I have been wondering a lot about my career path, lately.
Started as a biologist, then a lab techie, then a biostatistician, and eventually an IT person. I recently left (was pressured out, essentially) a soul sucking job at a mediocre healthcare IT shop and I have zero desire to go back to that field.
We have a plethora of high quality data available to make important decisions... But as we've seen with at least COVID, the bottleneck seems to be more cultural than technical 😒
Just thinking about how wrong the phrase is, "You have to earn respect".
No, you have to earn disrespect. As a human being, I'm naturally going to respect you if I don't know you. It's when you earn my disrespect, that I'll stop showing respect.
I give people respect freely, until they prove to me that they don't deserve it.
I miss when packages took like a week to arrive and there was no overnight postage nonsense (unless you paid a lot for it). Now it is industry standard and I need to be ready to get my package the next day, like...I need at least few buffer days to prepare emotionally.
Also the tracking system is not great and telling me it can come between 8-16 is NOT HELPFUL.
I an up at 8 only in case it arrives now.
Madness, I tell ya.
I really do have a soft spot for 80s heavy metal like Iron Maiden and Dio. I don’t listen to it very often, but occasionally the mood strikes.
There is something about it that feels grandiose, almost naive, and a bit playful compared to the dark assault that much of the genre seems to be these days (though tbh I don’t really have a wide knowledge of contemporary metal).
It’s also partly nostalgia and a connection to my teen years.
I love a lot of RPGs but I think honestly only one has made me actually want to visit the world it is set in: Assassins Creed Odyssey (and yes, it is a proper RPG, one of the reasons it is shunned in the r/AssassinsCreed subreddit).
Admittedly I have always been very fascinated by Classical and Ancient Greek history and the whole Mediterranean area pre-Rome, but also that game is still in 2024 gorgeous as heck.
So, I've been working on hatching a theoretical structure to address the quandary of MAGA for a long time. I think it is almost impossible to combat it unless one can identify grasp the causal factors of the eruption of a mass psychosis. This is going to be a really long thread and I'm developing it slowly. Please feel free to mute me if this irritates you - I'm thinking aloud here. And most of my ideas aren't original, I'm just sometimes gathering them together in novel ways. #musings
That shame, in a moment of sobriety, that acknowledgement of not being a 'good parent' in a moment of clarity, reinforces the principle that parents in general, are caring and should be. So even failures reinforce the association of authority with caring and fairness.
I'm going to move on, taking the model of expectations of how those who possess authority should behave and that, even when they fail to meet our expectations, their attempts to hide or deny it still reinforce an ideal #musings
History haunts us with the specters of catastrophic leaders. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Of ideologies that were used to excuse barbaric atrocity. But history has grappled far less with why such a mass of their citizens willingly participated, tolerated or were ambivalent to the horrors of their actions over long periods of time. Historians have attributed their collaboration to ideology also. But I do not find this satisfying. #musings
And with the rise of leaders like Trump or Johnson or Putin, that rationale of ideology really fails. These men have no ideology, unless one can conceive of greed as an ideology (which is a concept I'm prepared to entertain). I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler or Mao in terms of historic catastrophe, but in terms of the effects he has on his followers. I simply don't believe ideology accounts for this. #musings
Moreover, ideology - the compromise of morality in the service of a greater good - provided a coherent (if entirely unacceptable) excuse for obedience in many cases.
My sense is that something has changed in a fairly profound way. When it comes to Trump, while those outside the MAGA movement might perceive him as an obscene transgressor, those within it don't. For them, he isn't a leader with flaws, he is a leader beyond where flaws are measured. He is an authority beyond law. #musings
I want to pause right there - an authority beyond law. I want to point out that the phrase itself is incoherent because the concept of authority has at its core the concept of law. Beyond the law... authority cannot exist. And so we've arrived at what I feel is a profound incoherence that begins to reach at an explanation of why, from the outside, MAGA looks like mass psychosis.
It may very well be. The links that build meaning have been destroyed. #musings
I'm going to stop here for today. I want to develop the linguistic framing further, and see where I get. I'd like to find some apt metaphors to flesh out my ideas, but I've quotidian stuff to do. #musings