Tuesday Hatred of a whole Internet of Things

I hated people who have time to do this:

Life is full of things. Internet is filling up life. Why do we need #IoT? Why don't we create the Internet of (/for) (human) Actions? #IoA

— joberv.bsky.social (@JoBervoets) September 5, 2014

Now I am one of them.

And not particularly good at it either. With advance apologies to all fine people putting their passion into this IoT thing, at least they’re taking action in something and it’s taking action that counts.

Still, all this talk about fridges talking to cars on where they are located such that the car can summon the phone of a repair guy who can hold the phone in the right way for the troubleshooting SW to tell the fridge to reset (and if that doesn’t work tell the phone to get repair guy to push the reboot button) is kind of lame. Not that it wouldn’t be cool (except maybe if you are the kind of repair guy who wouldn’t take advantage of being let into a home because his phone tells someone’s door to open on account of the fridge telling the door that: “It’s O-Kay” on some fancy super-secretly encrypted protocol). It just seems a lot of fuzz over manipulating things where in principle one would think that it’s somewhat more interesting to work with what actual people do.

At the very least what I got out of this post is that I managed to write a paragraph where a majority of words are bracketed (but there is more on the core of the issue, for those who still practice the slowly disappearing art of suspending judgment).

Fired Man Working

The unit of human capital writing this blog post is planned to be scrapped. End of June. This is partly because of a basic design error of almost all of the known units of human capital better know as free will. Most capitalists know free will to be a bitch to be kept at bay in production and to be abused only from the point of view of consumption. In my case I couldn’t handle being ‘owned’ anymore to continue something we started, dreaming to improve the world of education, in order to fuel some organization’s desire to make money on pushing more Theon taming (known originally as training).

I won’t put in my LinkedIn profile that my will to consume is as weak as my will to create is strong. I wonder whether there is a maximum of will meaning a stronger will to create weakens the will to consume, and vice versa. If so it might explain why the wealthy are so concerned to ensure our will to consume is stimulated. The wealthy are só smart (how else would they have become wealthy?): they most probably have enough will to create amongst their happy few to count for all of us. Anyway they have the money so we will just have to consume what they create with what little money they leave.

We can take some comfort in the ideas of Thomas Piketty: as the wealthy will appropriate more and more wealth, there will be less and less for us, leading to a system break-down. At that point most of us will either be death or die quickly in the service of one of the factions of the wealthy, but at least the happy few will become unhappier and fewer for the briefest of moments. It’s not much but we’ll take what we get.

I’m just being bitter, of course. On top of not making any sense. Bottom-line is: I didn’t get it my way.

Tuesday Hatred of stress

The essence of life is stress. Life is such that only the strong survive. I am not strong & this wouldn’t be nearly as depressing it it were not the case that there are a great many that are much weaker than I am.

Every second of every minute of every day situations are created that call for taking sides. We need to be decisive in being divisive. There is no escape because all threats are imminent and any opportunity is an emergency. What the world needs is a time out. Or maybe it is just what I need & would gladly share with all of you. I’ll get the drinks from the cooler – please be patient because my stomach is playing up and I may need to sit down above a hole for a while. That’s opportune because it is time I can use perfectly to perfect my time-out speech:

Tuesday Hatred of “Yeah, right!”

I hate people who are structurally nonplussed. They are like walking cold showers. I would very much like to give each and every one of them a golden shower in return.

1. A: I really like that painting. B: Yeah, right! Let her first show she can make a boring photographic reproduction of a vase with flowers, then we’ll know whether she can really paint. Maybe.
2. A: This person has a good idea about handling poverty. B: Yeah, right! Let her first earn a couple of billion dollars and eradicate polio in Afghanistan like Bill Gates, then I’ll listen to her advise. After listening to Bill’s.
3. A: Finishing a first draft of my novel really gives me a sense of accomplishment. B: Yeah, right! You had better first manage to convince a large volume publisher to carry the title before you feel anything but shame about spending your time on such an egoistical endeavor. And, by the way, your sentences are too long and the plot unravels too slowly (if you can call it a plot in the first place, nobody even dies).

This is what happens when you smoke too much Tuesday Hatred

You get ill. You have to take pills, even more pills than the ones you are taking anyway to deal with your genetic disorders, your post-surgery complications and the effects of your neurosis on your sleeping pattern. It must be karma. Things that I did wrong. Next stop: taking pills to deal with the secondary effects of pills.

I hate that increasingly there seem to be only two opinions on anything. Both call for swift, decisive and radical action. Both incorporate the conviction that who does not share the opinion is not only stupid but also outright disingenuous. Charity is something that apparently is to be measured, in hard currency.

I went to a screen adaptation of Musil (second of three parts). The truth is long-winded. I hate impatience. It is stupid and outright disingenuous.

Synday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (5)

It is difficult to like a book (this one) and hate its main character (Tyrone Slothrop) and do both at the same time. But what is difficult is not impossible. The RocketMan stuff is like torture to me. It is endless, pointless and basically narcissistic as far as I can tell: an exercise in showing off unbounded imagination rather then imagination trying to break bounds. Maybe there is an incredibly super-intelligent purpose in subjecting the reader to such a masochistic experience. Maybe the point is that it prepares us to have a more forceful literary orgasm when we finally reach Mexico or Pökel. Maybe it’s even deeper than any of that, but however unfathomable it may be: I hate show-offs.

“Slothrop has the inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions, and anyhow he’s jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head aswarm with souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling Thunderbolts.” Whipped I feel, over the buttocks with a rather thin cane.  Did it make me enjoy the following quote more? “They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide.” It did not. I would have enjoyed that anyway. Back to the whipping:

Tuesday Hatred: Opinionitis

In the memorable words of my erstwhile young German colleague whose English language skills were even more imperfect than mine: “Let’s get loose!”.

I hate people who want me to share in their overdose of opinions. I am not referring to opinionated people. Everybody hates opinionated people, it is constitutive of the meaning of ‘opinionated’ that the people who it modifyingly refers to are hateful. I am referring to people who call everything an outrage or who see in any event a sign of the end of civilized times (as if we had the good fortune of having a history in which there was any time at all that deserved the modifier ‘civilized’).

Such people have kind of an infection going on which is not sufficiently reached by their blood vessels and which therefore festers into a highly inflammable state of mind (if this metaphor doesn’t work it doesn’t, I’m not a doctor). A symptom of an advanced stage of opinionitis is the going on-line and decrying this, that and the other. The disease is beyond cure if such a going on-line ends in the verbal equivalent of throwing their arms up in despair whilst shaking their heads in despair of the lack of basic human understanding of their internet interlocutors (or their naïveté or lack of morality or various cocktails of all of the before). Once at this stage of development the final symptom will arise whether or not the going on-line is done in a context of like-minded spirits or to-be-provoked opponents.

I know this because I came ever so close to doing that. In the meantime however my erstwhile young German colleague is middle-aged.

It is not so much that I hate the people but that the people do not allow me to hate their opinions without also having to be committed to hating them personally. In general, My love is as deep as shallow is my hatred. If they would listen (this is a counter-factual for purely rhetorical purposes) I would tell them: you can hate the world but you can’t run from it.  In fact they could, but they won’t because people suffering from opinionitis are convinced that the world would truly go down the drains if they were not in it. They are by the way also convinced the world will go down the drain if they are in it, so it’s safe to assume that they generally feel entertained by the world being doomed whatever anybody including they do in it.

I, from my side, would be entertained by seeing little tiny jagged edge knifes being thrown at them for each opinion that is a crucial one in their view. These knifes would get lodged in particularly painful places, would be too small to be extricated manually but too big for them to resist the temptation of doing so. If this is not a scene in the Divina Commedia it should be (my Dante expert suggests this one is close):

This has been longer than intended. It has also been more opinionated then intended. I guess I have to see it from that side too, as much as I hate to see it from any other side at the present moment.

Anyway, dear readers, I would hate it very very much if you would resist the temptation to utter your strong opinions on this matter in comments. Resisting that temptation would mean that you would not become regulars at The Weblog and, in turn, it would mean that there would be no candidates for the unpaid hating or confessing regular franchises that are open for all applicants that first prove to be regulars. You may hate these rules but there is no playing if you do not first agree to be bound by them.

A unified theory

It would be satisfying if, as per this Frank Rich column, the Bush administration’s torture and Iraq policies could be combined into a unified crime — that is, using the urgency of 9/11 to justify the use of torture, which was then used (as in all previous torture regimes) to extract false confessions, in this case about the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.