From Clifton Mark, in Aeon:

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.

As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

LMAO

feeling the river-cut rivulet paths of the many focus eras of my life. from when I wrote songs daily, to poems, to jokes, to fiction, to physics, to code, to commercials… there are so many possible paths for a thought to ping around in, and they all come out at different times. I never know which response will tumble out, or what further transformations will occur once I look away. and I wonder, half-asleep, how the paths intersect, and how much of what feels like wasted effort on dead-end paths has created the impossible calamities of creative eruption, and which electric habit-paths from 20 years ago factor silently into getting from present-day question to unforeseen answer?

Queen — Who Wants to Live Forever

Nick Slater, in Current Affairs:

Is the inability of most Americans to emigrate really that big of a deal, considering all the other problems of the present day? Isn’t complaining about this just whiny American privilege? Plus, given that most people prefer to stay where they are, then if the United States had non-exploitative healthcare, a stronger social safety net, and a housing market with any semblance of sanity, why would you even need to move elsewhere?

If those questions have entered your mind, banish them! They originate from the premise that human beings should only hold rights that can be “justified,” and those rights should be grouped into hierarchical categories. If people want to move from Place A to Place B, then you are presuming they’d better have a good reason for it. They better meet the right criteria of “deserving,” too. And before they fight for the right to move, they better fight for more immediately pressing rights like universal healthcare. This kind of logic is profoundly authoritarian. Not only does it constrict people’s ability to make choices about their own lives, it also serves to fragment and isolate various struggles for freedom, which can then be stymied or crushed altogether.

[...]

There seems to be a general understanding, even if it’s often smothered, that freedom should be humanity’s default setting.

What happens when it becomes obvious this is not the case in the United States? Americans have long been indoctrinated to believe they enjoyed freedoms that were the envy of the world. This lie has always been obvious to some—Native Americans, Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and others who have never enjoyed the luxury of pretending otherwise—but today the gap between “how free we think we are” and “how free we actually are” has never been clearer. The vast majority of Americans have no meaningful freedom to choose their job, care for their kids, or even protect their own health. And despite capitalism’s promises to provide all the lifestyle choices you could ever desire, few of us have the option of trying our luck elsewhere if we want. There’s something sobering about the thought that, for most people, moving to Canada is as realistic as moving to the moon.

julia jacklin - comfort

the rest of this album is more intense than this closer, but it's one of the better acidic-sweet songwriter albums I've heard in a while. sparse, painful, thoughtful. there's a song where she howls at the end that reminds me of how good it feels to howl melodically, and also how rarely I get to do that anymore.

the last, best show I did as a solo musician was over a decade ago now; I played songs of mine on guitar and piano in the basement room at blackbird coffee, to maybe 50 people, howling and crooning my way through years of creative effort, capable and confident that whatever I was doing, I could do it well. several people told me it was one of the strangest and most beautiful concerts they'd ever been to. I stopped performing live shortly thereafter, because of a hundred reasons, mostly because the tension of maintaining the practice of all these songs without feeling there was any payoff in sight became too much to live with. some dreams die so that the body may live.

I haven't had a space of my own to feel comfortably alone in, in almost a year. I haven't had room to sing at the top of my lungs for most of this year. I'm very grateful to the people who have housed me and put up with me for this very strange interval, and if I can keep up with my work, there's every likelihood I can have a place of my own by January. it's expensive, simply occupying space. I don't want much. just to howl at the room.

This drives me skyward:

No she isn’t, you detached and detestable democratic fossils. She and Biden both suck in similar ways, and you owe the country more than one apology for running toothless establishment conservative cowards rather than letting the rising and broadly-supported leftist movement of full healthcare, immediate climate action, decriminalizing drugs, eliminating police, and improving labor conditions in a more meaningful way than marginally increasing hourly minimum wage, AND prosecuting white nationalist terrorists including the current administration… just to name a few things both Hillary and Biden functionally ignored in their campaigns.

You do not know the fuck about which you speak, Philippe, and you should retire so someone better-informed can make decisions for the future.

I looked at the election counts for the first time just now, and I gotta say, for trump to get tens of millions of votes this year, for it to be even CLOSE, is....................... abysmally frustrating re: this nation and its population of absolute fuckers

whether he wins or loses, we are drowning in people with dangerous alignments shaped by unreality

Steve Krouse, in Lunch with Alan Kay: how to become educated enough to invent the future:

Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

I've had an extraordinarily-difficult time forgiving myself for not achieving certain goals I set in my late teens. And without being condescending at all to those younger than I am now, or to myself back then, I finally agree with this: a goal is just an idea you had. It might be a good one, it might be terrible, it might lead somewhere interesting, it might ruin your life. Following your feelings and interests is good, but committing early to something that "consumes your horizons" is... not a great idea.

There's a lot of pressure on us to specialize, to start a career, to become something, anything as early as possible. I beat myself up for a decade because I didn't become a professional musician by age 20, but my god; the chances of that happening given where and who I really was were so slim. It wasn't my fault that my life took other — difficult but often quite interesting and fulfilling — turns. The only real effect of refusing to give up that ghost dream was that making music drained of its pleasure for a long, long time. What a shame that is. But it's okay. I forgive myself my passion, because it came from a beautiful place but was wrung out by horrid cultural forces.