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Tag: Frank Wilhoit

Weekly Round-up, January 18, 2025

2025-01-182025-01-18 John Winkelman

A sprig of purple kale peeking out of a pile of snow.

[A sprig of decorative purple kale peeking out of a pile of snow just outside of Martha’s Vineyard in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]

Another week in the hopper, and I am exhausted. This week I worked 51 hours and managed to avoid missing the evening classes by logging in between 6 and 7:00 in the morning. But we have two more days to go, though I am sure the project leads would love for me to work through this three-day weekend, that just ain’t gonna happen.

The next blog post – indeed, the next couple of hundred blog posts – will be sent from the newly-formed Fascist States of America, headed by several billionaires stuffed in a sagging, ugly, shit-stained Donald Trump costume.

This state of affairs became inevitable when the Supreme Court passed Citizens United, which codified into law the idea that money is exactly the same as speech, and that the richer a person (or corporation) was, the more deserving of free speech they were. It is no coincidence that these billionaire broligarchs consider themselves “free speech absolutists”, but only when it comes to the dissemination of white supremacist and other forms of hate speech. Note how quickly they close down any criticisms of themselves on their own platforms.

So in that sense, Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other wealthy media outlet owners are the most cowardly men on the planet. They have gone to astonishing lengths to build up enough wealth to not only shield themselves from the consequences of any of their actions, but also to shut down most avenues of criticism of them and the members of their cohort. They are the living embodiment of Wilhoit’s Law: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Reading

I have passed the halfway point of Doctor Zhivago, but it is still slow going. Maybe the long weekend will afford me time to get in some pages.

Writing

I am giving up on writing anything substantial until February. This month has been a total wash.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, Cryptids
Setting: Ruins
Genre: War

Listening

Aphex Twin, “On”

Interesting Links

  • With the annual State of the World address wrapped up, a new conversation is ongoing at The Well: “State of the News 2025“
  • Have a couple of decades to kill? browse the Magazine Rack at the Internet Archive.
Posted in LifeTagged Aphex Twin, fascism, Frank Wilhoit, politics comment on Weekly Round-up, January 18, 2025

Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

2023-12-092023-12-09 John Winkelman

Hello. This is me trying to get back into the habit of weekly blog posts about goings-on in my life. We will see how long it lasts, and how my intentions endure the slings and arrows of *gestures at everything*.

***

I have been thinking about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, and also about Frank Wilhoit’s quote about capitalism.

Ashby’s law states, more or less, that in any control system, the control apparatus must be able to account for (e.g. be as complex as) all possible variants in the system being controlled.

Wilhoit’s quote is as follows: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

There is some resonance between these ideas which I have been exploring in my (almost non-existent) downtime, and I will post updates to these thoughts as they crystalize.

***

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, and I have logged my eighth win out of eleven attempts, I feel like I have the energy to continue writing. In past years that has not been the case for many and varied reasons, but this year, though I am well into my mid fifties, I have energy reserves which were simply not there in years past. So I will take advantage of that.

Writing, be it creative, work-related, keeping a journal, or blogging, is a habit which requires practice and maintenance. And when pulling out of a slump, there are two parts to restarting the practice: getting out of the habit of not doing the thing, and getting into the habit of doing the thing.

***

Currently reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Fields of Castile by Antonio Machado, Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

***

The writing prompt for the past week was:

Subject: Undead, Addiction
Setting: Ship
Genre: Magic Realism

I didn’t do much with this one, other than to come up with a few interesting scenarios during my walks to and from work.

The writing prompt for the next week is:

Subject: Addiction, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Border Town
Genre: War

***

Random links for the week:

  • Literary Fight Club: On the Great Poets’ Brawl of ‘68 (LitHub) – This would have been a fun party to attend.
  • Gulag Archipelago: Fifty Years After The ‘Bomb’ That Exploded Lies Of Soviet Rule, Solzhenitsyn’s Son Recalls Book’s Impact (Radio Free Europe) – I haven’t yet got far in The Gulag Archipelago, but I did read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and it has stuck with me for over 30 years.
  • The Bond villain compliance strategy (Bits About Money) – This is why financial crimes should be treated as violent crimes. De facto, the wealthier the criminal, the more severe the punishment should be.
  • The Etymologies of Capital, Capitalist, and Capitalism: A Brief Sketch (Naked Capitalism) – I like that “capitalist” and “decapitate” share the same etymological roots
  • Pressley, Welch introduce legislation to guarantee right to vote for people with felonies on record (Associated Press) – I’m all for this. All citizens should be allowed to vote in any election in any district of which they are constituents. This right must not be limited in any way. Not by photo ID requirements (which is to say, poll tax), gerrymandering,  limited access to voting locations, limited location hours, or any of the other ridiculous barriers to democracy which conservatives have put in place, and continue to put in place, for decades. Even the slightest limit or restriction on the voting rights of any American citizen is nothing less than full-on, deliberate fascism.
  • Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction (LitHub) – The simple answer is, of course, that the cruelty is the point. When it comes to book bans in prisons the goal, like banning books in schools and universities, is to create an under-educated underclass in a state of permanent precarity. This plus the decades and centuries of purposefully and openly racist carceral policies in the USA demonstrate that the American version of conservatism is nothing more than aristocracy and feudalism with the serial numbers filed off.
  • Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (Cory Doctorow) – Exactly what it says on the tin.

 

 

Posted in LifeTagged Antonio Machado, Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, Frank Wilhoit, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Min Jin Lee, NaNoWriMo, reading, writing comment on Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

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