TQ White II

I want to note first, that I have no thought to contradict the current edition of 'Stoic' ideas that are giving people comfort these days. Maxims cherry-picked from Marcus Aurelius Meditations are mostly perfectly good ideas, if taken out of context. My interest is in understanding my opinion of Stoicism as a technical philosophy and why I have, on that level, a generally bad opinion of it.

Also worth note is that Marcus Aurelius was the last in a series of four or five important Stoics. Zeno and Epictetus are the two others who influence my thinking most. (Though Seneca, another important Stoic is interesting in that he was tutor to Nero.) They varied significantly in their interpretations of Stoicism.

I am correct in my recollection of the fundamental Stoic reliance on God as a motivating concept. Though the Stoics were (like me) materialists believing the opposite of Plato's notion that the real reality is the ideas that occur in you mind, somewhat inspired by the information of your senses. The materialists consider the world to be physical and our perceptions to be indicative of what is really happening. (Eg, the mishapen circle we draw is more real than the ideal, mathematical one we imagine and use for our geometry).

For Stoics, God is the soul of the physical world with most of the attributes of the rest of the Gods. For them, virtue is obeying the laws of that God/nature, whatever those are. Zeno and Epictetus took this to the extreme of considering anything that distracted from behaving virtuously to be anti-virtuous and thereby actually seeking discomfort. So, for them, and this is where I start to be annoyed, comfort and pleasure are to be avoided and love for others is no virtue.

It has the famous idea, inspiration to Aurelius and the modern maxims, that the good life of virtue is entirely internal to the person, ie, one's thoughts. The quip has been made that a Stoic could be happy on the rack, under torture, if he retains his virtue. They hold that Socrates cheerfully choosing death rather than recant his philosophy is the ultimate hero. A good Stoic is not troubled by the death of, say one of his children since that external event is no obstacle to this sort of virtue.

The way that the Stoics got to the idea that the only virtue is (put over simply) good thinking is that they believed in determinism. Fundamentally (which I mean literally to distinguish from the nicer ideas in pop culture today), the Stoics thought that God created the world for an inscrutable reason and that our actions were merely motions of the cogs. It is true that they also considered humans to be God's purpose but that didn't make our will any more free.

Every doctrine has stupid crap like that and I am happy to overlook it. My real beef with the Stoics is the passivity it suggests. It turns out that Aurelius was king in a bleak time (war, pestilence, earthquake, insurrection). Much of the point of the Meditations (written as a diary, not for publication, and which I have not read) seems to be the account of his ways of enduring life in a difficult time, ie, obeying the will of God (in a deterministic universe where free will is not a thing).

As Bertrand Russell characterizes it, "When the Stoic philosopher is thinking of himself, he holds that happiness and all other worldy so-called goods are worthless; he even says that to desire happiness is contrary to nature, meaning that it involves lack of resignation to the will of God." 

Stoicism, then, provides a way to live with adversity and offers no guidance about how to avoid it or to make it better. This is appealing, of course, when times are difficult. I like the idea of controlling one's internal state to feel more comfortable but, when choosing a philosophy, I prefer one that offers ideas for a life that is better.

TURNS OUT THAT working with a bunch of people doing crimes in order to gain a benefit is a separate crime all on its own. 

"they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity"

The indictment lists 161 criminal acts, many by Trump himself, to support the claim. Fani documented phone calls and meetings and emails and actions and speeches where Trump and his gang worked together (as an enterprise) to convince officials to illegally change the outcome of the election.

I read the entire indictment, all 98 pages, and Fani didn't shrink from her duty. She dug out every single outrage, documented it in detail and charged Trump and company with racketeering. She also charged them with 41 of the crimes separate from the racketeering charge. We finally have an official accounting of Donald Trump's crimes.

A friend praised an article in The Atlantic magazine. He quotes...

Brooks is a simpering boob. Atlantic won't let me read the whole article, HERE, (and, since it's David Brooks, I should thank them; it's bad enough I have to see him in the NY Times) so I can only respond to your quotation. I do not share your admiration for it. I mean, "fill a hole in his soul"? Who says that kind of thing? In 2023, who writes articles about peoples' souls?

(Obviously, this is a guest editorial. I post it here so I can see it whenever I want.)

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. 

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.

So, I admit to being a dope. It's inescapable from the lack of insight I live with. But, this is a new low for me. 

I have had a Taylor Swift week. I watched her Reputation concert the other day, amazing. Tonight I watched documentary about her (Netflix, terrific). I have been a fan of hers forever but in a distant way. She’s not really talking to me but I enjoy her quality, perceptiveness and professionalism. I think she is this era's Madonna, a truly excellent artist.

This documentary told me about her journey. She had a huge turning point when she fought back at that guy who put his hand up her skirt at a photo shoot on Colorado. If you haven’t listened to her song, The Man, hurry up. She explains that she was galvanized by the experience, horrified at the realization that she only got justice because she had "seven witnesses and a photograph" and even then, she had to fight to be believed.

Now she is a modern female Neil Young writing intense, sophisticated political songs for the resistance aimed at young people, her incredibly devoted fans. She has a bunch of songs that are knife sharp but the one that strikes me most is this one, Only the Young, an urgent and, if her explanation in the documentary is to be believed, intentional call to arms. She makes clear that salvation is only going to happen if young people stand up for change with determination and resilience.

Dig the video. Listen to her songs. I think about the hundred thousand kids a week (or however often her current mega show, the Eras Tour, happens) hearing her exhortation. You see the concert footage and those kids recite her lyrics like religion. It gives me a small bit of hope.

Watch her HERE.

There is almost certainly intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Probably lots of it. Also, UFOs are bunk.

If there are, say, a million species that could build spaceships, that would average out to one every 1.3 x 10^4 light years if the universe was only one dimension. Since it's not, it comes out to, I guess, something like one every 1.44 x 10^8 cubic light years.

Now suppose they developed interstellar travel, and they could afford to send a hundred ships cruising to see what's what, knowing of course that it would be thousands of years before they found out what they learned (say everyone but us lives a really long time). If they sent them out at their equators, every three degrees, by the time they had traveled just one light year, they would be separated from each other by approximately 3.6 x 10^11 miles. That's a very, very large gap in the search pattern.

So, they aren't going to get here by accident and certainly not the several different kinds the conspiracy people envision. How about detecting us somehow and coming here specifically?

The strongest radio station I ever heard of was WGN. It was, I think, fifty thousand watts. Let's pretend that the entire earth is fifty thousand watts going in all directions, all the time.

Radio waves get weaker as they travel by something called the inverse square law (basically, the energy spreads out into a sphere, and the inverse square is the math that describes that).

At one light year distant, the inverse square equation looks like 5.0 x 10^4 / 3.6 x 10^26, ie 10^-22 or .00000000000000000000001 watts. I'm not even sure if that is one whole photon.

Suffice to say that you wouldn't notice it with the most sensitive detector ever made. And, that's only if the aliens happen to be only one light year away and if they happen to have their super-sensitive radio telescope pointed exactly at us.

How likely is that? Space is really big, and we are really small, so the precision of the aim required to see us is insane, and the numbers are too. Riffing off the example of spaceships, if they put one of their super-duper radio telescopes every one degree around their planet, that would take 65 thousand of them, and it would have the same problem as spaceships. 

Suppose the aliens are around Earth's closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri. Around 4 light years from here. That means there would be a gap of 4 x 10^11 miles between each telescope's sight lines (a tenth of a light year, give or take). But, it's worse because this is outer space. For each telescope, there would be a region of 16*10^22 square miles in which we could be missed. And, that is for the closest star.

Bottom line, even if interstellar travel weren't out of the question, it would take an insane stroke of luck on the order of winning the big lottery a thousand times in a row for them to find us.

Have I mentioned this already? Apologies if I did but it tells of an important data point. It turns out that measuring both successful and unsuccessful cohorts, they find that there is no important difference in the quality of the decisions they make. The canard that poor people should just decide to do the right things and stop doing the wrong things is simply wrong. 

The first amendment has become as dangerous and stupid as the second one. Obviously, the founders never wanted to protect the right of mass shooters to use automatic weapons. It is a gross, willful misinterpretation to say it does.

HERE

'Total Control' by The Motels showed up in a tv show last night. Today I thought to take a train down memory lane. The album was pretty good. Not quite what I remembered but, what is?