Bundling and Unbundling I
I. “The identity of any real entity must be accounted for by a process, the process that produced that entity […] When it comes to social science the idea is the same: families, institutional organizations, cities, nation states are all real entities that are the product of specific historical processes which created them and those more »
Mulling: “The Media”
My posting has slowed quite a bit. Big changes at work are one reason. The start of a terrifying online game of Diplomacy is another. Also, in my rush to try to find a strategy to save Austria-Hungary from her nearly-historically-correct total destruction, I discovered my unread copy of Kissinger’s Diplomacy and then started reading that. Suddenly my RSS feeds are more »
An Aside: The Perils of Uncritical Enthusiasm
A short post this morning. — The problem of the “weak man” is pernicious. It’s incredibly frustrating to carefully craft a position and then to see it conflated with a duller one and summarily dismissed. Videogame evangelism often feels that way. While a decade or two ago there were rampant unsubstantiated claims regarding why games of more »
Flavors of Declinism and Exceptionalism
I. Flavors of Declinism Three speculative flavors of political declinism, in order from most subtle to most immediate. Inspired by an article I can’t find anymore- it was a throwaway line in a conservative magazine (The National Interest?). I ought to find it and credit properly. Falling Short: Dissonance between ideals and action. Common more »
Prowess and Cheapening
I. I had a discussion with some friends in Boston last week that kind of clicked with some ideas that have been in the air around me. I guess I was the least musically-inclined person involved in the discussion. Let me sketch out the situation: One of the songs from Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories starts. One person more »
Interstellar Communication
I. I’ve said this before: While it’s not the only reason for my interest in “weird politics”, engaging earnestly with more uncommon frames allows for some helpful recalibration on common issues (or, if you’re the trolling type, a new set of arcane rhetorical weapons). I’ve scratched similar itches by reading conspiracy theory sites, reading Weird Fiction, and trying to more »
Apologetic, Association, “Weak Men”, Fnords
I thought that I was going to release some stuff about aliens today, but I didn’t get to write as much as I wanted this week. — These are loose notes relating to an older thread of ideas about apologetic, and our own propensity to use association to empower our own tribe and demonize the other. I was more »
Titling
I. The word “Species” means something. When asked “Does a ‘species’ exist?” you might get tripped up: the taxonomy is itself a human invention, and the traditional definition of a species- a group of creatures bound by their capability to breed- is shakier than one might be comfortable with. But, overall, I think the reasonable answer is more »
Housekeeping: May 26
Dumping out some follow-up thoughts. I sometimes think this whole operation might’ve better served as a micro-blog. But I can’t decide whether that’d be annoying or not? Reading I have a lot of heavy-lifts in terms of projects this season, but I’ve got three books I’ve started to meander through. I doubt that I’ll release comprehensive more »
Social Physics V: Data-Driven Society
Quick overview: Sandy Pentland subscribes to the kind of ecological view that a lot of my recent sources have espoused- an emphasis on the relations between objects, instead of on the objects themselves. He argues for a “computational theory of behavior”, using Big Data and a system of collection/observation that he calls “reality mining”: the point is to more »