Hollowed Out

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My daughter and I took Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson, and our next-door neighbor up to Canyon Lake to spend the day of the 4th of July at the military recreation site there; there are pavilions there above small sandy beaches, for the use of active military and retirees to picnic in, restrooms and shower complexes (in need of serious renovation, or at least a sand-blasting and a clean-out of crud and insect life), an RV park, some boat ramps, and a scattering of cabins for rental. The day was overcast until late in the afternoon, and it has been very, very hot and rainless for the last two or three weeks, so the water level was quite low. Both the boat ramps on the Air Force side were well out of the water, and there was quite a lot of exposed beach, much more than last 4th, when we also spent the day there.

But there was a good crowd at the beach, mostly families with children, venturing into the rather silty water, with innertubes and floaties and small life vests for the smallest children, in the intervals between the adults barbequing and drinking. It all seemed utterly normal, and yet hollow, as if we were only going through the motions out of habit more than anything else.

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“Threads”

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Meta’s new Twitter competitor is called “Threads”, the name deriving from ‘threads of conversation’.   (The use of the term in online discussion systems may owe something to its earlier use in operating system technology)

However, another connotation of the word “threads” seems appropriate for this particular product.   Marionettes–puppets–are manipulated via threads (OK, strings if you want) and controlled by a puppeteer.   They have no autonomy, they do what the puppeteer wants them to do.

Given that a lot of the support for Threads seems based on its promise of a ‘curated’ environment, this other meaning of the term fits quite well.   (See this post  for early examples of this curation in practice)

It has becomes more and more clear how much power devolves to those who control the communications environment, and how difficult it is to overcome this advantage. See my related posts:

Comm Check

The Rage of the Prince-Electors

Book Review: Year of Consent

Coal Mining Songs

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In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.

–George Orwell

Whatever the downsides of coal mining have been, Orwell was certainly correct about its importance to the building of our civilization.

And coal mining has also inspired an extraordinary number of good songs…indeed, coal seems almost up there with the sea as a source of musical inspiration.

Some of the songs that come to mind include…

Coal Tattoo, Billy Edd Wheeler

Dark as a Dungeon, Tennessee Ernie Ford

Coming of the Roads, Billy Edd Wheeler

The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore

Daddy’s Dinner Bucket, Ralph Stanley

Last Train from Poor Valley, Norman Blake

Paradise, John Prine

Coal Mining Man, The Roys

Others?

The White Queen’s Boast

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Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

One fashionable example: “Surgery, or even a simple incantation, can turn a man into a woman.” Presumably this works by sympathetic magic. Tiresias required a miracle from Hera

You can easily find other examples in which we are assured that the evidence of tradition or our eyes is all wrong. And I know a man who assured me that before he dies, technology will have advanced to the point where his mind can be downloaded into a computer.

How did we get here?

You might cite Chesterton’s famous non-quote “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” but the former happens a great deal and the shape our belief systems have taken seems unique.

Older fashions–for example, admitting spectral evidence–were shaped by the religious and scientific understandings of their era. A witch can strike at a distance; the murdered man’s body will bleed in the presence of his murderer, etc. (Ironically, earlier church canon law (1140) forbade belief in witchcraft.)

If you know something of the details of the technology and engineering that goes into the “pocket miracle” of having light appear when you flip a switch, you won’t mistake that for a miracle–and I hope we are appropriately grateful for all the invisible effort that goes into it.

But if you get used to “pocket miracles” (everybody has Dick Tracy’s “radio wristwatch” now) and don’t think about them, you risk not understanding their limits.

I think we have a science fiction culture. Or, if you like, a Willy Wonka culture of “pure imagination”. We can imagine anything. So many things have come true, why can’t they all?

SciFi&Fantasy isn’t our religion. But I think it informs the way we look at the world.

If you can dream it, you can have it. And if you can’t, you can blame somebody else’s dream for interfering.

The Guide laughed. “You are falling into their own error,” he said, “the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught–an inability to disbelieve advertisements.

Interesting Discussions

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At Instapundit,   Glenn Reynolds highlights a comment and posts it for further discussion:

The comment:   “I get the feeling that our govt leaders and business leaders are sort of bored with keeping a great system and country running. They must do something transformative and sensational! Green! Pride! Equity! And so they wreck the system they were charged with running”

Glenn’s response:   “I think this desire for exceptional significance is an unfortunate hangover from the civil rights/Vietnam era, and I think the activism of that era was hangover jealousy of their parents’ generation’s World War II experience. Now it’s degenerated into causes that are basically fake.”

At Twitter, Claire Lehmann says:

“Catering to everyone’s exquisite emotional preferences in childhood & beyond has not created a generation of strong, healthy, productive individuals. It has created a generation of neotenic hairless pets whose only skill is taking selfies & ordering packages from Amazon.”

Related post at Quillette:   Harry Potter and rites of passage

At LinkedIn, some assertions about ‘digitization’ and ‘digital dinosaurs’ and subsequent discussion.   (I find all the current talk about ‘digitization’ to be kind of strange…all modern computers and the information systems based on them are digital, as were early mainframes, and, before them, punched card systems.) Note the comments by Bill Waddell, who used to comment at CB.