Ecce Sigum

Tag: Frank Wilhoit

  • Weekly Round-up, January 18, 2025

    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.

  • Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

    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: