Thoughts on A Phone
Topics for future pieces, or just general ruminations
Photo by 胡 卓亨 on Unsplash
Lately, I have been pulled by several different tasks that have forced me to write at weird times, without any real consistency. It works well creatively because a daily routine is the bane of whimsical meandering. Unfortunately, it also makes it challenging to finish a specific piece because I sometimes feel like a dog in a park full of squirrels. I’m the type that prefers working for many uninterrupted hours at a time when dialed in on a subject.
To accommodate the situation, I am trying something new—writing on my phone during sporadic down-time. The idea is to get some words on a page when they occur to me that I can refine later when I have time on the computer. After doing it a few times, the activity itself feels ridiculous. Like a social media addict, I am hunched over this irritating little device clacking away at pretend buttons, often while sitting in a corner or some other out-of-the-way place. Still, it might help produce more thoughtful pieces, so here is the first installment of the thoughts that came to me.
The foolish way we think about war
Most people, especially rational people, hate the very concept of war. Those who wax poetic about it or regale events from a first person perspective in which they had no involvement are usually psychos or closet cowards.
The reality is that war has long-term devastating effects on just about everyone. Lives are lost or shattered by injury, economic and ecological systems collapse, and survivors and their progeny endure crippling psychological issues. Wars inevitably include atrocities like serial sexual assault, torture, the murder of children and the infirm, and so on.
One has to wonder—if wars are so terrible and people hate them, why do they ever happen? The answer is simple and underlies a great many of the horrible things that are inflicted upon humanity: Their perpetrators pitch them in a way that helps procure enough support to allow them to happen.
Take Russia as an example. The Russian government is led by an unquestionably immoral man who seems unbothered by whatever suffering his forces inflict on anyone who gets in the way of his agenda—including his own people. But Vladimir Putin is not ‘Russia’ and many living under his regime abhor his actions as viscerally as non-Russians.
Characterizing the actions of the Russian government or military as simply “Russia,” paints every innocent person living in that country as evil. Doing so makes it easy to watch any retaliatory event with indifference, such as when an entire city is annihilated by opposing forces or people are thrust into desperate poverty by economic sanctions. Americans might be most guilty of this phenomenon given their geographical and cultural separation from the rest of the world. (See Palestine, Japan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq for just a few stark examples).
It is critical to remember that the ultra wealthy, political, religious and military leaders do not share the same agendas or world views as the vast majority of the global populace. They routinely express little care about the collateral damage they cause in their pursuit of power, wealth, or whatever motivates them to kill. Succumbing to their deceptive flag-waving, freedom-loving rhetoric has been the norm for millennia, but history has repeatedly shown that wars do not work at all or they cause such destruction that the payment is not worth the prize.
Contrary to what leaders will often claim, there are plenty of other solutions to dealing with murderous regimes than simply killing people, the majority of whom typically consist of those unlucky enough to live under lousy governments and have nothing to do with the war, or even oppose it.
How can I say such a thing about these little guys? Credit Charles J. Sharp of Sharp Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0
Meerkats are adorable little brutes
We all understand and accept that the animal kingdom is rife with violence. Nature is divided in large part by predator and prey. Killing and consuming others is a requirement for survival, no matter how distasteful it might be to accept.
A creature’s savagery is often associated with its appearance. Claws, teeth, scales, size—these sorts of things are visual representations of one’s ability and, perhaps, propensity to commit violence. Cuteness, on the other hand, almost never falls in with that group. Yet, with meerkats, it is the camouflage hiding some serious wickedness.
Among all mammalian species, meerkats rank the highest for intraspecies murder. Even accounting for infanticide—which typically happens as a result of males killing babes not their own to propagate their own bloodlines—meerkats exceed all other species by double or more. And meerkats kill babies too, but almost as a political move—as this 2006 study showed.
I have the great fortune of being around meerkats regularly. While I have always found the adorability of any creature suspect—it always struck me as a form of evolutionary manipulation—I can’t help but get a chuckle out of watching them lope around like a bunch of children at a playground. Still, every time I see the sentry train his beady eyes on me, I wonder if he is just being diligent or plotting my demise.
I wish I cared about the pursuit of wealth
Life would be so simple if chasing dollars was in any way fulfilling. The way the 21st century is proceeding, getting fools to part with their money is easier than ever. It is why people like Graham Hancock, Terrance Howard, or Eric Weinstein have lucrative careers.
In case you are among the fortunate who have not heard of them, Hancock cherry picks data to claim that an ancient civilization of superhumans once existed that instructed the dumber modern ones how to build the incredible monuments we know today. Howard—an actor that can’t get an acting job because he is an asshole to work with—thinks he knows the secret to existence. His theory—if it can be called that—begins with the ludicrous assertion that one times one equals two. Weinstein is a math PhD who also claims to have a ‘theory of everything’ so riddled with vagaries and conclusory jumps that it is rather meaningless.
What all three, and those like them, have in common is that the nonsense they propose is summarily rejected by academia because it lacks evidence, logic, or ability to be substantiated, not some grand conspiracy to shut down their super-secret, genius insights. Their fame is built on claiming victimhood, that “the establishment” is trying to suppress them. They try to equate “Big Academia” with Big Tech, but only one of those things exists in the way the terms are often used.
The problem over the last few decades, but especially the most recent one, is that a large number of people have become convinced that everything they don’t like is a scam, and everything they want to be true is true, evidence be damned. Where this leads is that they accept the scams of charlatans as legitimate because they are proffered in opposition to the “enemy.” The problem is exacerbated by profound ignorance of the subject matter.
For these reasons, far too many believe flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, those I already mentioned, or RFK Jr… just to give some examples.
It seems that the path to instant wealth is simply to make any ridiculous argument that will appeal to conspiracy theorists, throw in some technical terms to sound smart even if the terms are totally irrelevant, and then claim “Big” somebody is trying to shut you up because they fear your brilliance. Then, sell some books, set up a website, and launch a podcast or YouTube channel. If you are lucky, you will get invited onto one of the really big podcasts where the dopey host will just nod along with your BS because he doesn’t know anything about the subject matter either. Then, all you need to do is sit back and count the dollars.
Hell, it made one guy the president of the United States, and several others members of his cabinet. How hard can it be to make just a few million dollars?
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