights to hold the stalks down under the water. The water penetrates into the partially dried stalks, causing the pith to expand and rupture the skin of the stalk, which permits bacteria into the stalk. That bacteria then rots away the chemicals which bind the fibers together (this is pectin, located in the cell walls of the plant cells) allowing the fibers to be separated. This process takes around two to three weeks to complete, but has to be carefully controlled and monitored; over-retting will make the bast fibers themselves too weak, while under-retting will make it more difficult to separate the fibers.

The final step is hackling (also spelled heckling), where the bast fibers are combed along a special tool (a hackling board or comb) to remove the last of the extraneous plant matter, leaving just the bast fibers themselves. The hackling board itself is generally a wooden board with several rows of nails (the ‘teeth’) put through it, through the earliest hackles seem to have been made of bone or else a wood board using thorns or thistle as teeth (see Barber (1992), 14 for a reconstruction). The fibers that come out of this process are generally separated into grades; the ‘tow’ fibers are short, loose or broken fibers that come loose from the longer strands of bast during scutching or hackling; these are gathered and spun separately and typically make a lower-quality linen thread when spun. They stand in contrast to the ‘line’ of long bast fiber strands, which after hackling form long wavy coils of fibers called stricks; the small tangles give these fibers coherence and account for part of the strength of high quality linen, once spun.

Once broken up, the pith and other fibers may be separated from the bast using a wooden knife in a process called scutching (the knife is called a scutching knife). By the 1800s, this process was assisted through the use of a swingle, essentially a board stood upright with an opening at the top where the flax could be inserted and held, while the scutcher then strikes with the scutching knife downward against the board.

Of course the other defense that gets offered is that all of this rape is historically correct. And to be clear, that defense gets offered, because George R.R. Martin offers it. And as should surprise no one who has been keeping track of Martin’s dismal record of understanding actual historical societies, that defense is wrong. I am not going to rehearse the reasons it is wrong here, but merely note that we’ve discussed it on this blog, it has been discussed on other blogs, and by other scholars. The idea, advanced by Martin, that the truly stunning amount of rape – most of it not in the context of war – in A Song of Ice and Fire somehow reflects medieval social norms or a true vision of the past or particular cultures is to be rejected.

More confusing to me is why the men are singularly uninvolved in preparing the meat from animals – the deer and rabbits – that are clearly hunted. That’s a skill they would have, since they must regularly hunt well away from the main encampment! I guess manly men don’t field dress hunted animals? [Update: I have subsequently learned that in fact men generally did not field-dress their own hunted kills in the Steppe and possibly also the Great Plains. So mea culpa, this one bit in the show is actually reasonable. Another point, surprisingly, for the Game of Thrones set crew over the books, which don’t include this element.]

On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time. (This ‘saddle jerky’ seems to gross out my students every time we discuss the Steppe logistics system, which amuses me greatly.)

A brief pedantic note: this sort of approach to history, beginning with big, slow changing patterns (what I often call here ‘structures’ – not a term I made up, by any means) like climate, geography, subsistence strategies, culture, etc. is generally associated with what is called the Annales school of history, which is a method of history. This framework is often more interested in La longue durée (lit: ‘the (really) long term’) which is just a fancy French way of saying ‘a focus on the long-term historical structures (like those listed above) instead of short-term events (like wars, rulers, that sort of thing).’ As always, this sort of historical theory is a toolbox, not a dogma; different approaches to answer different questions. But in this case, it is handy because of the way that the basic activities necessary for survival in a given climate form a sort of ‘bounding box’ for cultural possibility.

That speed was important; sheep were generally sheared just once a year and usually in a fairly narrow time window (spring or very early summer; in medieval England this was generally in June and was often accompanied by a rural festival) so getting them all sheared and ready to go before they went up the mountain towards the summer pasture probably did need to be done in fairly short order.

There are interesting variations in what the evidence implies for the gender of those shearing sheep; sheers for sheep are common burial goods in Iron Age Italy, but their gender associations vary by place. In the culturally Gallic regions of North Italy, it seems that shears were assumed to belong to men (based on associated grave goods; that’s a method with some pitfalls, but the consistency of the correlation is still striking), while in Sicily, shears were found in both male and female burials and more often in the latter (but again, based on associated grave goods).

That thought may seem strange to many Americans (for whom transhumance tends to seem very odd) but probably much less strange to readers almost anywhere else (including Europe) who may well have observed the continuing cycles of transhumant pastoralism (now often accomplished by moving the flocks by rail or truck rather than on the hoof) in their own countries.

Transhumance can be either vertical (going up or down hills or mountains) or horizontal (pastures at the same altitude are shifted between, to avoid exhausting the grass and sometimes to bring the herds closer to key markets at the appropriate times). In the settled, agrarian zone, vertical transhumance seems to be the most common by far, so that’s what we’re going to focus on

The coat of a sheep (its fleece) has three kinds of fibers in it: wool, kemp and medullated fibers. Kemp fibers are fairly weak and brittle and won’t accept dye and so are generally undesirable, although some amount of kemp may end up in wool yarn. Likewise, medullated fibers are essentially hair (rather than wool) and lack elasticity.

The exact time of harvest varies based on the use intended for the flax fibers; harvesting the flax later results in stronger, but rougher, fibers. Late-pulled flax is called “yellow” flax (for the same reason that blond hair is called ‘flaxen’ – it’s yellow!) and was used for more work-a-day fabrics and ropes.

Adam Smith noted how essential this restraint is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If a suddenly successful person has any judgment, he wrote, that man will be highly attuned to his friends’ envy, “and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

“I have been with family sociologists who think it’s crazy to think that friends could replace family when you realize you’re in real trouble,” Carstensen told me. “ Yeah, they say, they’ll bring you soup when you have the flu, but they’re unlikely to care for you when you have dementia. But we could reach a point where close friends do quit their jobs to care for you when you have dementia.”

In a book published in the summer of 2020, Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, argued that some friendships are so important that we should consider assigning them the same priority we do our romantic partnerships. They certainly view their own friendship this way; when the two of them went through a rough patch, they went so far as to see a therapist together.I mentioned this to Laura Carstensen. Her first reaction was one of utter bewilderment: “But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life. This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymoreYet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving.

In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

And yet the kind of relationships also matters. After all, “we remember the deceased because he was a father” is hardly heroic praise, amounting to little more than congratulating someone for the fact they managed to reproduce. It’s not the fact of our relational existence that matters to us so much as its quality: a loving mum, a supportive dad, a caring husband, a kind sister. We want to be remembered for the charity and sympathy with which we lived in communion. As the poet Philip Larkin put it, “What will survive of us is love.”

Death mercilessly cuts through the moral fog of living. Few people want to be memorialized for the stuff they had or the leisure they enjoyed, in spite of the fact that we spend so much of our time on earth pursuing these things and then talking about then. We want our funeral eulogy to be positive—obviously—but positive about the right things.

“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  I have spoken these words myself many times.  They are echoed in the old words of the Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.”  They might have meant something different in their time and place, but today they can often sound like a posture of self-flagellation, of refusal to believe in our essential goodness. What follows in the story are the words of Jesus: “Do not be afraid.”  Jesus sees Simon’s fear and shame and tells him not to be afraid. Some of us queer Catholics can get stuck in “Depart from me, Lord.”  It’s hard to make it to “Do not be afraid.” It was hard for me to hear the words of Jesus and really believe them.

I was overwhelmed by his mercy, which I had learned was one of God’s names.

Cringan evolved into its current form, cringe, in 16th-century Middle English, when it came to mean “to bend or crouch in embarrassment, servility or fear” (see: Robert Greene’s 1591 pamphlet describing a “fellow courteously making a low cringe”). By the 19th century it had been generalized into the current meaning: “to recoil in embarrassment, shame or fear.”

rhizomyx]] https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1490789320822767626 /

The Self 000 Knowledge Management 100 Personal Management 200 Philosophy & Psychology; Spirituality & Religion Others 300 Social Sciences 400 Communications & Rhetoric; Language & Linguistics Others + Self 500 Natural Sciences 600 Applied Sciences 700 Art & Recreation 800 Literature History of Others & Self 900 History & Biography & Geography

My favorite classification system is Universal Decimal partially because it can do cool shit like the sequence of digits is interrupted by a precise type of punctuation sign which indicates that the expression is a combination of classes rather than a simple class e.g. the colon in 34:32 indicates that there are two distinct notational elements: 34 Law. Jurisprudence and 32 Politics; the closing and opening parentheses and double quotes in the following code 913(574.22)“19”(084.3) indicate four separate notational elements: 913 Regional geography, (574.22) North Kazakhstan (Soltüstik Qazaqstan); “19” 20th century and (084.3) Maps (document form) things can also be coordinated with +, marked as an extension of the first term with /, subgrouped with [], specified that it is inclusive with A/Z, and have other systems introduced via * So searching for “novels about lesbian firefighters in norway from 1960-80 by bisexual authors” is a legit query

Step 1: Divide everything in to ten things Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets. Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different. Put a label on each bucket. This forces you to group things quite broadly, but that’s the point.

Tagging is very useful but the lack of control and meaning breaks things down fast. “a (controlled term) is worth a thousand tags” as one article put it. Part of my pitch here is to say that i8n organizing your PKB you should favor controlled vocabularies and favor classification systems when you can.

women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again

I know whose side I have to be on.

One of the key facts of what I call “soft totalitarianism” in my recent book is that this ideology is taking power within the structures of liberal democracy. Take Amazon’s decision earlier this year to stop selling books that present transgenderism as a pathology. Amazon has the right to sell, or to not sell, whatever it wants. But Amazon controls so much of the US retail book market that if it decides not to sell books that take a particular moral or political position, then Amazon will have effectively exiled that debate from the public square. No publisher can afford to take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. All of this is happening within liberal democracy, which is one reason why this totalitarianism is treading softly into dominance.

However

If Orban fails to ground Hungarian democracy in Christian thought and practice, then something quite ugly and racist may well arise. I think often about Ross Douthat’s great line: if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.

there’s no doubt that the Orban government is anti-Muslim, and doesn’t want Muslim migrants. I think this is a wise position for a European country to take, given the evidence in other European countries. In the US, we have been able to assimilate Muslim immigrants, but for whatever reasons, that has not been true in Europe.

because he dissents from the woke race ideology

Kids of my generation, even in the Deep South, where I grew up, were taught that what Martin Luther King stood for was true and correct, and in fact profoundly Christian. This is true! I still believe it’s true. But now we are told by the American left that that’s not true, that in fact what the old segregationists believed – in race essentialism – is actually the case. I find this profoundly illiberal, and profoundly anti-Christian.

The idea of giving the invisible “others” so much influence over one’s work and creativity is baffling.

We are now programmed to evaluate our creative work using metrics,

We have all experienced those interactions where friends, colleagues, family members, and lovers got upset because we didn’t like their Facebook entries or Instagram photos fast enough.

Tempted to make a [[YunoHost]] package for [[Agora]].

Consumers can now buy improved heat pumps and induction stoves, which can boil water in nearly half the time as a gas stove.

“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”

In November 2019, the California Restaurant Association sued the town of Berkeley to strike down the change in building code. The association in its lawsuit said that “many of these restaurants rely on gas for cooking particular types of food, whether it be flame-seared meats, charred vegetables, or the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok.”

In the Pacific Northwest, a group of gas and pipeline companies put up $1 million to establish another front group called Partnership for Energy Progress.

The concept of everyday cake is upheld by cultures around the world. Cake features prominently in the ritual of English afternoon tea as well as in the Swedish coffee break known as fika. Italians eat cake for breakfast.

A staff of local women prepared and provided not only breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also two coffee breaks, midmorning and midafternoon. The indisputable star of the latter, café da tarde, was cake, cut into neat squares: bolo de fubá, made with cornmeal, coconut, condensed milk, on one day; dense chocolate frosted in buttercream another; vanilla sponge layered with strawberry jam and vanilla cream the next.

"good maps are better than naked-senses sensing the territory"

To me, getting terse edits in Google Docs is preferable to the time an old-fashioned editor sat me down, looked at my draft, looked at me, and said soberly, “Words matter.”

Do you really care how that person’s weekend was?

(It’s also much more obvious when you are stifling your anger in person than when you are typing and deleting draft Slack messages. I typically do this in an offline text file to avoid the ominous “Olga is typing.”)

When the audience is large and unregulated, women can feel shut down, harassed, or ignored, says Susan Herring, an Indiana University professor who researches gender and digital communication. But in situations where a teacher or a boss is reading what people say—like a classroom discussion group or a workplace Slack channel—people are more likely to be civil.

Women are often punished for not behaving gently and communally. But on the internet, nobody knows you’re a bitch.

Of course, I still want my colleagues to like me, so I still bend a knee to gender norms. I simply say what needs to be said in Slack, throw in an exclamation point and a nice emoji, and call it a day. It’s much easier to perform your gender with a dancing penguin than by “power posing” or whatever.

Some educators sneered that the parents who complained just wanted free babysitting. But I’m not ashamed to say that child care is at the heart of the work I do. I teach children reading and writing, yes, but I also watch over them, remind them to be kind and stay safe, plan games and activities to help them grow. Children deserve attentive care. That’s the core of our commitment to them.

A magistrate could instead be an augur, a different sort of religious functionary whose job was specifically the reading of Omens. In Roman society, practically every major public event was preceded by an augur doing some kind of thing to make sure the gods approved of whatever the event was. The two main ways of doing this were by examining the flight of birds and by slaughtering an animal or bird and examining its entrails. Doing this was important enough that we are aware of manuals and diagrams to show people how to do it correctly. As your quotation points out, an augur could in theory put a hard stop on substantially anything the Roman State attempted to do simply by claiming that the Omens were bad. Caesar's co-consul Bibulus used this technique (as a magistrate, per your source) on several occasions to try to block Caesar's agenda, but was generally unsuccessful.

The flamen dialis, a priest specially dedicated to Jupiter, could never leave Rome for more than one night and could never touch iron or ride a horse, and he could never attain the high office of consul.

Christopher Dyer reckons that people in late medieval England usually worked about 240 days a year after allowing for holidays, festivals, illness, and times when they showed up at the shop and the master was not hiring journeymen that day, so an income in pounds a year is more or less pence (1/240 of a pound) a day (240 workdays in a year). So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so).

So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic. That is not so different from the price at the court of Henry VIII of England, considering that the ancients did not have spinning wheels. The linen tunics in 301 CE were probably woven as one rectangular or cross-shaped piece and sewed up the sides and under the arms, whereas the English shirts were cut and sewed from long pieces of cloth, but that is another story.

t's the belief that something will happen, that the world will work in a certain way, without any real evidence or rational arguments as to why it will do that. So we want less of that, and we want more truth—which what I really mean is a greater reason to believe that our expectations will be met.

Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.

And if we had the time, I would tell you that the same thing has always happened—with the troubadours of 11th century or Sappho and the lyric singers of ancient Greece or the artisan performers of the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt. Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down.

The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work.

For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or maybe just its rhythmic groove—five years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return unopened.

I listen to 2-3 hours of new music every day, and I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.

I like these random prompts for thinking about stuff. [[Tarot for thought]].

Doesn't sound good.

[chesterton's fence](#chesterton's fence)

Sequential Wiki Not a formal term, but I use it often. A sequential wiki is like a wiki page, but people contribute blocks of [[content]] instead of arbitrary fragments; and they maintain clear ownership and control over their blocks.

codexeditor]] https://twitter.com/codexeditor/status/1482906226292039681

[[Is]] it [[in an [[endearing]] way]]?

It feels more like an invisible weight that can be felt through every idea and keystroke. Through every executed action, like something you can lose, something you need, something missing from the stream of data you’re writing.

I read a book once which argued that the problem with modern political discourse is it pits the "I don't want things taken from me" (liberty!) people against the "XYZ is a human right" (entitlement!) people. And that a better way to frame the cultural argument is "XYZ is my responsibility to society." As a simple example, "Internet access is a human right," is just a sneaky way of saying "someone should give people free Internet." Who is someone? It's left unspecified, which is skipping over the entire mechanism by which we deliver the Internet. It's much more revealing to write, "To live in a healthy society, it's our responsibility to make sure every person has Internet access." Suddenly, oh, crap. The someone is me! Healthy society is created through constant effort, by all of us, as a gift to our fellow members. It's not extracted from us as a mandatory payment to our overlords who will do all the work. If there's one thing we know for sure about overlords, it's that they never do all the work.

This set of tools for easily creating graphs is conveniently disguised as a set of fonts. OpenType features are used to interpret and visualize the data. The data remains as editable text, allowing for painless updates.

In response to a detailed list of questions about my purchases and about online sales in general, the EPA said that it understood its Risk Mitigation Decision “would not completely remove second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides from use by general consumers, as it intended to allow use by persons such as farmers and custodians.” It also said that it was “aware that retail has changed dramatically since 2008,” but it did not say whether it has ever taken any enforcement action against manufacturers or digital retailers. The agency added that it is currently reviewing the registration of these products but gave no timeline for the review process. Eisemann tells me there is a familiar pattern to regulating pesticides. The development of new technologies always outpaces the scientific understanding of their risks and benefits. As a result, regulators are continually playing catch-up. Even still, he was struck when I told him I had been buying the stuff from Amazon and walmart.com. “It’s probably time for the EPA to certainly take a look at doing enforcement actions,” Eisemann says, “and it’s probably time for them to reevaluate e-commerce.” 

The first step was to build up a deep layer of indigo blue (usually 8-10 dips in the vat) followed by a mordant, and finally red and yellow dyes. That red could be madder or cochineal but I chose to use only madder, since that is what I am growing in the garden.  My preferred yellow is weld.  Each different combination results in a subtle variation. Some “blacks” are more purple, while others are a bit more green, or brown. I began using black walnut  and cutch as a substitute for the madder and weld and sometimes added madder or weld to those.  Each is a distinct hue, and definitely in the “black” family. I am confident of the lightfastness of these hues because of the primary dyes that have been used. 

Alum and green vitriol (iron sulfate) both have sweetish and astringent taste, and they had overlapping uses. Therefore, through the Middle Ages, alchemists and other writers do not seem to have discriminated the two salts accurately from each other. In the writings of the alchemists we find the words misy, sory, and chalcanthum applied to either compound; and the name atramentum sutorium, which one might expect to belong exclusively to green vitriol, applied indifferently to both.

“The in­ter­ro­b­ang was eas­ily made with a back-space and over-type”, as Ned told me via email, which is re­mark­able in it­self. But this quirk of type­writer op­er­a­tion also al­lowed the con­struc­tion of the fabled quasiquote, where a hy­phen and quo­ta­tion mark were over­struck to pro­duce something like "this", or 'this', and which en­cap­su­lated an ab­bre­vi­ated or para­phrased quo­ta­tion rather a ver­batim re­port of the speak­er’s words.

In the second century before Christ, king Ptolemy the Fifth promptly ordered craftsman to stop exporting one of their national products. The reason was as simple and mundane as jealousy. A rivaling library in Pergamon, then in Mysia an now in western Turkey, had gained enough traction to greatly annoy the king, who wanted to protect the fame and power of his Great Library of Alexandria at all costs. The sudden papyrus shortages did not stop Hellenic king Eumenes the Second from expanding the library in Pergamon. His hunger for literature was much, much bigger. The papyrus plant does not grow well in Mysia, and resorting to clay tablets greatly decreases the capacity of a single book. Instead of accepting defeat, Eumenes' experts perfected the eastern art of writing on animal skin, a method that until then was only used locally and not highly regarded. Ptolemy’s masterstroke turned out to be a painful mistake. It was called parchment—pergameno in Latin—as a memory to the city where this technique was perfected, and it was parchment that made sure Ptolemy’s already crumbling Alexandria lost even more political power.

Many stories out of the past have only become “escapist” in their appeal through surviving from a time when men were as a rule delighted with the work of their hands into our time, when many men feel disgust with man-made things.

These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the “full Victorian panoply” for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed.

Art of the same sort, if more skilled and effortless, the elves can also use, or so the reports seem to show; but the more potent and specially elvish craft I will, for lack of a less debatable word, call Enchantment. Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.

Let us take what looks like a clear case of Olympian nature-myth: the Norse god Thórr. His name is Thunder, of which Thórr is the Norse form; and it is not difficult to interpret his hammer, Miöllnir, as lightning. Yet Thórr has (as far as our late records go) a very marked character, or personality, which cannot be found in thunder or in lightning, even though some details can, as it were, be related to these natural phenomena: for instance, his red beard, his loud voice and violent temper, his blundering and smashing strength. None the less it is asking a question without much meaning, if we inquire: Which came first, nature-allegories about personalized thunder in the mountains, splitting rocks and trees; or stories about an irascible, not very clever, redbeard farmer, of a strength beyond common measure, a person (in all but mere stature) very like the Northern farmers, the boendr by whom Thórr was chiefly beloved? To a picture of such a man Thórr may be held to have “dwindled,” or from it the god may be held to have been enlarged. But I doubt whether either view is right—not by itself, not if you insist that one of these things must precede the other. It is more reasonable to suppose that the farmer popped up in the very moment when Thunder got a voice and face; that there was a distant growl of thunder in the hills every time a story-teller heard a farmer in a rage.

Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.

At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called inherent[Pg 65] symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the great memory associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of[Pg 66] an elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command.

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are— (1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. [Pg 30]I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Religious mysteries are things that you can understand, but not explain in words. Sex is a common example: you can read all the information about sex you want, but you won’t know how *you* respond until you do it yourself.

Basically, it’s what happens if you take a path intended for small groups of people with a high commitment level and formal structure, and mesh it with American ideals about free access, along with some of the feminist movement rhetoric around issues of power and control. Again with the handwaving over complexities, but you get the idea.

The Roman Catholic Church could not very easily call the Great Goddess of Ireland a demon, so they canonized her instead. Henceforth, she would be ‘Saint’ Brigit, patron saint of smithcraft, poetry, and healing. They ‘explained’ this by telling the Irish peasants that Brigit was ‘really’ an early Christian missionary sent to the Emerald Isle, and that the miracles she performed there ‘misled’ the common people into believing that she was a Goddess. For some reason, the Irish swallowed this. (There is no limit to what the Irish imagination can convince itself of. For example, they also came to believe that Brigit was the ‘foster mother’ of Jesus, giving no thought to the implausibility of Jesus having spent his boyhood in Ireland!)

The attempt to make a distinction between the spiritual, devotional, or celebrational side of our religion, and the more utilitarian use of ritual and ceremony to effect desired changes in our world, would never have occurred to us. One of the principle tenets of Witchcraft is that the spiritual and material sides of life interpenetrate one another and cannot be meaningfully separated. To attempt to do so is to encourage the sort of Neo-Platonic dualism that has bedeviled our Western society for centuries and led to, among other things, the demonizing of sex and the body, and disdain for our environment. In fact, any attempt to separate Wicca from Witchcraft, the religious practice from the magical practice, is not only historically misguided, but politically dangerous. It plays us directly into the hands of our detractors. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Another example is something I do for ongoing workings. I create a design with symbols that make sense for me and that working. I do a sketch or five in pencil to figure out specific elements and layout, then do a full size one. I trace it in pen, add colour with watercolour pencils (I have a set of the Inktense ones, which are very vibrantThen when I’m ready, I activate the whole thing by going over it with a brush and clean water. That extra step makes it much easier to focus on the intention without worrying about the art.

Animism – which is a worldview, not a religion – teaches that all things are not things but persons. If we are virtuous and ethical, we do not use and exploit other persons – we form respectful relationships with them. Other-than-human persons are not human, so we don’t relate to them the same way we relate to other humans. Our relationships with tree-persons and wind-persons and cat-persons aren’t the same as our relationships with human-persons, but they are relationships nonetheless.

Communities are helpful and rewarding, but they require work by all their members.  Avoiding the unpleasant parts of community marks you as a religious consumer instead of someone who is committed to the goals of the community. Without the active, caring, and sometimes frustrating religious communities in which I live, work and worship, my practice and my life would be far less than they are.

Ancestors and family spirits are generally thought to be more accessible than Goddesses and Gods – a Heathen saying goes “if you feel a tap on your shoulder, it’s probably your grandfather, not the Allfather.”

It is connecting someone to the living human community of that tradition – a little bit like marrying into a family, or becoming a part of another tightly-knit group of people. Relationships like that are a two-way street. You can say “I wanna join you” all you like, but the community (at least in part) has to say “Yes, and we want to have you join us in this kind of connection.” But to get that far, you need to want to have a connection to that group of people – and they have to want it with you. No one can force that (or should), but at the same time, when it happens, it’s worth celebrating.

I have a theory about why so few older people are hikikomoris or otaku. I think that they have succumbed to learned helplessness: they’ve suffered throughout their entire life the fear21 & stress of walking down a crowded street and having no idea who all these people are, what threat they are22⁠, or how they relate to you, and their minds have been warped to the point that it no longer bothers them, they’ve simply adapted to the mental burden23⁠. (As one would expect, young people are more exhausted by groups24⁠.) The remaining mental dislocation is handled by exactly those small-scale social organizations whose passing Putnam bemoans in Bowling Alone. (This solution is as viable as it ever was. But the young have other options, and are no longer forced into this ancient conformity.)

Some people like to relativistically argue that all natural languages are equally complex and such comparisons are meaningless or ignorant (or racist). This is false. Children learn different natural languages at different rates (eg. Danish vs Croatian); this has real effects on their education (why are Estonia & Finland—with highly similar languages & regular spelling—ranked so high on PISA⁠, when the wealthier & healthier Swedish-speaking Finnish minority has lower scores?). To demonstrate with grammatical gender⁠; English has very little gender and when an Anglophone learns French, the male/​​female genders and associated differences in spelling & endings may strike him as superfluous complexity. He’s right. The gender rules, and specifically memorizing what gender each and every word is, are arbitrary and convey no meaning. They are random—a compression algorithm would choke on them. And we can run a thought experiment (no need to appeal explicitly to algorithmic information theory); imagine a French Prime which is like French but where there is a second gender system with, say, 20 different genders (and accompanying spelling & endings), and for each of the 50,000 words in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, a random number generator decides what gender it is. By definition, the output of the RNG is unpredictable & uncompressible. All a Francophone can do is memorize 50,000 gender indications if they are to speak proper French Prime. Surely French Prime is more complex than French—all a French Prime speaker has to do is blissfully forget how many thousands of vigesimal genders he memorized. (If this is not intuitively convincing, then let the number of genders go to the 140 of Tuyuca⁠, or 50,000, or however many words there are in a language; the gender rules would be monstrously complex, with no simplification anywhere in the language.)

The very concept of working for socially responsible computing implies several things. It implies, first of all, that a special kind of work is actually necessary. Computer people bring an ordinary degree of responsibility to the daily practice of their profession, of course, and outside social mechanisms such as laws and markets promote and regulate the use of computing in their own ways. Yet these factors together have not produced all the potential social benefits of applied computing, and they have not prevented certain institutional pathologies. Another implication is that computer professionals can, by departing from usual ways of doing things, actually ameliorate these problems. Doing so, whether as part of one's paid employment or on one's own time, amounts to a type of social activism whose relation to existing practices may not be simple.

The thing that all museums have gotten caught up in — and European museums as well in the last 50 years — is the building boom. The architecture bonanza has been great for architects, where a museum has to claim architectural singularity to get press, to get attendance, to get donors. So much of the attention and the money has gone into the making of the buildings, some of them good, some not so good — many of them not so good. But many of them, I think, to a fairly surprising degree, are not necessarily hospitable places to look at art. They might be incredible examples of urban intervention or the building arts, but they’re not necessarily places that are particularly congenial to, certainly, looking at paintings. Maybe looking at other kinds of art — they’re ones that could well be suited for that. I sometimes wish that less attention and less money went into the creation of these vast buildings and more to, as you say, just showing off the collection.

For want of a better word, the academic style of painting is something which is hard to do alone. It’s part of a whole culture, a whole academy of looking, a whole way of looking and setting up the studio and having a certain kind of assistants, a certain kind of pigments, a certain kind of tests of drawing, and things that contributed to the look and feel of those paintings. One could do it. It would just take a tremendous effort of will, and then, what exactly would be the point?

I think people might underestimate the decorative function of painting. Painting has various functions. A good painting satisfies most of them or all of them, pretty much at a high level. One of the functions, historically, is to make the room look better, to make people’s emotional temperature quicken slightly when the painting is in the room as opposed to when it’s not in the room. That’s a decorative function. It’s an important one. I remember the first time I met Jasper Johns. He actually said to a friend of mine, who was standing with us, “The first obligation of a painting is to make the wall look better that it’s hanging on.” It is one of those statements that is so simple-minded it brooks mystification, but it’s just a simple fact.

A lot of people find the idea “I can do anything I like in ritual” to be really appealing. The thing is, that’s a bit like saying “I can cook any way I like!” You have the freedom to do that. No one’s going to come into your home and stand over you and scold you. But that doesn’t mean that all methods lead to an equally good meal – or an equally good ritual or religious life or spiritual experience. Some methods may just not get the results you wanted. That’s a waste of your time and resources, but maybe a good learning experience. Bread and cake have a lot of the same ingredients, but they’re definitely not the same food. Some methods may be dangerous for you or for other people. For example, if you choose a bad method for cooking or food handling, you might get food poisoning or cause a fire. Those are a problem, not just for you but quite possibly for other people. The same is true for magic and ritual.

One great thing you can do for yourself is try thinking through different ethical situations. What would you do if you were in that situation? (Or what would you do so you were never in that particular situation?) What would you do if someone in that situation asked you for advice? What pieces of the situation would matter to you? Which ones wouldn’t matter?  I read a number of advice blogs, in large part because I’m fascinated by the different ways people think through situations, how they demonstrate what they care about and value, and how people who think differently than I do go about resolving things. If you’re looking for examples to think through, try AskMetafilter (all sorts of things), b (personal interactions), and Ask A Manager (workplace situations). You can read the ones that intrigue you and pick up a lot of how to think through different situations along the way. 

Exoteric religions are those open to the public, and generally accept anyone willing to abide by the requirements of the religion. They focus on the needs and demands of daily life – personal struggles, family and job life, community structures, and they are generally accessible to a wide range of people (all ages, genders, backgrounds, interests, etc.) Protestant Christianity is a great example. Esoteric religions and orders are designed for and focus on a much smaller group – not everyone is considered able, willing, or appropriate to the group’s goals. Just the same way that not everyone may go to (or want to go to) a particular college, not everyone will fit with these goals or practices. Esoteric groups also generally focus on religious mysteries, and often have some initiatory practice. Traditional Wicca is an obvious example, but the Freemasons are another well-known esoteric order.

He writes about the present moment's popular culture as characterised by this stoppage of time: an attachment to retro which means our own period has yet to develop a signature sound that places us in time. He writes that the same distance of time exists between Glenn Miller and Kraftwerk, that exists between us and jungle. And yet, is there anything that's happened musically in the last ten years which would shock a listener of the 1990s, were it somehow piped backwards in time? Anything like the shock of jumping from big band to electrosonic?

Digital art is necessarily abstract - to compress the physical world into binary and pixels that still read to the human eye as real. But unlike the abstractions of life that have existed in art, for as long as humans have created art, the digital is somewhat different. It's designed to be entered. To log on is to be surrounded by unreality - to become unreal.

Here, too, is political possibility: we practice living in a world where social and physical gender becomes an irrelevance.

I think about chance online encounters that have changed my life, and yet there is another sense in which they have not happened at all; nobody saw them happen; nobody intended them; nothing was seen or recorded, ghosts that cannot be picked up on geigercounter, apparitions only i saw.

The web is a necropolis, where the dead will one day outnumber the living. In my years online, people who have been part of my daily life have suddenly, unaccountably winked out of existance. Disconnected or died? or, like ghosts on a stone tape, merely overwiped. On the web we are ageless; our bodies may decay, but text typed at 14 looks much the same typed at 24 or 54.

The early internet used the language of physical space - from "chatroom" to "homepage" - as if we weren't quite ready to relate to the digital world as pages and data. I remember vividly the sense of relating to the web as a series of places. My early pagan spirituality was built from pixels and Times New Roman in little hand-coded cottages with a "Garden" of herbal remedies and a "Library" of articles (sometimes, delightfully, with a little bookshelf you could click).

The digibeaches and flooding Miami malls recreated with loving irony in vaporwave are interpreted in popular culture as commentary on commercialism, nostalgia for the optimism of the 90s, or the garish aesthetic joy of retro. What seems to be missing is that these landscapes felt sinister. Uncanny valley, but for space rather than people.

But if the web is a place, it is one where things from discordant times are jumbled up together - like the lost property offices and antique collections that form triggers for time to shatter in the world of Sapphire and Steel. A girl in sombre victorian clothes skips, unexpectedly, down the hallways of a modern flat; a maid in tudor garb appears, runs and then screams in a certain room of the video laboratory; and in my room, surrounded by wires, Al Bowly lives on as sound - repeated over, and over, and over, until he is interrupted by SOPHIE, and for a moment - we have broken time.

How strange that we are here, in the future, surfing the digital cyberhighway, becoming cyborg as our technology forms such an integral part of our bodies and psyche - and yet our sense of the future feeling "futurey" is gone - because our access to every tune, every era, every evocation of memory and moment, is happening all at once.

Fishkin's examples sit at one end of a spectrum.

"All I knew about the word 'cyberspace' when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page."

a virtually-integrated society in which our Fortnite costumes will carry over to our Onlyfans accounts and we will never, ever have to log off

I’ve some really interesting threads on Twitter that are full of useful information, but as a consumer of that content, it’s a nightmare to follow. Content creators should make content as simple to consume as possible.

Using the example above, I became aware of it because someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread. Because it was a random Tweet in a very long thread, I (and I imagine most other people reading the tweet) had absolutely no context as to what the whole saga was about.

I assume it’s because these people seem to get a tonne of followers off the back of these threads, thus perpetuating the whole thing and forcing more people onto that bandwagon.

the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads

Instagram is pure PR for the nuclear family, and it totally erases how much childcare has always been shared within communities — and how much families have always relied on each other to raise their kids. Because Instagram is just images, and momfluencers try to have everyone camera-ready for posts, and those posts need to be very easy to “read” while you’re scrolling (here’s the family toasting marshmallows, here they are at the beach, here they are all together in PJs) it’s just easier to control the imagery if it includes only the nuclear family. Like, you’re not going to ask your neighbour Janine who looks after the kids twice a week to put her hair in barrel curls so she can appear polished in a picture, you know? Also, no one’s going to read a caption explaining who some random person in the pic is. The audience is tuning in for the main characters. The upshot is that we see a completely ahistorical representation of family life in most of the mamasphere. Care-work is completely erased. There are no neighbours in the mamasphere!

I joined Gizmodo at the start of 2020 and I think the plan was that I was going to write a lot about political ads. But I find political ads boring for various reasons. Not in content, but just the way that they’re served up. So instead I was just like: Screw it. I’m just gonna cover privacy. That’s gonna be my thing. It’s gonna be great. It was not great.It was a lot of late nights - and I wasn’t getting this at AdWeek as much and obviously I knew that there were men on every panel - but when I would moderate a tech panel it would be men. 99% of the time it was just a sea of white guys, and they’re the sources to my stories, which would also be about men 99% of the time. And when I got to a consumer publication I was writing about these really hardcore technical topics and I would notice that when my pieces would be shared on Reddit or Hacker News people would be saying: oh, this language is so flowery. And I took that seriously. I took that to heart. I’m just like: What does that even mean? Am I doing something wrong?So I went to a friend of mine and she was like: What? No! They’re just saying that you’re a woman. And thankfully that’s the minority and because of my aggressively centrist views I’m actually pretty well regarded. As far as lady tech journalists go. Venture Capital circles hate me because they hate everyone.

So adtech, by extension, you are deciding how advertisers are supposed to make people feel like they are worthless. Adtech is the technology that decides how worth gets distributed. That’s the broad philosophical overview and the idea I have come around on.VFD: I think that’s pretty right.Shoshana Wodinsky: It’s really more philosophical and profound than people would like. Because they like to see their jobs as making beeps and boops that decide where the money goes, and they’re just making software that connects to more software, and it’s not their job to decide whose money is good or bad, or who gets it in the end. That’s somebody else’s job. It’s a job that’s predicated by staying in your lane and kicking the can down the road to somebody else. And when you have enough people deferring responsibility, and enough people just not caring, of course you’re going to get insane shit. Like, you have companies that won’t fund LGBT news outlets but will fund white neo-nazi news outlets – not because they know that’s happening, but because that’s what the tech told them to do. And when you call them out on it they’re just like: Oh, no, I had no idea! And it’s like: why didn’t you have an idea?

Likewise, curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a full time job.

The creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project, it has some of the appeal of scrapbooking; and the end-result is also appealing to browse through.

relying on feeds shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It's stifling, homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly samey.

It's a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites.

Traffic is evaporating, and small websites are dying, which brings even fewer visitors. Rinse and repeat.

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit

For veggies, the Irish relied on cabbages, onions, garlic, and parsnips, with some wild herbs and greens spicing up the plate, and on the fruit front, everyone loved wild berries, like blackberries and rowanberries, but only apples were actually grown on purpose. And, if you lived near the coast, edible seaweed like dulse and sloke made for tasty salads and side dishes.

Which raises the question: What was Irish food like for the 1500 years between Patrick and potatoes?The short answer is: milky. Every account of what Irish people ate, from the pre-Christian Celts up through the 16th-century anti-British freedom fighters, revolves around dairy. The island's green pastures gave rise to a culture that was fiercely proud of its cows (one of the main genres of Ancient Irish epics is entirely about violent cattle rustling), and a cuisine that revolved around banbidh, or "white foods."

Still

Still, looking across the political landscape, it is unclear who the David is to take on the tech Goliaths. Republicans are cozy with big business, [4] Democrats are cozy with tech interests, and constituents may not rally behind the issue on their own if the flow of information is controlled by the companies under threat.

Hindman’s underlying claim is that if one website has a wide array of content that frequently updates itself and is also tailored to users’ interests, then that website will dominate their attention. But, again, the advantage of bigness holds: the expenditure behind a feature like personalization is only feasible for the largest companies.

For instance, in his memoir, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announces that he has come up with a new “social good”–oriented definition of capitalism (fact check: he is actually just repackaging Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “The Gospel of Wealth,” a treatise justifying the concentration of wealth as a means of promoting public welfare).

Research in 2013 from demographer Richelle Winkler shows that in the U.S., age segregation is often as ingrained as racial segregation. Using census data from 1990 to 2010, Winkler found that in some parts of the country, old (age 60+) and young (age 20–34) are roughly as segregated as Hispanics and whites.

“I think we’re in the midst of a dangerous experiment,” Cornell University professor Karl Pillemer told The Huffington Post. “This is the most age-segregated society that’s ever been. Vast numbers of younger people are likely to live into their 90s without contact with older people. As a result, young people’s view of aging is highly unrealistic and absurd.”

In his book How Old Are You? Brown University historian Howard Chudacoff demonstrates that age was not an important part of everyday life for most of the 19th century. According to Chudacoff, “The country’s institutions were not structured according to age-defined divisions, and its cultural norms did not strongly prescribe age-related behavior.” (Birthdays were rarely celebrated or noticed — and the happy birthday song wasn’t even invented until 1934.) However, during the industrial age in the U.S., an assembly-line mentality led to grouping people by age, in the hopes of standardizing everything from the education of the young to the care for the elderly. And it brought some benefits. But the extreme degree to which we’ve shunted young people into educational institutions, middle-aged adults into workplaces, and older people into retirement communities, senior centers, and nursing homes has come with costs.

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable. This opacity encourages users to disregard the possibility of understanding their desire at a deeper level, of probing it, developing it, attenuating it, or even negating it if need be.

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as inexplicable, ineffable — a matter of chance correlation of elements rather than something that requires deliberate causal explanation. The vibes framework may hone our abilities to identify settings like “cozy” or “cursed,” but it doesn’t give instructions on how we might build them or avoid them in our lives. As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

Content systems optimized by machine learning amplify the repetitive quality of internet content by identifying and recycling the same topics that generate interest and controversy, and the tendency spreads elsewhere in culture, such as in the continuous, unnecessary reiterations of movie franchises like Star Wars or The Matrix. The vibes are gamed until they become stale, and an increasing facility in vibes makes this trend all the more evident and noticeable.

In other words, “vibes” are similar to the approximations that machine learning systems use, and the two feed off of each other synergistically.

These masked bad vibes are actually pointing toward urgent questions: How do we break out of this loop? How do we escape this cycle of political deadlock, Covid lockdown, and the dread of climate catastrophe? How do we create new art forms that aren’t just remixes or nostalgic revivals of existing ones? PC Music can pose the question but can’t become the answer; it can only manifest the problem in a heightened, intensified form.

Consider the vibes-based music categories like hyperpop and PC Music, which serve as an avant-garde of the moment, mixing a wide variety of other genres with hyper-specific cultural references and inside jokes.

Instead it effectively identifies a “rainy” vibe through correlations of an initially arbitrary set of parameters.

As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural networks. This parallel may not be a mere coincidence.

Intuitively, the question seems to me to be this: Can societies without religion reproduce themselves over the long run? 

When a civilization stops giving birth to its future, and ceases to understand why it’s important to do so, it’s in trouble. This is a global crisis of the industrialized world, the collapse in fertility

Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s classic work Family And Civilization said that the collapse of the Greek and the Roman empires had to do with the collapse of the social forces that formed families.

Wokeness in America as hegemonic left-wing illiberalism is our own Cultural Revolution.