dream log

we were moving. it was a group effort. we had rented one of those big 18 wheeler trucks and used it to port everyone's things around. everyone from the office needed to get their stuff but i was in charge of moving the truck. i wasn't bad at it, which was weird because i thought that i would be. we had all tossed our stuff into the back of the truck, luggage and things mostly, like hiking backpacks and pillows. i moved the truck close to the new place so everyone could unload it. luckily there was parking out front, but of course there was parking, it was a fire zone only. the building was like a north williamsburg warehouse that had been transplanted somewhere tropical, i parked and knocked but no one came. we sat out there, sweating and no one came. i rang the doorbell and pounded, small diminutive pounds, on the large wooden door and no one came. eventually i just went inside and told some people and then they all showed up but the experience of no answer left me shook. i left the van parked for a bit and waited inside. when i went back out to move it, it was empty but it was also time for us to leave. we needed to get on the road before rush hour and head downtown to visit some old teachers but there was no way to do it all, you know, before the traffic started. we left in a hurry.

Reflections on Totalitariansm

I'm still working on Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.  It's dense and a great read and I'd also very much like to be finished with it soon, mostly so I can move on to the other books that are piling up.

It's slow going because of how incredibly dense it is. I'm pretty sure that what would be 100 pages in most sci fi books of the day are crammed into 20 pages in this particular copy.

I'm not firmly into the last section, Totalitarianism. I finished up chapter 10 today (The Temporary Alliance between the Mob and the Elite) and got through the first half of chapter 11 (Totalitarian Propaganda).

Generally speaking, while it's obvious that Arendt has read thousands of pages of source material and has a very good understanding of the order of events and internal machinations of the Bolshevik and Nazi movements, she doesn't do a great job of laying out the historical events. As a reader coming almost 80 years later, with little to no knowledge of the series of events or speeches or rallies of either the Nazis or the Bolshevic movement, it's sometimes hard to follow the series of events that she describes.  I understand that her aim isn't to provide an account of events, but rather to provide analysis, the situate the happenings in a broader framework and provide a commentary overlay that organizes the various aspects of the phenomenon into categories and tendencies, like "A Classless Society" and 'Race Thinking" and "The Decline of the Nation-State". She does this brilliantly, but I am feeling a bit as though I'm going to need to do a lot more reading in order to fully understand the underlying events that her analysis sits on top of. Luckily, her footnotes and bibliography provide a great starting place. Unluckily, I don't really think I have the time to read them now.  There's too many other things that I'm interested in reading after this.  Namely, de Toqueville's Democracy in America feels incredibly urgent. And then for work, I feel some amount of urgency to really dig into Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Finally, Debt, the First 5,000 Years looks amazing.

Notes from the section on the elites alliance with the masses:
- Arendt's analysis points towards a certain vengeance of the "elite" to punish the society that wouldn't accept them, or take them seriously.  Thus, the rich and powerful align themselves with the masses with the goal of forcing society to listen to them, and finally take them seriously, if not by just completely wiping them out then at least elevating their own platform and sycophants to the level of culture previously occupied by a 'high society' that has largely been barred to them.  It's notable that Arendt's use of the word 'elite' wouldn't be recognizable today. There has definitely been a categorization of a cultural elite that certain want to be rich and powerful people (cough Trump) have thrust themselves upon, using the anger of the mob to propel themselves there.  We don't call Trump's well-to-do friends the elite, but we do recognize them as a portion of society that is wealthy and not the hoi polloi, and yet, they aren't part of high society or society in general in any recognizable way. We don't really have a word or cultural signifier for the Trumps, or at least didn't used to. "Elites" has been co-opted to mean something else.
- "I am the movement, and the movement is me". It's fascinating how closely the Trump movement is tied to the cult of personality. I didn't realize how incredibly 'Fuhrer' based the Nazi movement was; it's interesting to see the parallels between 'Trumpites', who ostensibly wouldn't have a movement at all without Trump. Trump does an ok job of recognizing his followers (the red states map, the call outs to 'my people', trying to get help to people that voted for him), yet doesn't seem to have near the grasp of loyalty.

Notes on propaganda:
- I hadn't realized how much of Nazi propaganda was centered on secrecy. There were things that those not in the movement weren't allowed to know, and the organization on a whole was entirely geared toward keeping a knowledge gap between those considered insiders of the party and those that were mere sympathizers or external audiences.  The Nazis would say one thing to the external audience, things that were lighter versions of what their actual intentions were.
- At the same time, they got credit for being 'forthright' in a way that no 'established' or self-respecting politician would. The Nazis campaigned on antisemitism and were open about checking potential party members' birth charts. Trump has been anything but quiet about the things he wants to do with regards to throwing out immigrants and building a wall. But the people of the Right have been wanting a wall and complaining loudly about immigrants for decades.
- A large amount of persuasive totalitarianism begins by pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of a system, and boldly claiming the immorality that the establishment deludes itself into saying it doesn't do, but that it actually does. This is why the current political candidates that don't accept corporate money are the most powerfully poised as an anti-dote to our current political malaise.

General thoughts:
- The Bolsheviks and the Nazis were a lot smarter than I feel I've been conditioned to give them credit for.
- I didn't realize that Stalin's doublespeak was a nod to a deep internalization of the Hegelian dialectic.

Book life update

I am logged in. It is Sunday, April 29 of the year two thousand and eighteen. I'm writing because I feel guilty for all of the books that I bought today. Well, only guilty out of the senses of obligation of needing to read them. I don't feel guilty for spending the money, but I do feel guilty knowing that I probably won't get to all of them. Buying a book feels like making a commitment to it and to myself that I will invest time and energy into reading it and absorbing what it has to say. There's a couple of books that I've failed to do this with. They pile up on my bookshelf and I feel guilty about them. Guilty about not finding the time to devote to them. Guilty about contemplating the future in which I have the knowledge that they would impart. Guilty about thinking I could buy them and that that would force myself into finding time for them.

I bought a bunch of books today. I went a bit wild in the Urban Studies and Econ section of the bookstore. But it was hard not to! They had all of these books that I've been wanting to read but haven't committed to yet there in one place.

David Graeber's Debt, 5000 years. I would have said no except that I realized that it was written by an anthropologist and I'm interested in debt because I'm hoping that it explains some questions I have about monetary policy. Questions that I think that only reading about history can help answer, not reading theory.

Last Interviews with Jane Jacobs. I haven't read any Jacobs in a while, but I've had this one on my long term reading list. It's just 4 interviews, so it's pretty short. I'm also trying to buy books that I have a high probability of actually reading and interviews are things I always enjoy. The last interview in the book is one of my favorite. It was originally printed in the back of my copy of The Question of Sepratism and I've even gone so far as to illegally transcribe it onto my other blog. Lol.

Some book on BART. Basically a history book of how BART got made. I did a lot of reading when I lived in NYC to prep myself for giving tours of 34th street and really loved how learning about the history of the city changed my relationship with it, made it feel more like a place that I deeply understood and loved. I think I'd like to read more books on the history of SF, and BART seems like a wonderful place to start.

The second book in the Binti sci fi series, Home.  I read the first one, more like a chapbook than a novel and accidentally bought the 3rd one, so I needed the 2nd one. I didn't love the first but feel like I should finish the series up seeing as they're pretty goddamn short.

I really splurged on Michael Lewis's books. Dog Eared Books had both Panic and The Big Short, and I know that I'll read and really enjoy both of them, so I went ahead and indulged.  I really really love the stories that Michael chooses to tell, and I'm 100% confident that I'll actually end up reading these so I don't feel too bad about spending the money on them.

It's a lowkey goal of mine to read most to all of both Michael Lewis's and Hannah Arendt's works. They had a new collection of works and correspondences of Arendt's at the store that I was *sorely* tempted to pick up, Thinking without a Banister. But! I'm in the middle of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and have her On Violence at home, and figured that was more than enough to see me through. Also, a short note on collections, I'm not always a fan of reading excerpts and strange collections of notes from authors. There's something to be said about a finished, fully considered and published work.  Notes and one off ideas are nice, but they don't really get to the crux of the piece, you know?

Other books that I've got in my 'reading' stack that I wish I had more time to devote to: Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor. Bunny Huang's book on Making Things. Jane Jacob's first book, Constitutional Chaff. Papers for the Lightning network. A short book of Wittenstein's. The Karl Marx book that Kate Losse recommended I read and now I can't remember the name of. Oops.

repitition

Often times when I get obsessed with a new author or thinker, and I find myself ripping through the majority of their big works in a short period of time, I'll also tend to notice places where they come back to the same points, where their logic or thread is basically a continuation of a previous point that someone else has made.

I don't know, maybe that's rude to discount an intellectual because their brain found a pattern and they didn't let go of it.

It's not endless repetition that I'm referring to, it's the sort of progress you'd expect from a truly deep thinker: a movement of building thought and connections to a prior thought that they'd had. By reading their works in chronological order, you can get a great understanding of how their thinking progressed, and how these different experiences that they've had in life have contributed and shaped their world view.

That being said, I can't help but find myself discounting them, or at least, feeling a bit disappointed that I'm only ever going to get one or maybe two interesting threads or viewpoints from a single thinker.

At the same time, when I find myself retreading old thoughts, there's a similar amount of dread. I feel like I'm committing a sin that I've condemned others for. It's a method of stifling, of self-abnegation driven by this need to continue to evolve as a world view, to bring forth something new and interesting not just for the invisible audience that I've built for myself (look, I know you're not invisible, the invisibility is the host of ideas that exist in my head and nowhere else; they're entirely internal thoughts that only I recognize as duplicates and yet, all the same, castigate myself for having had them anew).  There's nothing wrong with retreading past points, it's incredibly hard not to do but all the same I want to escape it.

I think that a lot of the self-castigation comes from an overwhelming sense of cowardice. It's cowardice that leaves me in the same place; it's cowardice that keeps me from accepting and embracing the things that I actually do want. The repetition may be the thoughts, but it's also, more generically a continual repetition of cowardice that keeps me from exploring the ideas that I have, that keeps me from executing, that keeps me stuck in the same world view.

It's fun and incredibly rare to find authors who manage to overcome, somewhat, their worldview problem. Arendt is probably of the highest order, but even with her, if you zoom out far enough you can still fit her thinking into 'historiological social interpretation of the human world order'. Well, sort of. You have to read both her Origins of Totalitarianism and the Human Condition to fully understand it, I think.

And even more broadly, as fresh and insightful that Arendt is, I still find a certain amount of 'datedness' in her writing, her context and her peers and the thoughts of others that surrounded her at the time of her writing that find their way into her work, inextricably, the same sort of contextualization that none of us are immune from. Philosophy aims to be universal, yet even it finds itself entrenched in an endless stream of context.  Kant, as Arendt points out, is incomprehensible without understanding Galileo.  Galileo makes little sense without a fuller understanding of the Catholic Church, which comes from Roman times and so on and so forth.

All worldviews are entwined, and you cannot escape if not the singular world view of your own, at least reflecting the worldview of your age.  The references and allusions that are made in work, the turns of phrase, the things that you mention as being 'worrysome' that all later become laughable or some inside joke for which later generations have lost all necessary context.

Context is king because it is the shape of your reality.

discursion

There's been a lot to think about lately.
There's always a  lot to think about.

I started a  new job but I don't want to tell anyone where I'm working.   At least, no one on the Internet.  It's not a secret, but I'm not talking about it. Not yet, anyway.  It's kind of nice to know that you don't know what I'm doing now. That where I am is unknown, except to those that know it. Silence breeds seclusion. I'll take it.

Maybe some day I'll tell you.
Some day that isn't today.

A new star has risen. I can feel it. A star rises, but the world beneath it stays the same.

Some words mean nothing, but are true nonetheless.

I  know more now than I've ever known. Knowing that lets me know I'm happy.

words are

words are the most powerful thing that you own.

words are the worst thing you could ever say.

we don't value words enough anymore and that's why we're

suddenly so susceptible to foreign propaganda.

your words matter. a lot.


Editor's Note: the following is submitted without editing or checks for correction.


and yet i seem so incredibly unable to sit down and get mine out. i'm trying to get all these other things done instead, to not get distracted, but the reality is that not writing feels like the procrastination.

everything else is just me procrastinating from writing.

if all i ever did was write all the time i think i would be a very happy person. i don't think i'd run out of things to say.

there are blog posts that i owe myself. here's a short list of them:
- reactions from arendt's eichmann in jerusalem
- an update on the moon clock project
- a personal life update
- an essay about gentrification and home ownership and san francisco housing politics
- an essay on why i want to leave california
- an update on Mandarin learning.


Reactions: Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem

Right now, we're in the midst of an Uber vs Waymo case.  Waymo is suing Uber over misappropriation of trade secrets, or something. To keep up with the court updates, I've been following Sarah Jeong who lives tweets the court room action every day. Sarah's part of a new breed of immediate courtroom relaying, but in some ways Sarah's tweeting follows in the footsteps of other court reporters, the most recent of which comes to mind is Hannah Arendt's missives from the Eichmann in Jerusalem, published first in the New Yorker as articles and then, later, compiled into a book.

I'd be curious to see if Jeong can turn her tweet storms into a book at the end of the Uber x Waymo trial; it'd be interesting to see what the result of a tweet reporting process is compared to a missive based storytelling style.

I digress. Let's talk about Eichmann, about what Hannah saw in Jerusalem, about what she discovered about the limits and the legacy of law.

I don't think I can say it as nicely as Arendt does, but in her epilogue, written ostensibly much later, she talks about how the judgement of the Israeli courts fell short of its goal of providing a framework for crimes against humanity, such as genocide, to be tried on an international scale.

For see, the problem with Eichmann was that he didn't kill anyone. At least, not himself. Eichmann's crimes are of the white collar variety -- there were layers of men and orders separating himself from any of the front line action of murder. Rather, Eichmann's role in the massacres were merely administrative -- he was brutally efficient at arranging transportation and logistics for moving hundreds of thousands of people on an already clogged train network.  A skill that, in the aggregate facilitated the murder of millions.

But who were these Jews that were murdered? They were disowned by their countries, rendered stateless by the apparatus that was the German government, and then emigrated elsewhere, or, if there was no elsewhere available, eastward to one of the killing centers.

Eichmann was an expert on Jewish affairs. Originally, Eichmann billed himself as a Jewish expert. He used his 'expertise' in Judaism to become the first point of contact between Jewish communities and the Nazi regime. He organized Jewish Councils that, then in turn, helped to send their communities to slaughter. At first, it was merely emigration. The Jewish Council could honestly and firmly tell themselves that they were just helping their fellow Jews to escape bad conditions. What they didn't know, at least not at first, was that they were sending their communities to their deaths. Once Eichmann's team had successfully exported a Jewish Council's population, they exported the Jewish Council itself.

The goal was judenrein, or, in other words, a Jew free territory.

You know, it's strange to say but also true that if the United States had opened their doors widely and unequivocally to Jewish emigrants from Europe that not nearly as many would have been killed. Eichmann exported in earnest first. But after a while, he found that there was no where else to send Jews. Maybe they would have sent more to Israel, if it hadn't had been Palestine and heavily opposed by the British.  The first Israelis owe much of their early influx of immigrants to the Nazis' desire to see Jews leave Europe. And then even more after, once survivors realized there was nowhere to return to.

Arendt's book on Eichmann, more than any other book I have read, clearly outlined the extent and the mechanics of the Holocaust. Why didn't we read it earlier? Sure, Anne Frank's Diary is not bad reading, but in terms of expressing the total impact and political implications of the Jewish Question and how the Nazis Tried to Solve it, it's not nearly as broad and concise as Arendt's telling of Eichmann's work. Because so much of it was his work -- the exports, that is. The movement of people. 

And yet, can you charge a man with murder for the mere act of moving people? Even if he was doing so under direct orders? How much does the law of the land,, HItler's will in this case, absolve you of responsibility from your actions?  Eichmann admitted to exporting Jews to death, but he claimed innocence in the killings. 

You know, Eichmann does remind me a lot of the question of responsibility that arose lately around the Wells Fargo scandal wherein thousands of Wells Fargo employees were opening accounts for customers without their consent. The customers ended up with black marks on their credit and charges for accounts they didn't even know existed; Wells Fargo then fell to the unhappy task of assigning blame for the hundreds if not thousands of front line workers' actions. The workers were just following orders to meet quotas. WHo should be responsible for their malfeasance? To what extent do the quota setters share responsibility for their actions? I think in this case some people's heads rolled but I'm honestly not sure. What then. What now.

God I'm so tired. I should go to sleep. But there's so much more to tell you. So much more.

Portland, First Impressions

The first thing I saw when I got to Portland was a legion of homeless bums, wandering and chilling in the streets. You might say I just hopped off the train at the wrong stop (Skidmore Fountain) but Google tells me it was indeed the right one for Voodoo doughnuts. I didn't end up getting a donut; I felt too conspicuous in my brand new grey Keds, clutching my phone hunting for directions. Instead I headed down to a cafe called Mother's to hole up from the cold.

The smell of unwashed people sticks with you. Whatever happened to public baths and poor houses?

The next thing I noticed is that there's lots of trains, that go all kinds of useful, practical places. Like downtown, and the convention center, and the airport. I was impressed at how incredibly walker friendly the train lines are. They go right through the center of town, and stop at street level. No stairs. I bought a day pass and just hopped on and off all day, but no one asked me for proof of fare, not ever. It reminded me a lot of the trains in Berlin, except cheaper and with warmer weather, somehow.

The weather was super dour. It was overcast all day and started raining at 3p. It hasn't let up since.

All the weird that SF used to be has strong echoes in Portland. People here are weird, in that fun funky Austin weird kind of way. I've heard that SF used to be weird. SF isn't weird anymore.

People talk a lot about how Portland isn't very diverse; it feels like the citizens of Portland have accepted this fact as a personal challenge and gone out of their way to instead showcase their individuality. Rock on Portland.

Women in weirdly overlarge button ups; butchesque.

I swear I saw a futsal arena and a pet funeral home out the train window on my way into the city from the airport. Should I know what futsal is? I don't know what futsal is.

Weirdly expensive shops. I wandered into a clothing shop near the Powell bookstore and was shocked to discover the pair of shoes.I picked up cost $500. The overcoat I wanted was $1,250. Yeah, right. How do people in Portland have this kind of money. What do people in Portland do that have this kind of money? Don't tell me tech exists here too; tech only admits to existing in SF.

Chatty airport staff who seem to really care about the rules. Please, don't talk to me. I don't want to answer your questions about the contents of my (yes really) empty pockets or the type of electronics I am currently carrying. And please just let the lady with two carry on bags and a purse do her thing. That purse is our repatriations for the loss of usable pockets in feminine clothing.

Powell's was nice, but I like the stock at Green Apple on the Park better. It's not as extensive, but they also don't have leagues of expired resale books. The number of sections Powell stocks is impressive, but I wasn't super awed by the contents of a few of their niche segments; a lot of it seemed undercurated, like they had just collected a set of titles without ready access to an expert in the field. For contrast, the small collection of books at SF's Botanical Gardens' gift shop is amazingly focused on botany and gardening books, especially for the Bay Area. Make no mistake, Powell had some great Portland/Oregon curation; I'm more complaining about their paltry Opera scores and electronics sections -- why even have one if you're not going to flesh it out appropriately?

I'm not sure what I think of Portland.