Tab Clearing...

• Chris Arnade walks the Faroe Islands.


• The Throwing Madonna.


• A Rape in Cyberspace.

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Tab Clearing...

• "These aren't my pants."


• Looking at your old photos.


• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

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Panopticon

"I used to think telepathy would be cool, but then Mark Zuckerberg gave it to me."

All that has changed in the past decade. In the same way that electricity went from a luxury enjoyed by the American élite to something just about everyone had, so, too, has fame, or at least being known by strangers, gone from a novelty to a core human experience. The Western intellectual tradition spent millennia maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private—embedding it in law and politics, norms and etiquette, theorizing and reinscribing it. With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.

Tab Clearing...

• It's funny 'cause it's true.


• The "My Bad $20".


• The Gun Culture 2.0 blog turned twelve, which is a lot in blog years.

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Re-Wilding the Internet

It didn't used to be like this...

"If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural."

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US v. EU

Good post from Chris Arnade...

"Every few weeks Twitter gets caught up in a fight when someone proclaims that Europe is better than the US, or vice-versa1. I usually stay away from these dust ups because it’s an ignorant debate. The question is badly defined, subjective, and impossible to answer, so the fights devolve into two groups talking past each other, until someone eventually drags out a picture of Breezewood, and then for all effective purposes it’s over2.

To the pro-Europe side, Europe is a cornucopia of crime-free, gothic-cathedral-having cities with great public transportation, quaint row homes, and sensible policies on guns, health care, and child care. America, in contrast, is a dystopian landscape of depressing suburbs with oversized cars, soul-sucking strip malls, and people shooting up drugs and each other.

To the pro-US side America is a land of hard-working, money-making, independent-minded people who hate being told what to do, especially by mid-wit bureaucrats with zero appreciation that human flourishing requires true and almost absolute freedom. Europe, by contrast, is an impoverished, crowded, backward, continent determined to stay impoverished, crowded, and backward because of a stubborn and stupid commitment to high taxes, high regulation, and low entrepreneurialism."

The title is self-admitted clickbait, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

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Casualty Vampires

A writer on the death of Vice:

"I feel like running the very famous and cool brand Vice – especially with how little they paid people – would be a slam dunk self sustaining business if only 45 people at the top doing nothing weren’t making like $19 million a year.

The death of Vice is the same story as the death of every other company in this country. It's a story of extraction of wealth at all costs for the few with malign indifference for the workers who actually gave the thing its (vastly overinflated) value in the first place."

It happens in all kinds of industries now. Buy a thing, slash costs to boost profits, extract as much value as you can, sell off any parts of the organization you think you can make a buck off of & outsource and/or offshore their functions, and if you can't find a buyer for the husk, just toss it. We've seen it happen with everything from Remington to Sports Illustrated. It's happening in slow motion with Boeing right in front of our eyes.

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Tab Clearing...

• Basically, nowadays Twitter is just 4chan but with a constant barrage of ads for crypto schemes and janky Chinese consumer goods, except 4chan doesn't keep pestering you to give them eight bucks a month.


• Flaco the owl's glorious year of freedom has come to a sad ending.


• Some men just want to watch the world burn.

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A Jog Around the Blogs

• Bobbi goes on a Prohibition-era wikiwander...


• "No longer a skull full of mush."


• Dodging the cynicism bullet, so far.

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Always a Student

Yesterday afternoon Bobbi had to run an errand, so I rode along and while we were out, her car swung into the parking lot of Half Price Books as though on autopilot. 

I picked up copies of Humans of New York and Peace, Love and Pepper Spray to add to my small collection of photo books. Also, I picked up Getting Your Shot: Stunning Photos, How-to Tips, and Endless Inspiration From the Pros and Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People.

While I'm not what you'd call a professional photographer, I have been paid for a picture or two at this point, and I've learned along the way. Mostly what I've learned is how much more there is to learn. That's the flip side of Dunning-Kruger: once you fall off the other side of Mount Stupid, you have an endlessly long slog up the Slope of Knowledge out of the Valley of Despair.

That goes for any skill. Greg Ellifritz is a widely respected trainer in the world of firearms and personal protection, and he writes:

"I think it is the job of a professional instructor to remain up to date in their fields of endeavor. I won’t stop taking classes as long as I am teaching these skill sets. I vow to never become one of those instructors whose peak instructional training is a weekend NRA class.

I think I owe it to my students to show them that I am continuing to do the work."

One of the meta-instructive things at a group event like TacCon or the old Paul-E-Palooza was you got to see which instructors were out there taking classes from other presenters in their free time. When someone decides they're too cool to learn anything new, it makes me question the value of their teaching.

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As Time Goes By...

When I was in my twenties, my big source of disappointment at sunrise on Saturday was that the party had wound down and it was time to go home and get some shut-eye.

Nowadays my big disappointment at sunrise on Saturday is that I only get crosswords in the NYT and the WaPo, because The Atlantic doesn't do a Saturday crossword.

Tempus fugit.

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Odds, Stakes, and Realistic Threats

From an article by David Merrill about using NFA items for home defense:

"Unless you’re involved with the illicit narcotics trade and living in a trap house, or your place is home to an underground gambling ring, the number-one threat won’t be armed men breaking in raid-style, but instead theft — people breaking in when you aren’t home and burgling your stuff. When we talk about home-defense firearms, there’s a balance to be struck; you want the firearm to stay safe from tiny hands and sticky fingers while still being easy to access."

From a piece by Greg Ellifritz on threat assessment:

"Have you ever considered the difference between being in a dangerous situation and being in one where you have limited response options?

I think a lot of us in the gun/self-protection world get those feelings confused."

That post linked above is one that a lot of the "rawr I'll never go anyplace where I can't carry a gun rawr" crowd need to read and heed. As Melody Lauer put it, “Don’t let your desire to protect your life keep you from living a life worth protecting.”

Remember: Millions of people go unstrapped yet remain unclapped every day. The gun is just a tool, and one with a very limited and specific use case, at that. If you need it, odds are good you've probably already made some mistakes. If I had to choose between perfect, omniscient situational awareness or perfect, turboninja pistol skills, I'd choose the former every time and just nope on out of situations where I'd need the latter.

Class Warfare

If you've read much Peter Turchin... and you should ...then you're familiar with his concept of "elite overproduction".

In Kevin D. Williamson's latest (paywalled) newsletter, he gives a good example of what the results of "elite overproduction" actually look like at the street level:

"As a cynic might expect, the credentializing and professionalizing of these institutions has not always led to excellence: In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, reporters and editors were in the main people who had not graduated from any college with any kind of undergraduate degree, much less one in journalism. In this, the toilet age of American newspaper journalism, promising prospects and leaders are expected to have graduate degrees in journalism from Columbia, Northwestern, or Penn. Dozens of big tech firms started by dropouts and uncredentialed upstarts celebrate the romance of their garage days but would need an extraordinary reason to even consider hiring someone like one of their founders for the most ordinary job, while the HR departments are barnacled over by otherwise unemployable grievance-studies graduates. Public libraries that were run for generations by volunteers or by bookish generalists now are in the care of people with advanced degrees in something called library science, under the management of whom our libraries have been turned into makeshift mental wards and masturbatoria for vagrants making the most of the public internet connections."

(Williamson signing on at The Dispatch is what pushed me into subscribing.)

Staying Well...

Another good episode from Tactical Tangents:

"Wellness isn’t just a soft and fuzzy term bandied about in the Human Resources department. Healthier, happier employees perform better, and in professions where the rubber meets the road, wellness is tactical. The trite concept of Work/Life balance isn’t so trite when lives are on the line. How do you keep yourself all happy and centered and still put in the grind to do the work? Listen to this episode to hear some ideas."

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Re-Fragmentation

Once upon a time, America had three TV networks. It was a fluke of history that lasted maybe a few decades, from the mid-Fifties to the late Eighties and the rise of cable, but for that period of time, we had something very close to a national monoculture. Show up at work in the morning and everybody would have probably seen the same TV shows last night. Further, there were a handful of big national news magazines... monthlies or weeklies ...that everyone read, and blockbuster movies tended to linger a lot longer in theaters in those pre-cable and VHS days, ensuring that most everyone got a chance to see them.

The era of cable and DVDs and the dawn of the internet caused a certain amount of fragmentation, but some coherence came back with the dawn of the big social media sites.

Half everybody was on Facebook and/or Twitter. Increasingly, though, people are fleeing to smaller, also siloed, alternatives that are safe spaces for their particular politics; Web 2.0 versions of Web 1.0 titans like FreeRepublic and Democratic Underground. Even if you're still on the big sites, their algorithms are so finely honed that they can let you silo yourself as effectively as if you'd migrated.

"The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture."

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Saturday Morning Surfing...

• Really good profile piece on Robert Downey Jr. at Vanity Fair.


• Good news! Mayim Bialik may be smart and a good actress but she was a terrible Jeopardy! host.


• I was not expecting to find a piece on my friend Bob Owens at The Atlantic. I can tell that the writer was doing his best to be fair, but he came into the story front-loaded with way too many biases to see past them.

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QotD: Skilled Trades Edition...

"The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." -John Gardner

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QotD: Filters Edition...

From Ben Dreyfuss's Substack, "Calm Down Ben" (which is paywalled but has a free seven-day trial):

"If you have a thought that you would share in person at a party to casual acquaintances, and you have the time and cell reception, you should share it online. Don’t worry about it. Just go. Chase it down a hole. Riff in public and evolve in public. Do not worry about the fact that some of these thoughts will be stupid because everyone has stupid thoughts.

(If you have evil thoughts—like, say Osama bin Laden is good—you probably shouldn’t share them for your own career, but I think the world is better if you share them. At least we know! People who have strong filters and only share what they think “the room wants” could be thinking anything! They could be cannibals. They could be witches. Hate me or love me, but I have no thoughts that I think are Too Hot For Twitter. My worst thoughts are out there.)"

I tend to agree. I do prefer it when unsavory jackholes and complete lunatics skyline themselves right up front, rather than keeping their whackitude under a lid and only let it leak out at an uncomfortable moment.

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Command and Control

Another good podcast from the guys at Tactical Tangents that has applicability outside the LE/.mil fields. Anybody in a supervisory or managerial role can benefit from this stuff.

No team in law enforcement is composed of robotic textbook-following automatons, nor would we want it to be, if we’ve ever found ourselves at 2MPH over the limit. But when a worst-case incident unfolds, we want every first responder to make the right decision at the speed of life, because in those incidents seconds often equal victims. How can we raise the lowest common denominator, so our people make the right decisions quickly without rushing to failure?

In this episode Mike and Jim talk about command and control, and teaching decision-making skills to team members. In this way, when everything hits the fan, the right decisions get made fast, and get made at the right level. There’s a reason for supervisors, commanders, and leaders, but it’s important to know when to let subordinates make decisions. Not every incident is The Big One, but nobody’s ready for The Big One if they haven’t been taught in the small ones.

This pic of Chuck at TacCon '17 doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the podcast, he just looks all command-'n'-controlly here.

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QotD: Pot Of Message Edition...

From an article by George Packer at The Atlantic:

"Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art."

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