J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Culture Rants/Shares Page 5 of 21

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

By

On May 23

In Culture Rants/Shares

I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I’d recommend it for many reasons. The book illuminates the distinction between racial antipathy and passively supporting social norms that limit the power and privilege of African Americans. While most Americans can truthfully say that they harbor no hate in the hearts towards people of other ethnic backgrounds, it’s a much smaller group that actively works to dismantle discriminatory systems and views that enforce the caste system in the US.

While not as explicit as the caste systems in India or Israel (both Dalits and Palestinians live under conditions that could accurately be described as apartheid), Wilkerson makes an effective argument that caste does indeed exist in the US.

I was somewhat skeptical of this idea before reading the book, but now I’m fully convinced. If you’ve read the book, please share your own views in the comments.

That’s all I’ve got for this week — we had a huge family event that has taken up most of my energy and bandwidth lately. In the next couple weeks I’ll be working on the final proof of The Last Crucible (Book 3 of Reclaimed Earth), which I’m hoping to deliver to Flame Tree in the first week of June.

I’m looking for book recommendations, both fiction and nonfiction. What are you reading and enjoying?

Humbled by the Masters (on YouTube)

By

On May 8

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

The amount of high-level knowledge and technique being casually shared on YouTube, TikTok, and blogs is absolutely stunning. The world is collectively experiencing a Golden Age of accelerated learning with no geographic, economic, class, or age-related limitations. Anyone with a mobile phone can learn from the most talented people in their field, for free.

Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of human cultural evolution. Anybody who wants to can raise their game in a small fraction of the time it would have taken ten or twenty years ago.

The first time my mind was blown by this fact was maybe five years ago. The pipes in my house were making a weird loud vibrating sound. After a quick internet search I found a helpful guy on YouTube demonstrating exactly how to adjust the water pressure in your house. I ventured into the crawlspace under my house, found the valve, and make the adjustment. Problem solved.

But now I’m all about raising my art game. Yesterday I was completely humbled not once but twice, in two different fields. I watched Ian Kirkpatrick break down his drums on Dua Lipa – Pretty Please. I’ve been making beats for three decades, with a fair amount of success, but I found at least a dozen tips I could immediately implement from this one video. Multi-platinum-selling producers are willing to tell you exactly how they do it, for free.

Another one of my nerdy hobbies is painting fantasy miniatures. I’ve been painting off-and-on since I was a teenager, but resources for learning how to paint were scarce when I first started. I remember getting some very basic tips from a booklet that came with a paint set, and that was all I had for many years. It wasn’t until I started watching artists on YouTube that I really started to gain some technique. Watching extremely skilled painters like Miniac, Ninjon, Lyla Mev, and Squidmar is truly inspiring. But yesterday I discovered a painter on another level entirely. Watching Marco Frison speed paint a miniature using only three primary colors and black and white, exhibiting his color theory genius while mixing and blending on a wet palette — it blew my mind. It was almost too much. I felt overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of knowledge being dropped. But having slept on it, I’m excited to actually try some of Marco’s methods, even though my own first attempts will be clumsy.

For learning how to write better, YouTube isn’t the perfect medium. But I have read life-changing blog posts that have bettered not only my writing technique, but also my productivity. For example Rachel Aron’s breakdown of how she consistently writes up to 10k words per day. While I generally only write for a couple hours in the morning and average between 600-1000 words per day, I’ve used her advice to easily ramp it up to 2-3k per day when I want or need to.

It’s such a better situation than learning this stuff on your own by trial-and-error. Or paying tuition or course fees and slowly gaining knowledge from a small handful of individuals who may not even be that talented. I’m not knocking other forms of learning — you can’t replace working with a skilled teacher in person, or practicing with others and getting immediate feedback. But if you’re not also partaking of the free knowledge the masters are handing out for free, you’re missing out.

In conclusion, Sean O’Malley breaks down his signature jab. So that’s how he hits people as if his hands were invisible.

The Roaring Twenties Redux?

By

On December 21

In Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

Kia and I were talking about all the things we want to do post-pandemic. We want to see all our friends and family, eat out at restaurants, go to concerts, travel, and everything else we haven’t been able to do for nearly a year now. Will we actually do all those things once we get the chance? It’s hard to say; maybe those activities will feel too stimulating and overwhelming after living the quiet inside life for so many months. But I imagine there will at least be a period of overcompensation, not only by us but by most people globally. Many are in dire economic straits because of the pandemic, so it remains to be seen how much of a consumer spending boom will result. But the appetite will be there.

The conversation got me wondering how much of the Roaring Twenties of the 20th century had to do with the exuberance and relief that followed not only the end of World War I, but the end of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans and 50 million worldwide. The good times didn’t begin right away. The U.S. experienced high inflation for several years due to pent-up demand, short supply, and the end of rationing rules. Wages didn’t keep up with rising prices and workers went on strike as a result. Class and racial tensions boiled over in many cities, resulting in riots and numerous deaths.

In 1921 the Fed lowered interest rates, President Harding provided national unemployment relief, and the U.S. economy was off to the races. Economic boom times were accompanied and amplified by cultural changes: women’s suffrage, the availability of birth control and the possibility for smaller families, the automobile, radios in most households, frequent cinema outings, and the rise and growing influence of Black culture (jazz, dance halls, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.). Reactionary and racist groups pushed back via Prohibition, Ku Klux Klan membership, the anti-communist “Red Scare” movement, and the Anti-Immigration act of 1924. But the mood of many in the country was exuberant, expansionistic, and celebratory.

21st Century Redux?

Could our own twenties follow a similar path? As a thought experiment, what factors would need to exist and co-conspire to create our own Roaring decade?

Read More

Is the United States Antifragile?

By

On December 16

In Culture Rants/Shares, Politics

Author Nassim Taleb coined the term antifragile, which describes an entity or system that becomes stronger in response to stress. Bones are generally antifragile; if exposed to impact stress bones tend to get denser and stronger. Though even antifragile systems have weaknesses and breaking points. Bird bones are particularly resistant to torque stress but weak to impact stress; human bones the converse (as I learned the hard way when I twisted my foot on a curb). But antifragile systems have the capacity to strengthen in response to stress, pressure, volatility, and chaos.

So what about the United States? Our relatively young nation has been subjected to extreme stress multiple times, most notably the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement and cultural changes of the 1960’s. The current pandemic, resulting economic crisis, and Donald Trump’s conspiracy-theory-fueled, GOP-backed attempted coup poses the most serious threat to our national stability and integrity in my own memory.

Is there something about our governmental systems, national character, and/or geography that make us antifragile?

Read More

What Will the Structural Collapse (or Rebirth) of the United States Look Like?

By

On November 14

In Culture Rants/Shares, Politics, Utopian Speculations

Let’s start the weekend with some gloom-and-doom, shall we?

First, Chris Hedges, a journalist who has been calling out the moral bankruptcy and pyramid-scheme economy of the United States for some time.

In this short film by Amanda Zackem, Hedges highlights the bread-and-circuses distractions of entertainment, consumerism, and digital media that distract U.S. citizens from the plutocratic consolidation of wealth and plundering of the state.

Next, let’s spend some time with Peter Turchin and his mathematical approach to “megahistory” in this excellent profile by Graeme Wood. Turchin, a Russian zoologist who turned his attention to the study of mathematical patterns in human history, famously predicted the unrest of 2020 back in 2010. Turchin believes he has uncovered iron laws of human societal evolution, cycles of unrest perpetuated by the “overproduction of elites.” In the United States, Turchin asserts that 1920, 1970, and 2020 are all points of major civil unrest on his 50-year historical cycle graph.

Peter Turchin hypothesizes that too many elites competing for too few elite positions leads to the creation of “counter-elites”: troublemakers who rise to power by allying with the non-elite classes. He gives Steve Bannon as an example of a counter-elite. Bannon was raised working-class, attended Harvard Business School, got rich via various investments and a small share of the Seinfeld television show, but only rose to power via his Breitbart race-baiting tactics.

Read More

Page 5 of 21

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén