My Rage, Resentment And Despair With Technology

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Luke Ford

Come July 3, I’ll have been blogging for 21 years, but I’ve never been ahead of the curve with technology. I only started using proper blogging software (WordPress) in 2006. I only started my Youtube channel in 2007. I only got an iPhone in 2016.

I was not one of the first guys in high school to learn to use a computer. I never took a computer class at Placer High School. I had peers well ahead of me in this respect. I did learn some computer skills writing for the Auburn Journal in my senior year, and then when I became the editor of the newspaper at Sierra Community College in the fall of 1985, I learned how to use a Mac.

I’ve always had this fear about technology, or just anything technical and practical. And not just fear, but impatience turning to rage and resentment and then despair when I couldn’t make things happened as I wished.

I was talking to someone close to me about this. We decided we had inherited this pattern. It was modeled to us in childhood and those neural pathways got so well worn, we haven’t been able escape them.

When JF Gariepy appeared on my show a few months ago, he said I’d get a lot more views if I did my videos more professionally. I know he’s right. I’ve always been more willing to expend effort to produce quantity rather than quality. My work history is frequently shoddy. “Careless” is my middle name.

So I’m in recovery now. I’m determined to up my game because I know that my habitual ways of doing things don’t work for me as I’d like. So I bought everything he recommended (including the BEHRINGER XENYX X1222USB sound mixer and the Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone, Cardioid as well as a few things in addition (such as a standing desk, a topo standing mat, the RODE PSA1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm, a polo shirt, and two Van Heusen dress shirts).

When the standing desk arrived, I read that it was simple to assemble, and yet I couldn’t do it. For one thing, my computer monitor cord was too short, so I had to order a longer one. I searched for videos with instructions on how to assemble the desk and there were’t any, so I sat on the ground and looked at the instructions and thoughts about how I could approach or pay people to help me and then I did a bit and a little more and then I set it aside for a few days until the cord arrived and one screw was missing, but I still got the desk working but the 30″ monitor seems shaky, who knows what it will do in an earthquake…

The togo mat was simple. I simply removed the plastic and put it on the floor and went to town on it.

The sound mixer bedevils me. I’ve watched all these videos on it and read the instruction manual but I don’t have a clue except I know that when I plug it into my computer, I can no longer get any sound in my headphones. I downloaded the Banana Voicemeeter that JF recommended but when I installed it, I could no longer get any sound into my headphones or speakers so I had to uninstall it.

I watched video after video about using Streamlabs OBS but I hardly have a clue about how I am going to transition to that platform and so I’m asking around for help.

This is how I’ve long dealt with my frightened approach to technology. I ask for help quickly, and when necessary, I pay for that help.

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Parasha Balak (6-24-18)

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Luke Ford

Listen.

From Chabad:

Balak, the king of Moab, summons the prophet Balaam to curse the people of Israel. On the way, Balaam is berated by his donkey, who sees, before Balaam does, the angel that G‑d sends to block their way. Three times, from three different vantage points, Balaam attempts to pronounce his curses; each time, blessings issue forth instead. Balaam also prophesies on the end of the days and the coming of Moshiach.

The people fall prey to the charms of the daughters of Moab, and are enticed to worship the idol Peor. When a high-ranking Israelite official publicly takes a Midianite princess into a tent, Pinchas kills them both, stopping the plague raging among the people.

* Num. 22:3: “Moab was terrified because there were so many people. Indeed, Moab was filled with dread because of the Israelites. 4 The Moabites said to the elders of Midian, “This horde is going to lick up everything around us, as an ox licks up the grass of the field.””

Numbers matter. Demographics matter. Fearing a powerful neighbor is normal.

* Balaam has supernatural gifts. I am open to people having such gifts. Perhaps God reaches out to those who reach out to him.

* How much do you care about other people blessing or cursing you?

* Wikipedia entry on Balak.

* When Pinchas kills the fornicators, that’s an intense solution to an intense problem — the public desecration of Judaism’s laws. It is one thing to sin privately, that can be ignored, but if you sin publicly, you’re asking for a response. The more intense the public sin, the more intense the response. What was the proper response to the decadence of Weimar Germany? What is the proper response to the decadence of Weimarica?

* Most men will give up everything for the opportunity to have sex with a hot chick. I see no reason to waste time denying or bemoaning this reality. Instead, we should accept it and design policy around it.

Women are not superior creatures because they have a lower sex drive (when did you last see a female leader fired for her bad sexual choices?). They are superior in the narrow sense that nature enables them to make less impetuous sexual choices just as nature has endowed men with greater strength and intelligence and courage to make sounder choices in other areas of life.

* Richard Spencer talks about the lawfare against him and the Alt Right. He discusses how almost every fundraising platform he’s joined, has then banned him. Well, when your stated platform is to overthrow the existing order, you have to expect this level of opposition.

* CNN reports:

HHS official listed work for anti-Islam show, conspiracy website on resume

(CNN)A far-right political pundit who was appointed to a post at the Department of Health and Human Services listed on her resume her past work on a conspiracy website and YouTube show where she made anti-Muslim comments, according to documents obtained by CNN’s KFile.

Ximena Barreto was placed on leave at the department in April following reports from CNN and Media Matters that she spread conspiracies and made anti-Muslim comments. She returned to work after issuing a public apology but was moved from her job as a deputy director of communications.
“Comments I made as I private citizen before I was hired at HHS were brought to light by concerned members of the press,” Barreto said in her apology at the time. “In the heated and hyper-passionate political campaign environment, I made generalized comments regarding race relations and radical Islam. I fully understand that these emotionally-charged comments were hurtful, and I deeply apologize to members of both communities.”
A copy of Barreto’s resume, obtained by CNN on Thursday through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows she listed her previous conspiratorial work on her resume as a qualification for the communication position.
The resume noted her work from June 2017 through the present on “The Right View” and on the Halsey News Network — YouTube shows she co-hosted where she said Islam was “a cult” and said the Republican Party shouldn’t allow a Muslim to run for Congress.

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The Bronze Age Mindset (6-22-18)

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Luke Ford


From Vox:

Who is Bronze Age Pervert?
That’s not altogether clear. His profile photograph is of an impossibly buff man facing away from the camera. His bio identifies him as an “Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder. Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist.” He’s been cited to me by a number of sources familiar with the cultural landscape of something of a leadership figure among devotees of Pepe the Frog. He frequently condemns other alt-right figures, such as Richard Spencer, at times suggesting they might be in league with the FBI.

His posts veer between retweeting MRA rhetoric about “roasties” (slang for women with multiple sexual partners), claiming that Jordan Peterson plagiarized his suggestion of “enforced monogamy” from him (in an earlier forum post, he claimed women should be reduced to breeding stock), and celebrating on #HandsomeThursdays the physiques of chiseled, muscular Aryan and Slavic men. It’s not clear, in his internet-slang-laced posts, where performative trolling ends and authentic far-right views begin, nor does it necessarily matter.

Nobody knows who Bronze Age Pervert is. But among a subset of internet denizens, he’s something of a demigod: a Jordan Peterson in miniature. He was well-known enough for the neoreactionary and proto-alt-right thinker Curtis Yarvin (better known by his pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug) to name-check him in a recent interview with an Atlantic journalist, telling Rosie Gray that Bronze Age Pervert was his contact inside the White House. While this seems to have been an attempt to troll Gray, it speaks to Bronze Age Pervert’s relative notoriety within this tight community.

An anonymous follower of his on another neoreactionary blog declared him the leader of the alt-right in language that, though comically over the top, nevertheless speaks to the fundamental mythic tendency of these movements:

“Bursting away the built up rust of the last centuries so new myths may be sung. He frees us from the constrictions of historicism and geographism- placing the race question in the light of the Faustian imperial infinity. By having us all take up barbarism the Right is spared from the civcuck middling elements having too much a say … new culture will be anti-fragile to the attaqs against it, it will soon give us victory. Long live our liege lord.”

It’s, of course, ridiculous. But it’s also illustrative. What Peterson makes implicit, Bronge Age Pervert and his followers make explicit: the intersection of trolling (complete with language taken straight from Internet memes) and traditionalism. The traditionalist aesthetic allows for both an embrace of an imagined past — in which order is triumphant over chaos — and a thoroughly contemporary assumption of transgression.

Bronze Age Pervert is an embodiment of the strange and effective tension between nostalgia and transgression that makes men like Peterson so popular. His blend of say-anything internet irony, highly eroticized valorization of splendid “warrior” bodies, and atavistic appeals to return to an era when men were real men is as close as you can get to a distillation of the Petersonian essence.

In one tweet, Bronze Age Pervert posts a painting of a naked wood nymph with a thoroughly Nietzschean caption: “return of the maenads …… imagine being torn limb from limb by crazed bacchant-gril as irregular drums beat and very thin, circular demented melody plays on two flutes handled by goat-men … I want such death.”

In a Twitter DM interview, Bronze Age Pervert told me that he did not call himself a traditionalist “because there’s no tradition I can think of that I’m trying to preserve.” He looks, he said, to Homeric and Classical Greek thought, as well as to Tibetan Buddhism, but isn’t trying to “adopt or revive” them.

“Most traditions are hostile to beauty and excellence,” he said, although he believes in a “biological hierarchy” that privileges some traditions over others (he’s a fan of the French, the Greeks, the Japanese; he dislikes Ashkenazi Jews).

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Andy Nowicki: Why are Alt-Right leaders such dismal failures? (6-28-18)

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3

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The Power Of Hollywood

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Luke Ford

I’ve had a CPAP since 2011 and used it off and on. Then this weekend I watched season two of Goliath on Amazon Prime, where the lawyer played by Billy Bob Thornton effortlessly uses the same type of CPAP as I have. So I went back to my CPAP this week and it was effortless. I was able to leave it on all night and reap better quality sleep as a result.

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