100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9hr ago
productive lives
Small to zero.
enriching
Anywhere from colossal to infinite.
Actual true story: my first best friend in childhood had something like severe downs syndrome. It wasn't actually downs but something very specific and rare. Her verbal ability was close to zero but because of kid brain plasticity or whatever, I could figure her out better than anyone besides her parents. We didn't have conversations per se, but we emoted, we played, we had a friendship. Around the time I was 12 or so, she and her family moved away.
I kept in touch with her and her family for 20+ years until she died very tragically and unexpectedly. My entire life was made better by knowing her and being her friend.
This is a common story for all special needs / developmentally disabled / retarded kids' family and friends. While measuring life quality in net GDP contribution is, charitably, overly metric based, imho, many to all of these kind of people have outsized contribution in terms of joy, fellow felling, and the nurturing of higher virtue emotions in others.
"But, but, but!" some will say, "Raising special needs kids is actually so fucking hard on the parents! You got to go home every day and didn't have to deal with the screaming fits and toilet mishaps etc." The challenges are indeed unique (and, on a practical level, I believe in generous subsidies for families dealing with them), I believe that any family who puts in the effort will find the rewards substantial. And the families who decide to murder cancel the body and soul in utero will, maybe, have a somewhat materially more pleasant life at the expense of another human's entire existence.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Good recommendations for an Einstein biography?
I realized, over Thanksgiving, that all I know about Einstein is second order stuff and, even that, vaguely. General vs special relativity. The atom bomb. He has bad at math in grade school (allegedly).
So, Mottizens, can you point me in the direction of a biography that does a good job and not a hagiography of "the smartest dude who ever smarted?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18hr ago
Was 100% thinking of the island.
Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting
person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this
one
being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good
news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all
directly reference instead of an example from my own life.
And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
- Early to mid 30s
- Coast Guard Veteran
- Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
- Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
- More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
- A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
- (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
- Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap
neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and
High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough
bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know
, sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around,
nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about
random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first
encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing
ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of
talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real
intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you
mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own
weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different
thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug
through the dirt and mud and found gold.
Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
This made the rounds on my Xwitter feed. I was wondering if it was going to show up here as well.
This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?
If you spoke to another adult like this in a corporate setting, even the most blue-haired of HR reps would have a meeting invite waiting for you by the time you got back to your desk. In a social setting, this would be suicidal, unless, as I said, you're actually just trolling a person in your outgroup for the lulz.
Alright, I found her on the White Women for Kamala Zoom Call. Here, she comes across a lot more normal - though still grating - HR style corpo speak. Healthy doses of progressive self-flagellation but nothing beyond the pale. This makes me think her gentle parenting schtick is just that; schtick.
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