Master of Puppets if it were a Muse song

This. Is. Amazing.

River Lethe's Best Music of (mostly) 2021

Well, it's been awhile since I've done this. I've been co-opted by kids and politics the past few years. I can say I am no longer a tastemaker, and it wasn't until the end of 2021 that I actively started looking for new music again. So, with that said, here is what I liked from 2021, along with a few other things that I missed since the last music list.

21 Pilots - Scaled and Icy

Brandi Carlile - In These Silent Days

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Every Time I Die - Radical

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I

Julien Baker - Little Oblivions

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Deafheaven - Infinte Granite

Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon

Black Crown Initiate - Violent Portraits of Doomed Escape (2020)

Svart Crown - Wolves Among the Ashes (2020)

Ageless Oblivion - Suspended Between Earth and Sky

Glass Animals - Dreamland (2020)

Missio - Can You Feel the Sun (2020)

Intellectual Humility

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/4/17989224/intellectual-humility-explained-psychology-replication?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=entry&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR11Zv5WglEUxaHmGRvHPtB-iCSIuhH16Yt5YiR9QwxkpchP6ZSUs68pZdM

Really interesting read, and very relevant to our times. Here's some highlights I felt were helpful:

“NOT KNOWING THE SCOPE OF YOUR OWN IGNORANCE IS PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION”

1. In order for us to acquire more intellectual humility, we all, even the smartest among us, need to better appreciate our cognitive blind spots. Our minds are more imperfect and imprecise than we’d often like to admit. Our ignorance can be invisible.
2. Even when we overcome that immense challenge and figure out our errors, we need to remember we won’t necessarily be punished for saying, “I was wrong.” And we need to be braver about saying it. We need a culture that celebrates those words.
3. We’ll never achieve perfect intellectual humility. So we need to choose our convictions thoughtfully.

And from here: https://cct.biola.edu/cultivating-humility-follow-we-know-part/

Are You Intellectually Humble? Questions for Personal Reflection

1. Even when you feel strongly about something, are you still aware that you could be wrong?
2. Do you trust that truth has nothing to fear from investigation?
3. When someone disagrees with your beliefs, do you view it as a personal attack? If so, why?
4. Think of a recent time you became defensive when someone disagreed with you. What may have been underlying your feelings in that moment?
5. Do you reserve the right to change your mind? Or do you feel weak or ashamed to change a strongly held opinion?
6. Is it difficult to respect people whose beliefs differ from your own?
7. What is a specific step you can take to better understand someone who disagrees with you on an important issue?
8. Do you feel insecure when others disagree with you?
9. Do you feel like you need to hide past errors in your thinking?
10. What would it take for you to feel more comfortable acknowledging to others when you’ve been wrong in your thinking?
11. Do you feel less worthy when you realize you’ve made a mistake in your thinking?
12. Do you approach others with the idea that you might have something to learn from them?
13. Are you open to learning new things every day? Even if it means changing previous ideas?

Ripping Apart Flat Earth Theory (also, it's not a theory as defined by scientific method)

The Tragedy of the Commons

Emergent Properties

Free speech for the dumb

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png

Optimistic Nihilism

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-macy-stafford/10-ways-to-salvage-a-bad-morning-before-parting-ways_b_7177542.html

10 Ways to Salvage a Bad Morning Before Parting Ways

By Rachel Macy Stafford

1. Notice the good — any and all good you can find — even if it is simply, “I am so glad to see your face this morning,” or, “You’ve always had a knack for unique clothing combinations!”

2. If someone is grumpy, let her do something you usually do, like pour the milk from a small pitcher, add the brown sugar to the oatmeal, or decorate a sticky note to put in a family member’s lunch box or briefcase.

3. Pull out a “When you were little...” story. A child’s image of himself tearing pancakes into itty-bitty pieces or calling strawberries “strawbabies” has the potential to bring a smile.

4. Open your arms. Don’t say anything. Just hold on.

5. Decide if it’s a battle worth fighting. If it isn’t, take a deep breath and move on. If it is, speak in a tone that can be heard. Listen in a way that conveys care and concern.

6. Release control of the situation with a peacemaking invitation, like: How would you do it? Show me.

7. Give two minutes. Sit beside him. Rub her back. Get at eye level. Giving two minutes won’t break the schedule, but it could make all the difference in someone’s day.

8. Be especially generous with forgiveness in the morning hour. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Can we start over?” Do-overs are a priceless gift that cost nothing but hold great value.

9. Think to yourself: That’s someone’s baby. That’s my baby. Seeing him or her as a human being who is learning and growing can offer a shred of patience and perspective to get you through a trying moment.

10. When a situation is quickly deteriorating, give yourself a three-second preview of what an angry, critical, or sarcastic response will do. Will it make the situation better or worse? A three-second pause can save a morning, spare some pain, and prevent regret.

On mornings that are not salvageable, remember this: Day after day, you provide countless doses of love without even thinking about it. That sacred collection of loving gestures far outweighs this morning’s clothing drama, burnt toast, and 7 a.m. meltdown. Remember: Love prevails over failures, flaws, and even disastrous mornings.

This is brilliant

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-udoewa/does-the-free-market-corrode_b_3844212.html

Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?

Yes, it does.

But there are a few problems with my answer. First, what is a free market? Second, what does corrode mean? Lastly, what is moral character?

First, let’s be honest. Theoretically, the free market is amoral. What makes it moral or immoral is the morality of the individual players in the free market. The free market is simply a marketplace or system in which buyers and sellers set their own prices based on competition, supply, and demand without state regulation or restriction. It is possible to experience moral or immoral outcomes in such a free market. However, the unregulated, ideal free market does not exist. Every actual “free” market system, today, exists within some regulatory context from state to state. So, for the purpose of this question, we will look at practical “free markets” which have “little” regulation, or at least relatively less regulation compared to socialism, communism, or considerably controlled forms of capitalism. On to our main question: Does the free market corrode moral character?

Economist Qingliang He uses China as an example of a country with an increasingly free market but with instances of declining moral order and business ethics while economist Jagdish Bhagwati cites Vietnam as an example in which “free” markets have led to instances of highly moral outcomes. Whom do we believe?

The question would be relatively easy to answer if all we needed were examples of two countries with free market systems in which country A has high corrosion of moral character and country B has low corrosion. If that were so, the answer would seem to be no: Free markets don’t corrode moral character. The major problem is that even if the free market does corrode moral character, there can be counteracting factors. What if the free market corrodes moral character and country B simply has an amazing, mandatory child, youth, and adult national service program that builds up moral character? The only way to truly test the question would be to run a tightly controlled statistical experiment in multiple societies in which you control for everything, only allowing the market system to differ (which naturally changes other things in society). How do you do that? Without such an experiment, it’s hard to say if other confounding factors are also affecting the moral character of country B or if another factor is affecting both the market system and moral character.

Instead of trying to prove causation which is very difficult, let’s focus on the practical, correlational question: Does moral character tend to erode in societies with free markets? Again, I say yes, but it depends on our next sub-questions: What does corrode mean, and what is moral character?

Much of the debate over the main question is settled when you define the time scale. If “corrode” means the erosion of moral character over a few years or in the first generation of a free market system, you might answer the main question with a resounding no: Free markets don’t corrode moral character. Look at the move from European feudalism or Japanese isolationism to their “free” market systems of today, you might suggest. And it’s true that in the first generation(s) of a free market system you do see individuals displaying good moral character through risk-taking, industriousness, forward-thinking, and perseverance. However, when someone pulls herself up by her bootstraps, makes a living for herself, and betters her life, those qualities do not always pass down to her children or progeny who are now born into families with much more disposable income, reserve capital, and wealth. The descendants do not necessarily have to work hard, take risks, or be innovative. Sociologist Daniel Bell noted the cultural contradiction of capitalism due to the cyclical decay in moral character after generations of wealth accumulation because incentives change through the generations. Some are rebellious, some resent the family wealth, others take wealth for granted, etc. When someone says that moral character has been built up in a particular society experimenting with a free market system, I ask, “Have you observed it long enough?” I’m interested in long-term effects on the society.

Still, no matter the time scale, the answer to the overall question depends on the final point: what is moral character? It all depends on your moral system as Ayaan Ali and Professor John Gray point out. On one hand, if freedom is the highest aim in your moral system, then a free-market system might be morally improving upon human character. Markets can improve certain morals. Markets are a means of social integration. People come together and interact, learning collaborative skills. It’s possible to learn empathy, form bonds, create trust, and experience solidarity. To be part of a market as a producer, you must work hard, take risks, be innovative, set visions, think ahead, stake out the playing field. It can develop within you a strong work ethic and increase your industriousness.

At the same time, other negative traits can be pronounced in a free market system. The gains and risks in the free market can be so high that people distrust one another, betray allies, and conceal plans. Pressure to succeed kicks in and we have extreme public examples of moral failures like Enron, the Great Recession, and the Madoff scandal. There are huge incentives and tremendous pressure to break the rules of moral conduct and then justify the breaking of that conduct just to reach the bottom line as Professor Michael Walzer explains.

However, even if it does corrode moral character, Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy says the free market is the best system we have: If the free market corrodes human character, other systems corrode it absolutely or to a greater extent. I don’t like this statement as an answer because the question is not relative. We are not trying to find out if the free market is the least bad of all options, we are only asking if it corrodes human character. If it does, we should improve upon it, look for a better alternative, or create a better system.

Still Henri-Levy’s answer does excite me because it gets to the heart of my answer. Free market apologists tend to criticise systems like communism on the basis of its communal corrosion of character. Implicitly they understand that there is such a thing as communal moral character. Critics like Levy and Garry Kasparov point to the experience of loss of aspiration and degradation of character due to the loss of freedom in authoritarian economic regimes: The USSR experienced communal terror and an entire culture in East Germany lost the ability to make decisions. Far from critiquing any individual loss, Levy and Kasparov are making statements about communal effects that trickle down to most citizens in the country. Criticisms of individual moral failures in authoritarian regimes are usually applied to corrupt officials or authoritarian leaders. The bulk of the critique is on the communal effects.

However, when we talk of the moral failures of free market systems, it is usually applied to individuals. Kay Hymowitz provides an example of a critique on communal character by noting the communal decline of the family and marriage in our post-marital society. Still usually, the critique is about individuals, individual freedoms, and individual mistakes. The communal critique is lost.

It’s not just that a single person, like Bernie Madoff, has an incentive to conceal, deceive, and steal to make his bottom line, but that in the same way, we do not call it communal stealing when money can be shifted from the poorer classes to the rich as in predatory lending (and now predatory microfinance in which organizations can charge 100 percent interest rates). As Michael Walzer explains, we regulate theft and extortion on individual levels but there are forms of market behavior which fall under extortion or theft (such as the ability of big business to unfairly influence the price of the goods they sell) which are not regulated or not regulated well enough. Entire pockets of society can lack access to markets or submarkets (like the health market) based on socioeconomic levels: They cannot even participate. These examples display a type of degradation of communal human character that I see, a type we do not name as readily as individual character mistakes and flaws, due to a love of individualism — the supremacy of individual freedom. What I look for, find beauty in, and prefer is individuality without individualism, a type of unity-in-community, being-in-interbeing, to use a Brian McLaren phrase. Without individualism, we are more than individuals, we are interdividuals (René Girard<). It’s this aspect which seems to be missing from our understanding of the effects of the free market. For me the identity of an individual is only defined within community, not in isolation. So communal character effects are prioritized for me; they influence individual moral action. And it is this tendency toward the corrosion of communal character in today’s actual free markets, that makes me answer the question yes.

Still, I do not necessarily advocate a different political economy. I actually do not know what system would be better, though I am willing to work with others to create one. Perhaps, a possible solution is more subtle than a change of systems. One of the communal moral corrosions that I see all around will help explain this — a lack of satisfaction.

I never have enough. Larger incomes demand larger expenses. I am always looking to the next promotion, the next salary increase, a better job, a bigger house — something else or something more that I don’t have that will satisfy me. We try to (temporarily) satisfy these cravings through various offerings: money, fame, power, sex, food, etc. But we still want more. Peter Rollins points out that some faith groups substitute God as another offering in the vending machine of (dis)satisfaction. However, the truly radical Christian move is to see God (as experienced through Christ) as destroying the entire vending machine of (dis)satisfaction. Instead of offering another (dis)satisfying option, in radical Christian theology, Christ can be seen as one who embraces fragility, brokenness, dissatisfaction, and vulnerability and invites us to do the same. Yet, there is a kernel of hope. It is in this embracing of brokenness and dissatisfaction that you find freedom, as you come alongside others who are suffering, simply be present, share yourself, and suffer with them; there is love. And where there is love, there is an experience of what Professor John Caputo calls the event of God.

Inside macroeconomic free market systems, I have met pockets of communities, today, that practice countercultural redistribution. Like a 1st century community recorded in Acts, there share everything they have and there is no one needy among them. Compare that with extreme economic examples: capitalism (great at production, poor at distribution) and communism (great at distribution, poor at production). What is striking is that ideal communism forces people to share when they don’t necessarily want to do so. Ideal capitalism gives people the freedom to share when they do not necessarily want to do so. These countercultural micro-communities stand at a strange contrast between the two ideal extremes because they show a people who are free to share and actually choose to share. They have not enacted a change in economic systems, they simply have a transformation of heart. So it is in these spaces between the margins in which I find hope. They possibly foreshadow a time, as Shane Claiborne says, when free market capitalism is obsolete and communism is unnecessary.

Why your ideology (and mine too) is a granfalloon

I often suffer existential crises, particularly regarding my belief system. I have, for most of my life, been pretty willing to ask questions of myself and others; to doubt and examine assumptions; to be a skeptic; to cherish the truth. It's probably why I was eventually attracted to getting a degree in philosophy, despite the perception that it's not useful.

The concept that hooked me was Kierkegaard's: passion in uncertainty. We are passionate about the things of which we are uncertain, the things we fear (to either come to pass or not come to pass). We are not passionate about the answer to a simple math problem or whether a bird outside ate breakfast this morning. The uncertain things we believe are often ludicrous, which can lead us into having to defend ludicrous things that may not have an easy resolution (or in some cases any proof whatsoever).

The solution lies in understanding the problem. We don't really live in a world where truth is cherished (or even matters). It's hard work and extremely uncomfortable to challenge your own beliefs (much less those of others). A few posts ago, I linked a great comic by The Oatmeal about belief, which I urge you to go read. And now, take the Kierkegaard's concept above, and it seems pretty easy to explain what is happening in our world.

Vonnegut's granfalloons are another way to explain human nature. If you aren't familiar, it is essentially what it is called when a group of people identify with each other based off of inconsequential and irrelevant details. For instance, liking the same book or TV show, being a fan of the same musician or sports team, and most dangerously to free thought, subscribing to a political or religious ideology. Or nationalism. I am not saying that politics and religion are inherently bad. But the phenomenon that occurs, is that once the granfalloon is formed and its members are identified, it starts to look at others outside the granfalloon as "Other" and "enemy". It over-simplifies the defining characteristics of the Other in the same way it has over-simplified the defining characteristics of its own granfalloon. And then the arguing starts. Followed by words and acts of hatred. All based off of inconsequential details and connections that aren't really connections.

So, back to my latest crisis of faith. Like many others in the country right now, I am gravely concerned about what is going on in the world, in our country, in our discourse, and just basically in the way in which we treat each other. Whatever is going on politically is not working. And yet each side argues that it's the other's fault (because there are only two sides in the U.S.; by the way, a fallacy of false alternatives occurs whenever only two options present themselves, when in reality, there are many more available). Each side holds the entire populace hostage in its adherence to its identified ideology. This is not a new problem, meaning it is not solely the fault of the current administration. I'd argue that we have the current administration as a direct result of the existence of this problem, which ironically, has amplified the problem to near unbearable levels.

The ideology holds certain values and certain things to be true, and they come as a package deal. If you claim to be a part of that granfalloon, then you have to hold all of those values and beliefs. After that, critical thought and empathy go out the window. All you have to do is go down the check boxes to see where you are supposed to fall on an issue. Problem is, as over-complicated as we like to make life, this approach is too simple. There's no nuance. The ideology supersedes the individuals of which it is comprised. The individual is no longer represented. It's why lifelong Democrats are pissed and disappointed in their own party, and why Republicans have split into different factions over the past decade or so.

If you're starting to think the solution is sounding like a path to becoming a Libertarian, I explored that too. Problem is, for every Libertarian you meet, you will either find another set of dogmas, or you will find drastically different shades of Libertarian. All will claim to be the only right way. There's a lot to admire in the ideology of the Libertarian, but at best it is an unrealistic thought experiment; an ideal that ironically only works if everyone were Libertarian (which is antithesis to its core tenet of individual freedom). It elevates the individual so much that it is hard to square with any kind of compassionate belief system. It ignores the social contract, and by extension social determinants that foster inequality. It ignores that the free market is a nice idea, but that in reality, will not exist because of inequality; because those already with power and money will almost always do whatever it takes to keep it--and since we live in a world with limited resources, that means others will continue to go without. We can't realistically end all suffering, but I fail to see how the Libertarian ideology won't simply devolve into Might Makes Right. Either that, or Libertarians are really optimistic about human nature.

We have to treat each other better. We have to develop empathy. We need to enter into meaningful discourse. We need to learn from each other, and listen. Hearts and minds are not changed (in a positive way) by violence. That just leads to fear and more violence. And fear is a tool to keep people from actual liberty.

It might sound stupid, but I always think about the Federation from Star Trek. In this fictional thought experiment, not only have different nations overcome their different ideologies, but different planets, races, species have aligned for the betterment of all. So whenever I see Nationalism rising back up in the U.S. rhetoric, in European countries wanting to leave the EU; when I see borders becoming more important than globalism, those things are a step backwards from the potential future we are shown in Star Trek.

You can't stop progress. Technology. An international global economy. Outdated manufacturing and other diminishing blue collar jobs are not coming back. Desperately trying to hold onto to ideologies of the past, be they religious, anti-science and technology, socioeconomic, or simply not being able to get over that different kinds of people are actually people is only going to prolong everyone's suffering.

Hope in darkness

" People are people, and we are the way we are. We’re all supposed to get along, and diversity should be appreciated fully in the light of unity. That’s peace on earth, and there should be room for everyone."--David Lynch