Founding Questions

UPDATE: Forgot to add that tomorrow is Friday, so please send mailbag questions! Rcseverian at protonmail dot com or in the comments below, and thanks for your diligent striving to increase quality outputs.

Gosh, the Left is going through it these days, aren’t they? Just for grins I’ve been checking out the social media feeds of some local(ish) newspapers. Given who reads newspapers these days (nobody under age 70), it’s sad, hilarious, and heartwarming in equal measure. They keep posting pictures of anti-ICE protests, for instance, and it’s always about 7 people… at least two of which are using walkers / in mobility scooters. Same way, half the comments are about the Eeeeevil Drumpf… but the other half are along the lines of “you’re trying to burn down Minneapolis — again — for the benefit of illegal alien scammers and rapists.”

Sad that there are still this many knuckleheads in the world. But at least it’s crystal clear what must be done, because if this won’t change what passes for their minds, then nothing will, because nothing can. It’s the clearest possible proof that 20 do 100 — send all the AWFLs into deep space, and it all goes away, for whatever value of “it” you like.

That being the case, let’s do a quick kvetch-up.

The first thing I notice is that there’s not much about Greenland. I figured they’d be hyperventilating much more about that. I guess they figure some Hawaiian Judge will just rule that he has to give it back, because reasons, and that will be that.

_{Jasmine Crockett and the cost of authenticity}

Here’s a possible explanation — the correct one, I think — for the ructions in Minnesota. Normal people are capable of distinguishing between different populations of Negroes. Even by the standards of total species failure, the Skinnies are awful. Other Africans hate them. The Obsolete Farm Equipment hate them. Everybody hates them, because they are frankly repulsive, even by African standards, which are the highest in the world. Only the Palestinians and… uhhh… those other folks in close geographic proximity to the Palestinians provoke the kind of knee-jerk dislike the Skinnies do, pretty much everywhere.

There are reasonable disagreements to be had about ICE. No, really — law enforcement is full of gray areas; only hardcore Leftists and equally dorky “back the blue” Grillers would say otherwise. But in this particular case, c’mon man; these shitheads gotta go.

But the Left can’t see that, because of the way their “brains” are structured. It’s like that Zork stuff we were talking about the other day. All they see is “black skin.” That alone triggers all their templated responses, like the most elementary computer program: IF/THEN GOTO.

See above, re: Jasmine Crockett. Exactly no one with two brain cells to rub together would call her “authentic.” I’d bet any amount of money that all the other OFE fully acknowledge she’s a grifter (they no doubt admire her for it, but still). It takes a staggering inability to process nuance to see “Jasmine Crockett” and “authenticity” in the same sentence without laughing. But… there it is.

Hey, speaking of the cops,

_{Mainstream media helped build the myth of law enforcement}

This ought to be good.

_{Alec Karakatsanis explained how the news media demonizes the poor while protecting the powerful}

This ought to be really good. It’s an interview, so I guess I’ll indicate which ‘tard is speaking if it seems necessary (it won’t be).

The cluelessness starts with the very illustration:

It’s like a Rorschach test or something — what you see tells you about yourself. What you think the other side sees tells you more. What I see, for instance, is some Media fag running away. Wherever the cops are going, that’s where the story is. They’re calmly walking towards it, while dickless books it the other way. Which won’t stop him from writing 30,000 words about it, of course, whatever “it” is, and at least a third of those will be himself lauding himself for his courage, because Journalists are the real heroes.

I also see some cop in camouflage, which I always find amusing, verging on dangerous — being seen is kinda the point in police-type situations, no? At least, if you’re the police?

Whatever, the point is, I simply have no idea what the Left sees in this photo. They obviously see something, and obviously to them it illustrates whatever their point might turn out to be…but I’m buffaloed. Nor is the caption any help:

_{PORTLAND, OR – JULY 30: A journalist runs past federal officers after he was caught behind a police line during a protest against racial injustice and police brutality in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in the early hours of July 30, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Protests against the federal presence in Portland continued Wednesday following an announcement by Governor Kate Brown that federal officers would begin a phased withdrawal from the city. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)}

What a revealing word choice: caught behind a police line. If you’re out there with the protestors, buddy, you take your chances with the protestors. Way to stick with the story, though. Much courage. So brave.

Also: July 30, 2020, eh? You couldn’t find anything from the last five years to illustrate your sob story about the cops? Nothing at all has been happening in the last five years, that might require a police response?

_{SWAT team-style raids, verbal and physical antagonism, and threats against citizen [sic; this is the first goddamn sentence, fucking editors, how do they work?] and journalists alike have long been embedded in the history of law enforcement in the United States, through both Republican and Democratic administrations.}

“The history of law enforcement in the United States” goes back to the middle of the 19th century. SWAT teams, I’m pretty sure, date from the late 1960s. So…uhh.. yeah.

_{But after decades of attitudes largely sitting between grudging acceptance and hero-worship, the last ten years has seen a surge of negative attention toward policing in America, provoked by acts of extreme aggression carried out with far less subtlety than before and that has, by spreading first on social media, forced mainstream media outlets to cover it extensively.}

Yep. Because The Media was so supportive before. That “hero worship” stuff? Those were tv shows. Fiction. You know, like Police Cops.

_{Critics of this media coverage, like civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis, say that since its conception in the United States, media’s role has been less to offer objective news and more to shape an obedient society that blames their problems on its most vulnerable, emphasizing a belief that state punishment is the solution.}

See what I mean about that Zork stuff? Consider the word “vulnerable” in that quote. To the cognitively normal, it’s odd, verging on a non-sequitur, especially combined with “blame” and “problems.” You know who’s really vulnerable? Babies. See what I mean?

But that’s because we’re “reading for comprehension,” as they used to say back in grade school. We not only know what the word “vulnerable” means, but we have a set of examples in our heads: infants, old people, etc. We also recognize (though we might not be able to name) that words like “vulnerable” are incomplete on their own. They’re meaningless without a grammatical object: vulnerable to what?

And what’s more, we are capable of comparing that concept and its examples to other concepts, like “blame.” So, for instance, we know that old people are vulnerable. To what? For example, disease. “Old people are vulnerable to disease” is a sentence that not only makes sense to us, grammatically, but maps onto real-world experience. But to us– the cognitively normal — “blame” is also one of those words that are incomplete on its own (I know the name of this one: transitive. “To blame” is a transitive verb). To blame for what?

Put them together, and you see the nonsense right away. “Old people are vulnerable to disease” is both grammatically correct, and true-to-facts. “Old people are to blame for disease” is grammatically correct, but so strange that it’s not even false-to-facts; it’s a non sequitur.

So: those of us who “read for comprehension” pull up short at the clause “an obedient society that blames their problems on its most vulnerable.” “Society” does NOT blame its problems on its most vulnerable. That’s not just false to facts; it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. The “most vulnerable” can’t cause crime-type problems; that’s what “vulnerable” means.

The Left, obviously, don’t read for comprehension (at least, they don’t read articles like this for comprehension). The question then becomes, why do they read stuff like this? The only answers that make sense to me are “interoffice memo” and “amen chorus.” They’re either downloading the latest NPC software patch — “this how Good People now talk about __” — or it’s the equivalent of a church service.

But those are really hard for us to grasp (well, they’re hard for me to grasp). That Rorschach thing — the fact that I don’t really get it tells me a lot more about me than it does about them.

It’s not that I never read anything just to see what “we” are saying about it. It’s just that, even there, there’s at least some “active reading” going on; I’ll still catch a gross non sequitur, a really retarded logical mistake, etc. And of course I go to church (though not nearly as often as I should), but that’s the thing: go to church. A church service works, emotionally — is spiritually refreshing — because the physical building is a liminal space…

The best I can come up with is that articles like this function for Karen the way adjusting your cup works for ballplayers.

Yeah, that’s a four minute video explanation, because the Internet is what it is. It’s the physical manifestation of a mental reset. Some people, when they break focus and have to reset, will shrug their shoulders or blow out a deep breath or whatever. Ballplayers adjust their cup. It’s almost automatic, and it’s a hard habit to break (insert your own music blog kayfabe; I already gave you close to five minutes on the minutiae of cup adjustment).

I’m guessing that articles like this are like cup checks for the nutless wonders who read Karen: The Website. They broke focus — I think we can all agree that being that crazy must require obsessive focus — and now they have to adjust their mental cups. After all, a cup is what protects your most precious asset asset from injury, and what’s more precious to them then their own batshit lunacy?

So they notice — because they can’t not notice — that the Skinnies, say, are the kind of criminal scum that even other criminal scum dislike. But Orange Man Bad, so they have to rush to the Skinnies’ defense. But the Skinnies are so repulsive that their behavior keeps causing their defenders to break focus, requiring endless cup checks like this.

_{Some Trump voters are sneaking away}

That’s Aman-duh, but I don’t have the strength to deal with it right now. I just want to point out that they’re still fucking that chicken, despite it being a sterling example of Trump’s piss-poor dictatin’. Historically speaking, dictators who are losing their grip don’t really bother with the Regime’s enemies; they spend almost all their time whipping their supporters back into line. Trump isn’t doing any of that, much to the chagrin of those of us who wish him well — he never misses an opportunity to fail to rally his base. Doing something Serious — halfway Serious; a quarter Serious — would bring everybody back onside, but he always chickens out.

_{RFK is in charge of flu season — and trouble may be ahead}

Speaking of chickens they’ll never stop fucking, this is from November 2025, and they’re reposting it. For obvious reasons — there are Midterm Erections in 2026, so they need to start harvesting those mail-in ballots stat.

_{Alison Bechdel faces her sellout fears}

_{There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there is a farmers market}

This is the other other reason I read Salon: for the nostalgia value. I might be the only one, and that’s one of the reasons I try (and so often fail) not to do too many of these. Unless you were in college in the 1990s — maybe even “unless you were a Humanities major in college in the 1990s” — this stuff probably seems quaint at best to you. For me, though, it’s a wonderful stroll down Memory Lane: The Cold War was over, the War on Terror had yet to crank up, the economy was going great. The Information Superhighway was ramping up, the better to tell us what some nerd thought about Star Trek. The world wasn’t yet totally insane, I guess is what I’m getting at, so someone had to fuck up all that peace and prosperity, just to keep us on our toes. That was Alison Bechdel’s function.

_{Alison Bechdel has been worried about selling out for decades. Not selling out of books — the award-winning graphic novelist has more than enough to go around — but selling out to capitalism for the sake of comfort. The specter of compromising artistic ideals, activist fervor and queer identity to the maw of the monoculture ran through Bechdel’s groundbreaking queer comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” as it built a loyal fanbase in the pages of now-defunct gay and lesbian newspapers. The layers of intellectual insulation that characterize graphic novels like “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” serve to distance Bechdel from the family whose secrets she’s publicly exploring. Her newest book, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” has no choice but to admit that “selling out” is now just selling.}

Ahhhh, that takes me back! Back to the days when bands had to pretend that they didn’t want to sell records, in order to sell records. Trust me, it made sense at the time. As much sense as any fad ever makes, anyway, and it was not without its tragedies: bands like Stone Temple Pilots were much better than they were given credit for, because they couldn’t disguise the fact that they liked being rock stars. Lead singer Scott Weiland couldn’t kick the heroin habit that killed him, in large part, because he never could get rock critics to see his band as anything other than Johnny-come-latelies, sellouts who started with selling out (again, it made sense at the time).

Same way, you had to talk about Liz Phair without reference to her being smoking hot, despite her obviously being smoking hot

because… uhh… reasons? I forget, but it was very very important, if you wanted any shot of getting laid by the kind of girl who knew who Liz Phair is.

Anyway, Karen: The Website started publication in 1996, and while I was blissfully unaware of it at that time, they’re still pretty much stuck in 1996, and articles like this one are a good reminder. They amuse me…

…but probably no one else, so I’ll stop now. Have a good one, comrades.

On Monday, Spare Droid wrote:

_{I nomonate “chicks, man” as a Friday Nerd Fight. Potentially epic.}

The Droid is a Sergeant of Marines; I’m sure he has some thoughts on this matter.

And it’s always good to clarify my own position, both to clear up misconception and as a general principle. So: I’ve been accused of “misogyny,” and by Current Year standards I’m certainly guilty… but here in the Current Year, “misogyny” is like “racism” and “the Holocaust” — it just means “You have mentioned an inconvenient fact.”

I don’t hate women. What I hate — with the heat of a thousand suns — is gynocracy.

I often say that I’m the only guy I know who really believes in Evolution, because it’s a useful way to skewer every one of the Left’s sacred cows. When it comes to the sexes, then, I believe in sexual complementarity.

Go ahead and do a google search on that term; it’ll tell you everything you need to know about Clown World. YMMV, depending on what browser you use (I suppose, and your search history and a million other things), but the first link I got was this:

_{“Gender complementarity” is a broad category, not a universally normative biblical teaching}

With “Biblical” uncapitalized, of course, because this is something called “The Reformation Project,” so you know they’re the worst sort of low-rent, strip-mall Prods, aka The Temple of the Current Thing (the next post in the series is “The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships”). The first few pages of search results are all the same: Evangelicals and other stupes of the Aman-duh Marcotte stripe, pro and con.

Which is why I like the Evolution thing. I say “sexual complementarity” is just another way to say “sexual dimorphism,” on which The Science is Settled ™, Why Do You Hate Science ™. If they’ve been to college, of course, they come back with “sex and gender are different!,” to which I enthusiastically agree — Gender Is Just a Social Construction ™. So what are we arguing about? My social construction aligns with The Science, which is Settled, and yours does not. Why do you hate Science? Surely you can’t mean that in this one case only, Evolution doesn’t apply? What are you, some kind of Godbothering Christofascist?

Usually they’ve fled screaming in terror long before you get to that point, but you can still have some fun with them for a time.

Humans are sexually dimorphic. Bearing and raising children imposes massive costs on the mother. The propagation of the species imposes an equally massive, but opposite, cost on the father — indeed, so much so that in the “state of nature” a solo pair of humans with a child wouldn’t live very long. The distribution of these burdens to the rest of the human herd is what we PhD-level Humanities types call “society.” Turns out Her Nibs was right: It does take a village to raise a child. I’m With Her! ™.*

*For the benefit of younger readers (assuming we have any): Back in the mid-1990s, there was a highly amusing period when the Left pretended to be pro-family. This was because the “culture wars” were raging, which the “Right” should have won with daylight second — then as now, the Left were obviously a bunch of drooling degenerates. But for whatever reason (hint: The Stupid Party), the Right allowed the Left to get back in the game, which they did by — and you’re going to have to trust me on this — rolling out Hillary Clinton her own self as some kind of Suburban Supermom. She paraded Webb Hubbell’s offspring around like a fucking trophy. She proclaimed that she “bakes a mean batch of cookies.” And so on.

It Takes a Village was part of that. P.J. O’Rourke reviewed it — someone with stronger google-fu than mine can probably find it for free — and he gave her both barrels, which must’ve caused a spot of bother on the campaign trail when that fucking Judas endorsed her over Trump in 2016 (or maybe not, because it was probably always a shtick, and I was just too naive to see it — he got called “the rightwinger it’s OK for lefties to like” in the fucking Guardian, all the way back in 2010, so yeah, it was always just a grift, like every other goddamn thing).

Anyway, the point is, men and women are different, because we’ve evolved for very different things. Sexual dimorphism is such a bedrock fact of biology that you’d have to be stupid — Ketanji Brown-Jackson stupid; “nobody ever said a vaccine is supposed to prevent the transmission of a disease” stupid — to say otherwise. What we PhD-level Humanities types call “society” works so much better when everybody stays in their fucking lane, evolutionarily speaking.

But for political reasons we have not just ignored that sage advice, but flipped it on its head, such that each sex’s strengths are now its greatest weakness. Men are hardwired to compete with each other, for instance. In “nature” — by which is meant “all of human history up to 1963” — that means “compete for female attention.” That’s why men invent shit and build shit and fight over shit: to woo women. It’s why men invented Art, and Science, and Math, and Technology, and all that other stuff, without which we’d still be swinging in the fucking trees.

But now that female attention is gone. But the hardwired competition remains, so men compete in staying away from women. Either that, or the compete in simping, which is the fastest known way to induce vaginal dryness. Women, meanwhile, are hardwired to compete for male attention in their way, which does not involve “running society.” But they do run society, so they spend all their time chasing men around, begging them to assert some fucking dominance for once… and then throwing them in jail when they do. You couldn’t design a better system for destroying a species.

So, no: I don’t hate women. I love women… in their place. The place nature ordained for them. Because that allows men to take their naturally-ordained place. And that, in turn, would make it far less likely that we’re going to PMS our way into getting genocided and/or starting a nuclear war, because something something bad boys, I can fix them.

Wiki’s usually ok on this kind of thing:

_{Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977…for the PDP-10 mainframe computer…the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game’s hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player’s location and the results of the player’s commands.}

I really enjoy the idea of these computer guys as amateur — and, functionally, pretty good — linguists:

_{The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)… The developers wanted to make a similar game that was able to understand more complicated sentences than Adventure’s two-word commands….Lebling first created a natural language input system, or parser, that could process typed two-word instructions.}

Think about that for a second. Unless he had training in linguistics, he built all that with just a naive understanding of the functional principles of language.

I remember playing Zork as a kid. This would’ve been one of the later versions, I’m sure, that was distributed as “freeware” back then, as I didn’t have access to a computer in the early 1980s. I also remember playing a graphic/text hybrid called King’s Quest. I figure it must’ve been this one:

_{King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown is an adventure game developed by Sierra On-Line and published originally for the IBM PCjr in 1984 and later for several other systems between 1984 and 1989. The game was originally titled King’s Quest; the subtitle was added to the game’s box art in the 1987 re-release, but did not appear in the game.}

We had a PCjr (pronounced “PC junior”). 1984 seems a bit early to me, but Wiki sez they were only made between March 1984 to May 1985, because the computer market was like that then. Apparently it sucked (“In 2006 PCWorld ranked the IBM PCjr as 13th ‘worst tech products of all time'”), and they started giving deep discounts pretty much right away, so maybe we caught it at the tail end, but even so, I doubt the thing would’ve been on any shelves at all past early 1986 (again, that’s how the “PC” market was then), so I guess it must’ve been late 1985.

Anyway, the game:

_{King’s Quest is the first adventure game to integrate graphical animation into the player’s view of the game world. This shifts the focus away from the static scenery, to the player’s character, which is animated on-screen. Animation sequences are in most player interactions reachable through the normal course of exploration. For example, animation sequences show Graham picking up objects from the ground, opening doors, and wading through water. Depth perspective is simulated; Graham can walk behind objects, causing his character to be hidden from view, or walk in front of them, obscuring the object. This attention to graphical animation, commonplace in action games, earned King’s Quest the distinction as the first “3D-animated” adventure game.}

_{The original version of the game relies primarily on textual input as its interface. As the player uses the keyboard to explore the game world, the on-screen character, Graham, is animated walking to the chosen destination.}

Again, it’s an exercise in functional linguistics. You didn’t move the little guy around with a joystick. You typed in stuff like “go to chest” and, if that command was in the program’s library, it would trigger the relevant animation.

Now, obviously I am not a computer programmer. I can barely turn one of the damn things on. So I’m well aware that I might be about to sound like an enormous retard, but that’s ok, because either way we learn something:

I assume there are “libraries” of “objects,” commands, and animations in a game like King’s Quest. Objects are e.g. thrones, chests, swords, bushes, and so on. Such that each “scene” in the game generates a room with various objects. You type in a command like “go to chest.” If there’s a chest in the room, the relevant animation kicks in. If there’s not, either nothing happens, or the game spits back text like “there appears to be no chest here” (I forget how it actually worked, c’mon man, it was 40 years ago).

Maybe that’s wrong, but even so, can we agree that that’s one way to do it? You can build a three-part structure, or a three-column table or however you want to visualize it: Objects, Animations, Commands. Then you match them up (or draw lines between them on your whiteboard or, again, however you’re visualizing it). If that’s so, then a big part of the trick is coming up with plausible variations on the commands, most of which involve synonyms — instead of “go to chest,” a user might type “go to cabinet” or “armoire” or whatever. Similarly, he might type “walk to chest” or “run to chest” or “perambulate to chest;” you could have the whole thesaurus in there, if you wanted to take the time to code it all in.

So long as it’s phrased as an imperative, and the verb-preposition-object pattern stays constant, the only limit is system memory (I guess) and the programmer’s time.

That’s a whole worldview, right there. We could go a million different ways with this, touching on most of the themes we discuss here. It’s an example of “seeing like a state,” for instance — states get into trouble when they start forcing things into categories they don’t belong in, based on nothing but superficial similarities, because it’s easier. There are real differences, for example, between a chest and an armoire, but they’re both boxy objects that you put shit in, so eh, good enough for government work. What you lose in actual lived experience, you gain in efficiency… says the Manager, and here we are.

Or we could talk about the ways interactive screens train you to think differently. Even now, FPS games (that’s “first person shooter,” for the benefit of older folks) usually have an option to “invert Y axis.” Back when I was a kid, they actually called this “airplane controls,” because there used to be these games called “flight simulators.” That’s what you did, you flew an airplane around. Sometimes into battle, in games like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, and if the fucking Wehrmacht hadn’t let me down I could’ve won the war for the Nazis behind the Go-229, because 1991 was a very different time. Anyway, the point is, there was a fun disconnect between programmers and players when it came to flight simulators:

The guys making the game saw the joystick like the control yoke of a real, physical airplane: It controls pitch and roll. On a real, physical airplane, you push the yoke forward — that is, “into the nose” — to get the plane to dive; the pitch axis is relative to the plane’s nose in level, i.e. horizontal, flight. But with a flight simulator, the player’s natural impulse is to make the “pitch axis” is relative to the screen. That is to say, the “pitch axis” of your monitor is vertical, and so the first thing pretty much players did when taking their first “flight” in a game like SWOTL was to push the stick up in an attempt to make the plane climb.

You push the joystick up to go up, right? Duh!

(also note that there’s no rudder in those early flight simulators, because joysticks don’t have rudders. You want to control yaw, you need to fly it from your keyboard, and think about that for a second — they all had keyboard controls, too).

So if you learned how to navigate “3D” “space” on a flight simulator, you first had to train yourself to push up to go down. Which soon became natural, so when games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom! came out, they had to offer the option to “invert” the Y axis, or elect “airplane controls,” actually called such.

We could do all that… but I want to talk about this idea of linguistic “libraries.”

The last few days we’ve been talking around this weird thing the Left does, where they miss the forest for the trees, I guess — it’s a cliche, and not particularly apt, but let’s use that for now, see where it takes us. The other day, Vizzini pointed out that the Wiki entry on “thoughtcrime” has a whole section on Iran, and only Iran, which coming from fucking Wikipedia is enough to give Alanis one lasting way more than four hours. Later, Andrew gave us a link in which, as he put it,

_{there are somehow quite a large number of commenters claiming to be fans of The Master and His Emissary that are shocked by McGilchrist’s sudden descent into reactionary right-wingery.}

Now, I’m nowhere close to finishing The Master and His Emissary, but trust me, y’all, the tl;dr is “Liberalism is brain damage,” and it’s obvious by about page 5. McGilchrist still has an academic career, and indeed The Master and His Emissary was published by Yale UP, so he must have some skill at maintaining kayfabe… but look at the Wiki entry for it:

_{In a positive review in The Guardian, philosopher Mary Midgley wrote that the book “points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain,”[9] and that “though neurologists may well not welcome it because it asks them new questions, the rest of us will surely find it splendidly thought-provoking.”}

A woman writing for The Guardian said that. The Guardian, quite possibly the most knee-jerk shitlib rag in the history of journalism. I bet David Thompson has written half a million words about the Grauniad, all of them hilarious. Here’s a sampling, a soupçon if you will, because nothing, I mean nothing, is as effete and faggy as The Guardian. Whatever the Current Thing is, they’re not just for it, they’re for it in the very best way, that posh British way that you lot simply can’t understand, sweaty little beggars that you are. It’s basically this

in text form…

…and they thought The Master and His Emissary was great.

How is that possible?

Let us note, in the interest of… well, not fairness, because fuck these “people,” but in the cold light of scientific inquiry it must be noted that the “Right” does it too. What’s even weirder is that the Left is, or at least was, capable of noticing it when the Right did it. I remember Karen: The Website (I’m pretty sure) making fun of a “Tea Party” goofball with a sign reading something like “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” So it’s not just them. But they do seem far more prone to it, whatever “it” is, than others, and let us note that the Tea Party was, holy shit, almost 20 years ago.

Anyway, my thought is: They’ve been extensively trained as “packers.” I forget which of you introduced the terms, for which I am sorry. A quick google search gives us this blog post, which refers us back to computer programming:

_{Mappers predominantly adopt the cognitive strategy of populating and integrating mental maps, then reading off the solution to any particular problem. They quickly find methods for achieving their objectives by consulting their maps.}

_{Packers become adept at retaining large numbers or knowledge packets. Their singular objective is performing the `correct’ action. Strategies for resolving ‘hash collisions’, where more than one action might fit a circumstance are \ad hoc\.}

Those text adventure games I talked about earlier would be examples of “packing,” and now I’m starting to get it a little bit, because those really sound like they should be “mappers.” In fact that’s one of the first things you think to do with a game like Zork: draw a map. Admittedly I was a giant nerd as a kid (“was?”, I hear all of you asking), but that just seemed obvious, and for whatever grade-school related reason I had a bunch of graph paper laying around, so… yeah. It ended up looking like NetHack (which I’m sure is a trip down memory lane for a few of you who are — in seeming defiance of several important laws of physics — waaaay nerdier than me).

But even though drawing a map seems obvious for a game like Zork, it’s not an example of “mapping” as defined; it’s almost a paradigm case of “packing.” There’s a list of in-game objects (chests and whatnot). There’s a list of action verbs (go, open, attack, etc.). And there’s a list of prepositions. The singular objective is performing the “correct” action: go to chest, open chest, attack monster with sword. “Hash collisions” aren’t so much dealt with as avoided — you can type in commands like “attack monster with bucket,” but even if you have a bucket, you’ll get the response “you can’t do that here,” because the verb “attack” doesn’t have a line drawn to it — isn’t “mapped to,” as we might say, thereby increasing the confusion — over in the “objects” column.

In other words, to the “parser,” the command “attack monster with bucket” is functionally equivalent to “attack monster with 23erlfdhjs;” it’s meaningless.

In the real world, of course — or, at least, in the world of mappers — we don’t normally think of buckets as weapons. In the abstract, if you asked us to list all the stuff you can do with a bucket, unless you’re particularly murderous it’d take you quite a while to get around to “you can bash somebody over the head with it.” But in this particular situation, the objective shifts. We’re thinking of things under a different species, I guess, if suddenly throwing in Scholastic terminology doesn’t do more harm than good.

The thought process, the operative question, the situation which we are mentally processing shifts from “I have a bucket; what can I do with a bucket?” to “I am confronted by a monster; what can I use to bash it, that might do more damage to it than my bare fists?”

A game like Zork can’t switch between species or categories or whatever like that, because of technological limitations. Again, the traditional terms add to the confusion: Zork’s interface is called “natural language,” but in this case “natural” just means “as opposed to a programming language,” which of course isn’t a language at all — it’s a metaphor; “natural language” is thus a second-order metaphor or whatever, and it makes talking about this kind of thing much harder.

Zork can’t make the leap between “things that can be used to carry water” and “things that can be used as weapons,” because those are like those cool topographical maps where you can peel away layers of elevation; they overlay each other at some point. Nor can Zork see it as a Venn diagram — the intersection of “things that can be used to carry water” and “things that can be used as weapons” (which would also include helmets and the like). Instead, Zork sees packets of information, inputs and outputs. It has been programmed such that there’s a discrete set of terms which can fill in the blank in the sentence “attack monster with ___.” If one of those terms is present, it will output “You hit the monster with the ___.” If the user puts anything else in the blank, the program spits out “you can’t do that here.”

We say that so much of Leftism these days boils down to them pretending not to understand things, thus making discussion impossible. But what if they don’t understand things? What if, in other words, they’re just going down a checklist, filling in the blank, whatever, Zork-style? What if whatever passes for their brains really looks like this?

That would explain a few things, no?

And there’s lots of evidence for it. I guess you’ll have to trust me, if you haven’t seen the Kids These Days for yourself in an academic setting, but I’ve told this story a dozen times, how you can discombobulate some fraction of students just by switching the word order around on a test. The powerpoint slide says “George Washington won the Battle of Yorktown.” You can get most of them to give you the correct answer if your test question is “___ won the Battle of Yorktown,” but just flip it into passive voice — “the Battle of Yorktown was won by ___” — and a few of them will get it wrong.

Yes, I know, Zork could probably have figured that one out back in 1977, but that’s where we are now. But even Zork would be fooled by “___ was George Washington’s most significant victory in the American Revolution,” even if the slides say “George Washington won the Battle of Yorktown” and “the Battle of Yorktown was the most significant victory of the Revolution,” because it can’t combine concepts like that. It can’t overlay them, like topographical maps, or mesh them up like Venn diagrams, or whatever metaphor we end up using, and neither can The Kids These Days.

See what I mean? Even if they weren’t born packers (or whatever we end up calling it), the State has put enormous effort into training them to be….

Obviously this is going to be one of those. And probably more so than usual, because all I have are very scattered thoughts. But I started thinking about this, from Vizzini’s comment the other day:

_{There’s an argument to be made that the red/blue rural/urban split is mostly about population density. Seems pertinent to the discussion about what causes leftists we had recently. We talked about caloric surplus and leisure time, but proximity/density may also contribute a significant fraction. Correlation or causation or both?}

_…

_{Rural people are effectively just as dependent on the system. We go to grocery stores, get our power from the electric company, have phones, internet, use hospitals. We’re dependent on the county to plow our roads, etc. Most rural people are just as dead as city people in a Mad Max scenario.}

_{So maybe it’s not system dependency directly, just that basic “rubbing of elbows.” Like, if my “neighbor” is blasting his stereo at 4 in the morning, well, it’s a few hundred yards away and I never know about it. It’s interesting to note that even in rural areas, if you’re looking for the leftists, you mostly find them in town, except for the really toney leftists that work for colleges, government, or NGOs and own their little 5-acre “farms” where they can advocate for lots of government programs to “help” the poor hillbillies without having to hang around many icky hillbillies.}

That’s one of those ideas that just feels right. To be effective, an idea must propagate, and barmy ideas propagate best — one almost wants to say “propagate only” — in near-anonymity. If you want to spread your barmy idea out in the country, until very recently you needed to do it face to face, where Farmer John can tell you in person that you talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded.

Same way, it’s hard to be seriously crazy in a Dunbar Number environment. Or, to be more precise, crazy gets addressed a lot sooner, a lot more thoroughly, out in the country, because interactions are much more in-depth. In the city, you have lots of “off” people who can appear normal for a few minutes, and a few minutes’ interaction is all most people get with them (and only once, or very infrequently, whereas in the country you might not have a lot of in-depth interactions, but by default there are a lot of interactions).

Without the Internet, in a community of 500, a Rachel Good would have a much harder time pulling her shit.

So maybe it’s not population density as such, but our old friend the Dunbar Number — the “rubbing of elbows” Vizzini mentions. A rural town is actually fairly population-dense, both as a statistical matter and “interpersonally,” I guess we’ll say. All that stuff your Sinclair Lewis types used to complain about is true, or at least was true pre-Internet: Everybody knows everybody, and has known everybody, for generations; you move out to the sticks, and you’ll be “the new guy” for the next 30 years. You ask for directions out there, and they’ll tell you to hook a left at the old Johnson place; you ask how you’ll recognize the old Johnson place, and they’ll tell you it burned down in ’64; that kind of thing.

So it’s not density per se; it’s density plus anonymity. Or maybe “density plus transience.” For irrelevant and boring reasons I lived in the same apartment for my first three or four years out of college; I must’ve had dozens of neighbors come and go. Hell, it was that way in houses out in the ‘burbs where I grew up — out on the fringes of Techopolis, you learn the true meaning of the Real Estate Agent term “starter home.” Everybody was always moving, in search of the next opportunity, and that (plus the tech thing) is why my high school’s sportsball mascot was Ganesh.

But it’s an odd sort of transience (here we go; I told you it was going to be one of those). It’s the sense of “permanent impermanence,” let’s call it.

I sometimes wonder if Noticing doesn’t come down to the opposite phenomenon, call it “impermanent permanence.” We are all of us “conservatives” — for rhetorical purposes — not because we dislike or fear change. We know better than anybody that all things are always changing — we are born, we grow, we die; nothing remains the same, not for a second… but only for us, personally. Nature doesn’t change. The sun rises and sets; the seasons move in their cycle; the needs of the crops and the animals will always be the same; will always be there.

It’s just we who will someday be gone, and “someday” is right around the corner. Someone like Sinclair Lewis thinks it’s hell, being constantly compared to your great-grandfather — you can never “just be yourself” in a small town, says he. And I don’t doubt that it’s oppressive at times. But it also gives you that sense of “impermanent permanence.” Great-Grandpa was born; he lived his life; he died… and so will you, and that right soon. But 100 years from now, some old lady will be comparing your great-grandson to you.

Everything human changes, but Nature does not change. That’s “conservatism,” I guess, and for lack of a better term. And that’s what causes Noticing, I’m coming to believe. It’s not that we dislike “change” — that would be as absurd as disliking the seasons. We dislike change qua change; change for change’s sake, and that instinctive distaste for change qua change is why we Notice. We have that sense of Impermanent Permanence, so we can’t help but Notice that today’s Current Thing is the exact opposite of yesterday’s.

It’s not “change” in the sense we understand, and instinctively accept — it’s not “change” in the way the seasons change. It’s directed change — somebody decided to do it. And if it’s not immediately apparent who, or why, we are naturally suspicious. We are “based,” if you will, in the Permanent, so we are acutely aware of the deliberate aspects of the Impermanent.

City life gives you the opposite, indeed overwhelming, sense of Permanent Impermanence. Nothing stays the same; the only constant is change. I remember seeing it in College Town, which was not particularly large, population-wise, but had almost all the “amenities” you’d expect from a major metro. Bearing in mind, as always, that “College Town” is a composite of several different places… but they’re all basically the same, and that’s the point.

The first thing that struck me about College Town — that you see in every College Town, coast to coast — was how shabby it was. Even the brand-new apartment complexes (of which there were many, Higher Ed being a growth industry at that time) all looked dilapidated. The next thing I Noticed was the lack of institutions. College Town had every imaginable “amenity” — exotic cuisine, 24 hour everything — but no playgrounds, no ball fields, no churches. Hardly any schools, despite being pretty good size relative to the surrounding area, because why would there be? All that stuff is for people who actually live there, as opposed to the transients, or even the “permanent residents,” if you will, on the faculty (what an unconsciously telling phrase that is!).

Nobody’s from there, and nobody stays there. Not even the faculty — they always have one foot out the door, no matter if they’re Department Chairs with 30+ years’ seniority. It is crucial to their amour-propre to believe that they’re always about to get the call from Harvard, which in part explains the weird phenomenon of the “faculty ghetto.” They’ll spend a zillion dollars “restoring” a frankly tiny house in the “historic” district, by which is meant “gutting it, and making it as close to a Current Year McMansion as the physical infrastructure can bear.” Then they’ll spend a zillion more on yearly maintenance, when they could’ve gotten twice the house, with the latest and greatest everything, built to spec on the outskirts of town…

…which is five minutes away; it’s not like they’re facing some huge commute (and it’s not like they walk or even bike to campus, and God forbid they take the bus. No, they’d much rather gut or knock down another old building, just to have a garage in which to park the huge gas-guzzling SUV they drive the 45 linear feet to “work,” because how else would they show off how important they are, without parking in their designated space in the one fucking lot in the entire town?).

In other words, they don’t want to admit that they live there — they are, at most, “permanent residents.” There are no public playgrounds, because their one designer baby isn’t going to rub elbows with the children of the few greasy proles they grudgingly tolerate in the absolutely necessary service industries — you know, the mechanics and plumbers and snow plow drivers and such. There are no churches, just one or two Temples of the Current Thing, and only to the extent that a few of them have paraphilias involving clerical vestments. No ball fields, no Cub Scout packs or Elks Lodges or American Legion posts, because c’mon man. A town that size anywhere else would have a Walmart and a Minor League team and a big rivalry game between the local high schools; College Town has head shops and Egyptian-Thai fusion cuisine and DoorDash.

Permanent Impermanence, in other words. Deliberate impermanence. Nothing lasts, nothing can last, nothing should last. There are some people who find that attitude — which I would call straight-out, shit-flinging nihilism — deeply appealing, and… well… there it is.