June 2012
31 posts
“Massachusetts, Congress was told, solved the adverse selection problem. By requiring most residents to obtain insurance … the Commonwealth ensured that insurers would not be left with only the sick as customers. As a result, federal lawmakers observed, Massachusetts succeeded where other States had failed.”
—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, citing Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care reforms in today’s Supreme Court opinion.
“I don’t know. The real theme of the show is Don Quixote, which you hear about in every episode. And not just Don Quixote—I’m very proud of this: There isn’t an episode in which there isn’t a reference to a musical—Man of La Mancha and Camelot and Brigadoon. The idea is that they are on a noble but futile quest—they’ve decided that that has honor, and they’re gonna do it.”
—Aaron Sorkin, TV’s Best Talker: Aaron Sorkin on The Newsroom, Sorkinism, and Sounding Smart
“Then he added, “I don’t know anything about ratings (and I’ve had the ratings to back that up) but if I were the president of CNN I would put the smartest news people I know in a room and ask, ‘What would a utopian news show look like?’ and then I’d ask ‘What’s stopping us from doing that?’ ”
—
David Carr, HBO’s ‘Newsroom’ as a Map for CNN
Play
Yesterday I accomplished almost nothing except for watching 7 episodes of New Girl. That show is categorically terrible. It has barely a thimble-full of humorous moments per episode.
However, this was mostly because I was torturing myself over an article that I just couldn’t figure out how to write. Finally at like 11PM it started flowing out of me.
I hate when that shit happens.
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell, on writing.
Neuroscience Study Supports Freud’s View of Anxiety | Psych Central News →
psychcentral.com
Researchers believe measurement of brain waves confirm Sigmund Freud’s contention that anxiety disorders such as phobias are the result of unconscious conflict. In new research, Shevrin Howard Shevrin, Ph.D., presented research on 11 individuals diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Each received a series of psychoanalytically oriented diagnostic sessions conducted by a psychoanalyst. From these interviews the psychoanalysts inferred what underlying unconscious conflict might be causing the person’s anxiety disorder. Words capturing the nature of the unconscious conflict were then selected from the interviews and used as stimuli in the laboratory.
what is wrong with my brain.
I hate anxiety so much.
“I work in a literary genre that thrives at uncertainty points, when questions about our future are unanswered. Even though post-9/11 America is as corporate-dominated as any cyberpunk could have anticipated, it’s also national-security-obsessed. We seem to be building toward a sort of public-private partnership of free-market totalitarianism that never felt like it was on the road map.”
—The Windup Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi on what we can learn from the cyberpunk breakthrough. Article here
We are a Risk Averse Society
See, Neal Stephenson gets it. Here’s a link to his Innovation Starvation articled in Wired last year.
Everything we are doing as a society is towards limiting failure. However, we are on the verge of a rupture. A glitch in a systematized culture. Where we realize we have nothing left to lose, or if we have anything to lose, it’s worth giving up for something more important. I see our culture as being afraid of risk because it would mean giving up the very little success that was in itself difficult to achieve in our current economic climate. I see OWS as a hyper-aware reaction to the stagnation of our culture insofar that we no longer care about the level of sacrifice required because the alternative is too soul crushing. It is a realization that our culture is about to plateau and we long for something more than the bottom line.
We are prepared to embrace the uncertain, luck, chance, mistake, failure once again. That is the opposite of the New Aesthetic. The opposite of the singular computer vision systematizing everything and quashing all difference.
Excerpt from his Interview with Buzzfeed:
Last year you wrote about how we weren’t making any serious effort in the way of innovative new space launch schemes. Have your thoughts on this changed at all with developments like SpaceX and more interest in commercial space travel?
What they’ve achieved is really spectacular. I don’t think anyone can appreciate just how difficult it really is until you’ve been inside on a development project like that, so it’s an awe-inspiring thing that they’ve done. I’d like to see people exploring other options besides chemical rockets, but there are a lot of obstacles to doing that — to make a long story short those obstacles boil down to our attitude toward risk as a society.
What’s our current attitude toward risk?
I think we’ve become far more averse to risk than earlier generations were — and people have become conservative about trying to fund and explore new ideas in a way that’s becoming a serious problem for us.
Why do you think it’s such a serious problem?
That’s an interesting thing to think about. I don’t claim to have the answer — one take on it is that 50 years ago we had very limited access to information compared to the way things are now. Even the best informed decision makers were operating in a vacuum, and they knew it. They knew they had to accept a certain level of risk and make some judgment calls — and that their bosses or people responsible for evaluating them had to just accept that.
And you think the Internet is to blame?
The Internet has created a situation that we at least have the illusion that we can get unlimited information about anything now — and it may have fostered the attitude that if you take a risk and it doesn’t pan out, you should have known it, and you’re personally responsible.
So you think we were more innovative before we had all this information at our disposal?
Yes, I think that naiveté can actually have some advantages, in a strange way.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”
—Anais Nin. Ken Robinson quoted it in a talk he gave at the World Innovation Forum. And just like that, our entire current moment in time distilled into a few lines.
“It is worthy of note that a revival of non-representationalism is taking place at the historical conjuncture when digital simulation technologies have nearly been perfected. Hypothetically everything conceivable by the human mind can be visualized with the aid of digital technology. The area of technical practicability no longer contains any limitations, the only borders are posed by human imagination and intellect. At the beginning of the century, abstract art brought an abrupt expansion of the conceivable. While a comparable and similarly radical
developement in the 21st century would be desirable, it seems to be rather unlikely at this moment.” —
developement in the 21st century would be desirable, it seems to be rather unlikely at this moment.” —
From the catalogue for the Abstraction Now Exhibition in 2003.
Until, you know. now.
“Time is a rubber band. The more you stretch it out, and the more you put off what you really want in favor of indecisiveness or not pissing anybody off or… anything, really, the more likely it is that it will just snap and hit you in the eye. You’re going to get hurt one way or another. Why, though, is it so often that the wounds are self-inflicted?”
—Last lines in a review of the season finale of Girls on AV Club. Resonated. That’s all.
Lesley Arfin Can Go Fuck Herself
As much as I like the show Girls, its association with the writer Lesley Arfin makes me uncomfortable.
Mostly because she is a piece of shit who is representative of the privileged youth culture who thinks they can get away with anything and everything if they hide behind the veil of irony. This isn’t just relegated to racism. “Oh, I’m not a privileged yuppie asshole, look how I dress!” It’s the identification, adoption and transformation of a counter-culture uniform to more subversively express your values without consequence.
And then they justify it by telling everyone to quit whining, man up, deal with it, and to take the stick out of your ass, etc. Or with a “whatever, psh, I don’t give a fuck what you think attitude” As if their total detachment or their presumably obscure intentions make whatever they do or say okay. It’s some vulgar distortion of a shocking punk attitude but with some twisted ironic sincerity that makes it okay to be racist or bigoted or classist.
This behavior is disgusting bullshit and Lesley Arfin and people like her can go fuck themselves. What a piece of shit.
A couple articles:
Lesley Arfin, John Derbyshire, Vice, Taki Magazine, and the Lingering Cultural Capital of Racism
‘Girls’ Writer Is Learning There’s No Such Thing as Ironic Racism
