Commonplace Book, Pt. 1

Dr Essai recently abandoned what was meant to be “The Joggled Mind Letter No. 120” after 10 days of flailing around trying to write an essay toothsome and wise about Our Political Moment, prompted by something historian Howard Zinn said:

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

From that, I tried to spin something worth reading about resisting the American government and its tawdry enablers. I remain enamored of the quote, but the best thing about the draft was the title, “The Resistance We Can All Join,” which should tell you all you need to know about the rest. I ran the draft through the AI agent Claude, using a prompt called Critical Professor. Dr CP savaged me. His first observation: “This piece commits several intellectual errors that undermine its core argument.” You think that was blunt? CP followed with a list of key problems. Here are the headings:

1. Conceptual Confusion
2. Historical Superficiality
3. Strategic Vacuity
4. Temporal Evasion

If the professor had made the slightest attempt to know me better or brought a scintilla of empathy to his critique, he would understand that strategic vacuity is my brand, but whatever. I intend to savage him right back on RateMyProfessors.com.

The only thing I salvaged from that confused, superficial, vacuous, evasive bit of text was the idea of a Joggle derived from entries in my commonplace book, which at the moment encompasses more than 40,000 words from writers Adams to Zinn. I didn’t imagine delving each entry for a couple thousand words of scintillating prose, but simply presenting the quotation followed by a brief response. Spurred by how long it has been since my last communiqué, I decided to give it a go. The “Pt. 1” in the title might be optimistic, but what the hell, let us move on to the meat course.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. — Hannah Arendt

Ah, jeez, what I could not say in 1,400 words, she dispatches in 45. That’s why she was Hannah Arendt and I am not, I suppose.

I doubt many MAGAheads came to Donald Trump and his merry band of bigots, whores, and thieves after close readings of Burke, Buckley, Strauss, and Hayek. His fervent supporters don’t strike me as people working off of an intellectual foundation. Or a belief in a Trump ideology, because there isn’t one. In human affairs, there seems to be this cycle of periodic mass disengagement with reality and established fact, not to mention moral distinctions. I have no idea why. But I think we are in one such cycle.

Who we choose to follow, and how we choose to follow them, is a confounding business. Humans have several tragic flaws, and I think one of the foremost is a propensity for obedience. Think how much might be avoided if we were better at telling authority to just fuck off.

Those who are determined to be “offended” will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt. — Christopher Hitchens

When I was in 9th grade, a very young English teacher assigned Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. This was a mistake, but only because a class of 15-year-old small-town Ohio hayseed white kids had no chance of engaging with the material. I sure didn’t know what to make of it, and I didn’t care. I carelessly read the book, added nothing to classroom discussion, and moved on to The Catcher in the Rye (couldn’t make much sense of that one, either). In retrospect, I admire that teacher’s idealism and her fearlessness, and her grasp of what education is supposed to do and cannot do without making kids confused and uncomfortable, even threatened. Imagine what would happen were she to try that today.

Historically, physicists eventually find a physical application for just about every sufficiently batshit idea that pure mathematicians dream up. — Rudy Rucker

Try this one: You can plot the position of a nuclear particle, or you can gauge its momentum, but you cannot do both at the same time. The particle has both qualities, position and momentum, but by measuring one, you make it impossible to measure the other. It is as if you are driving on your street, two blocks from your house, traveling at 30 mph. That is reality. But if you were a particle, glancing at the speedometer would make it impossible to know where you were. Glancing out the window would make it impossible to know how fast you were driving. That’s nuts, but it’s where the equations take you.

Or this one: A particle does not exist in any one place until you observe it. As if the act of observation put it there. In this case, this physics of quantum particles, observation doesn’t just measure reality; observation creates reality. If that makes you feel all god-like, chew on this: an observer does not have to be present. When photons collide, the collision extracts information, and that’s enough to collapse the space where they might be to where they are. But they are in that precise spot only because they collided and created information. That’s nuts, but it’s where the equations take you.

This is only the beginning of the weirdness of quantum physics, all worked out by math that sometimes looks deceptively simple. But this batshit mathematics has made possible semiconductors, lasers, MRI imaging, GPS, and other technologies that account for about one-third of US gross domestic product. And provide your ability to watch cat videos on your iPhone. Nothing batshit about cat videos.

Sometimes you just stand mute before the mystery of your own life. — Keith Carter

I can’t improve on that, so I will just stand mute.