In the News…
Some fellow had his ‘smart-home’ disabled by Amazon because an Amazon driver [falsely] accused him of racism. Robert Kennedy, the hope of the free world, talked up his love for ‘model democracy’ Israel (my guess; to appease the Israel lobby, but who knows?). ‘Uncle’ Ted Kaczynski died (about whom I’ll have a bit more to say in a couple of weeks), as did Cormac McCarthy (an over-rated author1) as did Tina Turner (who, in her pomp, could do this). Four children, aged thirteen, nine, four and one, survived for forty days in the Amazon rainforest (four children in the West couldn’t survive forty days in a supermarket). And world temperatures took what can only be described as, and I’m no climatalogist here, but I’m going to chance my arm and say; an anomalous lurch towards civilisational-disrupting instability.2
Oh yeah, and some big cheese in Moscow, former advisor to Yeltsin and Putin, and head of an important think tank, thinks that the West has forgotten their fear of nukes which should be rectified with a little A-bomb.
Falling Asleep
If you want to know, in your own experience, why stupid people are stupid, why they regard the widest variation of quality as essentially the same, why you cannot ever explain anything of real importance to them, why they only ever replicate their own ignorance in their works, just try to catch yourself falling asleep. Your awareness cannot become aware of its own death — its own immersion into the other — for the same reason that it cannot experience that which is greater than itself; a new kind of glory or beauty. The living, speaking sun, for instance, silently radiating its ageless intelligence into your bellymind, cannot be heard, any more than a dream, as a dream, can be seen, only sensed, through the limits of your own awareness, like the reassuring presence of a sleeping lover is felt, in the middle of the night.
Japanese Housewife Gossip, 1
I read blogs by Japanese women living in the UK,3 two women, one of whom lives in Manchester and one in a Carlyle. What they have to say about my people is almost one hundred percent negative; they don’t seem to have any real desire to look for what’s good about England and the English — which, to be fair, is difficult to locate, underground as it now is — but still, they’re quite right, in what they say, and their criticisms come from a race which, in many respects, has a right to look down on us all. Last week, ‘Carlyle Woman’ mentioned that one of her colleagues has, for the last ten years, eaten nothing but Heinz tomato soup for lunch. This week she described the demise of a local Italian restaurant that opened up a year ago, the only one in Carlyle run by an actual Italian. Week one: Vongole Rosso, Carpaccio, fresh grilled sardines with pasta al dente. Week ten: Lasagna and bolognese, with pasta so soft ‘it’s returning back to flour’.
Thus, democracy.4
Japanese Housewife Gossip, 2
‘Manchester Woman’ shared a bit of office gossip about a beautiful young man from Pakistan, always cheerful and flirty, who vanished for a couple of weeks to get married with a woman from his homeland. He returned, and then slowly, over the following months, got more and more withdrawn and depressed until he confessed, during a tea-break (with two women and two men), that he hated being married and that he felt his life was over. The group then then chatted generally about marriage, and he asked them ‘but how long is marriage really enjoyable for?’ and all of them agreed on, as an upper limit, three months.
This inspired the following thought…
Sleeping Beauty
Prince Charming had battled his way through the forest of thorns to the little room where the princess had pricked her finger, fallen asleep, and lain, as if dead, for a hundred years. The moment the great prince had waited for had now come. He bent down, and kissed her lips, which were rather more sticky than he had imagined, and a bit thinner. There was no response, so he kissed again, and again. It felt a bit like necrophilia, but eventually she groaned and a hot, foul gust of breath — almost shitty — wafted over him. He pulled back as she roused. Her face was pale and blotchy, her eyes stick and puffy, her hair lank and strangely matted. She croaked a word, hard to hear. He didn’t really want to hear it, but he put his ear next to her mouth. ‘Breakfast…’
‘Sod this,’ he whispered to himself, and, reaching over to the spindle, pricked her again so that she would go back to sleep for another hundred years. ‘Let someone else handle that,’ he thought to himself, and left.
Computer Update
I bought a new computer this week, my first new one for over ten years. Generally, I don’t update operating systems and applications and so on. If the thing works, keep it as it is. Are you interested in this? Me neither. Point is, using the new system, with all the new apps, I note again how everything now becomes shit at lightspeed. I’ve never been much of a fan of the internet and personal computing and all that, but at least it served users. No longer. Cory Doctorow, as you may know, recently wrote a piece on this, which was kind of interesting, about ‘The Enshittification of TikTok’. You’re probably aware of the principal reasons for ‘enshittification’ — that in a high tech market economy profit must go before utility and falling profit rates compel corporate leaders to adopt cannibilistic business practices. Another reason is that success leads to over-complexity which requires forms of planned management which are ever more remote from the intelligence of the individual working at the coal face, and so ever more absurd to that individual. A third reason is that success in a technological system means meeting the demands of technology, for rational order, at the expense of ‘the user experience’.
And so, over time, people who are merely qualified to do things squeeze out people who can do them, free time and free choice and other forms of freedom get sacrificed to businesslike order and quality work gets replaced by cheap labour, because it ‘makes sense’ to replace someone who cares about a product, such as the application I’m writing this on, with a poor Indian, who merely has to care. And so on, and so on. The system enshittifies everything in the same way, for much the same reasons, with non-enshittified stuff becoming almost absurdly expensive. Substack hasn’t started enshittifying yet, as far as I know, but it will probably happen sooner or later, and then I’ll return to, and refurbish, my old website.