RW128 - Episode 128

This week Dan and John talk about:

John Trying to sell his GMC RV (GMC RV)
Dan’s recording setup (Podcasting)
Dan’s granddad listening to the radio in a jar (Dan Benjamin)
The march of technology

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

Dan's iPad holder for his rower (Dan Benjamin)
John's Motorcycle trip (Motorcycle)
Soulmates (Philosophy)
Feeling responsible to do something about climate change (Philosophy)
Baseball-hats and sports logos (Sports)
Progressive Metal (Music)

The show title refers to the fact that this is the 128th episode of the show. It has not been referenced during the show and it seems as if Dan couldn't come up with a title because of the very serious topics.

John is opening the show in a neat voice, one of the many voices in his file folder of voices. He is no longer congested, but it is all a put-on in the manner of the voice. The voice is a little bit Rod Serling, but not Clint Eastwood, or Ace Ventura Pet Detective. Dan is not sure if he likes it.

Not a lot is new. The same as usual!

Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.

Dan’s recording setup (RW128)

A lot of the time when John is ready to record, he will message Dan in the Skype app, but Dan will not see that because of the way he is set up from the old days. A billion years ago he did a lot of shows with multiple guests at the same time, panel shows with at least one or two and up to six other people on a show. He used a mixer before he upgraded to an Apollo and he would connect all the inputs as if the people were right there in the studio. Instead of having human beings talking into the microphones and plugging them into the mixer, he had ancient Mac Minis he got second hand and he plugged the audio in and out from the mixer into each of those. For each guest who wasn’t physically here, Dan would run Skype on one of these dedicated Mac Minis.

Dan connects to those machines remotely, launches Skype, makes the connection and he will hear John in his headphone and microphone, but nothing is going on on the local computer in front of him. Only when he remotes to those machines he can see the screens in a window on his main computer. When John messages Dan in Skype, he doesn’t see or hear that unless he happens to have already connected to that machine, whereas John is probably running Skype like a normal human. There is probably not a huge advantage doing it the way Dan is still doing it except that the Apollo has those really great plug-ins built into it and Dan can do real-time compression, noise gate and EQ on John in real time, which saves a ton of time in post-production.

John does not record his end and send it to Dan, but Dan records everything. John does 4 podcasts now and he records two of them locally and two of them over Skype. A long time ago people seemed really concerned about audio quality in podcasting, but Merlin and John bucked that trend pretty hard and Merlin just recorded John on Skype. There are still people who are bothered by the sound quality, but Dan finds it usually pretty good. On a very rare occasion there might be some artifact and there have only been a couple times when Dan had to actually edit a part out or where some content got missed, but it has happened.

There is a lot less dynamic range over Skype than if John would record it and send Dan his recording. John certainly could start doing it now that he is set up to do it, although it is not even really an extra step beyond it just being an extra step. To Dan it doesn’t matter if he had to combine the recordings, but maybe they should release the good version to the Patreon supporters? Dan could intentionally lower the quality of the non-Patreon version to 50k with artifacts added and they would both sound like they were talking into a tin can for those who really miss the 1930s and 1940s.

Dan’s granddad listening to the radio in a jar (RW128)

Dan’s granddad had a crystal radio and they would put the speaker into a jar which would help amplify the sound. In the evenings they would gather around the jar as a family and listen to the radio (Dan told that story also in RW106). Both John’s mother and father sat around the radio at night with their fathers, but Dan’s people are from Pennsylvania and they did things differently up in the Appalachians. Maybe they couldn’t afford an actual radio with a real speaker.

It is weird to have seen the birth of radio, automobiles, computers, the Internet, all of this stuff that we have now in a single lifetime! Dan's and John's kids are born in a time where iPhones, iPads and the presence of the internet is ubiquitous. The idea of a world without it seems bizarre to them. How did you watch stuff on TV if you couldn’t just pick the thing you wanted? They just watched whatever they were lucky enough that came on the TV until they eventually got a VCR, then they could kind of choose.

The march of technology (RW128)

(this segment starts at 17:54 after the first ad-read)

John’s dad was about 85 years old when he moved into an assisted living facility where everybody else was also in their 80s and 90s. He was born in 1921 and there were Model Ts, airplanes and telephones, but there were also still a lot of horses on the roads and most kids did not go all the way through High School. It was the roaring 20s before the stock market collapsed and before the depression.

Changes happening during 1920-1965 and 1965-2005

John asked his dad to go around the old folks home and ask everybody: If you could divide your 85 year old lives in half, which half saw the most change? Was it from 1920 to 1965 or from 1965 to 2005? It seemed like during the first half all the big technology was invented, from biplanes to big jets, they harnessed the atom, they were flying into space by that point, they had computers, they had interstate highways, there was the civil rights movement, they had fought a giant world war, it was a whole different world with washing machines in the house and everybody had a toaster, which are small things that changed the quality of life.

From 1965 to the present, other than iPads we haven’t really moved the ball forward that much. They made it to the moon in a few short years, but that has pretty much been it, although they had already been sending stuff up there and were just doing the same thing slightly better. By 1965 they had already invented the fastest plane and flown it the fastest, you can take a car from 1965 and drive it on the road today while you couldn’t really do that with a Model T. The toasters are the same, light bulbs are the same, and the front facing side of technology is really not that much different. The changes between 1965 and are almost 100% social. The way people interacted in 1965 vs 1920 wasn’t really that different. If you were gay in 1920 or 1965, there wasn’t any more visibility. If you were black in America, you were still experiencing the same institutionalized prejudices without redress and so forth. Society was stratified in the same way.

During the last 50+ years, the world has changed as dramatically and globally: Life expectancy, freedom from disease, freedom from hunger, an explosion of new rights and new consciousnesses. There has been tons of social change in a very short period of time that was super-compressed compared to before. It was not because of the Internet, but because of the technology in the 40 years prior to that. The airplane did more to level the social playing field in the world than almost anything else. Prior to the airplane, if you lived in a major American city, how many people from India would you see in a typical day? The answer is none! Every once in a while you would see someone who was there as a diplomat.

John's dad came back after having quizzed everybody in the old folks home and they all felt like the second half from 1965 to 2005 was the bigger change. John was surprised by that, because from biplanes to the moon seemed like a pretty startling acceleration, but in 1965 everybody still wore a suit to work, the country club still didn’t accept jews, and if you were out in the day in the city most of the people you met were white and if they were black they were working in a different strata of jobs. For them that second transition was astonishing.

John asked his mom the same question. She loves seeing girls of different races walking together, holding hands, talking, clearly friends, because when she was a young adult woman that was just impossible. You could not have had a group of 4 girls of different races who were all friends, it would not have ever occurred. That is the progress for her! For those young girls it doesn’t even enter into their friendship calculation. It works all the way to women in their 30s, but if they are older than that it is much rarer that people have that many friends of different races.

The time John first met someone from Vietnam

John remembers the first time he met a Vietnamese person when he was in college in 1988. It was exotic: ”Wow! All the way from Vietnam?” Even though they had airplanes before, they had been at war with Vietnam and had only just started to have a diplomatic opening. There were plenty of people from Vietnam in America that had emigrated after the war, but they were living in concentrated communities in Louisiana or Texas.

John had never met someone from Vietnam before! The airplane and the labor-saving technologies made a lot more people wealthy enough to travel. Persians decided to go to Paris and see what was going on. Then there was the post-war United Nations one world mentality. John doesn’t think any of their parents who would be old enough to have them would have walked down the streets in their 20s in an American city and seen anywhere near the diversity of people that there is now.

The internet is rewriting history

The Internet is serving to erase that progress in people’s minds. Younger people who didn’t live pre-internet can only see the world through the aperture of the Internet which has decided that we have made no progress, the world is just as bad as it ever was, no-one prior to today has ever had any success in achieving a better world, there was no feminism before today, there was no civil rights movement, and we are all still living in the exact same prison than we were living in 1920 until the heroic new generation came to save us all.

That is the most disappointing thing about the Internet: It has rewritten recent history, because every time someone encounters an injustice now, they put it up on a big billboard for all to see and for all of us to wring our hands about. There is no context for how far we have come, how proud we should be, and how much progress has been made in how short a time.

Dan was talking to somebody recently who said that right now is the most volatile and turmoil and most things are changing and happening in the history of the country or the history of the world. It didn’t really ring true to him, because in WWII there was a lot happening. How much of it is just that we are more and more aware of what is going on more immediately?

So many things happened in the 1960s and 1970s

John was just looking at the events of the spring of 1965 and pulled a couple of things out (he did this for the intro of FF41). In February Malcolm X was assassinated. In March both the first bombs of the Vietnam war fell and the first ground troops arrived in Vietnam, Martin Luther King marched on Selma, the fist cosmonaut to ever walk in space, the first war between India and Pakistan began, Gemini 3 was launched. In April West Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations for the first time, US troops occupied the Dominican Republic to suppress a coup. In May Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston. In June I can get no satisfaction was released, the Beatles played at Shea Stadium, and this is just within a few months in 1965. If you looked at same 5-month period in 1968, it would blow you mind what world-historical events happened during that period.

In the 1960s and 1970s George Wallace ran for president of the USA on an openly white suprematist ticket. There were energy crises in the 1970s and people thought gasoline might soon be $10 a gallon. There were lines of cars stretching for miles outside of gas stations that had no gas. There were famines where millions of people were dying of starvation while the world stood by and watched and it didn’t seem there was any solution or that there would ever be a solution. We had entered into a world where every year millions would die of famine. Somewhere in there in 1965 the first Watts Riots occurred and cities were literally burning. There were revolutions in the streets, cops fighting citizens with dogs and fire hoses, people setting cities on fire, and Detroit burned at that time.

We think it is bad now, but it has been much worse before

It seems to us now that our president and his policies are the craziest things that have ever happened, but they are not at all. During the Reagan administration the government was waging illegal secret wars and was funding them by selling drugs. Those were respectable people and those were respectable times! Our situation right now is crazy, but also overwrought. What Dan’s friend should have said is that there has never been a time in the entire human history where there has been more equality, less violence, less starvation and less war. There has never been a time in human history where life expectancy has been greater across the world, where there was a larger global middle class, where there was as much clean water and less infant death. There has never been less rape than there is now. There is less police brutality and less racism than ever before, both globally and in the United States.

If you listen to the news and didn’t think for yourself for one second, you would think that none of those things are true. If you just went on Twitter you would think we were living in the most racist unequal sexist awful time in history, but it isn’t true, it is just that we see it now and we didn’t see it before. We comment on it now and we didn’t comment on it before. What we don’t revel in is that it has never been better. We are doing a good job! We, the 21st century Americans and our parents, the 20th century Americans, have done amazing work in advancing the cause of human rights. Why would we deny ourselves the opportunity to celebrate it?

To say that there is so much work left to do is reasonable, but to say none of the work we have done up till now matters and it is all for shit because right now there still exists inequality is to misunderstand history, to create a culture of hysteria and panic. If you were a Russian agent you could do no better than to sow within the American Left that we had done nothing and that times were as bad as they had ever been. You couldn’t be a better agent of chaos than to take away our triumph.

Russian propaganda provoking both the right and the left

The Soviets always situated themselves against the United States as a classless and less racist society. Their propaganda posters of that period always showed people from around the world, because they were trying to influence politics in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. There would always be 10 faces on the poster with a representative face from each continent. It was their counter to the American civil rights problems of the 1960s and 1970s: "Look, over here in the global communist revolution everyone is equal and there is no racism!" The Russians are as racist as people can be, but they wanted revolutionaries of Southern Africa or Central America to think: ”Do we want to side with the United States where they are spraying their own citizens with water hoses or do we want to go with this bucolic picture of all the world’s races living together in a melting pot?”

Now history has shaken out that the global proletarian revolution didn’t really produce a world of Unity and Equality any more than the capitalist rapaciousness and the awkward violent American experiment. We think about Russian bots on Facebook getting Trump people all riled up with fake news, but they are fake-newsing the shit out of the Left, too, the Left just doesn’t recognize it while the right is really easy to provoke. You post a thing on Facebook saying that those trans-people want to steal our bathrooms and make our kids look at their penises and the little old ladies in Texarkana are like ”No!” We think they are easy to manipulate.

There is no armed revolution, things are going well

There are many hourly provocations of the left that aren’t as much based on misinformation, but they are colored in the way Dan’s friend was saying: "There has never been a worse time than now. Take to the streets! This is our moment to start an armed revolution against the oppressive white capitalism!" That is just as much a provocation, but not coming organically from the way people think, but it is seeded in the culture. People love to pick those banners up, run through the streets, and ”Look what I read!”

There are calls for armed revolution on the left that go all the way to Nazi punching. John once got in a big argument with people about that (They talked about that in RW54) and he reads it all the time from reasonable middle-aged left-leaning people: ”Punch a nazi!” It just makes him laugh and laugh how soft-minded that stuff is! There is no armed revolution in the United States that benefits anyone but the most fascist. People who honestly think that the Left is going to rise up and overthrow Western capitalism through armed struggle and impose equality by force have not read enough books. It is laughable and it is premised on false premises.

Things are going good and Trump is a bump in the road. A lot of people on the Internet say that John can afford to say that because he is a middle-aged white guy, but that is a dumb thing to say: Everyone’s lives are better now than they were. If you are 20 years old, no matter your orientation, no matter what type of person you are or what you aspire to, you have more opportunity, more freedom, and more justice now than if you would have been born 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 1000 years ago.

Progress isn’t slowing! This conservative revolution is a concern and it should be and we should talk about it, but not in this strange language we have now where everything is completely black & white. There is no way to talk about the 50% of the United States that feels differently from you without denouncing them and then be forced to denounce Hitler at the same time, like ”Which side are you on? Do you support Hitler?” Not being able to say that things never have been better without being accused of being Hitler is very frustrating.

Postmodernism and post-structuralism

Postmodernism or post-structuralism is a theory of the world based on the idea that texts, like books, movies or language in general, create reality and that structures buried in language build realities. Those structures can and for a long time did go completely unexamined. In examining them you realize that things are set up a certain way. The SAT-test is set up to prefer people who went to suburban High Schools. Language creates these realities and you tenter into a situation where there is no objective reality.

When it was first introduced, this theory was shocking, novel, intellectually challenging and exciting because it felt like part of a moment in the 20th century where everything was possible, where we were discarding the old order across both economically, politically and in a lot of different ways. This literally theory seemed extremely exciting to a culture of intellectuals because all of a sudden this world of books, semiotics and philosophy had political power and we could use it to attack the structures of power effectively, not just critique them. There was an active component of post-structuralism, a new way of thinking and seeing.

That theory disseminated through everything on the intellectual Left. There was no thing that couldn’t be critiqued. It was philosophically and then also practically connected to Marxism. What we forgot somewhere along the way was that it was a theory. When you learn it in the university the description of it actually contains the term ”theory”, but we forgot that the word ”theory” has a meaning that is different from the word "proof".

The framework of post-structuralism allows an awful lot of permutations. You can apply the basic structure of that theory to a lot of things across the board: To the way language is used, to the way power is structured, and to interpersonal relationships or big structural relationships. We are now living in a world where that theory invisibly undergirds a lot of our political movements. Most people haven’t studied post-structuralism or postmodernism, most people haven’t read those books and they don’t know what those books were critiquing in the first place.

The power of that moment in the 1960s and the 1970s was that all the academics knew what had come before. They had read the books and understood the language of structuralism enough to be able to have a post-structuralism. This response, this counter that was so exciting! Along the way until the world we live in today we were excluded from what came before because it was determined that we had entered into a new world and the stuff before was somewhat heretical. It influences us everywhere in our culture!

Tearing down confederate monuments

The surface-logic of wanting to tear down confederate monuments defines them as racist things that shouldn’t be in the public square of this now very diverse town which is aspiring to have equality between people. We shouldn’t have a statue in the middle of the town that is of a very divisive character or that is very exclusionary. That is all the argument you need, but there is all this other argument beneath it about the power of representation, the power of images, and the fact that the presence of the statue disempowers people. It is a theory, but we accept it at face value!

We could also walk past this statue every day, tip our hat sarcastically at it and go: ”Hey, how you like us now? Fuck you!” and get on with our day. You could make a case that leaving the statue up was good for people because it gave them a place to piss. You could come up with half a dozen different theories about what the presence of that statue does and what it communicates, but we live in a world where our theories have led us to conclude that it is a symbol of ongoing oppression, even when that is a very difficult theory to prove.

You can say anecdotally that there is still oppression and these statues are still here and our theory is that if we would take them down there would be less oppression because we wouldn't have this statue-endorsed symbol of racial inequality anymore and we would have less inequality in the aftermath of taking this statue down. That is the premise and on the power of images and the same is true for the world that is premised on the power of words.

The power of words we don't use anymore

There are theories about bullying and about words we don’t use now, but we decided really only during the last 10 years that there was going to be a list of words that were no longer usable and that list keeps growing. Those words have so much intrinsic power to oppress or to exclude, bad words that are all just words and in some cases just descriptive words or words that took on a meaning. We are forbidding an entire word because it took on a meaning somewhere along the lines, but all of that is predicated on accepting a theory of language and of the world-making power of words. If you speak a certain way or say certain words, and if language is allowed to be used in certain ways, it isn’t the laws or the policies at work that create inequality, but it is those words that seep in and generate unequal worlds.

There is a culture of people who are on-guard looking for offense all the time. They are not just sensitive or getting their feelings hurt, but they are on guard for language which is creating a world of inequality and they see themselves as combatting those worlds, stopping those situations before they take root or pointing at them and calling them out and saying ”There it is again!” You just called me darling, which is a dismissive, diminutive way to describe me and it is part of a systemic attempt to disempower women who stand up for themselves at work.

It all makes sense to us because we have all been educated within that theoretical system and it has now become our lingua franca where there is no counter-argument to that theory other than the one you see coming from people who are like ”What? I was just saying darling because I was being friendly. That is just how we talk!”, but the Left is ”Boo! That is exactly the sort of ignorant and oppressive language-using!”

There are two sides to it: One side is hyper-attuned to a theoretical approach to how the world is built and the other side is just not. They are not thinking that way, they don’t have that theory, they didn’t come up in that culture and they are just bumbling along. That is why you see so many Trump-supporters characterize themselves as just fun normal people who like to have barbecues and be normal Americans.

They are not necessarily comfortable within a white supremacist culture or whatever it is that the Left would jump to describe it as, but they don’t even understand what the Left is talking about! All they said was this simple thing and people are jumping down their throats all the time. They don’t have a background for feeling the power and universe-building capability of that language. Unfortunately the Left doesn't have a very good understanding of why they are doing it either. They understand the system and the technology of using it to attempt to make the world better.

The guys in MBMBAM were trying to figure out on their D&D podcast what their characters were going to be. One of them wanted a certain character, but he was afraid to do it wrong and therefore he made this character have green skin which was going to save him from a wave of condemnation from the Internet if he choose the ethnicity for his D&D character wrong. They made the character green and were immediately dumped on by thousands of people who said that green is symbolic of jews and it is the color of Pepe. There wasn’t a way to have a green character without lots of people feeling very strongly that this character was creating an unsafe world.

Should Austin change its name?

Dan tries to be respectful of people’s opinions, but things like that are just confusing to him! You can’t ever do something right! A report from Austin’s equity office mentioned a number of streets, institutions or other things were ”within the spirit of the resolution representing segregation, racism or slavery”, like Littlefield Street, Tom Green Street, Dixy Drive, Confederate Avenue, Plantation Road, Barton Springs and they proposed changing the names of some of these streets.

Some things on this list were secondary considerations that we might want to think about, like Austin itself, because the city is named after Stephen Austin, the father of Texas. Apparently back in the olden times when Texas was Texac (pronounced Tehas) and Mexico wanted to ban slavery in the province of Texac he said that he was opposed to that because if you free the slaves, they would become ”vagabonds and a nuisance and a menace” Dan doesn’t know what else he did other than that comment that makes people think he was pro-slavery. Maybe he had a lifetime of pro-slavery, but this is the quote they always refer to in every article about this topic. They are saying we should consider changing the name of Austin because it was named after Stephen Austin who made this comment.

Dan has been living in Austin for over 7 years. He knew the city was named after Mr. Austin, but he didn’t know that he had said that. At some point, can’t things ever take on a different meaning? Can Austin not have that meaning to some people or once something like that has happened, it is forever tarnished, that is what it means now, and once people learn that a change has to be made? Dan thinks that would be an overreaction.

When Dan grew up, everything was offensive to everybody eventually. Dan’s grandfather was not allowed to get a masters or doctors degree because he was Jewish. He would apply to the programs and they would reject him. He continued to get education but he couldn’t go to that level. When he was working for the government doing the tank armor he lead the group and he was one of the most respected scientists in his department, but he couldn’t get an advanced degree because they would simply say ”No!” He didn’t let that stop him from being a great scientist and from having an incredibly successful career including getting presidential medals and other things. He didn’t like it and it bothered him quite a bit.

The reason Dan mentions it is that at some point we have to be able to look at things and say that this was named during a different time. Does that mean we have to change the name and remove the statue because that person wasn’t 100% perfect and maybe had a bad perspective, does that wash away anything good they might have done? Then you can bring up the experiments the Nazis did during the Holocaust: Can we use the information that came from that? These are hard question!

There are people who are probably upset about it right now! Dan does want to sensitive to these people, but he also doesn’t think it is necessary to change the name of Austin because of one comment that their founder made. Dan doesn’t understand the context of that comment and what his overall believes have been. Was he a horrible person or a good person? He is the father of Texas! There would be no Texas without him! Is that good or bad? Texas was stolen from Mexico and maybe there should be no Texas? Where does it stop? Do we just call the streets A,B,C or numbers? Street 1 and Street 2? Do we call towns as Town 175, but then the 5 has significance to people and we have to rename it to 177 because everyone can agree that 7 is the lucky number, except for people for whom it is nota and who petition to change it.

Making the leap from a theory to a political system

There have always been intellectual fashions. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are not inaccurate or bad. Marxism was a great theory of economics because it was about human interaction and, like a lot of great theories, it was descriptive. Before Marx and Engels we thought about the way people exchanged labor for money in a certain way. They came along and nothing in the world had changed, but by virtue of their description we understood the dynamic better and, like a lot of descriptions, it was really good up to a point. It described something in a new and insightful way.

As soon as that converts to a theory of a political system, you start to encounter problems because every political system talks about people in the aggregate, like ”The workers” or ”The bankers”. It is a description that is meant to be insightful, like ”The workers do this and the owners do this and this is the dynamic behind that relationship”, and you go ”Right!” If you take it the next step and say that therefore the workers need to do this to counter the owners who are going to be doing this and the result of that is going to be a better world, you have made quite a few big leaps. You just said that the workers are a cohesive group that is capable of acting as a group or as an entity, but the biggest jump is ”That is going to create a better world” You described an inequality, but to leap ahead and say that you have a solution to it and that the description of it suggests the solution is where theory crashes into politics and starts to be a wobbly wagon.

In the case of Marxism we have spent 150 years trying to figure out how we can implement this insight to make a better world and there have been some pretty dramatically bad attempts. We are now living in a world where post-structuralism and postmodernism were descriptive, fascinating and really insightful and they changed the world, but as soon as it started to get applied as ”Now what we need to do is…” we take the insights and the suggestion of these insights to take the following action. This happened a lot in universities and was the natural ground for action. The first things that were changed were curricula. We didn’t study books the same way and pretty soon after that we didn’t study the same books. It was initially a revolution that happened in universities and it produced generations of smart people who went to college and were the smarts at their college.

Literary theory vs theory of evolution

John Hodgman studied literary theory at Yale when Yale was a hot bed of precisely this kind of thinking. He is not somebody who studied literature at the university of Arizona, but he is seeped in some fundamental aspects of this world. A lot of people we know are, but the way it was taught at universities was not ”Here is a theory and here are some other theories”, teaching some controversy like ”Maybe the world was created in seven days or maybe there is evolution!”

Literary theory is now the theory of evolution and any counter-theory or other reading of history is essentially creationism, that is how dismissive we are of it. Any perception of dynamic between people that doesn’t have a Marxist reading at its core is creationism or an older theory and history came to an end at a certain point when we realized the truth of all the things. Now we just need to apply it and bring all the dumbs up to speed. It is a culture-wide fashion that is now going on its 6th decade and all of the smart people in our culture were educated under that way of thinking, all the journalists, all the college professors, all the writers. Even if you weren’t directly educated that way, you were within that culture.

John studied the comparative history of ideas in college and he started with the Bible, Plato and Homer and worked his way through Augustin, Descartes and Hegel, the Declaration of Independence through to Nietzsche and Derrida, the whole survey of it and he studied it in a way that suggested that each thing of its time prepared the ground for the next thing and was evolutionary. A lot of Socrates leapfrogged and threaded through all of history. You can read Socrates now and still be amazed by it! Some of those philosophies were dead ends, wandered off and burned out, but in the main there is an evolutionary thread through history.

This is not the end of history

It is really hard not to situate ourselves as the end of history and to not think that we have a complete understanding and all of our struggles are just revolutionary ones where we need to enforce our way of thinking, our finally-realized understanding of the world. We are just in the middle of something and we don’t know what is going to come next, what is the next fashion and what happens next. John suspects it will be corrective.

There are brilliant writers, thinkers and people who are ”Wait a minute!”, which is how all things like this come to pass: People say ”Wait a minute! I have been thinking!” and all the conventional wisdom seems wrong to them now that they have had this new insight, whatever it will be. John has a suspicion of what it is and it will again feel like a new liberation when it happens. What we are being liberated from may not be what we think we need to be liberated from. Nobody knows what the next big surprise is going to be philosophically and whether it will be economic, social or what.

John is not too bent out of shape whether or not they want to change the streets in Austin or change the name of Austin to Medgar Evers Town, because we are just in the middle of somewhere. Paris has been called Paris for hundreds of years, but if Columbus, Ohio ends up being called Tecumseh, Ohio it would be more of a monument to our time as any statue we could erect and it may end up being our legacy. Our statues may be the plinths of the statues we tore down. It will be how we will be remembered by people in the future who may return the name of Austin to Austin. Stalingrad and Leningrad are not called like that now and haven't been called like that before, but they spent a long time like that in the middle. Things like this do happen and you leave your mark as best you can.

Conclusion

John doesn’t think that post-structuralism and postmodernism are very useful as a descriptor anymore. They have become garbled and what was interesting about the theory was never intended to be a political system. It was never intended to be a way of governing nations, but it was reactive like a lot of theories are. It looked at the thing that came before and it judged it according to a new principle, but it wasn’t necessarily creative and that is the world we are living in now: We are judging everything, but the system we use to judge is not creative and doesn’t make something new to take the place of the old. It just wants to dismantle the old and it presumes naively that dismantling the old is enough to allow something new and beautiful to flower. That is not true and that is what is so scary about the idea of a leftist revolution.

There is an awful lot of talk about tearing down the racist, classist, sexist status quo and a lot of that talk plays up all the things that are the worst about our world, but it gives no credence to the fact that all of these systems are actively engaged in change and have been for hundreds of years. The American experiment is largely succeeding and there is no place in the world that has the rights and freedoms that they have there, even with Trump and his minions banging at the gates. Nothing can erase the progress we have made!

In the short term there can be new unenforceable laws that have to wend their way through the courts, but both sides feel that way about the other’s laws. In the main there has never been a better system and the idea that we need to tear that system down and burn it is usually not accompanied with a very clearly articulated better plan. It is always based on the idea that if you tear it down, what comes in its place will be better.

If you eliminate the police, then man’s better nature will protect us. It is really the police that are the problem and crime is a product of police brutality rather than something that we need police for. Every time John reads someone on the Internet who says that we are living in a culture that is so completely bankrupt that the only thing left to do is to destroy it, he never sees their follow-up tweet where they have a new declaration of independence and a new constitution that sets up a different system. You can’t just put a link to the Democratic Socialists at the end of that tweet and feel like that is sufficient to explain why we would destroy our world and replace it with what? Just the people, the workers? That is not just naive, but it is insufficient!

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Was John worried that this episode was a little bit too much of a lecture, but Dan doesn’t think so! John hates to wade into politics, especially these days. Some dingeling professor in Canada has become a fashionable guy who is yelling at the academic Left (Psychology professor Jordan Peterson). He is an intellectual, but at some point along the way he said that political correctness has gone too far and he offered a critique of it from within the academy. He became famous for it because the Alt-Right chuckies jumped in and said that ”Finally someone who speaks for us!” He got full of his new fame and has become one of those people who is over there with the proud boys, trying to make a smart critic, but who is politically allied with the people who are manipulating him to be a front person on their thing and he is not in control of it anymore.

When John starts talking about this stuff, there will be people listening who say ”Yeah!” Some kid has tried to tie John to that guy for things John has said that sound in the family of things that the professor said. By tying John to him, John is all of a sudden tied to everything the guy has every said and to all the people who interact with him and agree with him. To be associated with that guy is to be associated with the proud boys.

We live in a soundbite culture and a tweet-based culture where we can no longer talk about things long-form. We can no longer critique ourselves and no-one on the Left can critique the Left without being accused of being an alt-right. Lots of people from the intellectual left have a lot of doubts about Marxism, let alone the extension of Marxism that has absorbed every disenfranchised group under its umbrella. It doesn’t mean that John doesn’t have progressive goals and values, but those are not synonymous with postmodern theory.

John feels at risk of someone saying ”You are just like this guy Jordan!” or ”I agree with you 100% just like I agree with Jordan!”, which is fine for them, but John does not identify as that type of person and does not share his overarching world-view. Anytime you say anything political, you step out on a plank. John never minded stepping out on a plank, he always enjoyed it, but nowadays he doesn’t! He has a little girl and he doesn’t want somebody to decide that they have got a hard-on for taking him down because of something he said about Marxism one time on a podcast.

Dan's iPad holder for his rower (RW128)

Which product are you using to mount your iPad to your rower? — Jonathan

Dan's iPad mount is from Rowfree.com, called the ”tablet, smartphone and laptop mount for Concept 2 Rowing machines, BikeERG and SkiERG” (link). He thought $50 was way too much money because he could do that with a hanger and some Duct Tape, but he decided to spring for it anyway and it is perfect.

John's Motorcycle trip (RW128)

As a motorcycle enthusiast I was very excited to see John back in the saddle this summer and even better that it was on a Dual Sport, that is my kind of riding! I have Washington and Idaho back-country discovery routes and love to explore the national forests and backroads when I can. John, I know you were inspired to get the Vespa running, has your trip sparked any further motorcycle touring ambitions? Perhaps we will cross paths in the hinterlands.

If you or your friends are ever looking for off-roading skills training, I attended a course close to you that was great at Don Hatton school of Vancouver island in Duncan, BC (link) at reasonable cost and highly recommended. — Jeff in Boise, Idaho

John is always hoping to be a motorcycle adventurer, but he is also a little bit nervous about wrecking his motorcycle, even when he goes out on the Vespa. It isn’t a question whether or not you are a conscientious rider, but somebody else might look down at their phone at the wrong time and if they hit you on a motorcycle, you get a lot more hurt than if you are in a truck. There is motorcycle touring in John's future, but he has to balance it against keeping healthy with his kid and he has to conceal it from his family. John thinks it is good and important to be nervous on a motorcycle, but he doesn't know if this is it a thing that is going to inhibit him. He is always somewhat on the fence about where the line is. Since he started treating his Bipolar he is less inclined to just do super-dangerous things and hope that everything works out.

Soulmates (RW128)

What are your thoughts on the concept of soulmates? — Bobby

There is a lot of luck involved in the way your life pans out. John got unlucky a lot of places along the way and if he had met someone when he was young who had the right chemistry with him, it would have changed his life a lot. We talk so much about how important the first six years of a kid’s life are, but the most important years in anyone’s life are 12-17. During those 5 years everything lines up and if it doesn’t line up, you are struggling with it for the rest of your life.

For some people things line up a certain way between 12 and 17, not that their life is necessarily easy or good, but they see things that confirm the way life is going to roll. That did not happen for John, but everything he learned between 12 and 17 confirmed that no-one can be trusted and he spent the rest of his life laboring under that. John doesn’t think he was preordained to feel that way, but he just didn’t get lucky. He got lucky in other ways, he had a lot of smart and ambitious friends and he learned a lot during that period, and the feeling that no-one can be trusted is not necessarily an inaccurate world-view.

John has never come close to meeting a soulmate or feeling like he had one. He doesn’t believe in them, but he does see people who meet their perfect match, live their whole lives with that person and talk to that person every day. Alternately they meet someone that they regard as their soulmate, but that person is not accessible to them and they pour all their feelings of wanting to belong and wanting to be whole into this person that is at a remove from them. They are either married to someone else or live far away or something and they become a repository of all those hopes and feelings. Those and plenty other versions of soulmates exist, but not for John and he feels unlucky as a result.

Dan has known people who have been married for most of their lives and who are retired now, getting into old age and are thrilled with the person they chose. Does that mean that they are soulmates? That is just a word. We have a concept that you meet someone, you fall in love and not only do you remain in love with that person, but you actually get along with that person. There are plenty of people out there who are in love with each other, but they don’t get along. Is that really being in love? Sure! If you marry somebody or if you are with somebody and you love that person and want to be with that person, does that make them your soulmate?

To Dan that concept means that the person complements you in every possible way and that you were destined to be with that person in this life as well as past lives as well as future lives. Dan doesn’t believe in a soul, but it requires that your souls are mated, not just your physical existence, not just a great match who you are attracted to mentally, physically and who you admire, but your souls are somehow intertwined. Dan loves that idea and thinks that it would be awesome, but in order to believe in that, he would have to believe in souls and in souls being forever intertwined. If you are going with the lose definition of ”I really like this girl! She is great! She is my soulmate!”, then yes, that is possible, but as far as coming into the world destined to meet the one other person?

Dan’s other response would be that he absolutely believes in a soulmate, but he thinks the likelihood of meeting that person out of the billions of people on the planet is almost impossible, because your soulmate might be somebody of a different age, a different gender and in a different country. If you were to roll the dice and look at all the people on the planet, what is the chance that your soulmate is going to wind up working in the same office as you and that is how you are going to meet? At the birthday party for the 5 people who’s birthday falls on October? You are just going to run into that person there? That seems pretty unlikely unless there is magic at work, but Dan doesn’t believe in magic either. He does want to believe in souls, soulmates and magic, but he hasn’t directly experienced those things and it is hard for him to believe in something he hasn’t directly experienced or at least experienced a tiny little taste of.

Dan likes the idea of it, but it would be much better to say that you found somebody who you feel completely compatible with and who you love to spend all of your time with. If that is your definition of a soulmate, then heck yes! John has that, too, but he doesn’t think that is the definition of a soulmate. John knows the person who is asking that question and has met them in the real world and John thinks that they may have a soulmate.

Feeling responsible to do something about climate change (RW128)

Climate breakdown brought on by human-made global warming is an existential crisis that I think about every day. I am not a scientist, a politician or a journalist and I have a hard time talking about those fears with the people in my life including my therapist, because climate change is of course the biggest bummer of it all. When I do talk about it, the conversations are unsatisfying and kind of depressing, especially since I feel that I’m not taking the actions I ought to in order to help.

I feel like I should drop everything: day-job, relationship, artistic practice, all middling and stagnant, and dedicate my life to combatting this urgent crisis. The fact that I am about to turn 30 years old does not help with the sense of unease. How do you guys wrap your heads around such things, especially as the parents of young children? Your thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks for all you do! — Ross from Glasgow

This is an interesting question because the fact that Ross is about to turn 30 is applicable to his feelings, but probably not in the way he thinks. He feels like old and stagnant in his life and the world is coming to and end, but from John’s perspective as someone who is 50, the fact that Ross is in his Saturn Return at 29 makes John feel like Ross is still young enough that he hasn’t been through as many of these global crisis as John has been through. That isn’t to say that John doesn’t think that global warming isn’t a problem. It is, at least as far as John can tell.

In the course of John’s life the first big global crisis he went through when he was young was famine. The idea was that there was not enough arable land in the world to feed all the people. There were a couple of periods in the 1970s where millions of people in Ethiopian and Sudan died of starvation in the course of a year and that seemed like a thing where there was no way we could imagine a solution. Some scientists said that there was a technological solution, but we needed better insecticides, better fertilizer, and more irrigation.

People said that this was not something that science could solve, but it was a problem of global overpopulation and a problem of changing climate. There was a perfect storm of reasons why famine was on the horizon, overpopulation being a big one. People used to say that they did’t want to have kids because they didn’t want to contribute to overpopulation and it was a real justification for deciding whether or not to have a family. At that time there were half as many people in the world as there are now.

It turned out that there was a holistic solution, but during the mid-1980s there was another enormous famine in Ethiopia and Sudan where again millions of people died. It really felt like that was the most pressing issue, even though we were aware of other environmental issues that fed into this fear. There was a hole in the ozone layer (see RW120), caused by aerosol cans and CFCs, and it seemed like there was irreparable damage to the ozone layer, the hole was only going to keep growing, we would have unfiltered sunlight burning the earth and we are all going to have to live under umbrellas, our skin would fall off and our crops would all die.

There is no way to describe how universally everybody understood that these were signs of the end-times. Those were environmental issues and the scientists and pundits of the day were all largely in agreement, just as they are now, that we had reached a point of no return. The funny one for John was that there were Africanized bees from South America that were hyper-aggressive and would just attack you, also an alien species of red fire-ants was marching their way up through central America and Mexico, they were going to arrive in America at a certain point and they were unstoppable. The national consensus was that we were just biting our time before we were invaded by murder-bees. It was on TV all the time and it was a crisis and a burbling hysteria (see FS108).

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s AIDS was an unstoppable and untreatable disease that was about to jump over from gay culture to mainstream culture, just as it had done in Africa and it would infect millions and billions. Some Avian Flu might cause a global pandemic! All of that taken together is not to say that global warming, the rising and warming seas, and the increase in hurricane strengths is not real, because the climate in Seattle and Alaska have changed noticeably in the last 5 years.

That feeling Ross has, that he is not doing enough, that this is the only thing that really matters, that if we don’t arrest climate change then there is no point and our children will live in a baked death-scape and his life will be for not, that is a kind of panic that he doesn’t need to personally feel. There was a time when the idea that you would use a paper bag in Seattle at a grocery store was the same as pouring a quart (1 liter) of oil directly into the river, because we were chopping down our forests and without the forests we won’t have clean air and in order to stop chopping down the forests we needed to stop using paper grocery bags or paper towels.

We have replaced paper bags with thin plastic bags that have created an environmental catastrophe. They are killing fish and it is the worst kind of garbage. After 20 years of plastic bags we have eliminated them at least in Seattle and we are back to paper bags. A lot of people carry their own cloth bag to the grocery store, but whatever kind of grocery bag you get and whether or not you use paper towels is not going to make or break whether the Earth survives. In John’s experience the panic that Ross feels is a thing on a cycle.

John doesn’t believe that journalists are creating panic in order to sell newspapers, but the natural human way is that somebody comes running out, Chicken Littles ”The sky is falling!” and everybody listens and runs around and that is the point of that Chicken Little parable. That is why it resonates: The sky is always falling. If Ross wants to dedicate himself to making the world a better place there a lot of things he can do, but it should come from a positive feeling, like ”I would like to dedicate myself to make the world a better place” and not from a place of ”The world is ending and life is a catastrophe and I’m useless and not doing my part!” He doesn’t need that because it is not true.

You cannot be 29 years old and not feel a sense of panic because it is intrinsic. John recognizes that panic and it has as much to do with being 29 as it has to do with anything else. Dan thinks that there is some kind of helplessness involved because you alone cannot make a difference, but just do the thing that make sense and if everybody does that, it will make a difference. Dan is always astonished how little trash his family makes compared to their neighbors. Dan's family are 4 people and will fill up their trash can way less than their neighbors who have 2 or 3 people living there. They don’t have a lot of packages, they don’t eat processed food and they don’t buy stuff that comes in boxes and bags as much as they try to buy the fresh stuff. It is not intentional, but the way they eat is different and as a side-effect they have a lot less trash.

Dan’s kids have never left their water running while they brush their teeth because they have been taught from day 1 not to do that. When Dan was a kid the water was running all the time while he was in the bathroom for 20 minutes. That was normal in the 1970s! John disagrees because he gave a presentation at a Cub Scout Jamboree about how to conserve water when he was 17 years old and one of the ways was to turn the water faucet off while you were brushing your teeth. Dan saw that on a ”more you know” kind of thing and was like ”What? I need to change this!” Turning it off after that felt good! It would never even occur to his kids to maybe leave it on or that turning it off is a good thing, but you just turn it off, you brush your teeth and turn it on to rinse and spit out and turn it off. That is the only thing they even know!

Ross needs to have kids and he needs to teach them to do it right and be better examples. Having kids is the answer! He sounds like a really smart person and needs to have lots of smart kids with somebody else who is smart and have those kids go around, keep watch and be good custodians of this world. That is the only answer! Otherwise people who aren’t as smart will have the kids and they will leave the water on and make too much trash. Ross is in Scotland, they don’t have any kids in Scotland!

Baseball-hats and sports logos (RW128)

Is $30 too much to pay for a baseball-style hat? — Tony

There is a distinction between a cap and a hat! A cap is maybe a kind of hat. it depends on what is on the hat or where he got it from or how it is made. Dan goes on with different examples and eventually asks John about his thoughts on clothing with sports logos on it. If he is at a sports game he can wear one, but otherwise he would not wear one in public.

John’s feelings about the Seahawks logo and the Mariners logo is that they are only fine and neither is attractive enough that he would ever wear it as an item (see topic in RW71). The Boston Red Sox baseball hat is attractive enough as a hat with the letter B on it and you can wear it around. Most of the time people are communicating that they are from Boston and they want you to talk to them about it. A Metz hat is saying ”I’m from New York”, a Yankees hat is saying ”I’m a dick!”

Dan doesn’t even want people who support the Yankees to listen to their show. The Seahawks and the Mariners have both bad colors. Green and Blue primary or fluorescent colors are not attractive colors for anybody and John wouldn’t wear them out. When he wears a Mariners hat at a Mariners game he is trying to wear the classic hat, not the new one. He does not really care, though. The logo is the S of Seattle on top of a compass because apparently they are great explorers, but it can look like a dollar sign. The team should have been called the Orcas or the Sea Lions.

Progressive Metal (RW128)

Around the time I started playing guitar I was listening to early 2000s Punk and Metal. As I continued to play throughout High School I found virtuosos like Joe Satriani and John Petrucci. These days I listen to a mix of music, mostly in the Progressive Metal area where one can find some fairly prolific people at their instruments in terms technical ability.

How ”good” music is to a person is very subjective, but I always enjoy listening to someone who has really honed their craft. These days I really appreciate artists like Plini and Animals as Leaders. I’m wondering if you guys have listened to any metal, either today or when growing up or if there are musicians that are more into the technical aspects of playing the instrument that you have enjoyed. — Aron M

For Dan, Metallica is entry level metal. They are more than Hard Rock, but they are not squarely in the center of metal, because there is much harder music out there than that. They are not a modern band anymore, but an old band. Dan does not currently listen to anything that would be considered Metal by current standards, but he will sometimes listen to Metallica. When they were a big band in the late 1980s / early 1990s, he listened to a lot of Metallica and played a lot of it on the guitar. The Enter Sandman time period was his favorite.

Back then Dan would consider Megadeth and Dave Mustaine as being Heavy Metal and he listened to that kind of stuff in High School. He was very angst-ridden in High School, so anything that was loud and involved loud guitars and people yelling was good. Were Suicidal Tendencies considered Metal or Punk? Wikipedia calls it a Crossover Thrash Band. Dan listened to a good bit of that. Google is categorizing Thrash Metal bands: Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Testament, Exodus, but none of these are in current rotation. Once in a while Dan listens to a little of Metallica, but then he can go a few months without hearing any of that.

At this point Dan’s Internet connection went down and he ended the show.

page revision: 3, last edited: 22 Nov 2018 12:19

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The Story of John Roderick

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