Triangulation Machinery, Poetry, and Politics

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I was reading Muriel Rukeyser‘s poetry and marveling at some of the lucid yet novel constructions she employs. I was trying to avoid the grueling work of comparing and contrasting Biden’s speech on the anniversary of January 6th, 2021 with the responses from various Republican defenders of Trump. Both pulled into focus the effect of semantic and pragmatic framing as part of the poetic and political processes, respectively. Sorry, Muriel, I just compared your work to the slow boil of democracy.

Reaching in interlaced gods, animals, and men.
There is no background. The figures hold their peace
In a web of movement. There is no frustration,
Every gesture is taken, everything yields connections.

There is a theory about how language works that I’ve discussed here before. In this theory, from Donald Davidson primarily, the meaning of words and phrases are tied directly to a shared interrogation of what each person is trying to convey. Imagine a child observing a dog and a parent says “dog” and is fairly consistent with that usage across several different breeds that are presented to the child. The child may overuse the word, calling a cat a dog at some point, at which point the parent corrects the child with “cat” and the child proceeds along through this interrogatory process, triangulating in on the meaning of dog versus cat. Triangulation is Davidson’s term, reflecting three parties: two people discussing a thing or idea. In the case of human children, we also know that there are some innate preferences the child will apply during the triangulation process, like preferring “whole object” semantics to atomized ones, and assuming different words mean different things even when applied to the same object: so “canine” and “dog” must refer to the same object in slightly different ways since they are differing words, and indeed they do: dog IS-A canine but not vice-versa.… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

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My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest

The Rafferty Toffs Show covers ¡Reconquista!

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I got on the Rafferty Toffs Show out of Tennessee to discuss ¡Reconquista!. I had never heard of the show but it is extremely popular on the ‘Chans according to many people. Some of the claims made by the guests are a bit questionable to my mind, but I love seeing critical thinking and a passion for literature!… Read the rest

¡Reconquista! Redux

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¡Reconquista! is now available in paperback format with some additional editing (because there is rarely enough) and an alternative cover design. Pick it up now via reconquista.pub or direct from Amazon. I’m preparing for a book signing event in December with the Las Cruces Writers Group and need something a bit more tangible than an electronic book. But the movement towards NFTs and alternative distribution methods continues apace!… Read the rest

Bobos and Grifters

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It’s a good time to be a pundit trying to find a vein of gold that explains the polarization of modern America. Is it political, societal, sociological, psychological, economic, or some mixture of all of the above? Take David Brooks’ new Atlantic essay on bobos and boubours. Here we have modern politics emerging from social, economic, and meritocratic trends that build on his riff on Richard Florida’s ideas of the creative class in the early 2000s. I’ll sum it up as simply as I can, though I also want to touch on why it seems flawed to me. But here we go:

  1. An intellectual elite arose that controls media, educational opportunities, technology, and culture (the “bobos” for bourgeois bohemian).
  2. Our politics (and some international as well: Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson, etc.) reflect a backlash against these new overlords by the “boorish bourgeoisie” (boubours) who see their political voices suffocated in this new class order.
  3. Maybe if we mixed together a bit more we can reduce the temperatures and empathize with one another better.

OK, so Brooks is on that solution bandwagon that always reaches for more social integration to solve all ills. It is positive and very bobo (I doubt he would disagree given his self-confessional acknowledgement of his own status as part of the creative class in the article.) We have seen calls for less assortative mating, more bipartisan dinner parties for congresspeople, and other ideas in the past.

All very positive, agreed.

But what if the real problem is more sinister? How about the idea that many people are being manipulated by con artists with respect to the things that should matter to them?… Read the rest

Gimmicky Nonfictional Fictional Futures

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Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.

Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.… Read the rest

The Retiring Mind, Part VII: Sustainability

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“How efficient can I get?” is a question I often ask myself. For almost a decade now my family has been working towards greater energy, water, and waste efficiency with a goal towards something like sustainability. It began with electric and hybrid cars and then, by 2013, we remodeled a house following a green sustainable model. All of the existing cabinetry, surfaces (as best could be done), and fixtures were non-destructively excised and passed to Habitat for Humanity. Nearly 10kW of photovoltaics were fixed to several roof surfaces. The only limitation was the HOA and CC&Rs of our California community that mandated a fairly uniform lawn requirement, thus limiting water conservation options. We could have battled for it, but the housing development itself spent north of $200K per year on gardening services, so it seemed an uphill fight to deviate from their idealized and fairly lush landscape plans.

So when remodeling our 1930s-era house in New Mexico, we went even further. In addition to 8kW of photovoltaics that push us easily into electricity producer over the course of a year, we added rainwater capture and reuse for watering a largely xeric collection of decorative landscaping plants plus some small food garden plots. The water system is not nearly as reliable as the PV systems, though even those have had some issues. I’ll get to pros and cons as I build out the basic designs further along. But I can certainly say that on balance the effort has been a net positive.

So, first, some design details.

Let’s start with the solar system. The 8kW of PVs are in two sections. 5kW is on a south facing roofline of our casita/office. We call it Chateau Derrière and it attaches to the previously unattached garage that dates to the 1930s and is comprised of stacked rock and a stick roof.… Read the rest

Time at Work

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Time is a strange concept according to several strains of science and related philosophical concerns. We have this everyday medium-macroscopic set of ideas about how there is an undiscovered country of the future, a now we are experiencing, and a past that we remember or model based on accumulated historical facts. When we venture into extensions of conceptual ideas like an infinite past or sequenced events we deploy reasoning about what their properties might be by excluding contradictory compositions of properties and using other kinds of limiting semantics to constrain a mental model of those concepts.

But that isn’t the weirder stuff. The weirder stuff is the result of a collision of measurement and scientific theory.

Take, for instance, the oft-described reversibility of Newtonian physics. We have an equation for an object’s motion that can be run backward in time. But entropy in large ensembles of things in motion is not reversible because of some odd property of energy dissipation into the environment that arises because of micro-interactions. Some say this creates an “arrow of time” in the face of these reversible equations.

But this is an odd way of characterizing mathematical statements that represent the uniformity of physical interactions. The idea of “reversibility” is just a matter of a computational representation of processes that do always flow forward in time. Running t from 0 to -∞ in an equation has no real relationship to any physical phenomena. So the reversibility of mathematical forms is just an interesting fact.

We can bind up space and time, as well, which also provokes feelings of incongruity when we start to talk about gravitational effects on relative elapsed time, or relative speed effects.… Read the rest