Fading

Although Robert Kennedy, Jr. has suspended his campaign to be President, and thrown his lot in with Donald Trump, this campaign sign seems new.

Pretty sure this future is over already.

This seems to be in keeping with reports that Mr. Kennedy is seeking to clear the field in Red states, but keep his name on the ballot in Blue ones (like Washington), where the hope is that he'll siphon off enough support from the Harris/Walz ticket to flip a few otherwise safe electoral votes. I, for my part, am dubious of this plan, but it isn't the most harebrained scheme that I've heard of.

Like all "third party" nominees, Mr. Kennedy never stood a real chance of being a viable candidate; the only real thing that he ever had going for him was the family name, and that was never going to be enough. Ross Perot did a much better job of shaking things up, back in the day.

In any event, it may be interesting to see if Mr. Kennedy remains a factor in the race. The bulk of his support on the left-hand side of the political spectrum seemed to come from people who were dissatisfied with President Biden, and it pretty much evaporated when the President decided not to accept the Democratic nomination to run again. Given that people seem to be still putting up campaign signs, I suspect I'll see his name on the November ballot. I suspect that it will mostly go unnoticed.

Rock Island

Concepts are not durable objects; they are highly subject to change as they are transmitted from person to person, as many people in the social sciences are fond of pointing out. This is part of the reason why the understanding of what it means to be "Stoic" has shifted so much in past couple of millennia. Because most people derive their understanding of philosophical concepts from sources other than philosophy classes, textbooks and primary sources, the pop culture version of stoicism bears only a superficial outward resemblance to the original.

Normally, this isn't much of a concern, after all, modern religious practice has pretty much nothing in common with how things were done when Rome was still the dominant power in Europe, and no-one seems to care that the term "Cynic" appears to have absolutely no relation to the school of Greek philosophy that it derives from. But Stoicism has become caught up in the periphery of the Culture Wars, and this has licensed pedantry about how it's "supposed" to be done.

When I was young, I understood "stoicism" to mean something along the lines of suppressing outward displays of emotion. Having emotions was all well and good, but displaying them in public, especially negative ones, indicated a lack of internal control. And I found this a useful way of understanding things. As a high school student in the 1980s, I found that classmates of mine would call me "nigger" to my face not out of any genuine racial animus, because they sought to get a rise out of me. One which demonstrated that they had a certain level of control. Learning to not respond to the provocations (something which I failed to completely master while still in high school), I found that people were less likely to deploy them.

But it was not a universal position. There were (and are, really) any number of people who felt that anger was the correct response to such disrespect. In this, we disagreed on how efficacious it was as a tool of changing others behavior.

A lot of the modern discourse about "real" Stoicism versus the pop-culture variety centers around the idea that mastering one's responses to emotions means suppressing the emotions (or the perceptions of them) themselves. And I can understand that. The difference between accepting something that cannot be changed and being resigned to something that should be changed is not self-evident to an observer. Accordingly, neither is the understanding that one cannot control others versus maintaining a pretense that no harm was done. As "Toxic Masculinity" has become something that must be stamped out, the difficulty in recognizing its constituent parts becomes clearer.

In any event, I find the discussion interesting, as it provides a glimpse into the broader conflict over the "correct" ways of being an acting. Given how rapidly the world changes, I doubt that there will be anything resembling a resolution before everything moves om. But even the partial insight is a useful too.

Happiness Is A Warm CPU

There was a short piece on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday; "Exploring concerns around users building emotional dependence on AI chatbots." To be sure, it didn't at all live up to the title. Rather it seemed to be an opportunity for banter between the hosts. They did play some commentary from Arizona State University's Liesel Sharabi, but she was given only around 100 words, not nearly enough to really open the topic, let alone explore it.

Which was unfortunate. This really should have been a longer story, or maybe even a podcast episode of its own, because the disappointments and complications of having relationships with actual humans have already led people to have relationships with life-sized dolls and virtual boy/girl-friends. To be sure, the numbers don't seem to be very large. I suspect there's a reason why every story I've encountered about men have dolls as girlfriends features this guy who goes by the name of DaveCat.

One of the recurring worries about these sorts of surrogate relationships is that they will normalize unrealistic expectations of what being in a relationship should be like. But it seems to me that particular train has already left the station. After all, DaveCat was talking about his relationships with his RealDolls in fairly unrealistic terms when I encountered his story in The Atlantic some ten years ago.

In this, I suspect the "danger" of automation and robotics in this instance isn't that it will change what people want. Rather it will become good enough to give them what they already want, but can't currently obtain. Replicant partners that are captive enough to be utterly reliable, yet offer just enough pushback to not seem captive? I can see the lines for that going around the block. It simply takes so much of the perceived risk out of being in a relationship. And that's part of the reason for so much of the automation that we currently have. After all, I've had dishes be broken during cleaning before, but never by the dishwasher.

For all that I find hand-wringing about how people are too selfish these days to be moronic, I understand the critique that people go into relationships mainly as a path to personal happiness, mainly because it (among other things) lowers people's patience for rough edges in potential partners. But then again, most people wind up marrying other actual people in their lives, so I doubt that this is ever going to be a big problem regardless of how alarmist one's take on it is. What I think it will become, however, is mediagenic, precisely because it can be spun as a looming crisis that could spell doom (doom, I tell you!) for humanity. And nothing drives ratings like the promise of a good crisis story. Sometimes, even when the promise isn't at all delivered on.

C*rses

One of the things that I don't understand about swearing is why there is such a need to pretend that people aren't. It's common to hear things that would have scandalized people when I was young. Especially given that, when I was young "hell" was still considered to be inappropriate language in some quarters.

And so when people want to put "swear" words on book covers and have them sold in national chains, they simply replace the vowel with an asterisk... like so:

I can't imagine who they think won't know what these titles say.

So... why bother? It's not like people won't immediately recognize the titles as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Let That Shit Go. If we're not going to be Puritanical as a society, why on Earth would we pretend to be? Sure, there's still something of a taboo about using these terms around preadolescents, but even that is rapidly going the way of the dodo; I've been around children who "swore" like sailors.

References to sex, body parts/bodily functions and waste have pretty much lost all of their shock value, much like "damn" has. So why not just let them go? Language evolves, and sometimes rapidly, there are already new words that are moving onto the list of Think That One Shall Not Say, some of the ones that are currently there, accordingly, can go on to other things.

Tall Tail

What's been described as China's first "triple-A" video game, Black Myth: Wukong, has landed in the news due to controversy sparked by a rather strange set of instructions sent to some number of people who planned to livestream themselves playing the game.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Not surprising, because this is China that we're talking about, and the Chinese government is notoriously sensitive when it comes to topics that it believes (correctly or not) might undermine or delegitimize it in the eyes of the populace.

I was watching a video-on-demand recording of one such livestream, and early in the game, the streamer responds to a viewer calling the game "Chinese propaganda." While the streamer wasn't interested in pursuing that line of discussion (after all, they were there to play a hot new video game), I'm sure that debate continued in the comments for a while.

It's an interesting commentary on the nature of relations between the United States and China. Black Myth: Wukong is a video game tied into the Chinese literature. And it's not the only property that's sought to mine the same story for details. The original Dragon Ball manga and anime draw very heavily from Journey to the West, and the Enslaved: Odyssey to the West video game couldn't be more clear about its inspirations. Even Lego got in on the act with their Monkie Kid set theme and accompanying animated shows. So it seems rational that Chinese companies would also get in on the act.

Responding to a video game that re-uses a very popular character from Chinese literature as propaganda speaks to the culture of distrust that has grown up under the geopolitical tensions between China and most of the developed Western world. (Except, it seems, where TikTok is concerned. Go figure.) While I'm sure that the Chinese Communist Party would like for games like Black Myth: Wokong to prompt young people in the industrialized West to think more highly of China, it seems unlikely that a game about an anthropomorphic monkey beating up on gods and monsters with a staff is somehow going to prompt people to overlook either the conflicts between China and other nations, or between the governing philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and their own values. For some people, a video game is just a video game.

The charge of "propaganda" is usually one of disagreement with the supposed beneficiary of a message, rather than the message itself, and concerns that this new game is yet another plot to undermine China's geopolitical rivals/opponents seems to fall into that category. It's also a charge of stupidity (or at least pliability) on the part of others... no-one ever worries that propaganda will somehow manage to subvert them. And in that sense, it's as self-aggrandizing as what it seeks to call out.