Good morning. Hello. How are you? #591

Curling. Moral calculus is hard. Latest batch of African coups. A new, nerdier, Jeff Bezos extortion attempt. Buy my book pleeeese.

Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am great. I did not oversleep today. In fact, I woke up like 90 minutes early, had to force myself to go back to sleep. I guess that’s what happens when you get too much sleep one night. Plus I have the day off—officially sanctioned, work-wide recharge day to make the three-day weekend a four-day weekend, because, February. I’m gonna write these words, my other words, then go to the Recycling center and the Walmart. Big day planned. And then, because the weather gods have deigned to make it 70 degrees and and at the last minute cancelled the rain they had scheduled for today, I’m gonna go out to the garden and start doing PREP work. Gotta dig some old gravel out of where I’m putting the new beds. Maybe do some tilling, maybe make a hoop house. All very exciting. Gonna be a swell day.

Made my one teeeny change to the GMHHAY manuscript last night. Emma is making her changes to the cover today. We are going to send these off to the printers today. I’ll buy some extras, but if you want one as quickly as possible, order the book now! Or wait twelve more days and order the digital versions. VERY EXCITING.

More curling last night. I don’t actually know the convention for spoilers in sports, I am watching replays, so it’s probably two days old, but still. I am just an interloper in this sportsland, don’t want to step on too many toes. Anyway that one guy keeps trying very complicated shots when simple ones will do, and he’s ruined himself in two different games with it. It is still all very exciting, though, and we have the men’s finals to watch and the women’s semi-finals and finals and then there will be no more curling in my life and I will be very sad and will have to return to my dystopian yet somehow still escapist sci fi. When the world is falling apart in the future it is fun television. When it’s falling apart now, it’s real-world trauma. Checks out.

Speaking of the dystopic now, good news. It turned out I was wrong, and Spotify did not give Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars. Nope. Turns out they gave him two hundred million dollars. Probably more! I swear to god. This planet has gone nuts. I refer you to this stellar article in The Atlantic by George Packer: We Are All Realists Now. Packer makes the very compelling point that the entire world has given up on any sort of advancement of human rights. Everyone is willing to compromise their morals these days for monetary gain. It starts out with the Chamath Palihapitiya quote that was basically 100% true but you’re not allowed to say it out loud, even though it’s how everyone feels these days: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs. I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line.” It ends with the story of an idealistic immigrant NBA player who didn’t get the memo that Americans don’t care about human rights anymore and ends up getting kicked out of the NBA for caring about human rights. In the middle it passes through Obama who states bluntly that even the Rwandan Genocide wouldn’t have merited an American response had we known about it in time. That’s where we’ve gone. From Bill Clinton racking himself with guilt (at least publicly )for his failure in Rwanda, and striving mightily in Somalia and Eastern Europe to avoid similar fates, to our hero liberal president saying he’d have just let half a million people die. And those are the good guys.

Nowhere is this new zeitgeist more apparent in this spectacularly craven yet refreshingly honest quote from famed golfer Phil Mikkelson, who is nobly shaking loose the shackles of the evil PGA by taking money from an actual murder:

Of course the flipside to all of this is that we are all exhausted and we have all learned way too much about unintended consequences. We remember Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam more than WWI, WWII and Korea. We know all about our leaders making shit up and we know all about our leaders killing our children for wars that have nothing to do with us.

One side effect of my daily country flashcards (still at it: Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, the Carribbean) is that I am sort of unwittingly paying more attention to international politics again in places that I haven’t paid as much attention to since I let my Economist subscription retire and stopped reading it cover-to-cover. Did you know that there have been a string of coups in the African Sahel? There is even a whole Wikipedia page about it. Two different coups in Burkina Faso in the last couple wof weeks. A coup in Sudan in October (plus a failed one the month before). A Coup in Guinea in 2021. A Coup in Tunisia in July 2021. A coup in Mali last May. An attempt in the Central African Republic beginning of last year. Sudan 2019. Not that the place was a hotbed of democracy before, but this…doesn’t seem great. And it’s more complex, at least in Mali and Burkina Faso, because of France’s failed attempts to provide assistence. Look I’m not 100% up on the situation but, yeah, bunch of coups, people are just like “oh. coups. yeah. that happens.”

Just like they explained in The Good Place, moral calculus is just so hard. So many people have decided that because moral calculus is hard and unintended consequences exist and people lie about their reasons that the only rational move is to wholesale abdicate getting involved in anything, to whole sale give up on making any difficult decisions about geopolitical ethics.

I might be going out on a limb here, but it feels like, to me, that just because moral calculs is hard doesn’t mean we don’t try? It doesn’t mean we don’t try and weigh and minimize the bad stuff? It means that rather than saying “well, Apple sucks because they are total softies on China and probably morally compromised on the whole thing and Spotify sucks because of Joe Rogan so I’m just not going to bother” we say “well, Apple sucks because they are total softies on China and probably morally compromised on the whole thing and Spotify sucks because of Joe Rogan so, for me, the most moral move is minimization in this manner?” Do we really whole sale reject performing the calculus? Is it just too hard? That seems… wrong and I do not like it.

I would tie this into some sort of larger comment here about democracy being on the defense worldwide, but I don’t quite now how to, though it is obviously playing a part. It’s all so depressing.

Anyway, records are made out of fossil fuels and they are terrible and I need to stop buying them but I don’t seem to be able to yet, but I will maybe try. I went through and found a few more duplicates, god, it’s really bad. One of these duplicates I think I’ve had for, like… ten years? Or more? Since living in Cambridge. It is stupid no one needs two copies of Indambinigi’s Zimba 12”. No one. Honestly, no one needs one, unless you are hell-bent on collecting every single release on Factory Records, in which case, drop a line I can definitely help you out with some of the stupid ones. Please, take this Morrissey/Vini Reilly 7” off my hands.

One other thing I am tracking: Very excited about the new Lord of the Rings “spin-off” happening at Amazon. Feel like it’s getting a bad rap in some quarters of internetland, but me and my pals on our text group THORINS THREAD are all pretty excited. Jeff Bezos is facing yet another extortion scheme, though. No not that one. Dude is a, shall we say, well-off fan of Middle Earth. He is spending a cool bil, at least, on Rings of Power. Yet, so far, all he owns are the rights to the Appendices of Return of the King, and the right to do an 8+ episode television series. He is going to want the rights to everything else, eventually. Lucky for him, they’re up for auction. Sort of. Saul Zantz Co is auctioning off the rights to the Lord of the Rings films, starting at a cool $2 billion, which they are assuming Jeff will pay, which is why they’re doing this now. Except even if he wins them, he has now just inherited a 10+ year legal wrangle between Saul Zantz and Warner Brothers, who claims they still have some rights, even though they didn’t keep making Lord of the Rings films, like they were supposed to, but they are now, honest which is why you’re getting that animated thing. So if he wants to get things free and clear, and get started making “real” Lord of the Rings movies (not that the Appendices arent going to be awesome), he’s gonna have to pay them off too.

Come on, Jeff. I ask you. What is the point of being so rich if you can’t resolve a nearly hundred year-old copyright clusterfuck on one of the world’s most beloved literary properties. Dooooo it.

All right, another mix. Let’s see if we can’t actually get off of Spotify this weekend, though I am deeply skeptical because Apple Music has been, lately, assaulting my ears with this super loud electronic noise sound when I stream certain songs. It is kind of messed up and I do not like it one bit. But I don’t know, man. Whast else amd I supposed to do.

Anyway here is a lot of shoegaze for you. God, there is so much shoegaze right now, it is so awesome. Remember that time in the mid-to-late 1990’s where there was almost no shoegaze? Great time to be in a shoegaze band, no regrets. I added a few late-90’s shoegaze flame-keepers here, though. Respect. But mostly this is new.