Vacation

It's not always clear to me whether to treat this blog as a repository for Important Thoughts, or just as a diary. It started out, way back when, as a tool to try to understand my marriage. Once I understood it enough to realize I had to leave Wife, I started to collect "diary" entries about times that Wife was particularly awful, in case I needed to bring a portfolio of documentation into Court. (Also I back-added the "diary" tag to earlier posts as well.) Since that time, it has bounced all over the place, with rapid tonal shifts between the superficial and the disturbing sometimes all within a single day. In fact I've talked about this confusion before.

Well if it's a diary, I should have posted three weeks ago that I had just finished spending a week vacationing with Marie's family at their summer cottage, the same one I wrote about here, and also in these three posts.* This year it was a reunion of all the siblings:

1. Marie's older brother, his second wife, and (for a couple of days) one of his sons;
2. Marie, with me;
3. Marie's younger brother, and his current long-term girlfriend;
4. Marie's younger sister, Cuñada, and her daughter Natasha.

The ones who were new to me were the older brother's son, the younger brother, and his girlfriend. So from the point of view of the four siblings at the core of it all, that means that only Marie's younger brother was new to me. Let me call him Hermanito—partly because it means "little brother" and partly because he was physically the largest of us all.

Mostly there's not a lot to tell. It was a very quiet week. I did manage to provoke a spot of unpleasantness, but only through being a clueless jerk. Nothing more malicious than that.

Becalmed, 4

I wonder if I can write a post where all of the heavy lifting is done by links to other posts? This might just be the one.

I wrote a little while ago about feeling listless. Also about drinking too much.

So far this month has been a little better on the drinking front (though I'm scared of jinxing that if I say too much). But I'm still not getting a whole lot done. I had hoped that the interview with Andrew Tate would inspire me. And indeed it did inspire me to imagine getting my shit together. That's not the same as actually doing it, though.

Just a few minutes ago, I looked up this post from nine years ago where I break down the actual mechanism that allows self-discipline to work. I'm glad that I was clever enough to figure this all out. Maybe I should try actually doing it.

Maybe it's time for bed just now.

          

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

I get most of my news from Twitter (or I guess now it's called "X") so I have an admittedly eccentric understanding of the hot topics of the day. One that I have seen a lot of posts about lately is the sexualization of children. I try not to read the details, but even a cursory glance tells me that the instances which make it all the way to Twitter are pretty horrific. And the discussion of the perpetrators seems to be mostly about whether to tar-and-feather them before or after drawing-and-quartering them. In any event, nobody doubts that they are evil people with evil intentions.

I'm not about to make excuses for these people, and it seems clear that sometimes the impact they have on the children who come under their influence is really bad. But I find myself wondering, in an intellectual sort of way, whether they are actually motivated by malice (or cruelty or lust or any of those things), or whether in some cases the problem might not be no more than mind-boggling stupidity?

Maybe we can all be outsiders together

There is probably no point to this post. Probably if I were sober I'd think of something better to write about. (Although I was sober all day up till now, and didn't write a word except on Twitter. So maybe not.) I guess you can read it and let me know.

Earlier this week, at the meeting of the UU Sangha I attend, our Dharma study was to read an essay by Ruth King about her experience of being Buddhist While Black. Then we discussed our reactions to the piece.

Opinions on Twitter

Nothing new here, because you all know this is my opinion and has been for years. But hey, I got to chime in on someone else's post. So there's that.

How to squander all 4 kinds of luck

This morning I saw a post on Twitter that claims there are four kinds of luck:

1. Blind Luck
2. Luck from Motion
3. Luck from Awareness
4. Luck from Uniqueness

It goes on to say that you can't do much about blind luck, but you can increase the likelihood of the other three by deliberate actions: 

• by "creating motion and collisions through hustle and energy" (putting yourself out there and thereby increasing the likelihood of a lucky break); 
• by "depth of understanding within a given arena" ("Chance favors the prepared mind."); 
• and by "your unique set of attributes" (where your eccentric hobby leads you down by-ways that no-one else travels, so you see chances that no-one else sees).

And right away I started to wonder about my own life, and my own relationship with luck. I'm not sure I like what I see.

I have certainly had plenty of luck in my life. Mostly I have avoided it or run away hard in the other direction.

Interview with a Cobra: the bad

A couple of hours ago I posted an article about Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Andrew Tate, in which I tried to highlight some of the genuinely positive elements I found in Tate's message. But there were other points where I think he was wrong, and I want to talk about those now.

Let me start by clarifying that I know almost nothing about Tate besides what I learned from the interview. I've briefly scanned his Wikipedia article and half-heartedly googled a couple of other tidbits, but for the most part what I know is what he told Carlson during this 150-minute conversation. So while I know generically that Tate is widely famous, and that most people in the world already have strong opinions about him (for or against), I am approaching the topic as a newcomer. And I propose to restrict my criticisms narrowly to the scope of the interview itself. In particular, I am not going to start saying "Well maybe he sounded nice for Tucker, but we all know that in reality …."

Let me clarify further that even after two articles about this interview, I will not have come anywhere near covering the whole thing. This interview was wide-ranging, and touched on any number of topics which I will ignore here. In particular Carlson and Tate spent a lot of time talking about current events and contemporary politics. I found these passages absorbing in their own right (and I was tickled by Tate earnestly urging that, "We all need to thank Vladimir Putin for curing COVID-19") but they don't really fit into any of the themes of this blog.

Where, then, are my criticisms?

Interview with a Cobra: the good

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson posted on Twitter a two-and-a-half hour interview with Andrew Tate. (Here is the link.) Somehow despite all the time I waste on the Internet, I knew almost nothing about Andrew Tate before listening to this interview. I had heard the name, and I'd seen people allude to him as somehow a generically Bad Guy, but I couldn't have told you anything concrete about him. So I learned a lot by watching it.

Tate talked about his recent arrest on the charge of human trafficking, and insisted that he has never done any such thing. He added that there is no evidence of him having ever done any such thing (because he didn't do it), and therefore that he hopes the case will be dismissed when a judge finally looks over the evidence. Then he concluded that if he is somehow convicted anyway, he will accept the result as a test sent by God, and will take consequences with his head held high.

But after describing the formal accusation, Tate went on to explain (like Socrates in the Apology) that he has a large number of informal accusers* in the society at large, and that he believes it was their hostility towards him that precipitated his recent arrest. To explain this contention, he began to explain the message that he tries to teach his followers. And it was at this point that the interview became very interesting.**