Hell is an Unexpected Second Iteration

The very worst tech experience is needing to do something complicated twice - far enough apart that you've forgotten how to cut through all the aggravations.

The Domino Fallacy

Monitor your confirmation bias as you read this:

"Anti-Trump Republicans wringing their hands at what's become of their party are not intellectually honest. If they can't see Trump as the inevitable outcome of Palin, they're failing to come clean. And Palin was the inevitable outcome of Gingrich, who was the inevitable outcome of Saint Ronnie. Given that mainstream Republicanism has sowed these seeds for some time, these guys shouldn't be shocked at what they've reaped."

For those left of center, the above might sound completely reasonable. But it's fallacious. Here's a visual representation:



By the same token, 60's leftist terror groups (Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc) could be seen as the inevitable outcome of militant, uncompromising radical groups like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society. And the Black Panthers and SDS could be seen as the inevitable outcome of GreenPeace, the ACLU, and NAACP.

And a bomb could be seen as the inevitable outcome of a Molotov cocktail...which could be seen as the inevitable outcome of a nice stiff drink. It's temptingly easy to trace literally any super-bad thing back through progressively milder antecedents - and to paint the entire chain with the same brush. Especially if you feel a general disdain for the group you're looking to condemn.


Many will argue this by insisting that Palin, Gingrich, and Reagan were truly awful - as bad (or nearly so) as Trump. While I'm no fan of any of those figures, if that's truly your thinking, I'd urge you to have a very long walk in a quiet place until you've regained your mental faculties. My only solace in this political era is the prospect that its sheer cataclysm may finally help the fuzzy-headed realize that everything they dislike isn't The Worst Thing In The World.

Trump - a paragon of vileness, ignorance, treason, and corruption - is the ideal vehicle for restoring perspective. That said, I haven't yet spotted much maturation in people's sense of proportion (watch folks howl when we wind up with President Pence, who, being on the wrong side of issues like abortion and LGBT, is The Devil Incarnate).

The Black Cop

THIS is how you punch a Nazi without actually, you know...punching a Nazi.
"FUCK YOU, SPENCER!" #SpencerAtUF👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽pic.twitter.com/NHXYLfg6j3

— Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 19, 2017

Some people might watch this video of the first 30 seconds of Richard Spencer's talk today at U of Florida and see a repugnant ass with a microphone. Others might focus, with sanctimony or ambivalence (I'm the latter), on the screaming kids drowning him out. What really gets my attention is a seemingly minor player: the very professional-looking black cop stoically standing there, protecting our enshrined right to peaceful free speech and assembly.

There were plenty of similar cops at the notorious Charlottesville rally. Always the black cop, completely unfazed, unimpressed, just keeping the peace. Period. That's the side he's on. Everything else is, quite rightly, yadda yadda.

Don't forget the cop. Focus on the cop. That's America. Not punching Nazis or drowning out Nazis or being Nazis; just standing there hyper-competently protecting everybody else's right to act like asshats. He's the good news people miss.

Baking Fresh Every Time

This is roughly-expressed - an insight "under construction" - but it's both true and seldom observed. And it applies to many facets of life - especially anything creative:


If your toddler daughter skins her knee and wails from the fear, and you somehow manage to say just the right thing so she immediately calms and feels better, you may repeat those same words with her some other time, or with other children, and they might help, but they'll never work quite as well. The words (or, really, whatever magic is behind those words) were tailored for that unique moment.

It's less so with everyday speech. But at crucial moments, when stakes raise, or something arouses inspiration, the result is always best seen as a one-off - a bell that can't be rung twice. Reused, the words will never have that magical effect. There's no getting around it; we need to bake fresh every single time.


One reason people seem to petrify a bit as they age is that they stop baking fresh. As every chowhound well knows, canned products are never the same.


__________

The above connects with "Desperately Parched for Surprise ".

See also:
Baking Banality
“Baking Fresh, Japanese Style"
"The Crux-of Creativity"

Perspective on the Scariness

An old friend asked the following on Facebook (in reply to this morning's scary posting):

I grew up in a country in which bigotry, racism and hatred were on the run. Equality, tolerance and acceptance were on the rise. What happened to that country? Why have we taken so many steps backwards??

Death throes. It's death throes.

The problem is that death throes and aftershocks can last a while, and be quite painful, even if, in retrospect, they're a negligible blip in the long march of history.

But look at these pathetic, incompetent idiots. Were the sad sacks at Charlottesville legitimately scary? Does Richard Spencer make you shake in your boots? For that matter, is Steve Bannon truly the diabolical mastermind he imagines himself to be? Or just a feces-throwing man-child?

75 years ago, someone like Bannon might have gotten real traction. Sean Hannity might have seemed like a bona fide gnarly superhero, and Sebastian Gorka a weighty visionary. But their time is past. We know it. We feel it. They're craptastic....not to say crap doesn't stink.

True, one of the Charlottesville mob killed someone. I'm not saying the situation is completely defanged, and I'm not saying things won't get worse before they get better (I've pointed out one possible avenue that might take). But this isn't the inky darkness of inevitable nihilism. This isn't all our hard-won gains collapsing. What this is is the impotent last stand of the assholes. It's their curtain call as they go out the door. They're entitled; they certainly had a long, long, long run!

Expect things to stink for a good while thanks to all the shit they'll be throwing. Hey, cleaning up is a dirty job. Did you really think it'd be easy?

My posting on Resilience included this relevant illustration:

See also The Un-Self-Aware Assholes’ Last Hurrah

Debbie Downer

Maybe I shouldn't post dark stuff like the previous, which needlessly puts people into an even gloomier frame of mind. That is not what these times call for.

But, as you likely recognize, I'm talking to myself here (while you eavesdrop). Working through ideas, making connections, trying to understand by explaining it all to myself. If I start directing this outward toward an audience, Slog might lose its sporadic, wheezing faculty for coughing up crude grains of insight.

I won't, however, linger in negativity. I like to mix it up! (that should probably be my epitaph...though I'm leaning toward "Kept all options open.").

Another Bone-Chilling Prediction (Sorry!)

I am not just non-tribal, I'm anti-tribal. And my parents knew better than to try to force me to be bar mitzvahed (at age 12 I spent after-school hours in full lotus position, wailing in Sanskrit. Not that my family paid the least attention, but even they got the idea and smartly gave me a pass). And I am a Muslim-loving race traitor. And I don't have a paranoid bone in my body, even when the world goes all Kafka on me.

So...that's where I'm coming from. You'll understand that I don't say the following in a knee-jerk way. It's not how I naturally think. This is not my intellectual groove:

The infectious smoldering of economic populism, of xenophobia, of white supremacy, and of vitriol at "coastal elites", media, "Wall Street types", etc., is not being pushed forward, I don't believe, primarily by anti-Semitic people (though plenty of rabid anti-Semites are, of course, conveniently enjoying that tide). However, The Jewish Problem is like super-dry, crackly, hyper-flammable kindling, lurking adjacently to it all, just out of frame.

Bring the intensity levels up just 20 or 30%, and anti-semitism will flash in a chain reaction so suddenly and so brightly that your retinas will scorch. It will arc, like lightning, through people who are not particularly anti-Semitic; who never quite connected their anger and bitterness to this particular scapegoat; who have Jewish friends and are generally decent people.

Millions lack clear awareness of the Nazi-ish mindset into which they've been gradually stirred. There's one essential chunk missing. Add it, and there will be a widespread, galvanizing sensation of fullness, momentum, and inevitability.


Re: my dire recent Puerto Rico prediction, I may, alas, have been right. See this.

"The New Rules"

Want to hear a widespread viewpoint almost completely unheard beyond the right wing bubble? Ben Howe of Red State, a conservative never-Trumper, had this very interesting response on "All In" last night when asked about Trump's threat against broadcast licenses:

"[With] lot of conservatives in previous administrations, if a president was going to go after the press - at their license specifically - I think they would've said "Why is the government involved in licensing media anyway?" And they'd talk free markets and things. At least that's what I would've done! But instead they seem to play by what a lot of them call "The New Rules" which is: "The Liberals made the rules and now we're gonna play by them!" So even though it might conflict with what should be their conservative point of view, they're going to end up taking the position "Yeah, let's take their license away because we're just following their new rules anyway!"

This seems to amount to a third conservative response to Trumpism. Response #1 was disgust and recoil (see Rick Wilson, et al), i.e. "This shit ain't conservative!" And response #2 was capitulation and revision (see Hannity, et al), i.e. "This is what we meant all along, even when we were very recently arguing vehemently in the other direction". But the "New Rules" Howe describes fit the tenor of our times. For many folks, conservatism is anti-liberalism, period.

The new rules - of utter reciprocity, and no "there" there in terms of conservative principle - explain many mysteries, from Hillary's defeat, to softness re: Russian on the Right, to the right's absolute inability to govern - "anti" only works as an opposition credo; you can't rule from "anti" (though Trump is trying hard, by brutishly uprooting each and every Obama program and appointee).


Re: the press/first amendment threat, don't miss McKay Coppins' new piece for Columbia Journalism Review, "What if the right-wing media wins?"

Know Thyself: 24 Cognitive Biases

Thanks to the legendary David Lerner, here's the placemat in the diner in philosopher heaven (I'm referring to the PDF linked at bottom).

Heads Up

I added a footnote to my previous posting, about smart Internet commentary.

The Role of a Critic

Internet commentary is mostly so disappointingly awful (it's awfully easy to forget how good it was for a minute with Chowhound). Yet there are still gold nuggets amid the mud. A few years ago, I found a shimmering bit of wisdom in a comment on some crappy Buddhism site. And tonight I stumbled across the following elegant thought, buried in a discussion of Penn and Teller's mildly interesting film about an inventor who tried to recreate a Vermeer painting:

"A good [film] critic should tell you what to look for in a picture, not what you'll find."

The most incisive takedown of modern-day atheism I've ever seen came via a letter to the editor of Wired Magazine.

More Puerto Rico Dread

Despite all the happytalk from our president, I'm far from assured that Puerto Rico won't wind up as I feared a week and a half ago.

Check out these two videos posted to Twitter by a small band of veterans who flew down to help out. They have "an urgent message to get out about what's really going on here in western Puerto Rico." People are drinking sewer water and they're starving.

Don Peppe: Clam Palace Grandeur in Ozone Park

I just posted the following to Chowhound.


I recently called Francesco's, a preserved-in-amber 1961 Italian-American tavern in White Plains, "The Last Great Italian-American Restaurant." I stand by that assessment when it comes to full-out Italian-American stuff, which is easy to find but excruciatingly hard to find good.

But there's Italian-American, and then there's Italian-Italian cooking...with maybe some American inflection. Don Peppe's, in Ozone Park down near JFK, is more along those lines. And it's just ridiculous, with a level of precision and perfection well above most of the cooking I've enjoyed in my life.

Don Peppe's is the sort of expensive cash-only place where elderly Italian men dine in track suits but the waiter demands you remove your hat. And I can't say I'm accustomed to $85 lunchs (including tip and a couple glasses of frigid "homemade" red wine). But, man, is it great.

I once devised a surprisingly non-ditzy system for rating foods on a scale of 1 to 10, and everything we ate here was tennish ("Absolute certainty that no one at this moment, anywhere on Earth, is eating anything more delicious than what you're currently consuming").

I didn't shoot photos because Yelpers have abundantly documented this place (see here). Let's go through the courses:

Baked clams are pulled from the broiler with a plus/minus .5 second tolerance. Another second and they'd have burned. There is nothing in the flavor of these baked clams that might surprise or intrigue you. This is baked clams 101, but the exemplar of the style. The sauce is tangy, but not so tangy that you'd remark on its tanginess. It's garlicky, but not to the point where you'd ramark on its garlickiness. Every parameter is optimized and balanced without any palpable effort. Not a bit of this is "impressive", it's simply as good a neighborhood Sunday-dinner-style representation as you'll ever taste, period, amen.

Linguini in white clam sauce has the same effortless sauce perfection. For example, the parsley is optimized for taste, not for visual; there's much less than usual, but it's precisely the right amount. But the pasta - oh, the pasta - is a master class in al dente. Cooked, once again, to a plus/minus .5 second tolerance. I imagine the chef watching the pot with enormous, bloodshot, violently locked-on cartoon eyes, but I'm sure it's second nature at this point. This doesn't mean, however, that decades weren't spent tortured with OCD, learning to get things just right.

Let's take a brief intermezzo while you digest the preceding, so I can debunk the biggest lie in food. Anytime someone tells you that the best cooking involves simply letting great ingredients sing, they are lying to you. Ingredients do not sing on their own, as any chef quickly learns. It's chefs - talented chefs! - who make ingredients sing, to the limits of their skill and diligence. Particularly great chefs erase their own tracks, so their efforts are not apparent in the final result, but this requires insane degrees of skill, talent, and hustle. You need to drive yourself crazy to cook effortless-tasting food. But, in any case, it's human skill and love that transforms ingredients into deliciousness, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. A magic trick requires a magician, and a completely seamless magic trick requires a great magician.

Veal scallopini with lemon and butter featured, naturally, fork-tender veal, but it wasn't the overly tenderized version served by the usual show-off places, where the veal's more viscous than meaty. It's meaty-satisfying AND disarmingly tender. And while it's clobbered with butter, the copious butter doesn't scream for your attention. It's worked in and optimally balanced with the lemon and the garlic. Tracks erased!

All these dishes come with sauce studded with whole cloves of garlic, evenly golden and melting (though still substantial). They must prepare these separately, and toss them in during the sauté. You don't see that much.

Broccoli rabe ("broccoli" on the menu) was not denatured of its bitterness, which I appreciated. And it was tender without being overcooked or stringy. Again: non-remarkable perfection in all aspects.

I rarely order red sauce in restaurants, because paying for disappointment is not really my thing. But at this point my two companions and I still had some appetite (we figured from the high prices that these dishes would be family-sized, but not really), and we decided we trusted the house enough to take the risk. So I went against all my experience and training and requested a $25 plate of spaghetti marinara. Less dramatic leaps of faith were seen in Jonestown.

I honestly don't remember much about the sauce (all sauces here are unremarkable in the very best sense of the term; they are simply exactly what you want). But the texture of the spaghetti was to weep for. Again: a masterclass in al dente. What a difference a nano-second makes! My teeth have experienced non-stop phantom-spaghetti effect ever since. I am literally gnawing at thin air as I write this. My needy, sorry teeth never felt completely UNDERSTOOD before, in all my decades of life.

We skipped dessert, which surely would have been a letdown, and we pulled clutches of 20s from our wallets, and it was good.

Important note: we arrived at 3:30 on a weekday, so the place was nearly empty (waiters played cards at a big round table). The food might not have quite this degree of shimmering optimization at peak hours.


Next time, I want to try their "Chinese chicken", a unique dish that apparently takes 55 minutes (not an hour; 55 minutes) to cook.

Consumerism in Politics

The following sentiment is heard from someone in our circles most every day:

When will they get rid of this horrid incompetent asshole?

Even aside from the civics naiveté, this represents the very worst of America at this moment.

Starting six months after we opened, lapsed regulars began to pipe up on Chowhound to complain about the poor posting quality. My suggestion was always the same: Post more! Make it better by contributing good stuff! Also: encourage the good posters, so their participation increases! The community is what you make of it! You do not play a passive role! But it was comical to observe their inability to see their own role in the problem - i.e. that they actually were the problem. By taking themselves out of the mix, they'd ceded to the idiots, and they blamed us for it! In their entitled consumerist minds, they were passively viewing a TV station, when they were actually program directors. So their reaction was entirely infantile: somebody fix this. Make everything better so I like it more!

We had an election. Most people didn't vote. Many who did opted for third party crackpots. And many Bernie people showered maximal scorn on Clinton long after her nomination was locked in, even fully recognizing who/what Donald Trump was. That election was where the problem happened. It was us. We had one task to do. Not to endlessly bitch on social media about the results, but to play an actual active role, and most of us blew it off or messed it up. And yet those same people flail at imaginary program directors, like the entitled American consumers they are, demanding everything be made better so they like it more, pronto.

How many of these people will vote in the 2018 midterms? Very, very few of them, that's who. But we'll continue to endure their loudmouthed pique and umbrage.

TV Tips

Ken Burn's "The Vietnam War" series on PBS was superb, but you knew that. Here are some lesser-known (and very lesser-known) tips.

The Deuce (HBO)
A non-titillating immersion into the 1970s porn scene by the creators of The Wire. Only saw the premiere so far, but, man, did they manage to evoke the New York of that era. I'm glad David Simon's finally moved on from Treme, which I couldn't watch (it's hard to appreciate fiction - in that case, about a jazz trombonist - when you're way too close to the topic).

You're the Worst (FXX)
Probably my favorite comedy series of the past few years. Romantic comedy featuring really dreadful people. The acting is so, so good (and subtle). The writing is intelligent and meticulous. There are relatively dry stretches, but they're always a necessary part of the writers' long game. Don't miss. Highly binge-able.

Rick and Morty (Adult Swim)
Can't talk about this in polite society anymore. Chuckleheaded fans have made asses of themselves, and now this show is a "You like that?" trigger term for a great many people. Yes, I like that. In fact, I love that. Everyone smart agrees this is one of the smartest TV shows ever created. Is it moral? Not particularly obviously so. But it raises smart questions about morality which, alas, non-smart fans fail to notice.

Fuck, That's Delicious (Viceland)
Reality show with a hip hop crew acting all outrageous for the cameras. Yawn. But most of it is about chowhounding, and one of them actually knows his stuff, food-wise. Fast forward between the food scenes. I first heard about this, strangely, via a Harrison Ford interview. On a cable channel you didn't know you had (note that if you're looking for this show in listings, it's usually just listed as "That's Delicious").

The Chris Gethard Show (truTV)
Are you a fan of bad TV? Uncle Floyd, the old Doctor Who, Joe Franklin, et al? This seems, at first glance, like more of that. But if you keep watching, it's quite a mind game. A crap show with pretensions? A serious show posing as crap? Shameless pandering to ditzy millennials or knowing millennial genius? I don't know and don't care. They have strangely famous guests, obviously embarrassed by the amateurishness, adding yet more puzzlement to the mix. Try to catch the episode with John Oliver, currently airing. And give it time...you'll need to suppress your initial aversion.


Previous TV tips