Comments (0) My fascination with the tribemen on the ground eventually led me to to this site:
http://savageminds.org/2008/07/01/are-there-uncontacted-tribes-the-short-answer-no/
As is typical on the internet, people are arguing about words instead of doing something proactive. More harm than good? I think not. Sounds like a little bit of professional jealousy and nitpicking if you ask me.
Slate has a very good series of articles about income inequality and the fate of the middle class in America:
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/
I think they are leaving out something very important.
American top marginal tax rate:
Even though that paints an incomplete picture of tax burden, the correlation between the tax rate and the ‘great divergence’ of classes in the US is hard to miss.
Then there is this one – American tax rates since 1960, showing an increase in taxes on the middle class and a drastic decrease in taxes for the wealthy:
Basically, either intentionally or by accident the middle class was engineered out of existence.
I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.
I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.
If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem. Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent in the world.
I’ve noticed something that may or may not be happening, and what I’ve noticed is this: In the ‘digital age’, culture hits but doesn’t stick. The artifacts are ephemeral, not only in their physicality but also in their cultural presence. People experience them, enjoy them, then the novelty wears off and they abandon them – and it leaves no lasting resonance with the predominant, ‘mainstream’ culture. Media, political events, trends in fashion or religion – they all seem to come and go without making much of an impact on people’s way of thinking or doing as they did in previous decades, not much of a dent in the edifice of the ‘overculture’.
If my hunch is right, I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening. One is that if something has no money potential it doesn’t get the investment it needs to make it enduring in the public mind. Another might be that there are fewer hard and lasting artifacts being created, no discs to transmit culture in a concrete way, it becomes like TV where the hardware is the artifact and the shows are emanations from the artifact – the screens and players are totemistic, the ‘content’ disposable because it has lost it’s object-ness. Clothing etc., is of lower quality so those artifacts are of a more ephemeral nature as well. Combined with the dynamic of speed – not having time to set in, develop and become ritualized the culture is discarded before it can make and impact, these characteristics create a perfect storm where we forget our collective culture as it happens.
Google Instant is the new Google default interface that starts showing results as you type. Just in case you really don’t know what you’re looking for. Apparently they block out a lot of words.
http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/
Personally I turned that crap off first thing. The page changing every time I hit a letter was annoying and why do i want results before I enter my query? I could see it being useful if a) your most sophisticated query is the name of a celebrity, a movie, a politician, or a celebrity politician on a TV show, and b) you are driving a car in the rain and really need to know what Lindsey Lohan is up to.
(Originally from August 2007)
Well today we were down in Goshen Pass for a little natural suana and swim, and as we were walking down the stone steps to Indian Hole, we saw this guy fall off the trail as he passed under some trees. He was walking with his friend and then he just sort of tumbled off of the dirt, right into the thicket.
We kind of skirted around him, grinning uneasily at the sight of a forty year old bald man so drunk he couldn’t walk, and his suntanned buddy smiling back at us, revealing a tooth-hole where his front teeth should have been. Wow, these guys looked like they were accident prone.
Anyway we went and sat in the rapids and had some lunch, then this dude on an intertube floated by, he said there was a guy who had fallen backwards off the steps and had a big old hole in his head now, with a piece of flesh hanging out of the hole, and his friend had driven him to the rescue squad. Wow! We knew immediately who it was.
So we finished our lunch and wanted to go to a different place to swim, so we started walking back up to the road. Right there on the path, right by the steps, was the piece of that man’s head, the piece that had covered the hole. It was red and bloody on the bottom, there was some gray bone jutting out, and half of the flesh on top was bare and the other half was covered in mostly-bald-man stubble.
Wow! How could he have left it behind?
Should we have picked it up and tried to give it to him? What would you do?
(I think this is originally from 2006? I added some youtibe videos at the end.)
I watched ‘Baron Munchausen’ again today and think it’s the most relentlessly optimistic movie I’ve ever seen. Yet it was rejected by the industry and audiences alike when it was released. At this point I have to say that says more about audiences and industry than it does about the film.
I saw Brazil on it’s eventual release to theaters, half the theater walked out before the film was over. I remember one guy was so disturbed he was almost shouting -- “I aint ever seen a movie that stupid in my whole life”. I was transfixed.
Gilliam said once IIRC that the film was about what happens if you try to stay a small wheel in the machine, you get gobbled up. I don’t think of this kind of message as pessimistic any more than Orwell, it’s more of an optimists tradition of trying to hold up a mirror to point out something kind of ugly. That’s an optimists preoccupation because he’s frustrated with the world the way it is and would like to see it different.
Honestly though the reason people walked out, I think, is because they were confused by the presentation as much as anything, and the abstract message wasn’t one they were prepared to recieve. Top Gun was more what they expected from a movie. I’d think of it more as just not having the language to get the film, and some not really wanting to embrace new language. Although it was such a beautiful film in the visual sense, I dont see how people could fail to be moved.
I updated this post, about the structural and policy changes in the government that came about because of the Hart-Rudman Commission. Obama has continued to implement many of the suggestions of the commission above and beyond the major changes that Bush executed.
Americans are funny. I’ll never understand the nostalgia for the Great Depression, but the Waltons ran for ten years in the 70s. What’s the thinking, “Oh, wasn’t it great when we were dirt poor and everyone was white as lillies, ‘member the outhouse by candlelight when we’d have to chase the racoons out… a real family time, just us and jes-us.”
That’s why all the rich old white people put miscellaneous country looking things on their porches and turn rusty wheelbarrows into planters. Will plastic lawn ornaments be the ‘Americana’ of tomorrow?
That teeter totter in the front yard, that’s really an oil pump. Harder, kids! we got to drill ourselves out of this here depression, you ungrateful bastards. We got to buy soap.
Little house on the prarie took place during the ‘Long Depression’ after 1873. Times were tough, we had to wear the same outfits all the time so you know there were no child labor laws, we need them to make all the soap. Work it harder, Nellie.
Yay! Let’s get them tea partiers in office so we can go back to the good times.
I haven’t had TV for a while and I’m starting to really miss Macneil-Lehrer.
The Web is OK for news, but while one might think that news sources would become more diversified because of the free movement of information, the exact opposite has happened. The print news sources don’t make much money, they just put the AP and Reuters stuff out there more or less unedited, and people copy it over to their blogs and opine about it. It’s all freely copied and ubiquitous, and it’s even more centralized and homogeneous than before. Website loyalty comes from whichever site has the editorials one agrees with.
The internet is the ultimate perfect market, and in a perfect market, wealth flows toward the ‘middle’, towards those who already have wealth, and is accumulated by fewer and fewer people. The same things happens with whatever goods you are talking about, including information.
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