Last of three parts.
Here's the final episode of my interview with @iwelsh. In it, we discuss the mess that Twitter has become, and Ian shares what gives him hope.
Ian Welsh on Twitter Madness (Part 3 of 3), by @costrike https://t.co/drcygtQ3VC
— costrike (@costrike) December 21, 2022
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
I did an interview few weeks ago with Chris Oestereich, which he’s putting up in three parts. I listened to part three today and, while I rarely say this, I thought it was quite good and if you’re interested in any of these topics, probably worth your while. It clocks it at under 24 minutes.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
To American friends. I hope you have a good one.
Being lazy and being uninterested are two different things. When I was a kid I was usually reluctant to do most farm work, because it was boring, but would go for 10 miles runs or long runs, or read multiple books in a day (which many people who love farm work would hate doing.)
Most of what passes for lazy is uninterested in drag.
The old maxim: “work is what you wouldn’t do for free” is part of it, but there are four types of activities on this spectrum.
One is your hobbies, vacations and so on. Two is work you like, which doesn’t also fall into the hobby category. Three is most people’s jobs. Four is things you do because if you don’t do it something bad will happen, usually because someone else will make it happen.
When I was a kid most (not all) farm work fell into category four, and most of the rest fell into category 3. I didn’t ever get paid for any of it, but I used to spend some holidays on an Uncle’s farm, and I liked him, and we’d do the farm work then go do something fun. I was getting something from it.
Most of my jobs have been in category 3: I did them because I needed the money. I’m not working construction or baking or being a bike courier, or painting houses or doing life-insurance back-end administration if someone doesn’t pay me.
Blogging and writing fluctuates between category 2 and 1. Some of it I’d have done (or do) even if I wasn’t getting paid , but some falls into “this pays my bills and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t write this article if it wasn’t my job.” From about 2004-early 2009 the category 2 blogging also fell into “getting something for it” in the sense that I believed in the Netroots, and that we might get enough political power or influence to make good things happen politically. I would never have worked 70-80 hour weeks at FireDogLake just for the money (which was liveable, but only just), I did it because I believed in the mission and when it became clear just how awful Obama was and that the Netroots was falling apart, I quit, because I hadn’t been doing it mostly for the money.
I’m not entirely sure that laziness exists much. So-called “Quiet Quitting”, where workers refuse to stay late or do extra work is just enforcement of what moderns call “boundaries”, and classifying work as category 3. “I’m not doing more work than you pay me for, because I don’t enjoy it.” High wage workers understand that implicit to their high pay is doing more than is “on spec”, but doing more as a low paid worker, unless you think there’s a chance of meaningful promotions and wages is stupid.
When the people at or near the top get a 100x what the people in the middle get, and 200x what the people at the bottom get, and when most people know they’re never getting to the top and most won’t even get to the middle, and when they don’t share in profits, why should they work hard at jobs they don’t enjoy, or wouldn’t do for free?
I had a friend who, for years, had a rule that he wouldn’t do anything for money he wouldn’t do for free. It eventually broke down because if he’d kept the rule he’d have wound up homeless and then dead. His problem wasn’t super-fussiness, he wanted to do jobs that helped people and used his skills, but our society pays best for doing things that don’t help people. Since helping people is sort of an intrinsic reward (you get to feel good about yourself), we think people should do that form almost nothing, or nothing.
The weird thing is that getting people to do what they enjoy means they do more and better work, and that helping people has strong (econo speak) positive externalities. The more your society is focused on doing things that actually help others in some way, the better it is.
But our society concentrates on negative sum games (we are doing more harm than good, overall) and uses money primarily as coercion, rather than using it to allow people to do good things that they want to do, or are at least willing to do.
I don’t like farm work, but I have known many people who love it and do it for almost no money because they want to be farmers. We take advantage of that sort of impulse, in nurses and care workers and increasingly in teachers. Things that are good are done for cheap, and by less people than want to or than we need doing them, so that we can pay other people well to do things that are bad.
What you want to do absent excessive compensation or e is often a good guide for what you should be doing (not always) is often a good guide not only to what is good for you, but what is good for society and we need more of it, not less.
Many people think this means that important things that need to be done like garbage collection, janitorial labor and sewage work wouldn’t get done, but when Graeber did his research for “Bullshit Jobs” he found many people actually preferred that work because it felt useful, even when it paid less. I recently talked to a woman who works for a real-estate company which runs low-end housing. She used to make much, much more working for high end hotels, but she prefers this, because it feels like she’s helping people. “I’d rather clean someone’s shitty toilet after they’ve moved out than do any more of that bullshit.”
Incentives work, but they work best at getting people to do things which shouldn’t be done in the first place.
All right, this off-topic and not the sort of thing I usually write, but may be of use to some people.
Oddly despite being “very online” I’m sort of a luddite about certain things. I didn’t have a smart phone till 2015 (and at the time had no cell phone). A friend gave me my first one, and my second is a very nice hand-me down Pixel 4 from another friend.
As a rule I don’t take my phone with me when I go out. I get by on cards. Of course, sometimes I need my phone or a laptop, especially when traveling, but otherwise, they’re not on me.
I do this because I want periods when I’m not online, and not available to anyone. In particular, I often hang out at coffee shops and unless I have specific work I want to do, I don’t take any electronic devices with me except my e-reader. I often pack some paper books and a writing pad, and that’s it. I take notes on paper, and keep the notebooks.
I find this relaxing. It’s nice to not be online and it’s easiest if the device isn’t even with me: if it is, I may think “I should check…” and get sucked in. It’s simply a matter of making a habit unavailable. There’s rarely anything in my life so urgent it can’t wait a few hours.
Of course, I’m in my 50s. I grew up before cell phones. I remember before answering machines, even, and when pagers were rare and only truly essential, 24 hour on-call workers carried them.
I’m used to being out of touch. In a sense, I’m used to being alone. You can be very alone, even when surrounded by people in a big city, if you want to be, and I often do.
The studies are clear: social media is bad for you, and the more you do the worse it is. Being constantly connected, I’m almost certain, is likewise bad for you. You need space, you need time with your own feelings and thoughts when they’re not being jerked around. And if you want to think well, you need time to think alone as well in addition to time to think with other people.
This is, I guess, more of the sort of article written in lifestyle magazines and sections “how I spent 1 week unplugged” and whatnot, but I really do believe it’s healthy and if you can do it, you’ll find, once you get over the twitchy need to constantly check your phone or watch videos, or whatever you do, that it’s relaxing. It’s also a necessity for any sort of deep thinking.
Weber was concerned with ideal types. An ideal type is an extreme: a person who is entirely rational, a society that is entirely traditional. Ideal types don’t exist in the world, but they are useful for analysis. A society may be primarily traditional, and one can look at where it is traditional and where it isn’t. (For example, a lot of Dark Ages society was traditional, but there was also a lot of value rational action.
The four types are goal rational, value rational, affection/emotional, and traditional.
Goal rational is “I want to accomplish X, so I do Y. You want to lose weight, so you diet. But this is a good example of how goal rational can be mixed up: how you achieve the goal is dieting, but whey you want to be thin could be because you think fat people are bad, or you want to look better, or because people in your organization are usually thin (ascetics, for example.)
Value rational is similar to virtue ethics. You tell the truth, even if it’s bad for your other goals, perhaps. You give money, because charity is a value you follow. You stand and fight because you believe in bravery or discipline, even though the fight is helpless. Classical Greek ethics is heavily value rational, and so was a lot of Victorian ethics and society. When someone says we should give everyone health care or no one should be in poverty, because everyone human deserves dignity, that’s value rationality. When you say that everyone deserves health care because it costs society less and because it makes the spread of plagues and disease less likely, that’s goal rational.
Affective/emotional is when you act based on your emotions. You’re sad and you cry, you’re angry and you hit someone or scream at them. You might hit someone even though you believe in non-violence, and you might cry even though you believe “real men don’t cry.” You might hit someone even though that will get you in prison, and that would interfere with your various goals in life. Your emotions are in charge.
Traditional is when you do it that way because that’s how your group or society does it. Dark Ages and Medieval society was very traditional: your forbears had certain rights, it’s traditional, and thus you get them too. Correct action is the action which has always been taken. Religions are often torn between value rationality and traditions, but so are nations. Whenever someone says, “this is how we’ve always done it” you’re dealing with traditional action. Traditional action has a bad reputation post-enlightenment, but it’s not all bad: unwritten constitutions are traditional constitutions, “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.”
Traditional isn’t necessarily irrational: if something has been done for a long time, it may be because it has worked, and making changes could have unforseen effects. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, things will keep going as they have. Of course, it doesn’t always work: burning fossil fuels because we’ve been doing so for 250 years is a good way to create radical change: not what someone who genuinely values tradition usually wants.
All types of action have value. Goal oriented is often the best way to actuate the other three, but it’s amoral. The Nazi bureaucrats making the trains and furnaces run on time mostly did so not out of any real belief in the holocaust, but because their primary value was to do what they were told to do in the most efficient and effective way. Confucius emphasized that if you do a traditional ritual without feeling the appropriate emotion (sorrow at the death of your parents, for example) you have failed the ritual, since the purpose of rituals is to create emotions in specific circumstances: and those circumstances and emotions are based on values, such as reverence for your parents.
So when you try to analyze actions using Weber’s classifications, what you’re looking for is how the types of action fit together. If traditional actions aren’t maintaining the society or group, traditional action is undercutting itself, for example. Is a goal based action leading to a goal supported by one of the other three types of action? Are your value based actions undercutting the larger goals, and if they are do the values or the goals need to change?
But also, if you know why someone is doing something, you can talk to them effectively. Saying the only way to save our society is to burn less fossil fuels works with a traditional actor. Saying that burning fossil fuels hurts more people than it helps may work with someone value oriented who thinks compassion, kindness and charity are important. And to activate people who are primarily emotional, pictures and stories of animals and humans being hurt might work best.
Without an understanding of the type of action, the type of rationality, you can’t understand others’ actions or influence them effectively, especially if they are acting from a type of rationality you don’t respect and you can’t predict their actions.
People are different; societies and groups are different, and understanding the the ways in which they are different opens up the world for you.
Hush. He will tell the story forwards, but it makes more sense in reverse.[xcviii]
He was at his house, leaving. He closed a red door and he thought “I must have it painted black.”[xcix]
His car was broken. It was a Mercedes Benz. It had been broken since 1969.[c]
So, he walked up the road. It was a long row to hoe and he would be walking for two solid days to get to where he was going.
And on that second day, the waters parted from the waters.[ci] The mirror crack’d from side to side as the man turned to the dirt path from the paved.[cii] There were trees crowded around the road and twigs dropped into the puddles from above. Again, he looked above at the clouded sky. There was no rain falling. Yet. But it was pregnant and foreboding. The late winter weather seemed waiting to drench him again. At least it was not snow.
He trudged along the basin. To his right, there were glimpses of a large reservoir. The reservoir was where the Dnipro and the Pripyat merged and converted. It was a Kingdom of crooked mirrors – which bank was which?[ciii] He realized he was more tired than he thought.
There was the quiver of spring, but not yet, not yet. Then ahead a yellow pickup truck was parked in the distance. Joy leapt from his heart. He ran very slowly because the trail was made of mud, and he had a long way to go. His eyes were fixed on the yellow back of the truck hoping that he could rest. Even if rest was in the back. Even if rest meant sitting in the rain. Anything was better than this. Anything.
So along he ran with drench green boots and tatter fur on the inside with brown coat draping and gray hat dropping. Then he saw, he saw… He saw nothing. The was no driver behind the wheel. It seemed as if the truck was abandoned. A crushing feeling made him feel more alone. He went walking; a sad walk at that.
Along the truck’s edge until he reached the driver’s side. There, there was a body. He could see red that exited towards the back. He did not see the face. It was a civilian – all the good that got him. Then he spied the keys still in the ignition. Never one to look at the teeth he opened the door and pulled the corpse out.[civ] For a moment he saw the wrinkled face. It had a white and black freckled beard. The man looked away, quickly. Very quickly. One should not look at a dead man. It would be irreligious and sacrilegious.
But in the driver’s seat, everything felt different. He felt a little bit in charge. He sat upright. His boots still felt wet and outside the precipitation went to ice, but these things did not matter. He checked the petrol and found it half full. He ignored the murmuring in his head that it was just too fortunate to find a truck with any amount of fuel in it. Coincidence.
The wheels slogged through the grime. It had been raining much of the time and the road showed the wear and tear of the late winter rain with a vengeance. He focused now on driving because his eyesight was not as it used to be. But he ignored glasses. Too fragile, too delicate, to easily lost, to easily forgotten.
He was a man, God damn it.[cv] Oleg was his God-given name.
Then up ahead there were men on the road. Infantry men. Green clad infantry men. Russian green clad infantry men.
There were only two choices, and he did not have time to choose either. The truck stopped.
The window was rolled down by inches which a manual window handle moved. Teeth.
The first man on the outside placed his hands over the door, and began to speak:
“What are you doing driving around here?” The face was young, the words were plastic. The young face stared blankly into his eyes with a brown surreptitious look.
The soldier came knocking upon the Queen’s door.[ii] With the twiddly branches of old white oak trees planted a long time ago on wide boulevards hanging delicately over streets whose names had been forgotten. The streets were brightened by crossings lattice lines of electrical round lights with the patina of old bulbs – the new kind which made less heat were still being debated in the council chamber. Now one spoke over these wires. In the distance large rectangular office buildings humped in the skyline. It was the largest creation of humanity in the land now called Ukraine.
The soldier came knocking with ill intent. In the soldier’s mind, he was a conquering hero who would be venerated by his citizens. But the citizens did not see him that way and so the soldier came crashing down on the Queen. A Queen that had been known for her wit. Many thought that she would bend and break when threatened by so much as a glower. Threads across the boulevards were no match, so it seemed, for the brutality and bluster of the soldier.The sun rose, and the day woke up clear. It was the kind of spring where the buds start their inexorable march towards unfolding. A man looked up from the sidewalk and merely stared at the loveliness that surrounded him. Spring does not care for the goings-on of soldiers.
A ray is where a spark pours but Aleksander was not in tune with the season, instead he brooded on the days yet to come when the Russians would strike with all their might against Kyiv. He knew he would be at the front because of his long days of training over the last several years. In that time, he had grown used to an overbearing demeanor and crisp sharp commands. He had also been given trust over those he commanded because there was nothing that he asked of any man that he would not do himself.
He looked down at the sneakers and stretched out his toes. It was a morning off before he went back to the area that had become the base. But Aleksander found nothing but time to brood on the coming night’s events. Though he would not pass the words over his lips, he was afraid, deeply deathly afraid. So, would be any man who knew rivals were trying to find their foes and that rockets were landing a higgedly piggly to turn over the earth and scatter its contents hither and yon.
He looked up and down the boulevard with no cars, people, trucks, or dogs. Only the cats were scattered over the asphalt, and most of them were retiring. It felt serene. And it was serene most of the time, but rockets’ red glare had intruded a few times in the night. They ripped down concrete walls and huge windowpanes. He saw one just down the street.
Then up ahead, he saw a young man with black hair. He would see that man in uniform very soon because the young man was part of his company.
Of course, being an officer, he spoke. “Greetings.”
Leo looked up; it was clear that he had been distracted by his thoughts. “Kapitan.” A clear smile lit up the young man’s face. “I would not have taken you as a man who would spend any time wandering the street. Are you going to be ready for tonight?” And then hastily: “Sir.”
Aleksander smiled. Leo had only been promoted to Serzhant recently. It was still a junior non-commissioned officer rank.
“Serzhant, I will tell you a small secret: we must be ready to do our duty but realize that we are never truly prepared for any eventuality.” The words came out of his mouth, and they formed a regular type of dialogue that he had mastered in his time in the Army.
Leo nodded.
Sometime later Aleksander was controlling a tank, and Leo had the helm. It was dark, and dark clouds still overhead. They were in the woods with trees crowded around them. It was auiet, and the wind did not blow on Aleksander. It was is reaching for other lives: a pot on the fir git ground; a ripped up pooh now distend out of pooh corner; lingerie divinized with no one left to wear it.[iii] Shredded bags and torn blankets skiterred. Only the hut is white.
There was an urgency. Into the night munitions fired and detonated. Aleksander looked up, down, and all around.
In a flash, he saw a weapon. In the bushes. Aiming; aiming for him. There was a moment of panic. But only one, because without realizing it his pistol was locked and loaded. Both men fired. His enemy missed.
Aleksander did not.
The soldier was killed.[iv]
Off in the distance, a helicopter bloomed white and exploded. Crash, beep, beep.[v]
Without realizing it, he went through the motion of halting the tank. Then he slung over the side with Leo watching his commander’s coolness under fire.
Aleksander went on all fours and examined the kill. It was a Yefréytor – a private first class. He too was young. As were the young men he protected. Waste of life otherwise. But his charges would come home, to their mothers and sisters.
“Sometimes nothing happens like on the wing of songs.”[vi]
Then looking down at his work.
“Sometimes I dig the grave.”
[i] On the wings of song.
[ii] An allusion to Vega, “The Queen and the Soldier”.
[iii] An allusion to Milne , “A House at Pooh Corner.”
[iv] An allusion to Vega, “The Queen and the Soldier”.
[v] The Playmates,“Honk, Rattle, Crash, Beep Beep”
[vi] Lesya Ukrainka (Леся Українка) – Book of poetry. Title.
There are moments that un-terrorize visions of horror. Twisted metal burned on a stroad with houses, one touched to another, in this, the East of the West. Bucha was a name that few people heard of; it was a point on a map outside of Kyiv. Even the few who had heard it had heard it almost recently on charts of a faintly military hue. Gogol would be proud of the objective – all Slavs.
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