Category: Miscellaney Page 1 of 13

A few memories stand out for me:

Age 5 or so, on the beach, kneeling on a rocky granite outcropping. The tide is out, and the rock has many small basins still full of water. In one of them a few small fish, silver and a sort of reddish gold, swim in circles. I stare, fascinated.

A tiny room in the third story of an old house. The woman I’m in love with, a psychology major, is doing her her homework, sprawled on her bed. I’m tucked into an alcove, knees up against my chest, reading a book. We aren’t talking or touching, but I’m warm in a cold room, my eyes are soft, and both of us are perfectly aware of the other.

I’m eighteen, running on 4th Avenue. The sun is shining, people are out shopping. I zip past a mirrored wall and turn my head to watch myself run. My form is flawless: my knees come up parallel to the ground, I’m running about a five minute mile, almost effortlessly, muscles warm and relaxed. I’ve done about eight miles; two to go. Sweet.

Now, or in the past, what have you enjoyed most? Write in comments, or email me if you don’t want to share widely.

Yesterday I wrote a very angry article about the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza, with the full aid and complicity of most Western nations, including the US and my own country, Canada.

As I noted in comments, it’s the angriest I’ve been since 2015 when Syriza crumbled to European austerity. The day that happened I was furious. I wrote an angry post and went for a walk, still boiling with anger. About half an hour later I thought “this is ridiculous, it isn’t helping the Greeks and I don’t like it” and the anger went away.

It was odd, in the sense that we often have thoughts and feelings we don’t like, but usually they don’t go away just because think “I’d rather not feel this way.”

But a fair bit of it stuck, and over the past eight years my anger has reduced radically, and on those occasions when I do get angry, I can end it quickly if I want to. I was angry when I wrote that post, but I didn’t go to bed angry.

From about the run-up to the Iraq war till 2014 I was angry most of the time. Lots of dead people, tortured people, raped people, hungry people, homeless people that didn’t need to be any of those things.

Our leaders and too many of us (remember approval for the Iraq war polled over 70%) were creating Hell when we could just as easily create Heaven.

In many ways the current Gaza war reminds me of the run-up to and early Iraq war. The same feeling of frustrated helplessness while vast evil was planned and performed. Iraq didn’t radicalize me, Obama confirming he was neoliberal scum and condemning a billion+ people to die by slamming the pedal down on climate change did, but Iraq turned me into an activist, a role I occupied from 2002 to 2009, and emotionally inhabited till 2014.

Anyway, what I learned in 2014, and what I grounded into my consciousness in 2015 was that being angry all the time was destroying me. My health, my effectiveness and my enjoyment of life. My anger wasn’t hurting the people doing all the evil, they could care less, and why should they care, they were well off or rich, powerful and living very pleasant lives while I was poor, sick and angry?

The only person my anger was hurting was me.

Don’t get me wrong, if my anger had let me, in some sense, win, I’d have taken the hit. I was committed, oh was I committed. But it didn’t work.

Andrew Cockburn once asked someone working for him if their hate was pure and I get it. Still is. I won’t pretend or cavil, or pretend to be a Saint. I hate Obama. I hate Biden. I hate Trump. I hate Clinton and Bush. Netanyahu. Didn’t use to hate Trudeau but genocide support has pushed me over.

My hate is pure, but these days not intense. Just a sort of background contempt (the most dangerous emotion, by far, contempt.)

At the same time I feel this odd empathy and sympathy for them. I get it, I feel it, the self-righteousness (especially evident in Obama and Trudeau), the love of power and adulation, the sense that they are the ones who know and make the hard decisions and so on.

Ben Gurion knew he was evil, and I respect him for that, but most of our leaders think they are good.

(And no, don’t succumb to the bullshit of “well if I think they’re evil, and they think they’re good, who knows who’s right. That’s garbage. Have you aided a genocide recently? Invaded a country based on lies? Denied the children of Iraq cancer medicines? Bombed a hospital or pharmaceutical plant? Made millions homeless then effectively made being homeless illegal?” )

Life is good for the people in charge: the senior pols, the CEOS, the high level executives, the tools who run NGOs (whose workers lives are mostly shit).

Anyway, I write this because I bet a lot of my readers feel the same way, and recognize a lot of what I’m saying.

Rule #1: don’t let the monsters ruin your life. Don’t let them control your emotions. Surges of anger are fine, but don’t live there. Seek out joy and happiness and as much as possible fight from there.

But remember also that emotions like hate, anger and contempt, in controlled doses exist to let you know who is an enemy, who shouldn’t have power, and who is dangerous to you. Such emotions are dangerous, absolutely, because they can be weaponized by others to turn you against people who don’t deserve them. See Jews, WWII and Palestinians, today. See Americans who think Putin is a bigger threat to them than Biden or Trump or the CEO of any Fortune 500 company.

What’s happening in Gaza is an atrocity. By all means do something, but don’t let it make your miserable, because if you do, the bastards have a victory, the suffering of their enemy, you.

But remember, oh yes, always remember. And remembering, act if you ever have the chance.

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Many posts I write aren’t intended to be persuasive if you don’t already agree with me on some axes. Take, for example, the post “some acts are always evil.” I chose rape as my example: it is not possible to have a justified rape. If you agree with this, you’ll agree that some acts are always evil. If you don’t think rape is never justified, then my argument won’t work with you, and indeed it didn’t work with all the commenters for just that reason.

There are three primary elements of persuasion.

The first might be called beneficence or trust or sometimes even disinterest. If you’re trying to persuade me to do or believe something, I want to know that you have my best interests at heart: that you aren’t trying to persuade me because it’s good for you that I agree, but not good for me. This is the entire thesis of the book “How To Make Friends And Influence People.” It’s the basis of all win/win negotiating methods. It makes a huge difference.

Disinterest is the intellectual version of this, meant more for changing minds than making deals. It is a “I just follow the logic or facts wherever they go and accept the conclusions.” If you’re obviously arguing “from interest” people will tend not to believe what you say about issues unless they share the same interest as you.

The second might be called competence or wisdom or knowledge. This is the “do you know what you’re talking about” check. Perhaps you’re arguing win/win that we should attack that tiger and take its lunch, but if I don’t think you know how to beat that tiger, it sure ain’t looking like a win/win to me. Professionals trade on this sort of thing, “I have training”. The guy or gal trying to tell you how to do well on dates or get a romantic partner needs to have a happy relationship or be constantly seen with beautiful women or handsome men. The person preaching how to get rich has to be rich, and so on.

I used to think this really, really mattered and in my early years of blogging I would write posts tallying up my predictions and how well they had done, with what a friend once called “Stalinist self-criticism.” I thought that if I proved I was usually right about certain subjects, people would trust me on those subjects.

Worked with some people, but not with most. It took me about five years to realize this intellectually, and another 6 years or so to understand it emotionally.

So this factor matters, but it’s only one factor and I would say that in most circumstances it isn’t most important factor.

The third factor of persuasion is what might be called mode. This how you persuade people: perhaps you make that appeal to authority. Perhaps you are friendly. Perhaps you simply make your statements confidently as if no one could doubt you. Perhaps show that what you say follows logically if people accept your premises (this is what I did in the “some acts are always evil post”, using rape as being always evil.) Perhaps you reason inductively “we can find hundreds of samples of this situation an in every or almost all case it went the way I say.”

There are socially dominant modes in different periods, societies and social groups. Scientists, at least in principle, should be convinced by evidence supporting hypotheses. Scholastic academics of the middle ages wanted one to use a combination of Aristotlean logic and biblical revelation. In most societies which have ever existed “this is how we’ve always done it’ was a killer argument. In others “I’ve got a big sword and lots of muscular friends” more or less worked, especially when willing to kill enough people.

In spiritual groups, showing that you appear to have attainments like calm and dispassion or universal love or the ability to concentrate for hours engenders trust in some people. In older societies performing miracles engendered trust (and whatever you think about it they genuinely believed in miracles and appear to have experienced them.) In established religions and with believers showing that the religious texts support what you say is an important mode.

Beneficience, competence and mode. It’s hard to get all three moving at the same time simply because different groups have different ideas of what qualifies one as competent. They shade easily into each other: the mode of arguing from scripture also suggests that the people who are qualified (competent) are priests or monks or theologians, for example. People who believe in the scientific mode of reasoning will tend to trust scientists, giving them more benefit of the doubt than non-scientists even if the non scientists are using the scientific method.

A simply summation of what works best might be “one of us and one of our leaders.” That combines an assumption of beneficience (group members want what is good for group members), competence (has risen to leadership) and mode, because a leading group member will almost always use the mode appropriate to the group.

All of these factors of persuasion can be hacked. Do Biden or Trump or Clinton or Bush care about average Americans? Of course not. There is no beneficience in most senior politicians for the masses. Are they competent? Well, maybe at making the rich richer and at campaigning, but at making everyone better off and safer? Of course not. As for mode, well, they’re usually good at adopting appropriate modes, but the recent example of Trump shows that what modes can work is a lot different from what modes are normal.

I tend to think that the most effective factor is beneficience. People are more tribal than anything else, and if you can get them thinking you’re one of them (even if you aren’t, which is usually the case with politicians) and acting in their best interests, enough of them will believe almost anything to get you what you want.

If you don’t want to be persuaded by con men and psychopaths, don’t believe “one of us” from anyone who either doesn’t have the same interests as you or whose interests, at least, aren’t actively engaged: whose well-being isn’t effected if you believe them or don’t.

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We spend a lot of time here dealing with everything that’s going wrong in the world.

Rather a lot.

The goal isn’t to be pessimistic, nor is it to be optimistic, the goals is to be realistic. But in some eras realism can be fairly depressing.

So I think it’s important to remember that there’s still a lot of good in life. Love, food, beauty, excitement and more. An excellent book or movie; a beautiful sunset or a gorgeous person; that feeling of warm mature love or the excitement of new love; warm soup on a cold day or the feeling of cheese squishing between our teeth.

Many people live too much in their thoughts: chains of predictions of bad events, many of which will never happen and even if they do, aren’t happening now. Instead, lean into the good stuff: that feeling of relaxation when you lie down in bed after a busy day or the pleasant languor when you wake.

If you look for these events, many of which are small, like my very comfortable chair, and you choose to rest in them, you’ll find life a lot better, I suspect. In ill times, savor what is good.

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