Idealism Means Well (2026-09-14)

Melancolia I, the famous 1514 print by Albrecht D¨rer, scanned from a copy now held at the rijksmusuem in the netherlands. Image via the public domain review, where readers can also check out the rijksmuseum's results page.

Many years ago now, in the course of completing some history course requirements in my undergraduate program, one class was going rather unevenly, at best. It was one of those situations where the instructor was burnt out and very near retirement, resulting in rather diffuse lectures delivered in a by turns disinterested or annoyed tone. We all had to be there, and though it was not a situation where anybody could say it out loud, I think we students broadly appreciated and understood the instructor's exhausted resentment. Unfortunately, this did not help very much with trying to sort out just what the learning objectives were. The books we were reading were old standards, that wasn't a problem as such. The issue was these were books in many ways out of context, and the instructor was limping along with a course designed for students who were fully indoctrinated with particular views of the authors of those books, the validity of those books, and how they should be interpreted. While I do not agree with indoctrination, the basics of the instructor's framework may need to be provided in the first week of lectures, and that is not necessarily a bad thing so long as the instructor is not tired and burnt out. In any case, we soldiered along together through the semester, and got to the last class, the one meant to set us up for the final examination. After the final, shorter lecture, the instructor opened the floor for questions. With five minutes left he sighed and said, "At least you all mean well." Not the most inspiring closer, yet it happens to capture the way "idealism" works in the world. As a concept people came up with while striving to make sense of the many absurdities and unfairnesses of daily life, idealism is a product of an impressive number of well-meaning people. When not abused or over-extended by the cynical and greedy, it is not terribly effective, but at least it is mostly harmless. Not being much in favour of idealism – as opposed to having ideals in the sense of ethics and constructive goals – even at its best it seems to me people committed to idealism are in danger of wasting their time or falling into despair because either the real world must always fall short, or they can't enforce change just with the power of their minds. In other words, I am referring here to the philosophical version of idealism, which my trusty OED reminds me broadly refers to "any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of the mind."

In many ways philosophical idealism reflects the difficulties anyone has in describing to others what we have experienced and/or perceived. While the most common response to this challenge is creating art, there are always some people who understandably insist, "No, no, we can solve this!" And we do get hints of promising paths via the techniques we have developed to facilitate communication, starting of course, with human language. There is language in itself, and then we do things like agree on meanings for words and rules for how to speak together in complex and fraught situations. The agreed on meanings part seems to be where we get in particular trouble, and the telltale serious temptations of idealism begin. Somebody always seems to fall into trying to create definitions once and for all, especially for ethical concepts, which it some people seem convinced they can find a "set it and forget it" version to finally create a self-perpetuating social harmony. If only we could find the correct, perfect ideas, then make sure everyone is instructed in them and kept from straying, then it woud be unnecessary to do anything else. Societies would become something like interpersonal perpetual motion machines, not requiring anyone to do anything to keep things going, all the tough problems would automatically be nipped in the bud or not arise. Please note, I am not trying to be sarcastic here. It is a known phenomenon that extremely idealised, utopian (in the sense of "no place" because not extant not "good place") notions tend to run aground when philosophers try to imagine how to make their no places into real places. One of the best known examples is Plato via his famous work The Republic. The imagined republic sounds great, except for how the dialogue develops notions of how to create and maintain it. At least Plato's characters had little to no trust or respect for the majority of people in their socities, presuming they could never be trusted to act according to "reason." But idealism is far from just a philosopher's dread temptation.

Consider the zoo. Zoos started out as a form of conspicuous consumption for the rich, who liked to show off their ostensible power by importing and maintaining exotic animals and plants from wherever they could manage. It looks to have taken european colonialism to take this down an ever more degrading slope, to the point of including mostly kidnapped, rarely hired Indigenous people in human zoos and natural history museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The human inclusion was something of a blip, while over time many of the zoos and zoos as a concept were redefined as for animals, with special plant collections set up as botanical gardens and the like even earlier. Then zoos became about a paying public, as people were and are understandably curious about exotic animals, many of whom are beautiful, and humane zoo keepers would want to do what they could to give the captive animals good lives. After all, few to none of them could be returned to the wild after long captivity. More recently I have seen arguments that zoos are important for teaching children and allowing people of all ages to see and hear animals they could not otherwise. However, this does not make much sense to me. All too many people in urban areas are in circumstances where they don't know anything about the animals native to where they live. Exotic animals have been taken from their normal environment and climate to live in an artificial enclosure, where it is difficult to provide them adequate mental and social stimulus, let alone a decent diet and protection from foreign climat extremes. There are a lot of well-meaning ideas wrapped up in modern zoos besides instruction and amusement of humans of course. Besides more local concerns, official gifts of exotic animals between governments is still a common practice. Yet, the exotic animals in question are practically all considered at risk or outright endangered species, with limited populations under constant stress from poachers and habitat loss. It seems they are being "loved to death" even as people strive to repurpose zoos as refuges, breeding centres, and rehabilitation operations for endangered animals injured by mishap or by human malfeasance. These are good and ethical uses of zoos, to be sure. They are also a sort of mass first aid to manage bad outcomes of human decisions while not dealing with the root issues driving people out of contact with the real world as reflected in lack of familiarity with local animals, let alone exotic ones.

One of the things looking into the use and application of ideals, ideas, and idealizations clarified for me is the difference between an idealization and an abstraction. (Yes, a pair of dreadful latinate words.) Alas, "abstraction" and "abstract" have suffered a great deal of abuse due to their cynical deployment by some fame and money-hunting artists and art dealers through the mid to late twentieth century. Yet, abstraction is a genuinely useful and fascinating technique, with a real high wire aspect to it because in its most well-known applications it is so culturally specific. For example, "westerners" to this day are prone to misreading artwork by people from plains First Nations as "primitive," by which they mean something an untrained child would do. The seemingly "simple" works are highly abstract, the point is not to reproduce the very specific, but to evoke a culturally specific framework of images, sound, and so on. They are intended to be "read" just as the famous hyperreal looking paintings by Vermeer are. This brings us back to the desire to communicate an experience or feeling, to share the understanding of one or more minds with other people. In contrast, idealism and its reflex idealization are expressions of a desire to enforce a mental notion on external objects, which slips very easily into imposition upon other beings who have their own say in the matter. Once coercion comes into play, it is very easy for things to go grimly wrong, because such conditions often reflect a broken feedback loop.

For an all too current example, we have only to look at the state of capitalist countries today. Capitalist fundamentalists insist that their profits must always go up, and therefore that they must constantly take steps to reduce wages, raise prices, and boost their rents. Both practically and logically, this is an untenable longterm goal. We have a finite planet, and long before that finiteness comes to roost, the finiteness of human endurance in conditions of extreme exploitation will come first. It appears that capitalist fundamentalists have merged in their thinking with certain forms of especially aberrant christianity, with their insistence that the end of the world is imminent and should be helped along by destroying everything. An anecdote is of course not data, but I have never forgotten the proud, self-proclaimed capitalist who assured me that money was meaningless, just a way to keep score. That of course is the logic of the game "Monopoly." (Top)

Now I Understand... (2026-09-07)

Excerpt from the cover of issue 33 of Sinister Wisdom, when it was still an actual lesbian-focussed, lesbian-majority written and published periodical.

One of the great joys and frustrations of reading classic lesbian and feminist periodicals published between roughly 1970 and 1990 is how gloriously uneven they can be. I don't intend this as damnation with faint praise, they were genuinely experimental, striving to figure out what a periodical could be if it was not mainly about selling stuff to the potential reader. This is quite possible to do in principle, but as many women discovered before the advent of affordable desktop publishing, the equipment required could be expensive or difficult to access, and for those working in the united states, men there have a special penchant for deliberate sabotage of the equipment once women are using it. (For more examples beyond periodicals, feel free to research the first women pilots, and then go on from there to look into women travellers.) It seems in the end that in the present north american economy, the one thing nobody could be bothered to do was work out how to support hard copy black and white printing and binding affordable enough for serious small-scale work and distribution, and so here we are with independent periodical production and distribution nearly as bad off as fifty years ago. Still, that was the least of the challenges the editors of these periodicals faced at times, as they sought to keep a steady stream of contributions coming in. Most of the time these editors were not in a position to pay contributors, so unless they had a more news-oriented framework, they needed to catch the enthusiasms of their audience combined with word of mouth to gather new material. As a result, they developed the now familiar genres of theme issue, conference proceeding, review issue, and general issue. Yet it is clear from reading the editorial commentary in periodicals like Sinister Wisdom that there was a structural issue the editorial team was dealing with, while not being quite sure what the heck was going on. Not having a lot of money, too much or too little of the right kind of contribution for the issue or whatever is bound to affect any periodical.

Perhaps it is obvious to others, but what finally helped me understand what the editorial teams were struggling with is Jo Freeman's famous article, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It is an important article, highly relevant to this day, and all women should read and study it carefully. The linked version is an authorized and updated one on Jo Freeman's site. On one hand, her explanation of the history and background of structurelessness as a negative issue helps clarify it as a notably united statesian one. There's more historical reason for this than Freeman gets into, but focussing in on the feminist case in particular, she observes how at its root structurelessness is a hang over from consciousness raising groups, where a lack of structure makes sense. The difficulty is that once the women want to go ahead and do something with a more outward-looking purpose, an overt structure is needed, otherwise the women involved in the new project are prone to getting caught up in crypto-structures that are difficult to change and often frustrate everyone. The crypto-structures are perhaps better known today as cliques, with all the ills those tight knit groups are prone to. A clique can't just let anybody in, and inevitably the group as a whole bogs down in struggles over who is in, who is out, and subsequent inability to adjust to changing needs and skillbases among the members. This is tough to deal with, especially in the case of groups determined to reorganize to carry out a longer term goal and adapt some structure on the fly. Freeman includes some thoughtful guidelines well worth using in any working group.

Reading The Tyranny of Structurelessness gave me a whole new perspective on what the editorial teams on those classic feminist and lesbian periodicals were dealing with. Case in point, Sinister Wisdom started out as a brilliant passion project of just two lesbians, who put together their knowledge about periodical publishing and awareness of the need for the one they had in mind to produce it. They understood "lesbian" or at least "woman loving woman" are terms covering a vast diversity of women just in the united states, let alone north america more widely. Eventually they took a lot of heat for the various supposed "-isms" in Sinsiter Wisdom before eventually handing on the editorial role to a new team. I have often found such complaints about small-scale projects of this type puzzling at best, mean-spirited at worst. They were so new, they were in no way the equivalent of such monstrosities as the productions of the "Time/Life" conglomerate, which remained and in many ways still remain as staunchly sexist and racist (at minimum) as ever. Neither Sinister Wisdom nor any other feminist project can be all things to all women, at the least not all at once. Everybody has to start somewhere. And indeed, over time the various editors of Sinister Wisdom in the period I have referenced developed those issue types in an effort to address their readers in all their diversity and complexity. It was a noble and genuine effort, and it seems to me they succeeded to a remarkable degree all things considered. In order to achieve this success, Sinister Wisdom became more formal in its structure, it came to have explicit editorial and production teams. The days of having a volunteer evening addressing issues to put in the mail were superseded just as the early typewritten issues were replaced by typeset and eventually computer-produced layout issues. These changes helped a lot, and certainly helped along the newer teams who managed to take control of Sinister Wisdom during the queer theory-fuelled anti-lesbian, anti-feminist, anti-woman backlash that has continued to the present.

Sinister Wisdom is also an interesting case study of how incredibly difficult it is to keep a periodical going based on sexual orientation or other personalized characteristic. The typical "women's magazine" still firmly holding a place in grocery stores near the check out has some of the same challenges, though they are bouyed up by their real role, which is to persuade women something is wrong with them then sell them something to "fix" it. Without having a more explicit focus of some kind, it can be tricky to persuade people to send in material for potential inclusion in an issue, because they are not sure whether their work would fit or what else their work might appear beside. How to strike the balance between a hugbox that pleases no one, and a publication that supports critical and respectful discussion of contentious issues? This is hard to do in the best of scenarios. Nevertheless, in the older back issues feminist and lesbian periodicals I have been reading, a genuinely impressive number of editors and writers sought to do make these periodicals work and overcome issues such as lack of balanced representation and not always being able to reflect complex and controversial discussions well. They succeeded far more often than they are given credit for, and sought to document what they learned so others wouldn't have to go through the same problems. (Top)

On Net Neutrality (2026-08-31)

A sample image from Geometria et Perspectiva, containing various ruined buildings, useful to intarsia workers, as well as for the special pleasure of many other amateurs; ordered and arranged by Lorenz Stoer, painter and citizen of Augsburg, via the public domain review.

All too often the really interesting and important articles and blogposts about a topic seem to fly under the radar when first published. One in particular I happened on recently discussing the problems with the internet, including the challenge of net neutrality was posted by Lori Emerson at her blog way back on 23 july 2015. This specific post is What's Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day. In all honesty I had never heard of this guy, so it was a real treat to learn about him and read his explanations of internet protocols. In fact, I would recommend reading the blogpost for exactly these explanations, because it is helpful to get the more practical description instead of the abstracted versions. With the practical version in mind, it is easier to appreciate how the implementation of the protocols creates many of the issues we are dealing with today, and why those issues are not inevitable and could be fixed. The part about net neutrality provides an important perspective very few people are talking about to this day.

Day: The other thing that CYCLADES noticed about layers in networks was that they weren't just modules and they realized this because they were looking at the whole network. They realized that layers in networks were more general because they used protocols to coordinate their actions in different computers. Layers were distributed share states with different scopes. Scope? Think of it as building with bricks. At the bottom, we use short bricks to set a foundation, protocols that go a short distance. On top of that are longer bricks, and on top of that longer yet. So what we have is the Physical and Data Link Layer have one scope; the Network and Transport Layers have a larger scope over multiple Data Link Layers. Quite soon, circa 1972, researchers started to think about networks of networks. The CYCLADES group realized that the Internet Transport Layer was a layer of greater scope yet it also operated over multiple networks. So by the mid-1970s, they were looking at a model that consisted of Physical and Data Link Layers of one small scope that is used to create networks with a Network Layer of greater scope, and an Internet Layer over multiple networks of greater scope yet. The Internet today has the model I described above for a network architecture of two scopes, not an internet of 3 scopes.

Why is this a problem? Because congestion control goes in that middle scope. Without that scope, the Internet group put congestion control in TCP, which is about the worse place to put it and thwarts any attempt to provide Quality of Service for voice and video, which must be done in the Network Layer and ultimately precipitated a completely unnecessary debate over net neutrality.

Emerson: Do you mean that a more sensible structure to handle network congestion would have made the issue of net neutrality beside the point? Can you say anything more about this? I'm assuming others besides you have pointed this out before?

Day: Yes, this is my point and I am not sure that anyone else has pointed it out, at least not clearly. It is a little hard to see clearly when you're "inside the Internet." There are several points of confusion in the net neutrality issue. One is that most non-technical people think that bandwidth is a measure of speed when it is more a measure of capacity. Bits move at the speed of light (or close to it) and they don't go any faster or slower. So bandwidth really isn't a measure of speed. The only aspect of speed in bandwidth is how long it takes to move a fixed number of bits and whatever that is consumes capacity of a link. If a link has a capacity of 100Mb/sec and I send a movie at 50Mb/sec, I only have another 50Mb/sec I can use for other traffic. So to some extent, talk of a "fast lane" doesn't make any sense. Again, bandwidth is a matter of capacity.

For example, you have probably heard the argument that Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon want "poor little" Netflix to pay for a higher speed, to pay for a faster lane. In fact, Comcast and Verizon are asking Netflix to pay for more capacity! Netflix uses the rhetoric of speed to wrap themselves in the flag of net neutrality for their own profit and to bank on the fact that most people don't understand that bandwidth is capacity. Netflix is playing on people's ignorance.

From the earliest days of the Net, providers have had an agreement that as long as the amount of traffic going between them is about the same in both directions they don't charge each other. In a sense it would "all come out in the wash." But if the traffic became lop-sided, if one was sending much more traffic into one than the other was sending the other way, then they would charge each other. This is just fair. Suddenly, because movies consume a lot of capacity, Netflix is generating considerable load that wasn't there before. This isn't about blocking a single Verizon customer from getting his movie; this is about the 1000s of Verizon Customers all downloading movies at the same time and all of that capacity is being consumed at a point between Netflix's network provider and Verizon. It is even likely they didn't have lines with that much capacity, so new ones had to be installed. That is very expensive. Verizon wants to charge Netflix or Netflix's provider because the capacity moving from them to Verizon is now lop-sided by a lot. This request is perfectly reasonable and it has nothing to do with the Internet being neutral. Here's an analogy: imagine your neighbor suddenly installed an aluminum smelter in his home and was going to use 10,000 times more electricity than he use to. He then tells the electric company that they have to install much higher capacity power lines to his house and provide all of that electricity and his monthly electric bill should not go up. I doubt the electric company would be convinced.

Net neutrality basically confuses two things: traffic engineering vs discriminating against certain sources of traffic. The confusion is created because of the flaws introduced fairly early and then what that forced the makers of Internet equipment to do to try to work around those flaws. Internet applications don't tell the network what kind of service they need from the Net. So when customers demanded better quality for voice and video traffic, the providers had two basic choices: over provision their networks to run at about 20% efficiency (you can imagine how well that went over) or push the manufacturers of routers to provide better traffic engineering. Because of the problems in the Internet, about the only option open to manufacturers was for them to look deeper into the packet than just making sure they routed the packet to its destination. However, looking deeper into a packet also means being able to tell who sent it. (If applications start encrypting everything, this will no longer work.) This of course not only makes it possible to know which traffic needs special handling, but makes it tempting to slow down a competitor's traffic. Had the Net been properly structured to begin with (and in ways we knew about at the time), then these two things would be completely distinct: one would have been able to determine what kind of packet was being relayed without also learning who was sending it and net neutrality would only be about discriminating between different sources of data so that traffic engineering would not be part of the problem at all.

Of course, Comcast shouldn't be allowed to slow down Skype traffic because it is in competition with Comcast's phone service. Or Netflix traffic that is in competition with its on-demand video service. But if Skype and Netflix are using more than ordinary amounts of capacity, then of course they should have to pay for it.

The interview is much longer than this, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. That said, even this snippet reveals how so many of the issues with the internet as a means to move data are tied up with inappropriately conflating capacity and source. How many of us realize this is the nonsense helping reinforce the drive to spy on what we are doing online? I suspect today as communities fight back against the massive waste factories going around in the guise of "AI computing centres" would have a great deal to say about the bait and switch behind attempts to manipulate "net neutrality" into a way to get free network capacity expansions.

Reading Emerson's blogpost also brought home to me how almost all "media" is now streamed, one way or the other, over the internet. At this point this is also true of the vast majority of communication by telephone or radio. Furthermore, the alternative networks originally built for radio, telephone, television, and so on, are being systematically dismantled in favour of replacement by fibre optic networks. This could be okay, except that it seems they are all being consolidated into the same few corporate-owned networks, making it all too easy for communications to be cut off via deliberate malfeasance or simple natural disaster. We have workarounds for this of course, and as it happens Emerson's most recent book project delved into the many alternate network possibilities, some very old, some very new, some very simple, others very technical. An important aspect of achieving and maintaining network neutrality is not placing all of our figurative eggs in one basket, as well as not confusing traffic engineering and source discrimination. (Top)

Propaganda Is Nobody's Friend (2026-08-24)

1893 advertisement for pear's soap from a catalogue detailing american's cup yacht races, via wikimedia commons.

Having written about advertising and propaganda before, I went back and forth on what to call this thoughtpiece. After all, technically, "propaganda" is not a bad word. Then again, "technically" is doing way too much work here. The connotations of the word are not so nice, and even the origin of the word goes back to the catholic church and its unethical practise of missionizing and proselytizing. We desperately need a simple and clear word that simply refers to sharing information, with or without an indication of personal opinion about it, without necessarily intending to convince another person of anything or manipulate their emotions. At the moment, at least in english, such a word seems utterly absent if not awol. Maybe "sharing" is the best we've got for the time being. In my experience, propaganda is the stuff produced in service of emotional manipulation, deployed by means of messages spread by some mass means. So depending on time period and technology available, the mass means could be church sermons, publications produced via printing press, movies and television programs, and so on. Derrick Jensen refers to propagandistic words as "inaccurate in order to serve ideological purposes." This is true, but "ideological purposes" seems too vague. Jensen isn't taking issue with ideological purposes per se in the article I excerpted this from, he is very clear the issue is with the inaccuracy. We can't rule out "ideological purposes" altogether because there are valid reasons to argue for or against different ideologies in the open, using accurately presented facts and the most accurate interpretations we can muster within the limits of human frailty. Jensen is responding to deliberate inaccuracy, which I would argue is all the more egregious because it is deployed in service of manipulating the reader's emotions in the hope that the reader gives more authority to the manipulator than they should, and sets aside their critical thing skills. So in the end it seems to me to be consistent, the key element in the description of "propaganda" in its invidious form, which at least in northern north america is often treated as its only form, is messages that manipulate the emotions. Advertising is an especially revealing example, and these days is more and more crude.

I actually found it helpful to think over the propagandist's potential communicative style in terms of the Satir modes described by Suzatte Haden Elgen in her books on the Gentle Verbal Art of Self-Defense. Propaganda is not a "leveller" form of communication, so even if it presents true information, it will do so in a way leading people to doubt what it says because of the source or the tone of the presentation. It is for good reason emergency messages on television are not presented by men in clown suits who punctuate each sentence by honking a car horn. The people producing propaganda tend to despise their audience, whom they deem stupid and easy to manipulate. This may be the case even if a big part of the reason they are opting to produce propaganda is because they have no convincing case to make for whatever it is they intend to tell people about or sell to them. In fact, a propagandist prefers an undereducated, naïve, or at least extremely time-pressured audience. With this in mind, it is no surprise how much propaganda is made in the form of "children's programs and literature" and versions of these revised "for adults." If nothing else, the "adult" versions are meant to trigger a sense of cosy familiarity and nostalgia, both of which presumably are intended to make us more biddable. "News" is as much propaganda as "advertising," and as we are all too bitterly aware these days, they are constantly more difficult to tell apart.

1906 advertisment for pond's extract soap, from an issue of The Delineator held in and digitized by the Wellcome Collection. Image used via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

I suggest there is a real difference, although it may not be where we expect it to be. "News" is meant to inspire fear, so the viewer or listener will feel an urge to "look for daddy," or some other authoritarian, parent-like figure. "Advertising" as I have noted before, is especially about anxiety, especially "fear of missing out" and fear of embarrassment. The sequence of three soap advertisements bring this out well. Notice the earliest one is pretty low key, possibly because the presumed audience is male and/or wealthy. What a clever way to ask if the reader has washed their hands recently. The next advertisement sounds very modern even though its illustration is still quite old-fashioned, as is emphasized by the wall of text. This here is arguably an ancestor of commercials directed at teenagers struggling with puberty-driven acne, as it recommends the specific soap brand for achieving and maintaining clear skin. The wall of text refers repeatedly to "nature," but the reader is to understand not their nature, only the nature of the soap will do the trick. (Readers who check the image at readable size will notice there is even a temptation to surrender personal data included in this one.) However, there is only so much anxiety any advertiser may inspire in an individual person abou themselves, and many sorts of magazines and product placements to write copy for. Hence the third example, in which the amount of text is cut down and the prominence of the image brought back to a primary role. Now the potential reader is supposed to worry about which soap she has used to clean her pantry with, what if she has been using a an impure soap. Maybe, heaven forfend, even in the early 1900s housewives were using carbolic soap, with its distinctive smell and thick suds. (A key scene in the movie version of Frank McCourt's novel Angela's Ashes turns on the unexpected smell of carbolic soap.) People need to wash themselves, their clothes, dishes, and so on. Now so few of us make soap, the likelihood is we will have to buy some. Soapmakers have the problem then of somehow persuading us to buy their soap instead of some other brand, and apparently suitability for the job or pleasing scent options are not enough. People don't need to have their emotions manipulated to purchase or things they need or enjoy, nor to do things they need to do or enjoy.

Then there is the sort of propaganda which specifically pretends to authority base in superior knowledge, thereby inspiring awe and rote obedience. This form is still most easily recognized in its form as religious sermon, in which it is hard to miss we are being browbeaten on a moral subject. After another recent skim of Chris Hedges repeating his call to us all to give up because humanity is hopelessly evil to the near exclusion of the real issues he is ostensibly writing about, I think this is the fundamental emotional manipulation of the genre. The point of the sermon is despair, to neuter and break down resistance. It may not be surprising to learn this format is a modern version of the legal argument as epitomized in the works of Cicero. Whether you are the defence lawyer or the prosecution, you want to deliver a summary argument so devastating, so impossible to challenge, the opposing party surrenders. All the more effective to resort to emotional manipulation when the facts are not so amenable to whichever side of the case you may be arguing. However, the sermon is especially nasty, because the person composing and delivering it may be entirely sincere and striving to do the right thing as they understand it. Maybe they even feel they are being completely honest, in that they truly feel the despair they hope to invoke in others. These are the really scary people who are all too good at indoctrination if allowed to get their hands on anyone who is in any way emotionally vulnerable. They are all too aware of how weak a purely faith-based position is.

1914 advertisment for ivory soap from American Cookery via wikimedia commons.

A "leveller" is someone who is simply expressing their own feelings and/or presenting their understanding of a particular topic or situation. Their audience may take it or leave it, although if the leveller is sharing information intended to help resolve a conflict or organize a task, we can hope the audience will take it and make constructive use of it. By rights, education as a whole should be a form of leveller communication, since children especially are not yet equipped to apply a critical sense to what they are told by authority figures. Then again, this feature of children is exactly what tempts so many into making education into a form of indoctrination, especially if they hope to instil lifelong conformity and obedience to outside authorities. Nevertheless, we can tell when education has slipped into the indoctrination mode because it slips into emotional manipulation as a primary goal, especially manipulation of negative emotions. I suppose there is a grim logic to this, considering the folk knowledge of how many more people we tend to recount our negative experiences to versus how many we share our positive experiences with. The additional sting in the tail when attempting to manipulate negative emotion however is that this very often inspires resistance rather than obedience. Resistance is important, although depending on the conditions we are in it may be difficult to engage in constructive and effective resistance.

Okay, so propaganda is not helpful because it manipulates and encourages negative emotions, and furthermore inspires doubt where there should be certainty by presenting the truth in disrespectful ways and lies as the truth. But what to call a document or presentation without those intentions or attributes, conscious or not? Take for example, a set of diagrams showing how to disassemble and clean an engine, or the series of lectures on reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital by David Harvey. Note these two examples still make arguments to us we can take or leave, the one that we can understand and work on engines, the other that it is possible to read and understand Marx's major work. I suppose we could fall back on another latinate but still common word, presentation. If we strive to present some information, then the connotations strike me as more or less what a leveller does. When we present something, the person or person(s) presented to may take it or leave it. It does not entail somehow forcing them to listen or watch, or change their minds about something. (Top)

Satisficing Isn't Working (2026-08-17)

An improvised fridge while away from home, photograph by Ruth Hartnup, april 2014. Image courtesy of Ruth Hartnup's photostream at flickr, accessed 3 august 2025.

My original plan for the notes I made against the title of this thoughtpiece was to write an actual researched essay. The collection of relevant slips and references had suddenly exploded on the subject of psychoactive drugs, licit and prescribed (SSRIs, ADHD drugs), licit and over the counter (tobacco, alcohol), and illicit with varying levels of immediate risk to acquiring and taking them (cocaine, street methamphetamines). There have been some interesting, if not necessarily great articles about these drugs, especially those now commonly prescribed. Take for example, ADHD drugs, as in the PioneerWorks article Dispatches From the Adderall Epidemic from march 2024. A bigger and more interesting line I thought might be the backbone of the possible essay is anti-depressants, especially SSRIs, as I had never forgotten the fate of edmonton activist and politician Tooker Gomberg, who suffered an all too common side effect of many of these drugs, suicidal ideation. For the people with the right social circumstances and biological conditions, these drugs work incredibly, wonderfully well. For those who without, these drugs are a terrifying form of russian roulette they feel they must play in hopes of regaining a productive, healthy life. Then again, there are a shocking number of men taking SSRIs and going on to commit mass murder, as in the infamous 2012 case of a young man who walked into a packed theatre and shot 12 people. For now we can set aside the question of how a person on psychoactive medication was nevertheless allowed to purchase firearms in that united states case, or how nobody seemed to notice the man was collecting weapons, body armour and such. But then over the past couple of months, various articles have been turning up about men going into psychotic states after long interactions with LLMs, so that did in my leaning towards writing about problems with these psychoactive drugs. Even if it still takes my breath away to reread my reference to UK bans on prescribing SSRIs to children, and warnings from health canada about antidepressants. But then I happened on Stuart McMillen's illustrated account of the Rat Park study of drug addiction, which reminded me of the original plan again.

The plan was actually to discuss how the explosion of psychoactive drug use, be it prescribed or not prescribed, legal or illegal, indicated how terribly wrong things are. For years and years, most people have been struggling along in the so-called "west," taking as given the claim that their current suffering, precarity, even outright poverty is okay. It'll all be okay, because no pain no gain, go through the suffering now for guaranteed goodies tomorrow. Yet even the people who are serious in their belief in the effectiveness of this trade off they are supposedly making are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They feel the desperate need for chemical support to help them stay productive enough, focussed enough, to push down chronic pain or anxiety or both enough. Antidepressants are often prescribed for other issues, especially to women because women are constantly told in this highly anti-woman society that pain, anxiety, anger, whatever emotion or sensation is in fact "just in their heads" and a form of depression. It doesn't take much research to learn about how well-accepted drugs or "psychosurgeries" that render women into compliant zombies are, until they aren't once enough women resist being abused in this way. The Rat Park study is particularly striking, because it strongly suggests, as McMillen writes as he recounts the cautious conclusions of study lead Bruce Alexander, "What if the difference between not being addicted and being addicted was the difference between seeing your world as a park and seeing the world as your cage?" At this point I concluded my original essay idea was well-meaning but a bit ridiculous. McMillen's comic is far better to delve into the questions about drug use, addiction and so on. Yet, the "satisficing" aspect stuck out, so much so I wondered, where this ugly portmanteau term came from.

How grotesquely unsurprising it was invented by a united statesian economist, Herbert A. Simon, whose focus was "corporate decision making." In his theory of how corporate decision making works, he coined the concept of satificing, which means according to the encyclopedia britannica article linked to here, refers to "achieving acceptable economic objectives while minimizing complications and risks – as contrasted with the traditional emphasis on maximizing profits. Simon's theory thus offers a way to consider the psychological aspects of decision making that classical economists have tended to ignore." Later Simon got into working on "artificial intelligence," which does make sense, as developing algorithms for decision making is central to mimicking intelligence, and indeed, most recent references to satisficing are in articles about LLMs. Before this research shift, Simon won a Swedish Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in the Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is not a nobel prize at all, but a crass triumph of money and marketing as part of a general push to make economics look "sciency."

"Satisficing" is a label on a real phenomenon, and its origins in seeking to more accurately describe the ways in which humans make decisions in "corporations," which they use to deflect the consequences of their drive to hyperexploit everyone else they can is telltale. Whether or not "satisficing" is working for corporations in anything but a short term basis, individual people are not served at all by adopting wholesale a concept driving them into individual hyper-self-exploitation. It seems obvious to me such hyper-self-exploitation would be bound to make a person's world feel like a cage, and drive them into a greater and greater sense of distress and misery, even before the evidence their sacrifices are not rewarded with success or even the most minimal security of food, clothing, and shelter. I am not quite convinced "satisficing" is really working for corporations either, but then again, the priorities of the people who hold up corporate entities between themselves and the rest of society don't have the same short term or long term goals as the rest of us. (Top)

Human Nature is Political (2026-08-10)

Cartoon by John Tenniel from the 7 april 1866 issue of Punch, via the internet archive. Curious to note is the label 'canada' rather than 'british north america.'

As always, words change their meanings over time because people speak and use them in day to day life. Hence, "politics" no longer refers as obviously to matters relating to citizens, being a citizen, and managing the business and broader interrelationships in a given community or society as it used to. Now, according to the OED and many other dictionaries reflecting present usage, "politics" is about governance and struggling to achieve power in a country or region. This is an awfully denuded version of "politics," one that goes quite nicely with the desire of current "elites" to convince us all that only people like them, the mostly very rich, have any business with, let alone interest in or real role in governing society. Certainly it is not out of line with the notion at minimum attributed to ancient athenians that anyone who did not take part in governance of the state was an idiotes, that is, someone who only concerned themselves with their own interests and cared nothing for their community or state at large. I don't think this terminology was originally morally freighted, hard as that be to believe. Initially, the very rich and the very poor alike could be recognized as likely to be focussed on their personal concerns to the exclusion of their wider community. However, the rich could be faulted for this because they had no practical reason for such disinterest: they were not struggling with such difficulties as long work hours for poor wages or hardscrabble farms producing barely enough for subsistence. The ancient athenians as portrayed by writers like Plato and Thucydides apparently lost track of the practical reality that if the majority of the population are unable to concern themselves with governing and building their communities, the result is a profoundly weak conglomerate that can only be held together by a combination of bribery and force.

But as it happens, humans are very much political animals, as Aristotle argues in his Politics, and that is true whether we are directly participating in some form of obvious governance body or not. This means that sometimes we are accused of being "political" when we are not engaged in any sort of political argument as such. In a previous thoughtpiece I recounted a rather startling exchange with an acquaintance who insisted the only reason I wasn't interested in the Star Trek spin-off Picard had to be about politics, and nothing else. While I wouldn't deny that entertainment choices can be political, because evidently they can, that doesn't mean they always are. It was a really strange conversation, but in itself a good example of how politicized aspects of our lives can get, because we are indeed "political." But then, what the heck do I mean here by using the term? It helps to step back and think again about how politics as defined by the ancient greeks and often accepted by peoples who have subsequently read and engaged with the works of those ancient greeks, especially of course Aristotle, focuses on politics as a means by which groups of people work out how to live together and meet the needs of the group. A not too large family can manage this sort of management in a seemingly informal manner, because everyone has internalized the family rules for what to do when interests and/or needs conflict and so on. "Formalized" structures are really externalized, they make the rules explicit, and we need to undertake "formalization" once we are trying to coordinate the needs, interests, and so on of multiple families, and from there on upwards. We also use the formalized structures to encourage some basic interpersonal predictability. Apparently small, day to day things are about governance, are indeed political, because they express whether or not we are constructive participants in society or not.

Now, that last bit helps shake loose what my acquaintance was using as the basis for his interpretation of my response to his question about the Picard Star Trek spin off. Very low level, individual acts can be political, and so at that moment my acquaintance, who was not teasing, interpreted my views as political. It is easy to make fun of this sort of thing, but we can check the ancient athenian examples for some alterative perspective here. After all, the surviving ancient greek plays are almost all the winners of one of their most important civic and religious festivals, and if we come away with nothing else from at least reading them, these plays have some blunt messages about society, its governance, and what makes a citizen. In the tragedies, kings are in some way directly related to or of direct interest to the gods. This constantly means chaos and destruction for themselves and their families, to the point that it strikes me as not so unreasonable to conclude that the best thing for a person of interest to a deity to do is indeed what most women in at least the stories if not the plays that have come down to us do: get turned into a plant or tree. Comedies seem to have been a bit more topical, delving into the more immediate questions raised by the impact of skilled speech becoming a necessity for citizens, who at that point were of course all men, to participate in the government. Presumably plays with other messages in both tragic and comic modes were written and produced, but they did not win prizes or at least were not preserved. In any case, scholars are in broad agreement that these plays accurately reflect the views of the rich and broadly influential elements of ancient athenian society. Even if they don't, the point is that these plays, whether or not they were understood as "entertainment" in the way we use that word now, definitely and deliberately had political content.

Even if we don't intend to explicitly make political art or political science, as far as I know there is no way to completely excise politics from either. The very structures within which we make the art or do the science are after all political, and we'll see the influence of those structures via what is funded, what is easily accessible, what we are encouraged to take seriously or even attack, what we are encouraged to ignore. Depicting every discovery as the product of a single brilliant man alone, or constantly reframing messianic tales from religious texts as superhero stories are indeed reflections of politics. The reflections may be, and often are, unconscious, expressions of "just the way things are." The screenwriter who rewrote a version of the origins of Superman again, or Spiderman, again, is not making a conscious political statement. Indeed, we could take that as an example of being not a citizen but the equivalent of an ancient idiotes. Perhaps a relatively neutral english equivalent rather than the present-day transcription "idiot" could be something like "taxpayer." That would capture the element of societal membership, but does not in itself indicate conscious political activity.

But since human nature is political, and we are regularly presented with news articles claiming to express concern about the appalling levels of voter participation, equating lower levels with general apathy, it seems obvious this equation is nonsense. I am not suggesting that voting is not important, because obviously it is. In a putative democracy, elected governments depend upon getting enough voter participation to reassure everyone of their credibility, their license to rule. It is notable that today elections are in such straits due to manipulation of voting areas, access to voting booths and such, the better gauge of satisfaction with a given government is opinion polling, although such polls can also be gamed. We do express our politics in many ways besides voting, some more effective, some less. When blocked from means of effective political participation, things can go awry very quickly, including temporary wild diversions into making tremendous ineffective political mountains out of molehills, like television program selections, or entertainment fandoms. (Top)

The New Malthusians (2026-08-03)

Scan of a late nineteenth century portrait of the infamous Thomas Malthus by artist John Linnell from the Wellcome Collection via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

At this stage of the implosion of the western empire, it has become quite fashionable to rant in the mainstream media in "the west" about how evil and horrible humans are, how humans don't deserve the Earth, and so on. Now, when people figuratively throw up their hands and groan, "Somebody send the asteroid" I get they don't mean that literally. They are expressing reasonable frustration with the fact that "the west" is run by vicious, irresponsible oligarchs who think whatever happens in the world, no matter how bad it may or may not get, they will always be comfortable, well-fed, and served by poor people they can humiliate. Those same oligarchs have spent a lot of effort on at least three projects: (1) seeking to convince everybody else there is no way to create and maintain actual democracy for whatever reason; (2) destroying as many mechanisms for democratic accountability as they can; and (3) trying to create and maintain what they see as dependable paramilitaries to keep them permanently in power. These oligarchs are quite contemptuous of any sort of book learning or manual labour, so they keep themselves quite ignorant of the history of how endlessly greedy and violent oligarchies actually turn out. I guess that's where the phrase "ignorance is bliss" really comes from. Not that the views of these oligarchs are particularly secret. They are very clear about how much they distrust and hate the vast majority of humans on Earth, and it seems to me not enough people are noticing that the mainstream condemnations of "humans" are paid for messaging from those oligarchs. When I raise a challenge to these lying mainstream messages, all too many of my acquaintances leap to the conclusion that I must be a climate change denier. The leap happens so fast its nearly possible for the virtual wind of their speed to knock you over. Their defeatist attitudes might strike me as sad except that are so obviously childish.

Stepping back a bit, it is not difficult to parse out why even non-oligarchs may be inclined to fall back on updated versions of Thomas Malthus' views that the poor are poor because they "breed too much." It is very difficult to remain unaware of injustice in the world for the majority of us who are not part of the oligarch club or among their professional managerial class henchman. No, the majority of us can't easily block off the evidence of our senses when we encounter more and more people struggling along without shelter, or clinging on as best they can to a slum apartment or a place in the ever shrinking number of single room occupancy buildings, which today are the last stage in how crooked landlords run older buildings into the ground. We have no boarding houses, and even travellers' hostels are vanishing under pressure of lack of funds and the people who need to use them as part of their modified couch surfing strategies. Then there are the people who are literally camping wherever they can find a space, or the more subtle converted vans and such of those who are a bit better off due to having a better paying job and a lack of health problems. The line ups at various soup kitchens and service centres for those in difficult straits are not getting shorter.

Meanwhile, heedless of the well-founded warnings about climate change that go back at least three decades, and the attendant "world leader" junkets in which "western" representatives sign on to treaties they ignore like every other treaty they sign with leaders from anywhere else in the world, apparently make no difference. We are at least observing if not directly experiencing more extreme weather events, for example. So far "the west" has not been too troubled by crop failures, barring those of cash crops such as coffee, chocolate, and tropical fruits like bananas. Despite all the concerns raised about the ridiculous, no obscene, amount of plastic in use and discarded everywhere, plastic production continues. The only way to avoid most plastics is first to avoid processed food as much as possible, and second as much as possible abandon packaging for paid goods at the point of sale. After all, it seems only complaints from "capitalists" makes any difference these days. Never mind how often cheap processed food is a fallback for people struggling with lack of time or facilities to store and cook real food. Never mind that while yes, obviously, internal combustion engine cars are a major source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, serious and effective efforts to improve transit and the ability of people to use bicycles and other self-propelled transportation doesn't seem to have made much difference. The only thing that did, so we are told, is the so-called "lockdowns" during the early years of the still raging COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we are being guided to view the human population in general as the problem. We are encouraged to consider it somehow just that COVID-19 continues to kill so many people, and to conclude vaccinations in general were a mistake because now "authorities" tell us our immune systems are like muscles and need "practice" to get stronger. Furthermore, look at all those paunchy if not outright obese poor people, they must lack self-control. To be clear, these claims are obvious BULLSHIT after only a little thought, let alone some basic research, by which I do not mean a sloppy query typed into a so-called "AI" or what google now pretends is still a search engine.

Then there are the people who try to be a bit more subtle than those who fall back effectively on the modernized version of "the poor have no self-control, breed too much, and so they are unhealthy and die young." Wait, that blunt description isn't modernized at all, except in vocabulary. Okay, the more subtle one is modernized, and it goes like this, "most people, not just the poor, are too lazy to work or so stupid they trained in something useless like english literature so they have to work in service jobs. If there were less of them, then their wages would go up due to the law of supply and demand." And it's only going to get worse, those neo-Malthusians are sure, because "AI" is going to take away all the jobs of all the people they don't like. "AI" will automate all the factories, take over all the teaching jobs, and the majority of the medicine-related jobs too. It seems a bit too perfect how "AI" is going to destroy all the jobs in public services, as well as the formerly lousy but at least decently paying factory jobs out there. (Please see Ed Zitron's The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble for an important and well-documented take down of the stories about "AI" and jobs.) In the end, it seems the general capitalist and neo-Malthusian view is that any person who is not at least in the professional managerial class or higher costs too much in wages, so it is better to replace them all together. It costs too much to allow them to reproduce. I think it is quite obvious that every effort is going on to persuade us all to blame the poor, especially the racialized poor for mass unemployment, the negative impacts of climate change, and the evidence of increasing social ill-health and disorganization.

Well, here is a reality check. The primary source of massive carbon emissions driving climate change is none other than the military industrial complex. The primary reason the demand for "energy" keeps going up is on one hand the constant demand to use computers to waste energy on "cryptomining" and so-called "AI," on the other the insistence of the oil and gas cartels that they must extract and sell for profit every bit of hydrocarbons they can steal. After all, they provide the all-important fuel for those multi-ton military vehicles. They also generate tons and tons of various types of plastic, which is how they use up the fractions of hydrocarbons not readily used in fuel. Coming up a shockingly close second to the military industrial complex is the obsessively greedy and ostentatiously wasteful one percent, who provide the market for private aircraft, massive yachts, and so-called "space tourism." The continuing enforcement of massive centralization of energy generation also means wastage via transmission is a huge factor, let alone the levels of careful compartmentalization people indulge in to convince themselves "nuclear power" is green when burning hydrocarbons is not. The first and most powerful step towards at least not making climate change worse would be to shut down the military industrial complex, which means taking down the psychopathic oligarchies and their enablers. Mowing down the poor or wiping out humans in general won't fix the issues we're facing. (Top)

An Unexpected Real Word of the Day (2026-07-27)

Quote of the cover card of Edward Gorey's The Fantod Pack, via Pomegranate, accessed 8 july 2025.

Long before the internet or the web were household words let alone accessed from home computers let alone cell phones, it was already possible for writers, illustrators, and indeed writer-illustrators to become comparatively underground hits. To be sure, in the case of Edward Gorey he was no underground figure, having been a longterm fixture in the new york literary scene and prominent ballet fan during George Ballanchine's years at the new york ballet. Yet he was perhaps best known among out-of-the-way denizens of canada by some of the work he had at best mixed feelings about, his illustrations and covers for a range of young adult novels published between approximately 1975 and 1985. It was thanks to one of these and his justly famous opening credits for the now much-missed original united statesian pbs series "Mystery!" that I was able to recognize his own books, admittedly via a strictly unauthorized source. Before the advent of peer-to-peer sharing, in conditions before many people realized their servers could be wholly visible on the internet if they did not set up their web server properly, while searching for information about Edward Gorey, having finally learned his name, I followed a search result link to a page with a non-javascript slide presentation of pages from The Unstrung Harp,. This was none other than Gorey's first book, but in its version from his first Amphigorey anthology, for which he laboriously redid the typed text in his signature hand-drawn font. In his subsequent works Gorey kept paring down the amount of text, and eventually he even pared down his gorgeously obsessive hatching and detail. Personally I miss the hatching when perusing his later work, which evokes the quality of woodcut work by the Dalziel Brothers. But suppose (how could it be?) a person does not find Gorey's work visually interesting, his writing presents a bonanza of wonderfully selected obscure nineteenth and not so obscure twentieth century vocabulary, selected it often seems, by their striking sound. For anyone wishing to expand their reading or crossword puzzle vocabulary, Gorey's earlier books are worth rereading with dictionary at hand.

But I had no idea of this on first encountering The Unstrung Harp. Instead, it seemed to me the most unfamiliar words of unusual shape must be made up, contributing to the sense of at once plausible and uneasily dreamlike quality of so much of Gorey's work. A key sentence stuck in my memory long afterwards in part of course, due to its accompanying illustration: "In the eighteenth shop they have visited, the cousin thinks he sees some sort of lustre jug, and Mr Earbrass irritably wonders why anyone should have had a fantod stuffed and put under a glass bell." Having been on what seemed likely to be a brief jaunt with a relative only for it to turn out to be a more and more desperately boring experience because it turned out their "just a couple of places to check" was nothing of the sort, there is plenty to chuckle over here. As for the fantod, duly shown with Mr Earbrass puzzling over it, well, that was an odd, not so small creature according to the world of Edward Gorey. And so it remained as far as I knew, until perchance the very word caught my eye while leafing through the dictionary. According to both my electronic OED and a much older hard copy, "fantod" is defined as: "a state or attack of uneasiness or unreasonableness." The dictionary also notes the word is "north american informal" for which I have to object and insist, northeastern seaboard unitedstatesian informal. The cultural background of the word, which despite being officially unknown seems unmistakably to be the refracted upper middle class english culture of unitedstatesians in the northeasternmost of the "original thirteen colonies" (a strange label to be unpacked another time) deserves to be recognized. In fact, Gorey strikes me as little recognized as one of the artists of his country who produced a genuinely "unitedstatesian" sort of art. It connects to the origins of much of the wealthier settler population of the area, to which Gorey himself belonged, and reflects the growing unease in the cultural circles of his time, which have certainly outgrown the original glass bell of his early illustration.

Gorey's notion of embodied fantods reappear throughout his work, including eventually as stuffed toys and cheerful occupants of the visual field in cards and his alphabet books. The particular disruptive, but is it harmful or not role of the fantod seems to me a central feature of Gorey's later book, The Doubtful Guest. Gorey published The Unstrung Harp in 1953, with The Doubtful Guest following four years later in 1957. Continuing to follow my fondness for actual late nineteenth century woodcut illustrations has led me to some unusual books, such as selections of "household tips" for rich people managing servants, and the more substantial and wonderful books by Ruth Goodman. It seems Gorey had a penchant for the same "household tips" sort of books, as a number of startling requirements of servants feature in the Doubtful Guest's behaviour, even though the titular character never is a servant in the story. It is intriguing snippets of this kind, as well as the time period during which Gorey wrote many of his most detailed in word and image books, that suggest while he was not inclined to make overt political statements, that didn't mean he didn't have any critiques or analysis of what he observed of the past and his present.

All of which is absolutely not to suggest anyone should set about trying to read Gorey's books for his political leanings or social analysis or whatever. Absolutely not, this would at best thoroughly miss the point. Certainly Gorey had his own ideas and critiques about things, but that he didn't set them up front is the point. His preference was to leave the reader and viewer just a bit stubbornly off kilter, enjoying the art and baffling at the unusual words, wondering if the story isn't rather sinister yet it seems oddly happy. Perhaps the best complementary artist to Gorey is Charles Addams, whose work is so visually distinctive, yet shares the sense off-balance, paradoxically happy-sinister atmosphere. (Top)

Puzzling Extreme Travel (2026-07-20)

Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen in antarctica, 2001. Image quoted from Bancroft Arnesen Explore.

Some time ago I had the good fortune to read Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft's book written with Cheryl Dahle, No Horizon is So Far: Two Women and Their Historic Journey Across Antarctica in its second edition. It is an intriguing, gritty book, providing plentiful evidence that more often than not if women do not succeed at difficult tasks and feats, it is not due to their shortcomings but due to literal male sabotage. This is a truly obnoxious fact, and I don't quite know what to make of such stubborn evidence of widespread male reversion to juvenile behaviour. That aside, there are plenty of other things to give a person food for thought in the book. Unfortunately the original expedition site is long offline, although there is still a fairly complete archive of it at the internet archive. The archive is well worth examining even if only to experience how different websites were just twenty years ago. Alas, pretty much all of the audio and video media is gone into the ether, and I do hope Arnesen and Bancroft were able to arrange for a thorough archive of all the data, as it would be marvellous to eventually see a richer, more coffee table style book, perhaps with an associated CD or DVD. It would be a big project, and these days they are busy with their ongoing projects at Bancroft Arnesen Explore.

When it comes right down to it, there must be a unique inner drive in those who undertake extreme travel as Bancroft and Arnesen have done. I don't quite understand this myself, evidently because I don't have a similar drive, though I do thoroughly enjoy travelling with a bare minimum amount of gear and lots of opportunity to travel under my own power rather than exclusively in vehicles. Since Bancroft and Arnesen are former teachers, their determination to travel in the far south is an important part of how they support their educational work by providing evidence of women's capabilities in specific and of course human capabilities in general. At the moment all too often our ability to work together in teams towards a constructive result is lost sight of, or derogated as supposedly an impingement on our freedom. Arnesen and Bancroft both discuss earlier male explorers and travellers over the south pole, which to this day remains so inhospitable for human life that there are no human settlements proper there, just military stations dressed up as science stations. Overall, so far my unsystematic reading suggests this form of exploratory, extreme travel is very much a "western" thing, a sort of persistent itch to go where no person has been before. It is easy to make fun of the original voiceover lines William Shatner and later Patrick Stewart intone over the opening credits of the Star Trek series, but they do capture a truth of "western" culture, especially in its colonialist, imperialist form.

Obviously neither Bancroft nor Arnesen had negative intentions at all when they set out on their epic trip. The times when people travelling to extreme portions of the Earth and stuck the flags from their countries there, in effect expressing a pretence of their governments to take over the land are long past. Instead, perhaps a key driver is the experience of the extreme physical and mental tests this type of travel entails. I think it is not coincidental that many "extreme travellers" come from once heavily industrialized countries, where daily life can be hostile to healthy outdoor exercise and working together constructively with others. A personal bugbear of mine is a desire for actual quiet, quiet without the intrusion of traffic noise, the neighbour's television, or the annoying buzz of electricity. (Power outages can be dangerous, but in truth comparatively short, non-dangerous ones are a genuine treat not to sniffed at or taken for granted.) The least accessible portions of the Earth will inevitably have primarily non-machine sound, and as Arnesen and Bancroft note in the context of the south pole, far less by way of extraneous smells.

No, I am not suggesting an inner drive to travel to the ends of the Earth is really an expression of determination to escape vast over-stimulus in heavily industrialized places. But the elements of teamwork, full use of mental and physical faculties, and getting outside of a rigid and often oppressive ordinary reality are quite undeniable. It reminds me in fact of some of Rebecca Solnit's earlier work on the remarkable and constructive societies people are able to create during and in the aftermath of major disasters. Without the active interference of outside authorities interested in preventing people from developing social cohesion, people are in fact able to achieve these things, but they have to be able to fend off those corrosive outside authorities. The issue is not "authority" period, but specifically a form of authority obsessed with imposing power and control over other people, and therefore incapable of trusting them because such coercive authorities fear the consequences of their own cruelty. (Top)

Now I Understand What Idolatry Is (2026-07-13)

Still from the tragically bad original star trek episode 'For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,' courtesy of The M0vie Blog, accessed 29 june 2025. The long and thoughtful review of the episode at the site is well worth reading.

These days it is relatively easy to learn about different religions and spiritual systems to admittedly widely variable levels of accuracy without getting into alarming trouble. In other words, now we can take courses at a post secondary institution, read a sensible book, or talk to trusted friends about such things rather than take our chances with a person of missionizing, and therefore dishonest and manipulative, mindset. However, I have never found any description that made proper sense of accusations of "idolatry." This is one of those odd accusations that is less used now than "atheist," perhaps because it is relatively clear what "atheist" is supposed to mean when somebody accuses another person of being one as opposed to just acknowledging a person who has stated that in their view there are no deities. "Idolatry" is much more difficult. It seems it must genuinely mean something, refer to a real human behaviour, yet it comes up in situations where the people using the term often turn out to be quite inconsistent. They seem to be engaging in the behaviour they decry, but via different means. My trusty OED reports that today the general spoken meaning of the term is "extreme admiration, love, or reverence for something or someone." Well, fair enough, extreme fan behaviour is a familiar example of this, and there is definite overlap in the definition of "fanatic," which is "a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause." And yet, somehow this doesn't help understand what idolatry is exactly, because the contexts I am most familiar with where this word is used are in translations of various christian works, especially of course, the bible. The people accused of idolatry typically simply are not christians, and their behaviour even in such a hostile source does not seem particularly extreme. Therefore it seemed to me the word "idolatry" had become a sort of verbal stick to beat people with, but the actual concern it may once have described had been lost. That's really strange. And then the current "AI" boondoggle began, and now, things are much clearer. Before continuing, I should note that yes, I have read the original Dune by Frank Herbert, and his reflections on "artificial intelligence." However, if he was reflecting on notions of idolatry or its meaning, they didn't jump out at me in the midst of such a sprawling work.

The majority of "AI" articles published right now are advertising trash, built up from cherry picked interviews and anecdotes at second hand, so these are not a source of information about what "AI" can do. Nor are they a particularly good explanation of what the LLMs serving as the "AI" flagships do. Nevertheless, the various "AI" salesmen are quite clear about how they would like the vast majority of us to view their software: as "AI," and not just any "AI" but generative and emergently conscious "AI" that we may treat as an oracle and ostensible "servant." We are encouraged to "ask it questions," "delegate it tasks," blame ourselves for not asking questions properly when it "hallucinates." We are encouraged to invest our trust in these black boxes of code, helped along by an intense effort to remove any need for, and in time I suspect any possibility of, typing questions in the first place. It seems some people have fallen into this, not because they believe the hype, but due to other vulnerabilities such that they come to believe the LLM is indeed a person of sorts, which in its programming is very good at fomenting and echoing back the products of disordered thinking. While I fully appreciate theologians will likely completely disagree with my interpretation here, it seems to me that the type of thinking and trust that the "AI" salesmen wish to foment is in fact an expression of idolatry.

With this in mind, it seems to me then that "idolatry" is in fact a form of deep irresponsibility, a form of misplaced trust in a pseudo-authority. The weak, human-sized, everyday version is the "I was only following orders" non-defense beloved of criminals who hope a few higher-ups will be punished officially "pour décourager les autres" while leaving the rest to go on with their lives. It is bad enough if we knowingly and mendaciously pretend some other person or being gave us permission to do something foolish, let alone outright wrong or criminal. How much the worse, if a person is guided into believing a non-human, non-existent sentient being is telling them what to do or reinforcing disordered thought patterns? Both possibilities are certainly dangerous and quite frightening if followed to their conclusions. Hence the denunciations we can read in various christian works are not necessarily unfounded, but the issue cannot be reduced to "so and so is not following our religion which is the only religion." Indeed, religious extremism and its expression in missionizing stand as all too destructive examples of idolatry.

Okay, then how to we properly resist the pressure, not necessarily subtle, to go along with this newfangled, technologically slick form of idolatry? Many people do this already, in the time honoured manner of resisting inappropriate authority. As Ed Zitron recommends concerning the "AI" salesman specifically, we should Make Fun of Them. Turn about is fair play, and considering these sheisters consider the majority of us in the world to be little more than stupid brutes, we have no reason to hold back. A genuinely useful and desirable technology does not need a mass of hard sellers who have mastered bloviation to persuade people to take it up. And considering blindly following any human authority or human-created proxy meant to obscure human authority is guiding us all to ruin, we would be well served to take full advantage of humour to help shut them down. (Top)

Many Times Wikipedia Should Not Be the First Search Result (2026-07-06)

Lithograph of the aurora borealis from William MacKenzie's 1891 National Encyclopedia, via rawpixel's collection of free high quality scans and openverse. The rawpixel's scan is licensed under CC Attribution (CC BY 4.0). This version has been slightly reduced in size.

The most famous wiki project, wikipedia, is one of those frustrating products of the attempt to create "web 2.0," a live-editable by anyone web. I appreciate the allure of "web 2.0" even though as a wholesale approach it is a bad idea, which is indeed disappointing. Security and content moderation are far from trivial challenges to address. Still, wikipedia has certainly shown itself to be a genuine use-case for the idea. Alas, in light of how wikipedia is actually owned and run, the various contributors cannot resolve the growing problem of articles written as fullbore propaganda, or at minimum presenting propaganda completely uncritically. (For clarity, I take "propaganda" to mean material created and presented with the deliberate intention to distract and deceive, not material a person may disagree with on grounds of politics or taste.) Nevertheless, it remains true that wikipedia is often a solid starting point for looking up STEM-related material. For non-STEM topics at least the reference list and footnotes can be fruitful, as they can point to useful articles and books or reveal effective terms for search strings. Those are solid achievements in themselves, and as the frequent appearance of wikimedia commons items as illustrations for thoughtpieces reflects, the media collection, much of public domain or creative commons licensed is too. All the same, it is truly unfortunate so many search engines insist on prioritizing wikipedia articles in search results, and this would be true even if there were not issues with propaganda and attendant editing wars, which are not always revealed by a helpful flag noting the content is contested.

The current intrusive ranking of wikipedia results is probably partly accidental. Since wikipedia is subtitled "The Free Encyclopedia" and has long had a permissive reuse license, including today's Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, for at least several years reskinned clones of wikipedia were rife across the web. To keep the resulting mindless repetition out of search results, developers set about ranking wikipedia high and its clones low, a sensible approach. Then for the basic sorts of queries hard copy encyclopaedias traditionally covered, it did make sense to prioritize wikipedia results once it had won credibility. Wikipedia is almost unsurpassed for four W's type questions: who, what, where, when, so long as they are not part of a contentious recent or current event. Like its hard copy parent, wikipedia is quite weak on "why" questions, since it rejects original research, and rather shaky on "how" questions outside of STEM subjects. And fair enough, in my experience wikipedia does not tend to show up in search results for queries intended to explore the whys and hows of specific events, individual actions, or processes. But it is not this type of query, which is typically based around a phrase or even a naturally worded question that is the problem here.

The easiest way to experience intrusive wikipedia results taking up much of the first page of link results and often a summary box as well, is to try searching on a one to three words. This is not surprising in principle, it is reasonable to presume such a simple query is intended to pull up basic information. Probably there is no way to avoid this apart from adding more detail to the query and applying the search engine's options for excluding results from specific web domains. Much more annoying however, is when too-clever search engine algorithms extract key words from a query and end up identifying wikipedia pages as high-relevance results. If we are researching a question in part on the web, and no longer at the stage of needing basic definitions, this is an extremely frustrating outcome. How could this be, a reader might wonder, if we can go ahead and apply search engine options to exclude specific web domains? It can indeed be so alas, because alarmingly enough, search engines do not necessarily provide such options anymore, or even if they do their quality has collapsed due to competing factors in the business models of the corporations that run them. The flagship example is google with its hideously mutilated search to go with its relentlessly intrusive profiling and tracking of "browsers" which of course really means "person browsing the web." On the relatively more privacy respecting and still fairly well known side, duckduckgo does have means to exclude domains, but they don't seem to work consistently. And then there are not so well known, but promising "google-style" search engines like mojeek.

So, for deeper dives and controversial topics, wikipedia should not be the first search result. To help work around wikipedia being a bit too favoured in the search engine algorithm, it is critically important for the algorithm in question to include a means to exclude site domains. There is probably no way to adjust for controversial topics to push down wikipedia though, since it is not so easy to mechanically identify them or fairly adjust for them in real time via human participation. That does suggest an intriguing question though: do people often consult an encyclopaedia for information on disputed topics, meaning about matters more complex than "is a platypus a mammal?" or "which anthropologist wrote about the kula ring?" (Top)

LLMs Are Not Search Engines (2026-06-29)

An animated gif illustrating the mechanism of a steam-driven locomotive, by Panther circa 2006. Image from wikimedia commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

I know, I know – strictly speaking, since search engine algorithms are generally not publicly code, they may well be based on at least similar mathematical algorithms to those used in large language models. So having cheerfully made up a clickbait-style title, it is as well to get a bit more specific as to what I mean. A great deal of coding time, electricity, and water (to start with) has been poured into trying to make LLMs "more powerful" since the big splash of ChatGPT's first public release. The difficulty with dubiously named "machine learning" and subsequent programs flogged to the general public is that they represent a vast effort to create a tool for which there is no general public problem to solve, let alone a cultivated "want" to satisfy. Branded LLMs are not the equivalent of the word processing or spreadsheet programs that made computers approachably useful to people who were not already computer programmers. But so much money has already gone into making these LLMs, including venture capitalist funding, that the desperation to make them somehow, some way into products people will buy ongoing subscriptions for is all but palpable. Based on my observations, they seem to be undertaking a two-pronged strategy. First, deliberately code the LLM interface to imitate a person at least enough to convince real people who want to be convinced, while constantly labelling program outputs with emotive terms for human behaviours and experiences. Hence the penchant for referring to LLMs as "hallucinating," "lying," or "making things up" all of which attribute non-existent intentionality to the LLM. Second, doing all they can to reduce the usability and accessibility of the web. Their original mainstay here was to deploy computing resources to running their associated web crawling bots, and not being too careful about it so that they regularly crash websites of all sizes and types by abusively downloading their contents, wiping out their bandwidth, or absorbing all connections so they are unusable. Now they turn a blind eye to the proliferation of "AI slop," which now includes entire pseudo-websites of LLM-generated imitations of articles and pictures. If the web is ever more difficult to actually use because sites are down or crashed, and kingpin search engine google is in a state of ruin, then the LLM-sellers can try to position their models as replacements for search engines and actually browsing the web.

I don't think people are actually taken in by this iteration of a crook causing a problem and then selling a "solution" to it that lines their pockets. There are many people who have played around with say, chatGPT or google's johnny-come-lately response, finding these programs to be something of a novelty and going on their way, others seeking to use them for specific tasks, and the least lucky ones ordered to use "AI" at work to "improve their efficiency." There is a potent minority of people who seem to be utterly convinced that LLMs like microsoft's copilot or chatGPT are near-perfect at such tasks as summarizing documents, writing papers and so on. Among them seem to be many managers and employers engaged in cynically following the trend of "increasing efficiency by adopting AI" in expectation of forcing a significant portion of their staff to train the LLMs into making their jobs redundant. Another portion of this influential minority seem convinced these LLMs are a sort of oracle which they can ask all manner of questions, including for personal and medical advice. This latter view is certainly encouraged by attempts to make the LLMs sound "human." Then again, people viewing LLMs as oracles are probably very much in the minority, but their at best alarming stories make great media copy.

Unlike search engine algorithms, the basics of how LLMs work is public knowledge, and there is even an entire series of course lectures by revered mathematics professor Gilbert Strang about the deeper technical elements via MIT's opencourseware project. Practically speaking, LLMs are based on applications of linear algebra, mathematical operations on matrices of numbers. To take an extremely simplified illustration here, take two linear equations such as 2x + 3y - z = 0 and x - 7y + 4z = 2. They can be represented as a grid of numbers, with the numbers from the left side in a "matrix" and the numbers on the right side in a corresponding "vector," as shown below.

2  3 -1 | 0
1 -7  4 | 2

It is astonishing what can be done by representing data in this way. One of the most commonly encountered applications is in signal processing, where manipulating systems of equations in matrix forms does things such as removing reverberation effects from seismic data or processing tracks in a music studio. A more day-to-day use is in basic digital photo processing. Processing language in a similar fashion may seem like a bit of a stretch, though it isn't necessarily. In fact, we have an everyday, very simple equivalent to how LLMs generate sentences and larger blobs of text in the form of the game often referred to as "mad libs." And it does make sense that a linear algebra-based program can be written and developed to imitate certain types of language, and even to do machine language translation. Those "certain types" have a strongly patterned nature. The programmers developing LLMs strive to write code that can accurately identify language patterns that can then be used to produce an output based on a prompt to get the ball rolling. I have read descriptions of this being a matter of the LLM predicting the most likely word one at a time, along the lines of starting with a properly selected noun from the prompt (assuming the language is english as I am writing in here), predicting the most probable verb, and so on. It seems likely there are some ready-made patterns already available, such as one for a five-paragraph essay or a book report. There is no denying that LLMs can generate some pretty impressive, sometimes useful, and sometimes startlingly human-like results. However, this approach is not at all similar to the underpinnings of search algorithms.

Suppose LLMs are "trained" on, that is set to apply clever mathematics to find patterns in, however many billions of known searches and search results that may be stored and available to acquire for analysis. Assuming for now the patterns identified are always real and not spurious or accidents, what the LLMs will be able to sort out first are the typical shapes search queries take, and the shapes of the sort of results people at least actually clicked on. This sounds like it could also be quite similar to the algorithms well-suited to generating and updating an index of interconnections and relevance ratings for searching. But LLMs like chatGPT are not indexers, they are building up "answers" based on a type of pattern based on mathematical abstraction and application of probabilities. They are not designed to simply return a result, but to generate something that seems plausible, at least to the person who typed in the query. This can have pernicious results. Take for example reference citations, for which there are several formal styles, all highly structured. It has turned out that LLMs are quite good at generating plausible-looking but utterly fictitious citations, even if their training data included accurate citations that would be appropriate responses to a person's query.

A search engine in the original, and yes I think proper sense, reports the results of a search. It does not in effect generate a result from bits and pieces put together in plausible order from a mass of unsorted data. I doubt LLMs are carrying out even a modified version of the most basic version of "Pagerank" from the early days of google as search engine. If they were, then the results would not be generated based on calculating a probable sequence of tokens, they would return pre-existing results. In the end it seems the real logic behind trying to position LLMs as search engines is not because that is what they are or what they could be, but because their boosters are desperate for "data." If only they could get enough data, supposedly that would make the LLMs "more powerful," by which they seem to mean "more convincing." However, it is hard not to see them as seeking ever more data in hopes of having a nice fat lot of it to sell off to so-called "security services" when the "AI" bubble bursts. (Top)

To Dislike Looking Things Up (2026-06-22)

Ghent university photograph of pages from Marsilius Ficinus' 1487 translation of Plato's works. Public domain photograph via wikimedia commons.

At times needing to look things up is undeniably annoying at best, frustrating at worst. Anyone who has learned another language as an adult has likely suffered the horrible stage when your understanding of the grammar is solid enough to parse what you are reading or hearing properly, but your vocabulary is still limited, so it is not even possible to safely identify the gist of it. In such circumstances, dictionaries are necessary but tormenting to use, and it seems like translating is nothing but hours of page turning or electronic searching. An even more common case I suspect is dealing with any task where it is necessary to combine ingredients, where the units on the package or in the recipe are unfamiliar or metric when you expect imperial or vice versa. With the hot pan and its ingredients bubbling or up to your elbows trying to mix plaster, having to look up a detail to make sense of the task is far from a pleasant experience. Yet it seems now, long past the days of the original google, when it was still notionally a search engine and so good many people, myself included set it to their web browser home page, looking things up online or off is not so popular. Recently I have found online and offline acquaintances who seemed not just disinclined to "look things up" because perhaps they had no time, or interest or need, but were resentful of the prospects of having to look anything up at all. While they may simply have been having an off day, it does seem like dictionaries, encyclopedias and such, whether online or hard copy are somewhat devalued right now. Instead, it seems like what many people prefer are documents with no unfamiliar or difficult elements, and/or something like an oracle.

To be sure, there is a joy and depending on the item a practical aspect to whatever it is being wholly familiar. Beloved old stories, movies, songs, and such for example. We know them, they are familiar, comfortable, and enjoyable. When it comes to instructions for doing new or complex tasks, it is quite reasonable to insist on not having to stop in the middle to look something up. Then again, in such cases typically we will have taken some sort of training or worked with a more experienced colleague to learn about the task, and so if we had instructions to assist us when working on our own, we would have the equivalent knowledge to the broader vocabulary necessary for continuing to learn another language. Then again, at work or similar, having to look things up can be more tolerable, if only because facilities to do so are often readily accessible. Perhaps a major factor in these times when many of us must work very long hours to get by, the issue is that looking something up takes precious time, and in that case of course a person would resent that. Indeed, having to look things up could be all the more frustrating when related to the tasks or pursuits in a person's limited spare time.

Still, I can't help but think the desire for an oracle is a big part of what is sustaining the "AI hype" outside of the high flying gamblers of the venture capitalist set. By accident I am not on social media (seriously), and like many of my peers I took up a systematic "news diet" after the destruction of the world trade centre in new york. Such a thing sounds quaint now, when so many people have cell phones and data plans extensive enough to allow them to read and post steadily on social media all day. I get the impression my more connected friends are constantly poked and prodded by alerts from their phones, and they comment on the deluge of information in their various feeds. It seems like the information equivalent of a wall of cacophonous noise. In such conditions, I can certainly understand a person wanting quiet and a defined, interpretable sound when asked for rather than such a racket. So perhaps the current widespread dislike of having to look things up is less about that task in itself than a response to having too much stimulation, too much "information" to parse, although it is probably better to refer to it as noise.

No, I am not queuing up an annoying recommendation to get off social media aka asocial amplifiers, nor even to cut back on reading or watching the news. In fact, a big part of what got me to thinking about this was and is website design. If a website is too busy, for example annoying graphics or too many sections on the page, visitors abandon the page as quick as they can. Splash pages, or more colloquially "go away pages" have mostly vanished, and the awful fad for poor contrast grey text on white backgrounds has mostly blown itself out. A site with any of these three broad types of features could certainly annoy a person into refusing to explore the site or use it to look something up if it is say, the front end of a database or a hyperlinked reference work. If a person is effectively demanding an oracle, i.e. a black box they can query and get an answer to whatever question they have, on the web this is a glaring sign the website/database interface is failing. In firmspace, demand for oracles is far more dangerous. (Top)

The Meaning of Technical Leadership (2026-06-15)

One of Michal Klabjan's april 2022 photographs of mount technical in new zealand, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license via wikimedia commons.

Among the stories in the "it would be cool if it was true in a genuine and good way" category is the one about how the united states is some sort of default leader in technology, scientific research, or many things else besides alas, flimflammery. Certainly without looking too closely, the story seems quite plausible, the way at first glance the huge number of medals the united states picks up at the modern olympics does. For instance, like many people outside of but in near proximity to the united states, I heard of the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison long before Nicola Tesla or the execrable Werner Von Braun. But having grown up in what is currently called canada, whose elites had a lingering allegiance to the british empire until the 1950s, the suggestion that all "inventions" and new technology came from the united states was not as consistently repeated as it was at least south of the international border. Probably had I been of the generation who saw the first united states funded Moon landing, my impressions would have been clearer and lined up with this early story. However, in one of those weird and yes sad coincidences, I am part of the generation of children whose first contact with the notion of explicitly united statesian technological prowess was the challenger disaster. This did not make me think the united states was not technically superior or that it was. Truth be told, based on my reading habits of the time, which included lots of astronomy books and science fiction, what little I remember of my ideas was that for some reason, the main, technologically inclined characters all seemed to have united statesian accents, and the villains english accents. This seemed odd, but this was also the era when science fiction and fantasy as genres were just beginning to tip over into seriously mainstream and popular status, so on reflection perhaps at the time I just accepted this as just the way things were. Puzzling over the united statesian claims for technical superiority came later, and not directly connected with its space program or anything of that sort.

What gave me pause was considerable puzzlement over how so many inventors, patents, and fancy technology could come from just one country. Having learned some very minimal statistics towards the end of high school in math class, at first it seemed to me it was a matter of there being so many people in the united states, my basis of comparison being to canada. To date, canada has over the past fifty years or so run at about one tenth of the population of the united states. After learning more about other countries and their populations, such as that of china, already astonishingly near a billion at the time, I realized this did not make sense as an explanation. Not being a person who thinks they are white, any claim to racial superiority of people in the united states was a non-starter. Gradually I learned information about how the availability of education, healthcare, and basic ability to get the necessities of life as factors affecting how much success any community or country could have in developing what the west called advanced technology. This was all very well, it gave me lots of information to be insufferable at parties with, but still didn't explain the story of the united states as technical, even scientific leader of the world that somehow didn't seem quite right even though on appearances alone it seemed plausible. At which point it finally dawned on me what had really made this story stick out. If any cause can be blamed, it must be the olympics because more and more often when they were held, on listening to or reading about the canadian medal winners, a curious theme kept piping up. So many of those medalists were people who had immigrated to canada and become citizens. Conversely, there was a striking number of former canadians who had immigrated to other countries and become skilled enough in their sport which was better funded there, to medal for them instead. Now sure, an argument can be made this means canada is generating olympic medal winners, one way or the other, and I am not critiquing the athletes or coaches or anything like that. But it is not coincidental or trivial that many of the immigrant athletes came from impoverished global south countries, while the emigrant athletes typically headed off to other "western" countries.

Therefore it is no surprise to discover on further reading that a key factor in the apparent technological lead of the united states over the years has a great deal to do with its ability to brain drain other countries. It does this on a much larger scale than canada can athlete drain global south countries, as we can predict from the united states being wealthier and until recently in a position to impose and maintain its dollar as a global reserve currency. If the best equipment, laboratories, and educational institutions for scientific and technical fields are concentrated in one or a few countries, currency factors aside, chances are they will draw promising people to them from all over the world. Nevertheless, it appears the united states did have something of a golden technical era of its own in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, going by its participation in astronomy, physics, and chemistry. Despite this brief list reflecting my idiosyncratic interests and training, considering that is also the period of united states-based development of the internal combustion engine-driven car and the industrial assembly line, this seems a plausibly identified era of united states-specific technical leadership. In fact, on checking dates a bit more, that very period includes the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison.

All that said, this seems to be a very brief period of comparatively locally grown invention and research. It can't be explained away as a response to new communication technologies allowing more scientists and inventors to work in teams to produce new stuff, because "science" and "invention" have been international in nature for centuries at minimum even in europe, which has had to cope with so much warfare and attendant destruction. For a short period, the united states invested a great deal in education, research, and development. This investment was not only by the state through the military or public education, but also by corporate laboratories, like the late lamented bell labs. But the tiny, richest fraction of the population able to disproportionately impact policy decisions, the beginnings of what we now call neoliberal capitalism began to take their toll. After all, it is cheaper for rich countries to brain drain other countries of their best people, people whose basic education and healthcare into at least their early adulthood was paid by those countries, not the united states. Hence similar to canada depending on snarfing up promising athletes from other countries to win olympic medals, the united states ends up depending on promising scholars from other countries and neglecting its own. This may be cheaper in terms of money, and meanly clever too. But it isn't technical leadership. (Top)

Convenience Über Alles! (2026-06-08)

Photograph by K. Mitch Hodge taken in londonderry, northen ireland 27 june 2021, lightly cropped, via unsplash. This image helped confirm that unsplash and probably wikimediacommons are using an LLM to tag and label photographs.

There is already a fulsome thoughtpiece from almost five (!!) years ago about "convenience" and how it is a supposed argument for the intrusion of surveillance in all aspects of life available here, Whose Convenience? And, my tongue-in-cheek image caption aside, I was not deliberately trying to determine whether unsplash was using an LLM to automate image labelling. It simply happened the search results and attendant tags on the photographs made it incredibly obvious in a way that admittedly surprised me. If wikimedia commons is hamfisted about these things, it is not surprising, even if it does not actually have the dubious excuse of lack of people or money to tag and label files properly. (Seriously, it doesn't. The wikimedia foundation gets plenty of corporate and probably security state cash and has no excuse for constantly e-begging.) But unsplash is something of a hub for professional photographers to get their names out there as well as provide a judicious portfolio of their work to view and use on a non-profit basis. Therefore I am surprised at what may be photographers not updating or correcting the tags or a lack of means to do so in a timely fashion if they are not in control of whether their photos are autotagged or not. After all this time since the 2019 thoughtpiece, it seems a great many people have decided actively or passively to trust one or another over-octaned automated mad libs generators to do what I concede can be tedious, and on the internet at times genuinely traumatizing tasks. By now few of us have not heard of the horrific material moderators on social media sites are deputed to deal with, and how many of these moderators are wholly unprepared and criminally underpaid workers in the global south. Since the near-total corporatization of the internet has supported continuing demands to remove barriers to accessing it and posting to the web by developing glossy and addictive social media applications and cheap and efficient video encoding algorithms, now more than ever it is too easy for assholes to poison the well for everyone. This is especially noticeable on mature and well-known projects such as yes, wikipedia and the internet archive.

Okay, but the 2019 thoughtpiece ended up focussed on the particular ways techbros and to a lesser degree the military perceive and define "convenience." It's really about their convenience, the former to avoid interacting with the hoi polloi or doing any task they consider beneath them or too much of a reminder they have bodies, the latter to obsessively try to absolutely control everyone by preventing all independent action, let alone independent thought. Their "convenience" is definitely not universal. Personally, I think a healthy sort of convenience is a technology that helps remove drudgery and help improve our knowledge and ability. Many of the machines and computer applications misused to automate away human jobs also remove the apprenticeship type tasks we need to undertake in order to achieve mastery at whatever work we are doing. While we should not arbitrarily jettison the capacity for mass production, neither should we allow ourselves to be blocked from genuine learning and application of human knowledge. Without that knowledge and practice, we can land in big trouble should the machines quit working for any reason. Yet my friends with their amazingly large and genuinely wonderful photo albums and media collections would not see any real connection between the use of machines to enforce deskilling and having their images and media auto-tagged and organized. And I can see what they mean. Maybe a rough, mostly okay pile of tags is more than sufficient for their purposes, or they are happy to have the automated rough in which they can then go through and update. The latter does suggest a sort of digital analogy to scrap booking. I can appreciate that, and even go along with it so long as all the tagging work is on their own device and under their control to turn off or on, seed with what they want, and so on. Certainly that sort of application is not taking away anyone's skills as such.

Then there is the current attempt to generate a moral panic around "AI" of the moment, which is deeply annoying because it is so obvious and obviously a distraction. The mainstream media has a more and more steady stream of articles claiming students, especially post-secondary students, are cheating their way through college or university by using LLMs to write their papers, generate media assignments and so on. Z.M.L. at LibrarianShipwreck is writing and posting an ongoing series of thoughtful articles challenging this narrative, having observed its early stirrings in 2016. The writers of the most recent attempts at ginning up a panic don't seem to be trying very hard, in fact the most recent one percolating up in my newsfeeds was already blighted by a clickbait headline and what was in fact a not so subtle advertisement for a techbro hunting vulture capitalist money. Now, there are indeed a number of students at any given time in post-secondary education who are cheating, who are seeking a credential rather than to learn. In truth, this has probably been true for as long as there have been credential-granting institutions. But these mainstream "students use AI for their work" essays are not about that. They lack real research, and centre on typically no more than two or three students the author could find and interview who were willing to talk about how they were using "AI" to do their assignments. I wonder if the authors appreciate how blatantly cherrypicked their interviewees are, or how the non-techbro interviewee's comments don't necessarily give the desired impression. For the article I have in mind, the non-techbro did not come across as cynical or lazy. That unfortunate young student sounded like they had been failed by their earlier schooling, which left them with no skills in identifying and managing their tasks and deadlines. Overwhelmed, the student's response was typical of such circumstances: procrastination, followed by bolting something together in a hurry, hoping not to lose too many marks. That student was also old enough to have had little access to anything purported to be "AI" until at earliest, high school. Their problems have little to do with LLMs or notions of convenience.

With this in mind, I suspect for many people striving to take advantage of LLMs in their professional or educational work are not seeing their use as a matter of convenience, cheating, or increased efficiency. It seems to me what they are more likely doing in those cases, is seeking to make up for a lack of needed support or training denied to them because of the ongoing attack on the working class and any sort of social services across much of the so-called west. A particular target for destruction by austerity enthusiasts is public education, which they insist must be more efficient and job-oriented, which they claim can be ensured by standardized testing. They are entirely pleased that standardized testing can be used as a wedge to drive out instruction in practical life and work skills, since that helps along their attack on the education system and the working class who must struggle all the harder to get by. (Top)

"Listen to Reason" Indeed (2026-06-01)

Honoré Daumier illustration from an 1839 edition of Les cent et un Robert Macaire by Maurice Alhoy and Louis Huart. Image courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

At this point, and no doubt long before now, I suspect the vast majority of people are utterly fed up with the way in which language and their intelligence alike are abused and insulted by self-declared "elites" and their phalanx of technocratic hangers-on. These people are now widely recognized to be gaslighting anyone they deem beneath them with all their might, while completely undermining the effort because after all, those people are "beneath them" and must therefore be stupid. When these people demand the rest of us "listen to reason" what they are really saying is, "obey without question." They aren't fooling anyone at this point. "Because I said so," with or without violent accompaniment never did persuade anyone. You can force someone to do something by some form of coercion, whether blunt violence or comparatively subtle economic pressure, but you can't force someone to think something. Here in a nutshell is the problem of those self-declared elites and their hangers-on. Since the big desire they all apparently share is a desire for power over others and the ability to break laws others must follow, they are always pushing the boundaries. For a long time, using coercion to force particular actions was quite satisfying to them. But as anyone who has learned about addictions also knows, the addict develops a tolerance to their original dose, so they must increase it or switch to some other drug for the same effect, if they are unwilling or unable to forgo the addictive substance or behaviour. Joseph Weisenbaum's readers will remember his explanation of how a pathological programmer is similar in psychology to a pathological gambler who feels they have a power to always win: they must constantly test their perceived power again and again. If they truly believe this power of theirs is real, then the test and the feeling of mastery with its accompanying dopamine hit is potent indeed.

The "elites" and those who identify with them have worked out quite a few means of coercion to enforce behaviour they want. But no longer feeling any constraint on their actions, nor much by way of lingering belief in the fundamental humanity of the people outside of their narrow groups (let alone respect for the fundamental right to life and well-being of all the other beings on Earth), they can no longer be bothered with putting a nice face on the coercion. After all, they insist socialism and communism have been utterly destroyed, so there are no other options. Perhaps unexpectedly, this turned out to be a disappointing result. The dopamine hits from the coercion are not so good, or maybe they aren't happening. And so it seems to me the next big turn was to "culture," more usually referred to as "entertainment." It was time to turn to forcing people to think and believe in certain ways, and to deny them anything that could contradict what they wanted the "hoi polloi" to think. Hence the extraordinary prominence of media magnates, grotesque techbros, politicians, and celebrities, including celebrity religious figures and spiritual hucksters. These elites also banked on the assumption people outside of their circles and indeed, outside of the united states, were in fact desperate to have whatever they approved of and had for themselves, indeed, were desperate to be them. Based on the stuff these elites approve for publication and repetition, they are stunned and furious to discover how profoundly wrong this assumption is.

I get the impression they were quite certain that all they had to do was withdraw their approval, as represented by their consumer goods and military hardware, at which point the targeted people would promptly fall in line and change their thinking and beliefs. On the country or nation-state level, this was supposed to lead to prompt "regime change," on the individual level ready acquiescence to betray their own communities, turning spy, informant, or agent. Otherwise, countries or nation-states could look forward to being denied access to all the goodies by sanctions, and then given a dose of proxy or direct bombing and attacks to destroy their infrastructure and kill as many civilians as possible. Individuals could look forward to such person-sized sanctions as criminal charges, whether genuine under law or not, and drawn out processes to clear their names which typically resulted in personal if not familial bankruptcy. There is more than one foul case of this type of psychological warfare driving its victim to suicide in hopes of at least sparing their families from poverty. Overall, this must have seemed to them, and indeed can seem to the rest of us, like the equivalent of a locked room and no means to resist the tormentors who poke at us from outside. Except, it isn't.

Yes, a lot of stuff, far too much of it the necessities of life, and a remarkable amount of "entertainment" related things besides, are now denied to huge swathes of the world via the decisions of those elites, enforced by their technocrats. People are suffering because of the deliberate effort to block access to necessities of life by cutting off trade or destroying their potential capacity to produce those necessities themselves. However, humans would not have survived to become bipedal creatures with bifocal vision and opposable thumbs if we had no ability to face down adversity. People do, all over the world. While I think it is true people in these conditions get a deep satisfaction in overcoming adversity, if only by analogy to much less difficult examples of overcoming difficulties I have seen and experienced myself, I call bullshit on the dipshits who go on about how they are "better people" because they have lived through an awful experience. Such people are really saying they are better than who they are speaking to. This is quite different from people who acknowledge they did not know they would be able to cope with the difficult experience until they did. Then again, those are not typically who goes on speaking tours about what happened, focusing instead on continuing to do what they can to be a constructive force in the world. They focus on deeds, not words. Maybe all these sanctions and hideous attacks and bombings would work if humans in general were not in fact intelligent, self-motivated, and creative. If indeed the majority of people were the sorts of fundamentally mindless drones these elite types insist we are, while paradoxically spending intense, obsessive efforts to try to make us into what they insist we are. Logic is not a strong suit with these high flyers.

And now those elites and their technocrats have an ever-growing problem. They can't get their desired dopamine hit or achieve their dreams of godlike powers on Earth. They are seeing and hearing every day about people outside their bubbles who have decided they can after all, do without the things these embubbled people think they should want or be ready to accept rather than deal with people other than them or die. It is easy to find out how confused the embubbled caste are about this, just check out the mainstream news, where their only explanation is to insist such people are obviously fanatics who don't value human life and mindlessly hate the embubbled caste and its approved way of life for the masses. These supposed news reports, which are of course mislabelled opinion pieces, sound more and more unhinged, even as they repeat with variations again and again "why don't you obey?" Oddly enough, this puts me in mind of Franz Kafka's grim short story, In the Penal Colony. (Top)

Some Contradictions of Militarization (2026-05-25)

Portrait of a group of gil guides from loanhead, scotland. Picture quoted via the now defunct website Scotland's War 1914-1919, accessed via the internet archive on 4 may 2025.

The springish cleaning continues, and among the website-related "hey look into this more items" turned up a gem about the scottish girl guides, Girl Guides and MI5 at the now archived Scotland's War 1914   1919 website. The site overall is quite interesting, including many scanned photographs, postcards, and posters alongside hundreds of articles arranged by region. The person commenting on the girl guides article drew out some fascinating snippets not least because for that time period women's involvement in sensitive war work let alone that of girls was often at best downplayed if not outright denied. After all, women and girls are supposedly hyper-emotional and incapable of self control or keeping a secret, according to the all too familiar vicious stereotypes. So, under the more difficult circumstances of wartime, how did the members of the girl guides in scotland involved in such work do? As it happens, so well the boy scouts were removed from doing the main job of distributing classified messages, sometimes even verbally. I can't resist quoting the first two paragraphs to encourage readers to have a look at the main article:

Working for MI5 is probably the last thing you would expect of a Girl Guide, but a top-secret document has revealed that 90 teenage Guides worked for security service MI5 in the First World War. It explains their working conditions, responsibilities, qualifications and pay scales.

All the girls who worked for MI5 between 1914 and 1918 were aged from 14 to 16. Their main role was as 50p-a-week messengers distributing highly classified information. The teenagers were so trusted by MI5 that they were allowed to relay some of the messages verbally. At the start of the war Boy Scouts were also used. But it quickly became clear that Girl Guides were more efficient because they were less boisterous and talkative.

It bears emphasizing: those girls were teenagers working under conditions of high stress. The person writing the article did seem to suffer a bit of worry lest we think the girl guides were being unfeminine or something, so they go on to emphasize more stereotypical tasks and the elements of the girls' uniforms. Still, as is often the case with such articles and their sources, it was they reveal unintentionally that teaches the most. For instance, the article inadvertently reveals some of the contradictory impacts of militarization.

There is no requirement that organizations like the girl guides should be militarized, yet it is curiously typical in anglophone and germanophone countries they typically are. So on one hand it looks like the girl scouts in the united kingdom of the early twentieth century were playing at least a small role in familiarizing girls and young women with new technologies, considering "By 1912 badges on offer included air mechanic, cyclist, electrician, sailor, telegraph operator and even tailor." Like it or not, men may be encouraged to view themselves as having an inherent ability to develop and use new technology, the reality is they are no more or less skilled at either task than women. When it comes to seriously integrating technology into day to day life without creating a surveillance cesspool, well, that tends to be the work of women. On the other hand, militarized organizations like the girl guides and the boy scouts both were easily drawn into any participation in war-related activities. After all, their members will already be acclimatized to uniforms, taking orders, and participating in highly structured activities. To be sure, this was more true of both the girl guides and boy scouts then as opposed to now. For a more militarized youth, the cadets are always looking for recruits these days. Obviously I am leaving undiscussed the way in which "military necessity" is so quickly deployed as an excuse to temporarily ease restrictions specifically keeping girls and women away from areas of knowledge and work that could support them in making an independent living or even becoming respected as persons.

The bigger contradiction raised by such organizations for women and girls is the way they demonstrate the capabilities of their members to themselves and society at large. Add to that the way they can support development of female solidarity, and no doubt the least savoury of male leaders began to get worried about how to curb that potential, no matter how detrimental this would be to society. The history of girl guiding would be well worth a closer look. (Top)

Ancient Authors (2026-05-18)

Photograph of a statue of a woman reading a book by Andrey Nuraliev published on unsplash 15 october 2021, used under unsplash license.

Being as it is that spring cleaning time of year, loosely speaking, it was also time to do some general note tidying. This means inevitably also the wonders of procrastinating, which is never so sweet as when really, we ought to be doing something more constructive. In this case, I was finally tackling an unorganized pile of course and lecture notes in what is often referred to as greek and roman studies these days. My hope is that the time is rapidly approaching when this label will be revised to the more truthful ancient west asian studies or something of that type. Hopes aside, there was real work to be done, and so I was sorting and filing materials drawn from what is very much the "standard author set" of most of us encountering this variegated "subject" in university. I use scare quotes on "subject" not to be sarcastic or anything, but to highlight it as a not very fitting word, but less poorly fitting than "discipline." It is for good reason, whatever descriptor is put in front, this is a type of studies, because all that keeps it together is the location of the peoples who produced the original texts. Hence like many other people who have spent some structured time taking part in these studies, I was able to learn ancient greek and latin, then spend a great deal of time reading a narrow selection of ancient historians and philosophers, combined with an incongruous amount of the greek new testament.

Practically speaking, in undergraduate terms this means for ancient greek some Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon in roughly that order for history. Then primarily Plato from just the Symposium and Protagoras for philosophy, plus supplemental Aristophanes to add to the picture of Socrates via his (in)famous play, The Clouds. In latin, the standard text in north america these days is still the venerable and highly respected because effective, Wheelock's Latin. Thanks to Wheelock, latin students get a thorough dose of Cicero, plus selections from the poets Martial, Virgil, and Catullus. After that, many students will end up tackling Juvenal's third satire, because Samuel Johnson wrote a poem in english imitating it about london, and then Horace's satire on the Country Mouse and the City Mouse. When it comes to prose, due to a quirk of my program, I read latin officially in graduate school, and so my picture of what upper level undergraduates may typically read is not so specific. At the university I attended, where there was a strong compliment of specialists in ancient medicine, I got to read selections from Celsus, Hippocrates, and even Galen. But no latin philosophers, instead I wound up reading Sallust on the Conspiracy of Catiline, and then it was back to poetry and the first volume of Ovid's Tristia. I strongly suspect it is more common for upper level undergraduates to spend some quality time with Tacitus, Livy, and yes, of course, the obnoxiously omnipresent Julius Caesar. Indeed, Julius Caesar's account of what he calls the Gallic Wars are so familiar to so many, in part because his prose style is not too tangled for intermediate latin readers, that it is possible to find humorous pastiches on famous sections in other books and subjects. It was both funny and uncanny to read a pastiche on Caesar's description of ancient Gaul's geography in a french language textbook, for example.

Altogether I found myself thinking this couldn't possibly be the full range of subjects ancient greek and roman authors covered, even if this was the genuine preponderance due to the vagaries of preservation. To try to get a better picture, I headed off to look through the basic overviews of the authors, works and volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. The Loeb website can be a bit fiddly to navigate through to these, and I found the most useful relevant index to be the volumes overview, as the authors list is copious but misleading. Among the very ancient texts surviving are a number of epigram collections and books like The Learned Diners preserving the only surviving bits of numerous authors' works who may be represented by as little as two to four lines. A significant number of the latin authors turned out to be clerics, who were particularly fond of producing religious biographies and confessional memoirs. Besides these, there is a wider range of subject matter and genre than might be expected. For instance, the romans may not have been quite so big on philosophy compared to the ancient greeks, but they held their own as orators and seem especially fond of letter writing for publication. Among the most well-known of their epistolarians are Cicero, the elder Seneca, and the Younger Pliny. The ancient greeks also wrote extensively on astronomy, mathematics and engineering, quite apart from the mass of material by Aristotle. The romans seem to have written on those areas less, turning to agriculture and military matters instead. The specifically male lineage of novel writing goes all the way back to this era and region, including Apollonius Rhodius, Lucian, and Achilles Tatius writing in ancient greek, and mostly the racy Petronious in latin.

Nowadays the specially adventurous may more easily explore "neo-latin" and even "neo-ancient-greek" works than before. There is a lot of latin out there because it remained the lingua franca (ha!) of scholarship down to roughly the late eighteenth century. Today it is possible to pick up a growing number of more recent books, usually fiction, translated into latin. J.K. Rowling helped boost this phenomenon, though it does look to extend further back, especially in europe. I had no idea anyone had tried to keep writing in ancient greek as such until very recently, and there was not much of this for practical reason. Unlike latin, which broke up into vernaculars clearly related to but very distinct from it, greek has remained greek. To this day, as one of my instructors in the language pointed out, greek maintains a significant amount of its ancient vocabulary, albeit reshaped a bit by phonologic and grammatical change. When it comes to examples of "neo-neo-ancient-greek," there is at least one well-known example, the translation of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone into ancient greek by Andrew Wilson. (Top)

Not a Coincidence (2026-05-11)

One of Abdulsalam Al Dabbagh's january 2025 photographs of an iraqi soap shop, via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Some time ago good fortune led me to pick up and read Katherine Ashenburg's 2007 book, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. It is an excellent example of popular history done right. Ashenburg never talks down to the reader while presenting her material in a good-humoured, crisp prose that makes the book tricky to put down. The book designer had a romp through victorian and edwardian era black line artwork of various sanitation-related devices and products, and the particular hard cover I read was printed on sensible paper so that the photographs were legible. There are all manner of interesting tidbits (e.g. origins of the obnoxious phrase "the great unwashed") as well as serious material in the book – among other things, it is a thoughtful meditation on the management and mismanagement of water, and how cleanliness was constructed into a telltale marker of socio-economic class (but for the "black Irish" see Theodore Allen). There are a few things Ashenburg did not follow up on too much, which is on one hand too bad, on the other likely to do with space constraints. For instance, linen is genuinely resistant to stains, and so a person who wears linen underwear and shirt can indeed get quite clean by changing their linen, that is stripping off their dirty linen, sponge bathing, and then putting on fresh linen. Of course, the challenge remaining is to adequately clean and dry the dirty linen. But since Ashenburg is focussed on people washing themselves, this is not the book to look for details on laundries and household or institutional cleaning. For those topics, Judith Flanders and Ruth Goodman are the better sources. Still, my point here is not to review Ashenburg's book as such. Instead, I am going to discuss a startlingly apropos paragraph reflecting on early twentieth century culture in the united states.

When it came to rendering the world as clean and odourless as possible, the 1920s were a watershed decade. As cities expanded, and people worked close to one another in crowded offices and factories, they grew unhappily aware of the smells produced by their own bodies and those of others. The arrival of women in the work world accelerated this new sensitivity. The fastidiousness that had first surfaced, tentatively, in late-eighteenth century Europe was becoming an American obsession. At the same time, prosperity was at an all-time high. People could afford products that would enable them to live in a smell-less zone, a safe place where they would neither "offend" nor be "offended." (243-244)

There is, to put it mildly, a lot going on in this quote. Setting aside the absurdity of the third sentence, and it is absurd, because women have always been in the work world, in both its unwaged and waged regions, let's pause a moment on the point that the time period is the 1920s. If we think back to what had just preceded that telltale decade of glamour and excess, we smack immediately into the first world war. A war in which the fighting was characterized by stasis, trenches, and endless days of mud and muck because the irrigation and drainage structures were among the first destroyed. That war is the one from which most accounts of twentieth century trench foot, constant wet clothes, problematic latrines, endless lice, and infectious disease carried by those same lice and such unasked for companions as rats and their fleas. All this was quite apart from infectious diseases that spread directly between people. Antibiotics were non-existent, making the risk of infected wounds all the more appalling. Check out the photographs and paintings by people not engaged in trying to recruit fresh cannon fodder, and it is hard to miss the ever-present mud and evidence the soldiers were managing with often poorly fitted and generally inadequate uniforms and boots. They often look dirty and unkempt, even when relatively spruced up. It would not be unreasonable to expect something of a mania for personal cleanliness to develop, especially considering the first world war overlapped with the spanish flu epidemic. Add to this how the 1920s was the first era of serious advertising, and savvy salesmen knew the best products to sell would always be the ones that must by nature always be replaced, all the better if people could be persuaded they needed their own portions. The united states was already famous for its hucksters, fads, and hyperconsciousness about class markers. Once people were convinced they had to not just look clean but smell it, and the smell was defined as functionally "not like a living person," then they were more than primed for the new "American obsession."

I suspect it was in this era that the wry statement attributed to an apocryphal european found its way into the world as europeans defined it: "In America the men smell like women and the women smell like drug stores." The european must be apocryphal, considering the most common term for a place to buy medicines and basic hygiene items in the early twentieth century in europe looks to be "the chemist."

But now, let's step back and take closer note of the last clause in the quote, "a safe place where they would neither 'offend' nor be 'offended.' I find this last part especially interesting because in the past ten to fifteen years, a great many bullies have attempted to redefine what offends them as crimes to be punished, and to define for themselves an arbitrary "right" not to be offended. Those bullies are not referring in any way to bodily scent of course, they are referring to ideas and questions they don't like. To be sure, this is just one example of the broader tactic of such individuals, most often men, manipulating the ambiguities of language as part of an effort to coerce others. They conveniently deny the reality of context and connotations when it is useful for browbeating others or worse, as in suddenly insisting "offense" must mean only something which could be against the law, as opposed to something that merely "causes a person to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful," to paraphrase the OED. The thing joining these two notions of "offending" and "being offended" is an effort to control the thoughts and feelings of others. It is no coincidence that notions of social cleanliness and personal cleanliness have such troubling ties. (Top)

Musical Fictions (2026-05-04)

Quote of a file photograph of budget recording producer and reseller Alfred Scholz, courtesy of discogs.com.

Among a number of long-delayed projects has been a recent compilation of a discography for a local CD collection including items from a wide range of musical genres, mostly secondhand. As music lovers who browse that hardy species, the independent music store carrying a mix of second hand and new items on vinyl as well as CD knows well, some of the most interesting items are hardest to document. Contrary to what may be expected in a primarily anglophone context, foreign albums are not too difficult on average, even if they are by artists from non-anglophone countries who also do not use a latin script. The main exceptions to this in my experience date to the 1950s and 1960s, and of course those are vinyl records. However, when it came to this CD collection the most oddities were cropping up where I least expected them, the items falling under the loose category of "classical music." That is, music we often associate with opera or symphonic pieces, although the category often sweeps in soloists and ensembles as long as the music dates from no earlier than the late 1700s and is played by professional musicians. Due to the rigours of time, a handful of the "classical music" CDs had only a slip sheet from the front or back of the original case, or even nothing at all apart from the case to identify them by. Only one of them seemed to have suffered the sort of mishap a different, "easy listening" CD by the acapela group The Nylons had, where the CD was recovered from a stereo but its case and everything else were lost. On top of that, some of this odd lot of CDs had issues with the information on the slip sheet. But I didn't fully appreciate that right away, because I got tangled up attempting to disentangle the details for the CDs which turned out to have fictitious orchestras and conductors.

Now, it is true that these were all budget recordings, including one fairly complete set aimed specifically at people seeking a reasonable entry point to classical music listening, and probably elementary and secondary school music classes. However, since these recordings could be of quite uneven quality or at best of dubious copyright and licensing status, artists were not necessarily lining up to slap their names on them. German conductor and producer Alfred Scholz turned out to be the person behind most of the ill-documented CDs, although to be clear, he at least does look to have had proper ownership of rights to reproduce the recordings via purchase or producing and conducting them himself. His profile at discogs.com reveals a remarkable collection of aliases, variations, and fictional orchestras. The musicbrainz wiki provides an excellent overview including cross-references to several important articles giving more detail about Scholz's career and identifying many of the performances he had repackaged. If perchance you have run into an apparently budget CD of Anton Bruckner's works, then John F. Berky's article Pseudonyms: Alfred Scholz and the South German Philharmonic will be of special interest. Having listened to the CDs in the collection I was dealing with that are from Scholz's productions, they are in general decent recordings, not muddy or screechy, and the work and movement identifications are reasonably accurate. So things were looking good for the remaining poorly documented CDs, a "beginner's introduction to classical music" set featuring Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart, and a poorly labelled recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Well, at least the four-disc set had nothing to do with Alfred Scholz. They turned out to be the product of a small, now defunct montréal-based company with a poor grasp of the material at hand. Whoever was handed the job of composing the track lists did not understand what they were dealing with, so they had problems. Besides some very funny and quite understandable typos, they did manage to produce intelligible and reasonably accurate track lists for Mozart and Beethoven. But Bach ran them to grief as they did not realize that the CD mixed together works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. And by the time they got to Handel, the terrible truncated recording of a music-only performance of the Messiah reduced them to providing a confused and vague note about excerpts from parts one and two. It probably did not help at all to have such an odd mixture of baroque, classical, and romantic music. In a european music context, that periodization is a critical starting point to make sense of the very different sound quality and change in instrumental ensembles. However, the person putting together the track lists evidently didn't have much information to help them along, and I can only imagine they were profoundly grateful not to be tasked with writing any liner notes. Indeed, my research on this CD-set revealed there were no liner notes.

For the Vivaldi recording, there is not enough information available on the disc as such to confirm it, but it appears to be another packaging of a 1965 recording by Suzanne Lautenbacher, Württembergisches Kammerorchester and Jörg Faerber, which does indeed fall under Scholz's oeuvre. The company that produced and marketed this particular album was registered in ireland, although its version of the disc is not yet included on the musicbrainz catalogue page. It is no easy task to identify and catalogue the many variants in packaging and release of Scholz-related recordings, and this one is an especially good example. There are at least three different publishing companies listed just in musicbrainz, and the albums present the music usually divided into twelve tracks according to movement. Overall the version on the CD from the irish company is a decent recording, not inspired as such but anodyne. It strikes me as another production intended for use in the classroom, which I don't intend as a damning with faint praise description. Teaching recordings have different requirements relative to full on performance recordings after all.

Today for those of us fortunate enough to have means and opportunity to access the internet, there are many more free recordings and proper fair use snippets to learn about all manner of music genres, not just european classical music. For those also able to pick up CDs, the main source of introductory recordings in my experience is naxos followed closely by decca classics. These are good to excellent recordings, with no fictitious or anonymous artists. (Top)