Author: Kilgore Forelle

A Governed Society Isn’t Civilized, It Is Slap-Dash

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

The so-called Modern World has been sitting on its thumbs since WWII, maybe since the US Civil War. How else can we explain the massive failures of The Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Military Industrial Complex, 9/11, and the Coronavirus Pandemic?  We keep getting caught with our pants around our ankles, because we do not pull our pants up in the first place.

We have randomly created the perfect government for making sure everyone is pissed.  We have enshrined the scene of the accident.

We focused on dissent rather than just getting away from one kerfuffle and into another.  We were escaping from King George III, so we wrote documents that immortalized the crimes of a crazy monarch.  Our concept of freedom is couched in terms of being away from a distorted personality.  Our Bill of Rights is a punch list of things we will not tolerate from European monarchists.  No wonder this government pays no attention to the BoR.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Song of the South

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

I have spent most of my life living below the Mason-Dixon Line, 72 out of 77 years, and 68 of those in Kentucky.  Kentucky is a border state.  Several of my great greats were Union fighters and a few were Confederate.  Honestly, I don’t know why any of them participated in our Civil War, what principles and beliefs motivated them.

I have had no reasons to perpetuate holy grails lost in the past.  The further we get from the conflagration, those who hold forth loudly on the topic know less and less what they are talking about.

A good friend warned me that this was starting off as if it were an apology for the South.  It is far from it.  There are no excuses.  There are no eulogies.

Furthermore, there will be no overlooking of the roles played by many north of the line.

Slavery is the worst abomination I can imagine, but it worsens, becomes more hideous when one considers the perpetuation of slave-like existence for descendents of the African holocaust today.  Europeans, to salve the wrong they knew they were committing, pretended that the blacks were inferior, deserving to be slaves, then fugitives, then servants.  It was a terrible fallacy.

Northern Europeans grievously created a fiction of superiority, which caused suppression of other peoples, then by dint of the denial created a confirmation bias that they have not overcome today, 155 years after supposedly settling the stupidity here in the USA.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Conflation Confirmation Conflagration

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Conflation is running amock these days.  People are actually making important decisions because certain things are viewed as Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, patriotic, religious, lawful, or criminal.

It is critical in this complex world that each person take in as much information as needed, in the most effective way, to make thoughtful decisions.  We should practice Ockham’s Razor whenever we sift facts, fictions, and factoids.  Ockham’s Razor, you may recall, is an admonition not to overstir the pot.  Reject overwrought accounts.  Just think.  Almost all of the information crucial to our physical or social health comes through news media, social media, politicians, bureaucrats, hidebound professional associations — none of whom know of what they speak, passing along only hearsay.  It is cacophony.  Can you keep your head when all around you are losing theirs?

There are traits that do not serve humans well as a rational species:

  • Conflation,
  • Confirmation, and
  • Conflagration.

Conflation is putting ideas together that should be sorted apart, first, before looking for specious connections.  An example would be to make some ideas congruent merely because they arose together.

Of course conflation goes hand-in-hand with confirmation.  We tend to conflate ideas that confirm our pre-conceived notions.

When we have thoroughly burdened any chance at truth, we start dropping bombs.  Presto!  Conflagration.

— Kilgore Forelle

 

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The Disintegration of Well-Meant Collectives

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Not to oversimplify, but most movements start with a gathering of well-meaning individuals.

I look at the Tea Party, started innocently by Ron Paul and his followers, in the middle of the warmonger regime of George W. Bush (how are those wars going for us now?)  Well, the Tea Party was ruined by interlopers, wolves in tea party clothing.

Look at the police.  Spoiled by those who game the system, turn off the body cams, learn to push the limits of qualified immunity, exploit their union membership.

See the workarounds, see how the so-called champions of the little persons turn on them when the least bit of power is within reach.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Got Your Divide, Got Your Conquer

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

There’s a popular behavior that consists of dividing everything in two parts.  All people are of two kinds — those who like this behavior, and those who don’t.

First those of ill-will tell us we must choose (why must we, btw?).  There are two occasion: being judicious, sometimes it is wise to make a binary choice, and sometimes not.

Last week I saw a statistical graphic on Facebook.  It was underlabeled and overinterpreted.  Mislabeling purported that it was a showing of dramatically different rates of Coronavirus cases by Red vs Blue political districts.  But how did the pollster determine which territory leaned which way?  How many voters were in each district?  At what level were the offices determined — local, state, federal?  What had been long term results of voting, or short term?  What had been long and short term effects of gerrymandering?

The graphic simply did not say, but complicated division was going on nonetheless — there was division between those who understood statistics and those who did not.  There was division between those who understood graphic representation and those who did not.  There was division among those who sought confirmation and those who sought information.

But why do we allow this kind of labeling?  Those among us who are cogent realize that this is knee-jerk divisiveness that is second nature to politicos.

Now we have at least 4 wedges at work, coronavirus, government response to a pandemic (real or supposed), police brutality, and protest.  Each of these wedges are in the process of spinning off new wedges, as I write.

But considering only the 4, that gives us the potential for 16 groups of sentiment composition (2^4).  But journalism keeps drumming up new wedges which are surreptitiously ideated by courtiers in the oligarchy.  The more division, the smaller are groups to be conquered.  The more division, the exponentially more groups of minorities.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Things I’ve Learned in the New Normal

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Some of the things I’ve learned in this iteration of “Normal:”

  • Everyday is a new normal.  Not only are you a unique individual, but you are a different instantiation of that unique individual every moment.
  • A good friend shared with me yesterday — an admirable couple were married for 8 years, when the male was diagnosed as autistic.  Someone asked the female why she hadn’t known.  She opined that the symptoms of autism and maleness were so similar that she hadn’t been able to tell.
  • I have a theory that autism is a precursor to the next stage of evolution.  We’re still waiting to learn if it’s an advancement.
  • Q. … Why does time go so slow for a child and yet the same time appears to go really fast for an adult?           A. … We throw away bags full of chunks of the past whenever we choose to have a spring cleaning of our minds.
  • Sports radio talk shows do not go away when there are no sports.
  • All politicians are not bad.  Most of them are trapped in their preconceived notions.  Like lawyers and accountants, good ones find something better to do.
  • The world still contains two types of people — those who intervene and those who don’t.
  • I have also learned, as did Socrates, who is the smartest; the person that knows that he or she knows nothing.
  • Voluntaryists, libertarians, individualists, and responsible people do not run in packs.
  • TANSTAAFL. 

 — Kilgore Forelle 

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