Week of February 16th, 2020

Hope you’re doing well. I’m sick as hell and way behind on a programming project. Joy.

Perhaps you saw it, but my younger brother posted the first trailer (for your left ear’s enjoyment apparently) to his first feature-length, though probably not feature-quality, film. I am in this, and it’s coming out this spring, so it is technically my first feature. I couldn’t be prouder. In addition, his friend announced the end of his Portal fan movies with a trailer. I love seeing the academy film tradition that we saw start continue on its own terms.

Did you see the debate this week? If you didn’t, do. It’s tremendous entertainment watching Mike Bloomberg self-destruct as shitty apologetic Donald Trump and making me root for Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar. Strange. We saw that Senator Sanders fucking hates Bloomberg and that Senator Klobuchar fucking hates Buttigieg, and both justly, if you ask me. Moderate Republicans rooting for Buttigieg can fuck right off (just look at this shit). There were so many wonderful moments. Everyone was so intense and aggressive. Everyone was visibly angry and unreasonable. It’s everything politics should be. Though, it is very important to note that something very shady is going on. NBC, without explanation, cut this part of the debate wholesale from the video on all platforms. It is very, very suspicious.

President Trump should be laying low and getting his approval rate up. He should go kiss some veterans and shake hands with babies or whatever the hell politicians do in times like these. He should be the winner of this week’s debate! Instead, he’s being a fucking idiot and pardoning his buddies. Not only is it disgraceful, it’s fucking stupid. Wait until after the election, damnit! This is the president’s race to lose, and it looks like he might just do it.

And now, Senator Sanders has reversed his promise of transparency over his medical records despite having had a heart attack! Geritocrasy is a great time.

Have you heard of what’s been going on with Dr. Jordan Peterson? He was such an important alternate culture right-wing icon back in, say, 2017. I was even a fan before I realized that he’s a terrible philosopher who makes his clout on misquoting Kant. Even when I was a fan, it was clear that he wasn’t totally stable. He’d talked about his depression and mental illness from time to time, and seemed to be in some personal pain. In 2018, he started losing his marbles. His daughter, a critical part of the JP lore, got him onto an all-beef diet which he advocated. He started to become more and more incoherent, which is why I stopped following him, and it’s now come to life that his mental health was severely declining.

Well he got addicted to Benzos, and his daughter shipped him off to Russia to recover cold turkey, contrary to medical advice receiving experimental treatment such as being put into an unnecessary coma. Strange. I think what feels so odd about it is that this is a man who has positively affected the lives of many young men with a message, though carrying some odd political and philosophical views, showed them why they must get their shit together. He got me to clean my room, metaphorically speaking, and it’s weird to see him vulnerable, weak, and possibly insane. People have been trying and failing to make sense of the man since 2017. I’ll give it a few years before I even try.

Whatever happens, now is a terrible time for hack writer Jim Proser to publish his new book Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization, perhaps the worst possible attempt to answer that looming JP question. It’s existence is so wildly out of time and out of touch, I can’t stop laughing about it. It’s such a straightforwardly misguided perspective, and I cannot help but think less of the people who buy into it.

In prior years of my life, I was a bit more susceptible to pseudoscience, though if you told me that, I would reject in on its face. Schools and other apparently trustworthy sources are wrong about virtually fucking everything, but dangerously so, at least in my case, regarding quantum physics. The explanations of quantum physics that I knew were part of the reason that I held on to faulty conceptualizations of consciousness and our place in the universe. Learning that so much of the language surrounding popular discussion of quantum mechanics was bullshit freed me in some ways to think more clearly. This entirely scientifically-oriented video does a great job at expediently cutting through that BS and demonstrates why science is philosophy.

This week, I discovered that another listicle website has stolen one of my Reddit comments as content, which is great timing, since the CollegeHumor article from before is now gone as their parent company has gone bankrupt. It’s a pretty popular website, too, from what I gather. I’d like to pretend to wonder who reads these things, but I think we both know the answer. I used to read these things.

The President decided to break from tradition, and write a good tweet! He has actually done so a few times this week, but this reminded me of something I forgot to share last week. You may remember that two weeks ago I wrote a whole thing about Rush Limbaugh’s cancer diagnosis and about how grace is crucial. Almost immediately after I wrote that, Limbaugh was saying the worst shit about Buttigieg. Follow that link if you want, but you already know what it is. And of course, the storm of people wishing Limbaugh ill rose again. And it genuinely pissed me off, too. I think I forget to easily just how shitty the shitty things people like Limbaugh say and believe really are. But I think this cemented the example for me. If I ever prance around shouting that I wish someone and his family pain, that I wish someone destruction, that I think someone is beyond grace (just grace, not redemption, not vindication), slap me because I’m not sure who I would be anymore.

Finally, I send you this short video without any explanation or commentary.

Thanks,
Jacob Morris