The failure of conservative humor

As if more evidence was needed?

I don't actually read that many books of hard-core conservative persuasion. It's kind of amusing, since many of my personal principles and philosophies do seem conservative on their face, but today's so-called conservatives lie too much. Today's uninteresting example is Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke. He's supposed to be a humorist of sorts, though a more apt description is "libertarian propagandist of little skill".

I've actually read 6 of his earlier books, so I have to count this book as being fooled for the 6th time and shame on me, but I keep hoping to learn something worth the time. After all, the whole point of REAL humor is to learn (in accord with my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff), but O'Rourke never fails to disappoint. There are some traces of interesting ideas buried in his stuff, but mostly he's just wasting my time with cheap sophistry. Almost done with this book and so far only detected one interesting thought: The distinction between negative and positive rights. The rest of it was fluff and piffle.

What finally provoked me enough to write this quasi-review was Chapter 8 in Part II. Just too perfect as an example of the intellectual dishonesty of the Libertarians. The premise is supposed to be that Part II is about solutions on an issue-by-issue basis. The ostensible issue of Chapter 8 is gun safety, but O'Rourke actually changes the subject to attack voting rights. It's supposed to be a parody, but it comes off as too sincere, almost a harbinger of the Bolshevik Republican policies of voter disenfranchisement. Actually I'm pretty sure those policies had started before the publication of this book, but either O'Rourke hadn't noticed or it's another example of his highly selective focus. Also a vicious focus in his unfunny personal attacks.

I'll go ahead and run through my earlier tags, though I was planning to discard the book without memory. On a page-based basis:

On page 11 (which is early in Chapter 2, dismissing Chapter 1 as an intro), I was struck by several items, such as the delusional attack against Richard Dawkins that only showed (1) O'Rourke hates Dawkins, and (2) O'Rourke hasn't read the book he's attacking. This page had a number of poorly written, false, and dumb things, but I keep reminding myself that O'Rourke will claim the "It's only a joke" defense, and only more so for his worst writing.

On page 13 I was offended by his joke about the Japanese word "jiyu" for one of the senses of freedom. The only things it showed are (1) racist viciousness, (2) ignorance of the Japanese language and indifference to the truth, and (3) ignorance of what "freedom" actually means--but that's only typical of Libertarian "thinking". The reality is that the Japanese word is about the sense of freedom where the cause of your actions is yourself. Also, I strongly suspect it's a word coined in China, not Japan.

Page 15 had some strikingly offensive personal attacks on the Clintons, but "It's just a joke" of some twisted flavor. A more substantive annoyance was the discussion of "intolerance" without any apparent knowledge of the Paradox of Tolerance. Add Popper's philosophy to the LONG list of important topics O'Rourke is ignorant of or chooses to ignore.

At this point I was already getting fed up and wanted to stop paying such close attention, but... On pages 42 and 43 he dragged Donald Trump into the picture. Really laughable dismissal considering how things have panned out. Most amusing quote must be "Every property he touches seems to go to hell" as he dismisses Trump's self-claimed wealth as a trick of "former Enron accountants". Words worth eating, if not well worth anything, eh?

On page 49 he brings the birthers into the discussion, though Trump doesn't get an explicit mention. The offensive aspect here is the link between birtherism and O'Rourke's own frequent and vicious and unjustified attacks on Barack Obama. Maybe there's some racism there, too, since on the next page (50) he also takes a cheap shot of some sort at Tiger Woods. At least I think it was supposed to be "Just a joke" of some sort. Maybe it was just broken by time? The joke seems to be implying that Woods could not keep a secret, so I'm guessing it had to do with his exposure as a philanderer and subsequent career collapse? Perhaps these things just seem less funny post-Trump-as-politician?

Speaking of narcissistic personality disorder, he actually cites the diagnostic criteria on page 70, but without reference to Trump. If he had mentioned Trump, then it would have looked as wise and prophetic as Harlan Ellison's prediction of the Reagan presidency in The Glass Teat.

Page 95 is the apex of his attacks on science. The only thing O'Rourke actually proves is that he has no idea of what science is about. Even less idea of how it works.

If there's any thoughtful or educational stuff in this book, then it's been shredded far above my poor power to unshred. Sometimes "It's just a joke" is no excuse.

Compass of Pleasure and Sleights of Mind

Version 0.5

A Comparative Review of The Compass of Pleasure by David Linden and Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee in Light of the Twitter

Now I realize that I probably bit off more than I can chew. I definitely feel like there is a unifying thread running through these 2 books and some of the recent research that I have been reviewing on Twitter, but it's rather hard to figure out how to weave the thread into words. It involves the unified focus of human consciousness. In other words, we really only think clearly about one thing at a time, and that's why research based on sampling of the Twitter on a broad scale is doomed to failure.

In The Compass of Pleasure, the primary focus was on the group of brain circuits that are frequently involved with pleasure responses and addictive behaviors. This was kind of a magic lever (with a deliberate play on the next book) into human behaviors, but the contributions from elsewhere in the brain were nebulous and far from clear. Being able to sample random signals going through other parts of the brain is kind of meaningless, as though you had a few random samples of neural responses and chemical samples from responses that are actually connected, but there is no way to explain the connections. You might detect that one particular neuron in the visual cortex is responding to a vertical line, while another fairly close neuron is responding to a movement, and somewhere else in the brain there is a clear signal that is activating a movement in the right leg, but the fact that these are all connected is not going to be something that can be inferred from this kind of data. Random sampling is wrong. You need highly directed searching, even if you have an anchor point such as the pleasure circuits.

In Sleights of Mind the the key notion is that magicians manipulate your mental focus so that you are mentally locked into the place where the trick is not taking place. In fact there's sometimes even automatic inhibitions of neighboring neural areas to help you focus on the place where the magician has specifically persuaded you to go with your mind's focus of attention. Often that involves friendly and empathic feelings that cause any human to respond to the interest expressed by other people, but feelings that are deliberately manipulated by the magician. The classic example is when one person stares up, and other people stop and stare in the same direction to see what it is. It's kind of like a shared social focus, though the authors used a more precise term for it (which I've already misplaced).

The intersection with Twitter is that no amount of analysis of random samples of tweets is going to produce anything useful. The metaphor is strained, but I think it's like having reports of the activities of random neurons from a brain. There are patterns to be found in the Twitter information, but your disconnected like the links between distance neurons. Again, the key is intelligent search. The hashtags can be clues, but even there things are very mobile. There are multiple competing foci among the hashtags and only a few of them ultimately rise to high levels of activity and visibility on Twitter. I'm not actually convinced that any of the information flowing around Twitter really amount to any decision points., but that is evidently what the people who are studying Twitter think they are looking for. Even President Obama was involved with Twitter this last week. I think he was just wasting his time, but he deserves some recreational time, too.

These ideas are actually linked back to my current thinking abut the recent election, where I am now feeling that the race between Obama and Romney was essentially the distracting focus that the magicians wanted you to look at, but far away from the the real action. Now I'm beginning to think the key thing was that all of that SuperPAC money wasn't really being wasted, though that is now the "magicians' patter" (from the pundits) about the election. In actuality, the money was effectively bribing the mass media to continue playing the election game in the same old way. Sure, it looks like the Romney got essentially nothing for a billion dollars, but especially in the swing states and in some key districts, the large flows of campaign advertising must have been enormous windfall profits for someone. I read that the nonpublic SuperPACs had to pay as much is 10 times the low basic rates that were guaranteed to the official advertising of the candidates. The money didn't disappear like a magic trick, and whoever got it will be glad to get more from the next election...

Not sure what insights to draw from this comparative review, such as it is. My problem remains that I'm fundamentally a replay machine, just executing the mental models that have been created by the real authors. It's not that I don't have anything to say, even when I can say it relatively easily using voice dictation (which I used for most of this post), but I'm more like a mirror than a light source.