Stoic Observations

I think we together are about to crack social media’s commercial focus on populism. I have just broken ground on a dream I have had for more than a decade. The book is called Anathem, the author is Neal Stephenson and the way I talk about it is he tells the story of a desolate future Earthlike planet which has literally descended into Idiocracy.

In the news, a Senator Lindsey Graham died. 71 is not that old, but 35 years in Congress is really not democratic. It turns out that he was one of the good guys on cursory looks. But South Carolina is what it is and it’s not in my responsibility to care. I wasn’t always absent from domestic politics, in fact some of you old hands may remember me as Cobb. In light of this guy and the fiasco of Graham Platner, instead of just shaking my head, I thought I’d offer up one of the last political benchmarks.

If you press me hard enough, my soft inner filling oozes out, like honey from a plastic bear. That’s a sentence it takes a human to interpret, but not really for long. The bots are coming and there is a tremendous amount of capital their implementors are going to have to recover, what with all of the new data centers and high priced Genius they’ll have to pay. In the meantime, there are interesting humans to meet. But are we really interesting, or do we live in ill-defined bubbles?

This is a return to form, and my old buddy Marc Danziger will probably be jealous. If you haven’t seen me have these kinds of conversations before, you can check out my American Wag YouTube playlist here. But if you hang around long enough I’ll end up bringing all of them here. A couple of notes. The dark poet I was thinking about is Paul Kingsnorth. My personality doesn’t allow me to be a doomsayer, not to say that he is, but I tend more to be a staunch defender and let the devil take the hindmost.

The original conversation (which I am trying to have more with actual commenters here) that I had with Claude is extended as I am now reading: Liberalism And Its Discontents — Francis Fukuyama Plutarch’s Lives — Plutarch and plan to read up on James Madison and what it took to write a constitution the first time around. It is in Fukuyama that I am looking to find threads of philosophical and political thought consonant with what I am hearing from ARC, one of the smartest groups around.

Stoic Observations Podcast Discovery, humor & reason without ideological baggage. Discovery, humor & reason without ideological baggage.

When I was just turning 30 I had become bored with many of my black friends. It was a kind of black fatigue almost nobody in America understands, it was the tedium of bourgie black success. At the time I was one of the 1% of black Americans living in Hermosa Beach, California, the beach volleyball capital of the world and home to a zipcode described by the demographers at Claritas as “money and brains”.

These days I’m so deep into agentic programming that I need AI to tell me how much AI I use. Not only that, I’ve upgraded my CV precisely under some AI instructions to tell me exactly how much. Here’s the new page. By the way, you can see that with over 700 git repos to my credit, I’ve gotten around. So when people ask me if I’ve done xyz, I need to say something more specific than probably. You may remember a product called Google Desktop.

For probably more than a decade, I have been thinking about society in terms of three functional classes, Rulers, Geniuses and Peasants. That originated in my observation that “the broad American middle class” operated in a particular way with respect to power. We believe that it has more than it does and we misjudge the way its power actually works.

One of my favorite movies was the Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I also hated it because I never found a woman like Sabina. Or maybe every woman was Sabina and I didn’t recognize it. I find it almost unbearable to try to remember what that film meant to me except that I was jealous of the man for his exquisite lover. Nobody in my neighborhood even knew the film existed, those that did couldn’t imagine themselves anywhere but where they were.