Steve_Spirgis's blog

Louis CK made the news again due to surprising a bunch of people with an unplanned show.

[cue canned laughter]

I used to like Louis CK. There was a point at which he was the first name to come to mind when asked for favorite comedians. There’s been a lot of talk about what destructive, toxic men should do in order to be afforded redemption. Hasn’t he suffered enough?

No, clearly, or we wouldn’t be asking these questions.

“Empathy is bad and it makes the world worse.
(https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474588/why-empathy-is-a-bad-thing/) ”

If I were Yale University I would be ashamed to have Paul Bloom on staff. I’d watch that three minute video and say, “Who hired this guy? Who promoted him? Who let this happen under our watch?” and then I would fire this guy, and I would fire the guy who promoted him, and I would just massacre everyone in the department who enabled this nonsense.

In the context of the horror of immigrant children stolen from their parents and sold into oblivion, Ivanka's post today is being seen as e.g. "tone-deaf." This gives too much credit by half. Try to see this image through the eyes of a white supremacist. It's advertising.

It doesn't surprise me that a lot of the people calling it "clueless" or "tone-deaf" are center/liberal public figures. Habitual deconstruction of advertising and rhetoric inevitably leads to radicalization, simply because humans innately dislike being lied to and manipulated.

One of the key parts of any functioning, modern government is the institutions that serve the needs of citizens. The government, therefore, generally relies on the good-faith participation of those at the helm, under the assumption that the polity isn't going to elect anyone so crooked, so clueless, so violently ignorant that they simply refuse to do their [bleep]ing job.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Isocracy, I give you: Donald Trump, and the incipient calamity of Hurricane Harvey, with all relevant government institutions headless, clueless, and practically penniless.

If your preferred system of economics permits and ignores situations like this, then your politics have failed. If your ideology permits and accepts situation like this, then your ethics and basic humanity have failed.

Humans matter more than 'the economy' matters. Bring the economy into line with human needs, rather than bringing humans into line with economic needs.
If you disagree with this, you are wrong, and I condemn you.

TW: Hospitals, blood, death, various unacceptable badnesses.

In the teeth of my recent statements about making policy suggestions and how I shouldn't do it, I'm going to do it.

Steve's Universal Healthcare System:

1) Everyone who walks into the doors of a hospital gets treated. No exceptions, no refusals for any reason. Humans in need get treatment and care, where 'treatment and care' is acknowledged to mean 'any medical service, operation, or prescription recommended and offered by licensed medical staff.'

If you really want to start cleansing your brain of the bad media habits that are subtly making your life more miserable, the best thing to do is to recognize and behave as though online publishing - not just Natural News or the Blaze, but even the respectable stuff like 538 and Vox or the New York Times, are all scams. All of it. It isn’t that the things they peddle are or aren’t true, either.

I’m just about finished with William Gibson’s The Peripheral. I’m at the penultimate scene, the one just before the climactic blowout. Thematically, this is a perfect place to have stopped, because one of the things the book talks about is life before, and after, the “collapse.” Gibson’s work is all about the future, about how the future feels between your fingers.

The problem is that most of the things happening in the world, or even in our own towns, are not things we have power over. We're made to be emotionally invested in things we can't solve, can't fix. "A fatal car accident today left three dead, including two children." It's awful, but it's also over. What does it mean for us to know it? Our own social support systems already exist for this kind of thing. If we needed to know, if it were someone important to us, we'd find out.

It is disheartening to watch the panic of the Obama administration as it attempts to have it both ways. It has spent the last week shrugging off Edward Snowden as a mere sellout with only middling access to privileged information, all the while moving heaven and earth to retrieve him. This reaction is not useful to any serious narrative. It gives credence to the notion that Snowden is a spy-for-hire, just looking for a safe haven long enough to unload his cargo of mid-level bureaucratic secrets.