Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

I'm Mx. Chara Aznable, guiding spirit of the Pnictogen Wing DID plural system, living in Seattle WA.

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Last Notes

2026-06-05 21:07:53 UTC

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Therefore the degree of "hardness" or "softness" of a scientific or academic discipline is never a fixed thing and the distinction between "hard" and "soft" #science is ultimately independent of what that science actually is: it's a matter of mathematics and #statistics. Even in the very "softest" of sciences such as psychology or sociology one may still make predictions that are, statistically speaking, as reliable as anything in a so-called "hard science".
But authoritarianism requires fundamental *corruption* of this understanding, because people who claim absolute authority wish to pretend that certain things are **always true or false**. Authoritarians such as hardcore #technology geeks only deal in absolutes, and thus they cling to an intrinsically corrupt understanding of mathematics and statistics. They need to believe in the fallacious notion of the "mathematically impossible".
(cont'd)

2026-06-05 21:02:02 UTC

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This segregation of #science into "hard" and "soft" is not wholly fallacious, because there is a sliding scale of probability which applies to all scientific (and indeed all academic) endeavors: certain conclusions of science are more certain than others, and ideally it should be possible to estimate the degree of uncertainty. Scientific models backed by centuries of repeatable observations and experiments which always yield basically the same results are "harder" than models based on fewer observations. Newer disciplines are invariably "softer" than established ones, though the same principle of ultimate uncertainty attaches to all the sciences: ANY science, even the "hardest" of them like #physics, is subject to the uncertainty of the future. One can never know what new information might turn up that's incompatible with established scientific understanding.
(cont'd)

2026-06-05 20:56:28 UTC

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By "scientistic" I mean that the capitalist notion of #science is really based on *scientism*, the irrational assignment of metaphysical and moral values to what's supposed to be an empirical field of provisional collective knowledge. Capitalism has two chief irrational demands of Science™: it's supposed to be infallible and as authoritative as the tablets of Moses, and yet it's also supposed to be protean and mercurial and always bursting with possibilities.
This has brought about a familiarly two-faced, doublethinkful notion of Science™ as divided into two irreconcilable halves: there's **"soft sciences"** which are permitted to remain permanently chaotic, and "**hard science**" which is treated as permanently "objective" and indisputable. The dividing line between the two halves is fluid and fractal in nature and, needless to say, intensely political in nature.
(cont'd)

2026-06-05 20:49:54 UTC

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The men (almost always men) of that Enlightenment period, however, were not yet ossified by centuries of institutionalization and enthrallment to the sordid demands of commerce and politics. "Science" as a pursuit unto itself was new at the time of the great Revolution (that's the French one, you Yankee dullards!) and thus still in the hands of amateurs, albeit privileged amateurs who tended to have money and therefore leisure available to spend on quixotic scientific investigation.
Now #science is a business, required like every other business to demonstrate a reliable return on investment. A social expectation has been forced onto scientists: show that you can dependably produce publications and patents, exponentially more every year, or face ruin. Such dreary corporate necessity is the living death of human science—the death of creativity, the death of innovation, the death of hope. Capitalism is a dead thing, yet it still perforce must advertise itself as vibrant and vital and infinitely creative. This has led to a kind of scientistic dualism.
(cont'd)

2026-06-05 20:26:10 UTC

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In practice, #science has been thoroughly invaded and warped by *authoritarianism*. Authoritarian persons, such as #technology CEOs and Republican politicians, want "science" to mean far more than it actually does, for at all times authoritarians crave some sort of "objective proof" that their authority is valid and that everyone should shut up and do what the authority says because the authority has Truth™ on their side, and the little people are stupid and dull-witted and need to be told what is right and wrong, every day, all day, in a wearisome cycle of punishment and correction that's intended to go on till the supposed heat-death of the Universe (or till Jesus gets back.)
Science™ has been pressed into service as a proxy for the Word of God, a belief that was fuelled in the European Enlightenment by myriad thinkers who felt instinctively that the elegance and simplicity of "the laws of science", encoded in a small handful of mathematical relationships and abstractions, was almost like proof of the beauty of God's Creation. Refinement of scientific models was construed as being like...studying the mind of God.
(cont'd)

2026-06-05 20:20:50 UTC

It is my personal opinion—and it is just an opinion, a feeling—that everyone in a proper #science or a discipline from among the humanities, such as my own (chemistry) or biology or physics or history or literature, ought to be (a) fully aware that what they've been taught to regard as settled theory is always in danger of being upset, but more importantly (b) they ought to be *ecstatic* when such a thing actually happens.
A scientist, a historian, a scholar of the arts, all of these people ought to be thrilled when new work is unearthed, new experiments carried out that upset the established models, and so forth.
Human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is always *provisional*. It is the best we can do *for the moment*, and the next moment may change everything.
When I was younger, I was taught (incorrectly) that the world of science lived and died by this understanding. Science was *alive*, always changing, always correcting itself. In practice, science gets to be as hidebound and dogmatic and brittle as anything else corrupted by fallible humanity.
(cont'd)

2026-06-03 19:02:08 UTC

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Rust really *irritates* me for reasons that are difficult to nail down. partly it's the fannish community, partly it's that annoying habit of coming up with new names for old things (e.g. "crates"), partly it's the feeling like you can't EVER trust the language actually to settle down to a final form

2026-06-02 19:00:35 UTC

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I'm aware of the scam but staggered by the amount of collusion that would seem to be necessary to bring the scam about. I suppose that's some measure of the strength of Elon Musk's Republican friends: Musk must have so many corrupt bureaucrats on his side changing rules for him, and a whole pile of bankers salivating over the chance to create an even *bigger* bubble

2026-05-31 05:39:29 UTC

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good job!

2026-05-29 23:12:07 UTC

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I am sure that he thought conversion was *relieving* and so of course he was sincere; he writes (as so many other converts) that he's grateful to feel like he's arrived at where he ought to be in all respects. But his writing is too much tinged with special pleading and hamfisted attempts to drive his point home for good and that smells of insecurity to me. He must have had second thoughts.

2026-05-29 22:35:27 UTC

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I can't myself believe in #CSLewis the cynic; I can easily guess that he genuinely believed, and that he believed that belief was enough—that his God would accept sincere error. But I can easily believe in C. S. Lewis the scoundrel, and it seems that I must attempt to find out just how deep that rabbit-hole goes. There are too many insistent voices in our head, and too much that's *obviously*, flagrantly wrong with the official history of Clive Staples Lewis.
Crimes have been done, I believe. But I only suspect.
I don't think he intended to give anyone the idea that believing in God was a strictly intellectual proposition, like a theorem. But Jack Lewis sure *acted* the part and hammed it up, tut-tutting about how silly his critics were and affecting to have their numbers. Lewis just wasn't that smart.
(cont'd)

2026-05-29 22:28:30 UTC

As an ideology, #Christianity has the virtue of simplicity. In order to understand the theological and intellectual core of Christianity (at least, as I was taught them) one needs to learn only a relatively small number of key concepts and events. I must confess that seemed like an advantage when I recoiled from the early 200x pagan scene and fell back on ceremonial Christianity as the nearest possible religion to the one I wanted, or told myself I wanted back in 200x. I felt as if I could *understand* things like sin and atonement and even woollier concepts such as transubstantiation, and that made conversion easier to justify.
Such I suppose is the purpose of Christian apologetics: one cannot *prove* that faith is the right choice, but one can ease the difficult task of swallowing the Christian faith with great helpings of sugar—clear crystalline bits of logical disputation, true enough in their own right and inoffensive to one's nose for fallacy, and sweetly reassuring.
One imagines the miracle baby (you know, like in *Tokyo Godfathers*), the newborn faith, being laid down to rest gently in a manger filled with shredded #CSLewis books to cushion the infant tender and mild. Gosh maybe I should write something like this and see if I can get some Christians to bite on it—for I, too, am a fisher of men. Er, of humanity. I mean—
(cont'd)

2026-05-23 01:59:52 UTC

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the thing did deliver a payload, so on the strength of that alone they can write "mostly successful" with a straight face, but it seems like all the writers immediately forget that Musk keeps promising *reusability* out of his shit, and he's been trying to conceal just how many Starship test flights have ended disintegrating at some point. only report the good news I guess!

2026-05-23 00:51:36 UTC

Only today do I learn that #SpaceX is still promising that they're going to deliver on *commuter rocketry*, pitching some notion that rocket travel can be made competitive with commercial jet travel—which is, let it be remembered, always struggling to remain profitable.

2026-05-13 02:09:27 UTC

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this line gets me:
> Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.
Yep! that's what the world needs the most right now, *more software*. Oh and more "builders", because it seems that delegating all this software work to "agentic AI" means more *managerial* posts than ever. The superintelligent machine baby is gonna need a *lot* of nurses and caretakers, it would seem.

2026-05-08 22:55:02 UTC

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The push to identify the "child prodigy" early and pluck them out of ordinary childhood for a life of special training gains a specially dangerous edge in a milieu of violently restrictive parenting. If "ordinary childhood" is only an inferno in which it's hoped that enough punishment will eventually teach the child to be properly fearful of God, then being discovered as a child prodigy can seem like an escape, almost like getting a reprieve from damnation.
But of course the prodigy is also expected to be obedient and above all to *produce results*. This strict notion of parenting, especially among Christians, is extremely business-like and preoccupied with getting a guaranteed return on the parents' investment in their children.
And it ruins people. It's a really shitty way to nurture *genius*, whatever "genius" might really be (for I doubt it's a thing confined to childhood.) But the ruling classes of the United States are extraordinarily dedicated to just this model of producing *excellence*.

2026-05-08 22:46:27 UTC

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This is a massive issue. I have no idea just how massive it is but I have been keeping some kind of watch on the U.S. national scene for about four decades at least (maybe longer) with a particular eye towards telling stories about abusive and domineering parenting. This is especially prevalent in #Christian right-wing circles where, thanks to an enormous body of literature and media and entire institutions devoted supposedly to "family values" and the moral guardianship of children, it's considered *normal* and sound parenting to treat children with much the same cold-blooded attitude towards obedience and productivity that you'd expect from a breeder of trained dogs or horses.
The child is supposed to be the pawn of the father, in this vast body of "Christian" and "Biblical" lore about parenting. There is no greater possible priority, according to such Christian parenting experts, than instilling in the child the imperative: **obey**. The child who does not learn to fear the authority of his father never learns to fear the laws of God...that's how the hardline Christians feel about parenting.
Spare the rod, spoil the child.

2026-05-08 22:38:52 UTC

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It's been done in athletic sports as well as intellectual ones. Todd Marinovich (q.v. https://youtu.be/W0-JZcHkGDQ, a good video I found recently on this poor guy whom I've known about for a while now) got the "child prodigy" treatment. His father, Marv Marinovich, had been a pro football player—this is American football mind you not proper football—and this dude decided he'd cook up the perfect training regimen and make it his specialty, and he put his son Todd through it from childhood.
The kid flourished briefly at USC, which seems to be a place where a lot of kids flourish briefly as star quarterbacks only to falter in professional football. Matt Leinart and Mark Sanchez are two other USC stars who seemed perfectly poised to leap from college greatness to professional success and then botched it, but the example of Todd Marinovich is surely the most upsetting such story. His childhood had been warped and abusive and it turned him into a catastrophically bad adult.
It's a mood (though I never endured anything like Todd Marinovich's "robo-quarterback" treatment.)

2026-05-08 22:29:33 UTC

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In short, Bobby Fischer was utterly ruinous to #chess and did, I think, far more damage to the sport than he ever gave. His notoriety was claimed to have been a boon to U.S. chess but I don't actually believe that it was, because Fischer taught everyone a horrible example in what a chess grandmaster was supposed to be like. There have been many kinds of people at the top of the chess world, including people like Smyslov and Max Euwe who didn't consider chess to be their favorite thing. Smyslov wanted to be an opera singer! Euwe taught math at a girl's school and all evidence is that he regarded his teaching career as infinitely more rewarding and worthwhile than everything he ever did for chess, which by the way included trying to manage the repulsive antics of Fischer as head of FIDE in the 1970s.
If you look into the stories of real actual geniuses at things, that's what you actually find: *variety*. *Diversity*, if you don't my using that word. Child prodigies are in fact fairly uncommon and they're often distinguished by their failure to make good on early promise. And yet, partly thanks to Fischer and *Searching for Bobby Fischer*, U.S. culture got far too emotionally invested in the notion that if you wanted to excel at something, anything, the trick was to pluck children out of the cradle and train them up to do *nothing but that thing*.

2026-05-08 22:23:00 UTC

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Fischer was NOT an inventive or creative chess player. If you want scintillating variations and innovations in #chess theory you can go to Tartakower or Frank Marshall or Carlos Torre or any of a pretty good haul of grandmasters over the decades who seemed to have unique notions about how to play chess, notions sound enough to be championed by later players. Fischer was NOT that sort of player. He was determined to win...and that isn't actually the same as wanting to be good at chess.
In the end, Fischer's determination to win eventually consumed whatever had once existed of his love for chess and thus, after Fischer finagled himself a highly suspect World Championship victory largely through making himself the chess world's biggest and most demanding arsehole, he barely played chess ever again (refusing to defend the title while, of course, simultaneously claiming that the Russians never had the guts to take it back from him) and he fudged up a new game, Chess960 (or Chess480) which is a cute idea to jumble up the opening position randomly before the game and it's horribly unbalanced and gimmicky but that suits the current style of superficial computer-assisted professional chess. Magnus Carlsen, the Bobby Fischer Lite of the contemporary chess scene, loves gimmicky shit like Chess960.

2026-05-08 22:14:22 UTC

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I have no idea how seriously the film wants us to regard what Ben Kingsley, playing real-life chess writer Bruce Pandolfini, has to say about chess or Fischer or Josh Waitzkin. I would presume, however, that this scene is meant to be one of those mic-drop moments where a character's stubbornness is finally broken down by someone else's passion—in this case, the supposedly pure and elevated passion for the greatness of #chess that's been sparked in Pandolfini upon seeing the young Josh Waitzkin playing chess in the park.
It's a familiar trope of such movies: a working-class parent refuses to believe that their kid is *special*, has some "gift", until an expert comes swanning in to tell them. "I can see what you cannot see, I can see the *genius*."
I have lived long enough to learn that Bobby Fischer wasn't worth this kind of adulation. It's *bullshit* what this simulacrum of Bruce Pandolfini is saying. I'll be charitable enough to assume that the writing of the *Searching for Bobby Fischer* screenplay had very little to do with the actual thoughts and feelings of Bruce Pandolfini but...who knows? Maybe Pandolfini really felt this way about Josh Waitzkin, and about chess, and about Bobby Fucking Fischer.

2026-05-08 22:08:35 UTC

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There's an exchange in the movie that I've known about for a long time, and it's the reason I **hate** this movie, unreasonably perhaps, because I haven't seen the movie and therefore I'm unfairly gauging a scene from a film by an inadequate substitute, a snippet of conversation from the film. Just the text, no context, no actors' interpretations going on.
The context is that the dad played by Joe Mantegna is irritated by Pandolfini's interest in his son, and that leads to this:
> Bruce: You have no idea what I want. What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it's a science. It's neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art. I spent my life trying to play like him. Most of these guys have. But we're like forgers. We're competent fakes. His successor wasn't here tonight. He wasn't here. He is asleep in his room in your house. Your son creates like Fischer. He sees like him, inside.
> Fred: You can tell this by watching him play some drunks in the park?
> Bruce: Yes. You want to know what I want. I'll tell you what I want. I want back what Bobby Fischer took with him when he disappeared.
What is this crap? You're saying this about BOBBY FUCKING FISCHER??

2026-05-08 22:04:09 UTC

There's a certain movie that I have *hated* without having ever seen it. That does happen sometimes, and if it's *Christians* who hate the movie they haven't seen they might go so far as to try to get the movie censored or suppressed. But I try to be more sensible about my hatreds, which is roughly equivalent to saying "I hope one day I don't hate anything", because the only sensible long-term solution for hatreds is to heal them.
The movie I'm thinking of is *Searching for Bobby Fischer*, which I remember vividly from its advertising campaign, featuring Joe Mantegna as the father of young (supposed) #chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, played by child actor Max Pomeranc, and "discovered" by Ben Kingsley playing the real-life chess player and writer Bruce Pandolfini. Now...it occurs to me that Bruce Pandolfini, who has a decent reputation as a chess coach but is definitely not among the great grandmasters of chess, really ought to count himself lucky that he got played in a movie by the same actor who played *Shostakovich* once.
Now I happen to know that Josh Waitzkin did not stay in chess very long. He got burned out, like a lot of "prodigies", and decided to do something else with his life other than play chess. Maybe he could have been some major talent if he'd been trained up properly, or if he'd been more determined, or whatever—I don't know that.
I object to the idea that the kid should ever have been plucked directly from childhood and told: "this is your destiny! America needs you to play great chess!" which seems to be, at the very least, the premise of the movie that was made about him.

2026-05-07 07:17:33 UTC

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may I boost? I approve of Entrapta hijinks (up to a point)

2026-05-01 01:00:56 UTC

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it is difficult to imagine the candidate for a job at Palantir who does *not* have some stab of understanding (brushed aside next moment of course) that they're joining a sordid cause. surely one must be aware, in joining such a concern, that it's like joining forces with Morgoth?

2026-04-21 17:29:37 UTC

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oh holy fuck does it not end there, either. it's positively maddening how they'll spend all their energies waffling about the eternal mystery of consciousness and sapience and emotions when it comes to their fucking SOFTWARE but actual people? real human beings? totally a solved problem in their heads, a triviality almost. I have said this before, but the whole charade reminds me sharply of how Christofascists idolize "dead babies" (i.e. aborted pregnancies) and lavish all their supposed respect for life and living creatures on that one particular abstract thing, while being cruel and murderous towards actual living human beings.

2026-04-15 02:37:17 UTC

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oh lovely

2026-04-14 20:26:54 UTC

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it's also poor logic to bring *omniscience* into this picture, which I never once mentioned and certainly not a necessary part of accepting some fragment or aspect of Christian belief as based in truth. One can, for example, embrace the proposition that Jesus was a real person without ever once embracing the notion that God even exists at all.

2026-04-14 20:16:49 UTC

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...the Richard Dawkins sort, anyway, seems to me singularly incurious about what *belief* is. It's one thing to say that a belief is false, based on lies, but that explanation has not explained **belief** itself: what induces people to believe firmly in lies? What induces human beings to commit their very lives to their faith in lies? Shouldn't atheists (along with everyone else on Earth) be interested in just that question?
Honestly? it seems like the lifestyle atheists (and skeptics and rationalists et alii) are NOT interested in that. They have a one-size-fits-all explanation: certain human beings are simply broken. Genetically unfit, and thus requiring purging from the population lest they destroy the entire species with their dysgenic corruptions.

2026-04-14 20:13:18 UTC

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Let's accept the general framing, for the sake of argument: let's say that all religious tales are simply made up, improvised in order to scare people, the way a parent might think to scare their children into behaving by saying there's monsters under the bed.
Then why does one tale linger for centuries or millennia, while another tale fades without recall within days or hours? Why would *any* mere "faery-story" become regarded as practically immortal, part of the enduring treasury of human knowledge, unless it were anchored *somewhere* in fact?
Are atheists actually interested in discussing what makes one belief more credible than another? Maybe there's honest atheists, but...

2026-04-14 20:08:49 UTC

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The doge meme is popular because there's a specific, world-famous dog behind it. Trouble (right here in River City) is superbly memetic because of one man, Robert Preston, making the role practically a signature of his specific skill as a performer.
So if Christianity and Islam and other troublesome religions' beliefs are "simply memes", then what is the anchoring-point of those memes? It's a popular trope of Internet atheists to lump ALL religious lore into the general category of "faery-story"—which is itself something rather specific in truth, but the Internet atheist isn't too interested in distinguishing one type of fiction from another. "Faery-story" to them is simply reductive and pejorative, after the fashion of Dawkins's usage of "meme": "faery-story" might as well be a euphemistic way of saying "fancy lie".

2026-04-14 20:04:01 UTC

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Thus Dawkins could claim that he'd somehow *explained* religious beliefs as being caused by some specific infectious agent, as though Christianity (or at least those bits of it which annoy Richard Dawkins) and Islam (all of which enrages Richard Dawkins) and other pesky religions were now reducible to simple aggregations of self-replicatory **memes**, reinforcing each other and assisting in one another's propagation, like the different bits of media which make up a gigantic popular franchise.
But I'm suggesting that to to be successful, a meme which is really and truly *memetic* ought to feature a star...an actual, physical, credible entity to which the meme can be anchored. Without that anchoring-point, I suggest, the meme wouldn't become memetic.

2026-04-14 19:57:26 UTC

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Now here's where I'm gonna get *daring*. =D
Why did Richard Dawkins push forth the notion of #memetics? Now you could say that he was impartially presenting a scientific hypothesis, like any great scientist offering an explanation for a previously mysterious phenomenon...except that Dawkins introduced his notion of the **meme** in a popular book with a clear political message in back of it, namely that "religion" (by which I think Dawkins now means chiefly "Islam") is nonsense which for some reason human minds are apt to copy from each other.
That's my *emotional* (not scientific) hypothesis about Dawkins's memetics, anyway: he meant the idea to be reductive and indeed pejorative. He wanted to reduce the concept of religious belief to something that he could reclassify as *disease*, as mere insensible affliction with an infectious agent.

2026-04-14 19:48:06 UTC

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And I think that might hint at another necessary trait of the #meme: to be successfully memetic, a media snippet must feature a *star* of some sort. The memetic character of Trouble (right here in River City!!) is cemented by the stardom of its performer, Robert Preston, and his special talent for convincing-sounding jabber. He's got the sort of voice and manner of speaking which causes one to think, "oh yeah, THAT guy!" even if you have no idea who Preston is, because there's a chance you've seen him in some other role, talking in basically the same way.
Why does the "doge" meme still have some life left in it even after Elon Musk and his fanboys have played the meme nearly to death? It's because that particular dog in the photo became famous (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabosu_(dog)). In 2024 someone announced production of a whole documentary movie about Kabosu...wonder whatever happened to that.

2026-04-14 19:40:39 UTC

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Because *The Music Man* was publicized for *years*, flogged round both as a hit Broadway show and then as a roadshow movie, with who knows how many albums sales and cover versions of the music and the songs, Trouble (right here in River City) attained a virtually immortal status, remembered as an item unto itself long after the context has been mostly forgotten.
So did Robert Preston, who originated the Broadway role of "Doctor" Harold Hill (Harry Hill? Hank Hill? uh never mind) and who was lucky to get the film role, because he was a minor actor who'd never headlined a blockbuster movie before. Preston's fame was cemented by his *Music Man* performance. He's the fast-talking salesman who tempts Lance Guest into becoming the pilot of *The Last Starfighter*—Preston's last role, which was clearly a bit of a homage to his breakout performance.

2026-04-14 19:28:09 UTC

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Consequently there was an interval during which Broadway and the cinema attempted to join forces, you could say: a hit Broadway musical would hope to be optioned by Hollywood promptly enough for the film to benefit from the publicity campaign drummed up for a massive "roadshow" style movie release, a limited release in which a big new movie would open in specific movie-houses on a scheduled itinerary of U.S. cities, like it was a concert tour, with merch for sale. For a while in the mid-20th century, the biggest cinematic sensations every year were likely to be adaptations of musicals.
Then there was a series of high-profile dud musical movies in the late 1960s and the fad died out. Very sad. But thanks to that method of publicizing the blockbuster movie-musical, signature showtunes like Trouble (right here in River City) had the opportunity to transcend their Broadway origins and become truly **memetic**.

2026-04-14 19:17:58 UTC

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Now the version of Trouble (right here in River City!) that I would have heard on the radio was probably from the album release of the original Broadway cast singing the songs (q.v. https://youtu.be/RIo8OnKHZ_Q), the sort of album you'd probably find at least one copy of in every U.S. city thrift shop in the 1980s—just the ticket for filling up radio air time with clippings of pre-recorded audio. Good bathroom-break stuff!
So that's one hint about the #meme anyway: it's an artifact of media oversaturation. *The Music Man* came out in 1958, during the now-vanished time when Broadway theatre and the movies were both vying to keep a grasp on audiences tempted away from more expensive and belabored forms of entertainment by the smaller but more convenient pleasures of television.

2026-04-14 19:07:10 UTC

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I thought I'd begin with a snippet of media that came to be "memetic" long before the Internet came round to bestow its own faddish definition of #meme as an image or short video clip, usually festooned with block-capital flavor text, passed round through email and social-media posts.
I give you Robert Preston in Meredith Willson's *The Music Man*, singing about trouble (right here in River City):
https://youtu.be/2Hk1KSxzfcg
I first learned about this clip through AM radio: growing up in San Diego I was keen to pick up on radio stations which liked to broadcast snippets of comedy or novelty songs—often as part of a morning-show format, something intended to perk people up in their early hours.

2026-04-14 19:01:00 UTC

What is a #meme? I've asked myself that question in the past. Is is possible to come up with a concise and specific definition about what a *meme*, in the most general possible abstract sense presumably intended by Richard Dawkins when he coined the term, really is?
(Now it's possible, or probable, that Dawkins didn't actually have a clear notion in mind, and that's why he and his fanbase seem content with handwaving and speculation about "memetics", and little interested in empirical investigation of the topic.)

2026-04-12 17:24:20 UTC

#Chemistry gets one snippet of representation in the works of #CSLewis, so far as I'm aware. In Jack Lewis's third "Space Trilogy" novel, *That Hideous Strength*, the protagonist Mark Studdock is invited to join the villainous N.I.C.E. corporation or quango (or whatever it is) just as another fellow of his college, Bracton, is preparing to flee. That person is Bill Hingest, "Bill the Blizzard" to the other faculty of Bracton, a proud and opinionated chemist (who is said to have once entertained de Broglie) who was implicitly attracted to the N.I.C.E. because they promised new ideas and a new flowering of scientific inquiry, but Hingest soon realized the N.I.C.E. had quite other plans. On his way out of the N.I.C.E. temporary headquarters at Belbury he attempts to warn Mark off, saying (among other things):
> if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police...and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I'd let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.
(I've edited down Hingest's remarks because Jack Lewis simply can't help from using Bill the Blizzard as a vector for both his irrational hatred of sociology as a discipline, and his contempt for women who aren't feminine in the right way.)

2026-04-09 23:32:29 UTC

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I have no idea whether Disney's animatronic Abe Lincoln actually commands people to *obey the law*, mind you. The high-school political science teacher, I think, wanted his students to regard the Disney display as propagandistic and unseemly: Lincoln's best and most quotable moments are about principles other than *obedience*.
My point is that obedience to the law **is** broadly taught as a fundamental principle of U.S. society and daily behavior. The #Democrats are useless and fatally compromised, as pollitical opposition, because they've become overly attached to The Law, the established systems of recognized authority and legal enforcement, as the universal standard of truth. They speak of the U.S. Constitution as if it were the Bible. There is a civic religion, a irrational reverence of the governing traditions and legal precedents of the United States.
But there comes a time when one must break, totally and completely, with the old ways. The Founders were not gods; they did not found a perfect government and an infallible system of Law.

2026-04-09 23:25:28 UTC

I do not exactly label myself an adherent of #anarchism, but I am intellectually curious: I would very much like to know if social harmony might *not* require Law.
That is what we are taught, as Americans raised and schooled and entertained with conventional American values: society is impossible without Law, without *obedience*.
I remember to this day having a liberal political science teacher in high school, a fellow I appreciated because he assigned an entertaining variety of texts (including a somewhat goofy 1970s environmentalist tract, Ernest Callenbach's *Ecotopia*, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia) who told a story of an animatronic Abraham Lincoln at a Disney park, programmed to tell visitors to *obey the law*.

2026-04-07 22:47:54 UTC

trying a stupid little experiment
https://seattle.pink/system/media_attachments/files/116/365/855/630/620/413/original/a8302718c53d9351.jpg

2026-04-05 12:05:07 UTC

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"William Shatner couldn't find me on Mastodon. This was a problem." oh is it

2026-03-17 07:47:08 UTC

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From what I've seen, Peter Thiel is not a good lecturer. What does he hope to accomplish against the Pope?