Category: Thoughts

If you think David Brooks is right, check again

David Brooks has a pretty decent column, for once, in the Times today. He discusses Trump’s strange lack of “theory of mind” and notes that the world is over-analyzing his work.

But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.

…
We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

This seems pretty insightful! And it would seem more insightful if I had not read a nearly identical piece from David Roberts, writing in Vox, four days ago:

On Twitter I talked about “theory of mind,” a basic capacity humans develop around the age of 2 or 3 to recognize that other people are independent agents, distinct minds, with their own beliefs, desires, fears, etc. We learn to “read” behaviors as evidence of those internal states.

…
Much of the dialogue around him, the journalism and analysis, even the statements of his own surrogates, amounts to a desperate attempt to construct a Theory of Trump, to explain what he does and says through some story about his long-term goals and beliefs.

…
But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?

Today In History

Today’s newsletter is about history and the future. I didn’t have room for this digression but it sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole anyway:

On May 9, 1726, several men were hanged at Tyburn following their arrest during a raid on Mother Clap's Molly House

The term “molly house” referred to a gathering place for gay men, usually a tavern, coffee shop, and/or brothel. Sodomy had been punishable by death since the Buggery Act of 1533 (when it first came under civil, rather than ecclesiastical, law) and remained a crime until 1967. Documents surrounding trials for these offenses would later become key objects of historical study. Gay men were more likely than lesbians to be prosecuted, and their history is therefore better documented.

National Review Declares Intellectual Bankruptcy

I suppose I should reiterate that I speak here for myself, and not for my employer, because I’m about to have some opinions.

Leading purveyor of respectable racism The National Review has a modest proposal for education policy. Well, actually, they have an editorial endorsing a study (by the same author as the editorial!) from a think tank funded by Arthur Pope, a.k.a. North Carolina’s homegrown Koch imitation.)

Obviously, the editorial and the “independent” “nonprofit” “public-service” think-tank say, nothing LBJ ever did was good. All those civil rights things. All those pencil-necks thinking they know about chemicals because they have degrees in chemistry and are telling you that shit is poisonous. Gross.

Anyway, with their “standing athwart history and yelling ‘state’s rights'” bona fides out of the way, they seem to think that if we’re going to be stuck having education foisted upon us, we should at least make it as terrible as possible. Force disclosure of speaker fees so that we can check whether the Comparative Literature department hosts too many left-wing scholars. Strike most of Title IX, and definitely stop having schools do anything about sexual assault. Yep, worry MORE about the political leanings of guest speakers, and LESS about rapists.

It wouldn’t be Real Conservative without a nod to the free market, by which I mean fly-by-night diploma mills. Accreditation, they say, should focus only on the financial stability of a school. If it’s profitable, it’s fine! Accreditation for quality is apparently optional. As long as suckers are willing to pay for it with federal loans, who cares if it’s any good?

This, somehow, is what passes for higher ed policy on the right: Art Pope funds some shit-shovelers, they shovel the shit right into the National Review, and the National Review then makes it respectable and somehow we’re supposed to pretend that this recycled shit isn’t shit?

Shit.

Pump the gas, Morty, we gotta get into the next news cycle

It takes more than just a cute cat to rise above the noise. You have to be a cute cat ringing a bell to get food and create an adorable commentary on wage slavery.

You can’t just have an advice board for home repair, not when creepy-tales board /r/nosleep can leak into /r/homeowners and create discussions about what to do when your house is bleeding for maximum upvotes.

You can’t just post a sad bird, you have to be a minor celebrity MMA fighter releasing an injured bird with disastrous consequences.

And you can’t just be surprised by people getting dressed up in fuzzy outfits and holding enormous conventions. Shit, from Leda and the Swan on up, generation upon generation has focused its formative pants-feelings on foxy anthropomorphized foxes.

To make the news with furries, you have to be an unsuspecting charity volunteer who brings a therapy dog to play with people dressed up as dogs.

Ideally, though, you’ll get something that pumps the gas a little more than that. If you wanna move units, whether it’s cereal or politics on TV or just the latest meme, you need more than one angle.

Ideally you get a remix of as many kinds of suck as possible, like this month’s neo-nazi alt-right furry convention disaster. Let’s count them:

  1. Furries.
  2. Some of them are Nazis.
  3. Someone makes a joke about the now-iconic alt-right getting punched to music.
  4. Twitter anger escalates to threats of gun violence.
  5. Ballooning security costs threaten the entire convention
  6. Convention management, led by a sovereign citizen who believes he’s immune to most laws due to special language and red ink, blames the victims.
    • (Aside: The Sovereign Citizen in charge at least partly because a prior convention organizer was revealed to be a sex offender. There’s an alarming amount of overlap between Sovereign Citizens and pedos, because of course there is.)
  7. And then shady accounting and attention bring the entire thing to a screaming halt and everyone points and laughs, starting with furry-community messageboards and moving on out to national news.

Pump the gas, Morty. We gotta get to at least ten different flavors of suck to make it into the next news cycle.

On Negotiation and Influence

I took a class through work yesterday on how to influence people without having formal authority. It’s not just a workplace skill, though, and when we broke up into groups to discuss one specific scenario, the group I was in wound up working not on “How do we allocate resources to competing software development projects?” but “How do three brothers help their mom move to a new apartment?”

My co-worker, the middle brother, didn’t just need to find an apartment and schedule a move. Mom and all three brothers had to agree on the details about size, price, location, and schedule.

Our conclusion during the fifteen minute training exercise was that it would be critical to finesse the older brother. He’s contrary and doesn’t like taking suggestions or orders from the younger brothers, so the middle brother would have to meet with him separately and make sure he felt that he was really a major part of the decision-making process.

That wasn’t the only problem. The thing was, nobody in the conversation was truly working in good faith. Mom says she’s fine with whatever, she’s ready to move to a smaller apartment, and any of the three or four neighborhoods they’ve been considering would be fine. But the youngest brother is always breaking up with girlfriends and asking to move back home, so she wants a second bedroom just in case. She can’t say that because it seems unfair to the other boys, who are helping her pay for this apartment, and also implies a lack of faith in the success of her baby boy’s life choices.

Similar subtexts and unstated preferences apply to neighborhoods: Mom’s in charge of picking the location, since it’s her house. All the brothers want her to move to the neighborhood which will make visiting her most convenient for them. They won’t say that because, you know, it’s mom’s house.

The relevant analogy for national politics kind of writes itself.

It wasn’t 10 albums, it was a couple of mix tapes

That whole “what ten albums meant the most to you” thing went around a few weeks ago, and it got me thinking that it wasn’t really albums that were the soundtrack to my adolescence. Oh, there were albums of course. Some stuff I heard on the radio, like Nirvana. Some I got from friends, like Portishead and (so you know I’m not making up better taste than I had) Sublime.

But it was mix tapes that really sort of opened up the sonic world to me. I got one or two from kids at summer camp – there was an older boy from New York who had a big collection of hardcore tapes by bands like Sick of It All and Minor Threat, which my father described as “music for assholes.”

I must have been in 10th grade when a friend’s cooler older brother, who went to a cool sort of alternative school, got a tape from his even cooler friend (I never met her, but I remember being awed that someone could be named Zee), and made a copy for me. Needless to say, I never saw the videos on MTV or heard the songs on the radio, and the tape didn’t even have liner notes. I didn’t know the names of most of these bands. I found a few over the years and bought some of the albums. And I mean years – I was listening to some of these things for ages before I found out who wrote them.

That tape was the one that introduced me to trippy stuff like The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” and the oddly beautiful noise of Medicine’s “Arcua” (Give it a moment. Give it several moments. Let it play until you think it’s never going to be anything but screeching… and then it collapses into a melody. It’s beautiful.)

And oh boy, The Drowners, by Suede. It sounded best with the bass turned up way too high, so that fuzz in the lead guitar riff hit you right in the gut, and it sounded positively pornographic. It was transgressive and dirty and bad and you just KNEW your parents were going to hate it. It was perfect.