BBC - The Trap, What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom

part 1

John Nash - devised the Prisoner's Dilemma, equations showing that self interest always trumps helping others. Got Nobel Prize. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic. The idea: there's no grant unifying theory of "the people" since everybody has only self-interest at heart: the Impossibility Theory. (oh, he's the one portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind". How amazing that Disney left out the fact he was notorious for his cruel games, above all his "Fuck you buddy" where you could only win through betrayal.)

Cold War, resulting from game theory: ends in an equilibrium where you made sure "the other" had no interest in attacking you - in this case by keeping squadrons in the air 24/7, by having enough missiles to destroy them -. Both sides lowering the amount of weapons will never work: you cannot trust the other, then you'd give him an advantage.

Game theory: the idea you can incorporate your enemy into your own thinking.

Tests carried out in relationships: people constantly battle to "win".

Government wants control for a "perfect" society. The result, for some, is the dictatorship of the USSR.

A test: distinguish between madness and sanity? 8 people including David Rosenhan went to different mental hospitals, hearing voice in their head that said the word "Thud". That was the only lie. Otherwise they were to behave as normal as possible. None of them had a history of mental illness.
It took some of them two months to get out. Doctors didn't believe them. Only by pretending to be sick and then getting better, they got out.

Tests were made, hundreds of thousands of people were questioned. A computer "computed" who was sane. Half of the American people had a form of mental disorder.

The tests changed. Became checklists. Tell us what to do / how to be if we are not insane. If you don't have this-and-this, you are sane. A new form of control by the government.

Thatcher claimed a new freedom. But knew she needed a new way to control the people. Again, numbers. Public servants were encouraged to follow their self interest.

"Zealots are less interested in incentives and self-motivation like money. You don't want too many of them in a group."

Computations were made by some guy: how many megatons needed to be dropped on the USSR, how many people killed and how much of its industry destroyed, to win. When applied to the Vietnam War, it showed its horrible face. "body count" had been considered a rationele for success: kill enough enemies and we know we are doing fine. So troops started to shoot civilians to get to their targets...
A year later he resigned. And was later asked by Thatcher to oversee the reform of the NHS in Britain. "Give incentives to do a better job." Shedding all incentives to work for the public good.

All of this based on the kind of people John Nash created in the 50s to make his game theory work.

The idea of freedom in the West is deeply rooted in the paranoia and the suspicion of the Cold War.


part 2

John Mayor tried to mimic the self interested drive of free market. Public servants got performance targets --> can achieve them in any way. They become entrepeneurs.

Clinton made a "smaller" government. Couldn't pay for his plans with the existing deficit. Listened to Alan Greenspan and Citycorp guy: let the markets do their work. Thus, dismantled most of the safety nets put in place in the 30s.

Freedom redefined: the ability of individuals to get whatever they want.

"Liberation management", a real thing. Tom Peters is an ass.

"You can never win when you deal with the public" a very sour politician?

This would start to undermine the very ideas of democratic freedom.

James Buchanan: politicians, like public servants do not server the public. This is a fiction. They too followed their self interest.

John Nash idea, about people always just following their self interest. Philip Morowski: People are little information processors. The market is the ultimate information processor. Voting - or a democracy - is a weak information processor, inefficient.

"You think of yourself as trying to create more of yourself when you procreate. Instead, you are just a vehicle for your genes. They are using you to ensure their survival." And then of course Richard Dawkins comes looking around the corner.

During the cold war, people were reduced to mathematical equations, simple desires that could be modelled - using game theory - because they lived in a scary era full of unknown dangers. In the 90s, the Cold War was over, but the theory persisted and claimed to fully describe man, his desires, goals and aims. A machine model of human beings. Ready to be adjusted. Not through politics, but by how well every single machine performed. Doctors and psychiatrists are now in control, by defining and quantizing all mental illness, by defining who is healthy and who needs adjustment. "Generlized Anxiety Disorder". Everybody suffered from it. "Panic Disorder". Checklists with only objective symptoms, deliberately not listing WHY these were experienced.

Drug companies started to manufacture "rssi"'s, such as prozac, adjusting the amount of seratonine flowing through the brain. The checklist became a powerful, seemingly objective guideline to people what should be considered normal. A static society was created of "normal people", defined by the checklist. "They imagine living in a world where there's never grief"

They deliberately excluded any understanding of the patient's life. And guess what? "it confused genuine psychological disorder with normal human feelings, like sadness and anxiety. This was happening on a wide scale." All done by Robert Spitzer. "So you effectively medicalized ordinary human feelings like sadness, fear, ordinary experiences.."
RS: "I think, to some extend. I don't know what the percentage is. 20 or 30% That's considerable. But we don't know. Whether it's 20 or 30%"

"Those drugs made them happier human beings. But they also made them simpler, more ordinary. Easier to predict and manage. Closer to the machine-like creatures at the heart of the economic models. [...] More efficient. Less human."
"A medicalized illusion of an epidemic."

In the UK, Tony Blair, new Labour, followed Clinton, selling government organizations to the banks.

The treasury, under Gordon Brown: they invented ways to assign numbers to things that previously no one thought could be measured. Hunger in Africa was to be reduced below 48%. And all the villages in England were to be measured for their Community Vibrancy Index.  Even the life in the country side was broken down into a series of indices, one of them measuring how much bird song there should be."

Almost immediately, New Labour began to discover human beings were more complex than the simple model allowed for.

In hospitals, wheels of "trolleys" were removed so they were no longer trolleys. People were scheduled for meetings during their holidays, so they couldn't come... but targets were met. Polic reclassified many crimes (including assault) as mere "suspect behaviour"... so targets were met.

Government response? Even more levels of target management. A more rigid society emerged. At its heart: education. Government tallied best and worst schools: this would entice schools to do better, all of education would improve. The opposite happened. Rich parents moved into neighbourhoods of the best schools, driving up the house price, driving away poorer people. All schools started teaching their pupils only what they needed to know to pass the exam, in order to meet the criteria, thereby hiding the wider education from them that they needed to rise above their poverty.

The inequalities not only determine how you will live, but also when you will die.

Politicians see things spiralling out of control.

And now, the simplified equation of human beings being simple automatons, programmed by our DNA millions of years ago, begins to erode. In the 90's, scientists discover that cells choose which part of DNA to copy.

And now, John Nash, who once championed the idea of humans solely fighting for their own best interest, starts to doubt his own theories, starts to realize the human being is more complex than that.

part 3

Alan Enthoven: Recommending missiles under ground, missiles in submarines, and all that, was a way to make it all more stable. We're trying very hard to reduce the likelyhood of nuclear war by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack, either a nuclear attack or a convential attack. Yeah, so, incentives are important to them.

Jungle Book (2016)

Nice enough but nothing really exciting. I wasn't miffed by the talking animals (which were exceptionally realistic) but couldn't say I cared a lot.

Philomena

with Steve Coogan (good actor here, I knew him previously just from "funny" stuff) and Judy Dench.

Quite moving story about an elderly Irish lady trying to find her son who was sold while she was a nun. Very effective "true" story telling. Both the journalist (Steve Coogan) and Philomena (Dench) go through an arc, but no muffy Hollywood way, yet very, very moving. He turns from cynic to angry, she finds peace. Beautiful.

Paul Robeson (vinyl)

"Me Curley Headed Baby" very old, but quiet for a Sunday afternoon.

"The World is Yours"

Heard "The world is yours" from "Scarface" for - I think - the very first time.

Eerily reminiscent of "Exit Music (For a film)" by Radiohead. Wondered if they were inspired by it.

SidiRum - "LUNA EP"

Electro, slow beats, spacey sounds.

Remo-Con - "Streams" (Nhato Remix)

Catchy, good house rhythm.

Mono - "The Last Down"

Quite amazing album. Same postrock soundscapes, but amazing melodies. "Cyclone" for example.

The beginning of "The Land Between Tide & Glory" is sad and lost.

Designated Survivor

Kiefer Sutherland as hapless president. I just want him to be Jack Bauer.

Westworld (season 1, 2016)

Enjoyed it despite the plot/logic gaps. I wonder where they will take it in season 2.

The western styled rendering of songs like "Paint it Black" and "No Surprises" was quite amazing. Must look into Ramin Djawadi.

Refused - "Refused are fucking dead"

Punk, screaming, fast riffs. Nice nice nice.

"Tannhäuser / Derivè" - violin with postrock guitar!?

Pyramidal

nice electro, floating, whispering.

Haruki Murakami - "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles"

    ... It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to win its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos.
    I rinsed my mouth and went on looking at my face for a time.
    I can't find the image, I said to myself. I'm thirty, I'm standing still, and I can't find the image.

Meaningful misery

Acknowledge negative emotions:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/negative-emotions-key-well-being/

Edge of Tomorrow

Remember seeing the posters and not thinking much of it. But it's a cool sci-fi time-travelling story. Almost not too Hollywood-ish.

Midnight Special

Boy shoots light from his eyes and moves to a higher / other plane at the end, while followed by FBI and whatnot.

"A cult classic in the making", the airline's description read. My bad for hoping that might even be slightly true.

Nightcrawler (2011)

With Jake Gyllenhaal.

Not bad. Lots of LA driving shots, him the dirty reporter that would do anything, including staging a shootout between mobsters and police, and getting his "partner" killed in the process, but it didn't really hit me. Good mood though.

Amy Hempel - "New Stories from the South"

Emily Quinlan - "The Green Belt"

    It was hard to be a triplet! You couldn't blame anything on anybody. Always you were there, sitting right across from two copies of yourself who were doing correctly what you had just done wrong.

    He didn't know what they were communicating to each other. He used to be better at that, that knowing. These days he brought Pamela coffee when she wanted to sleep, tried to kiss her when she was dreaming of salad.


Marjorie Kemper - "Discovered America"

this story blew me away completely

    When we'd pulled up, Dr. Grueber had been working on a GM van in his driveway. He was middle-aged - I couldn't help thinking he was the right age to have worn a German uniform during World War II. He washed his hands at the sink with Borax. He dried them on a towel hanging off the kitchen stove.
    "So! Poison ivy!"
    "Right," John whispered. John's head had eaten his neck; John was the color of Paul's fire truck, he was in no condition to question his new doctor's credentials, his diagnosis, or his living arrangements.
    "Cortisone," the doctor said briskly. "Some pinephrine for good measure, I think," he added, eyeing John.
    Dr. Grueber opened the fridge and batted around in it. A family-size bottle of ketchup fell out on the floor. The doctor kicked at it, and it lodged beneath a baseboard that had never seen a scrube brush. He called to the woman in German.
    She was leaning against a counter and answered him in English. Hefound was he was looking for in the door. Where she'd said it was.

    Abortionists don't, as a rule, have green thumbs.

    I knew from the start I couldn't take a chance on having John's baby. To have it was to be stuck with John forever because that's the way I am. And by then I believed that a woman had a right to a life not patched together from mistakes she'd made when she was too young or too dumb to know any better - like marrying a Yankee who talked too loud and didn't like her mother; a man who got midnight hang-up-calls and wanted it every night. (I never bothered hunting for her underwear.)

    The bathroom was tiny. You couldn't have swung a cat.

    With your automatics, I found driving a car is not that big of a deal. D is for drive. That's pretty much it. I had no need of reverse. The worst part is you can't close your eyes crossing bridges. I drove to Dallas.

    But we'd none of us listened, and now it was too late. Death was on television like a beauty pageant; it was in my grandfather's familiar cigarette cough; it was enthroned trumphant in my empty womb; it was depicted on the front page of every newspaper, morning and afternoon, which each new day hit the porch with sickening thuds.


Elizabeth Spencer - "Return Trip"

    Patricia got up from the porch and walked in th dark down to the New River. She kicked off her shoes, sat on the boat pier and put her feet in the cool, silky water. It was then she heard the Mississippi voices for the first time. She knew each one for who it was, though they had died years ago or hand't been seen for ages. Sometimes they mentioned Edward and sometimes herself. They talked on and on about unimportant things and she knew them all, each one. She sat and listened, and let the water curl round her feet.


Tim Gautreaux - "IDOLS"
 
    "Take you back?" Julian gave him a startled look. "Didn't you tell me that woman beat you with a broom?"
   Obie looked down at his plate and smiled a faraway smile. "Aw, she's just a woman. Can't hurt a man unless she buys a gun."

Greg Egan - "Permutation City"

   'But ... if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet ... why shouldn't the pattern we think of as "the universe" assemble itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers ...  then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing?'
    The djinn's expression hovered between alarm and irritation.
    Squeek. 'Paul ... what's the point of all this "Space-time is a construct; the universe is really nothing but a sea of disconnected events ..." Assertions like that are meaningless. You can believe it if you want to ... but what difference would it make?'
    'What difference? We perceive - we inhabit - one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There's no reason to believe that the pattern we've found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff - just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometres and hundreds of seconds apart to be side by side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from twhat we'd think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We're one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram ... but it would be ludicrous to believe that we're the only one.'


    'We haven't structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty. We've swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level.'


    The most that could be said, at anymoment, was that someone existed who knew - or believed - that they'd once been David Hawthorne.


    Peer seemed to be making love ith Kate, but he had his doubts.


    'A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust ... or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole ... or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.'
 


Intriguing philosophical ideas about id and personality, spreading scans of people's minds over thousands of processors (where is the person), slowing them down (where are they in between thoughts).
As a story, not the best. No characters you truly care a lot about. Perhaps I read it too fast. I never got the part of the dust and its patterns well enough to appreciate it enough.

Kelly Link - "Pretty Monsters"

The monster stood and looked down adn grinned. "You," it said. It had a voice like a dead tree full of bees: sweet and dripping and buzzing.

She still has that magic touch of estrangeness in her shorts, but I felt like I knew the trick by now. I stopped reading them for some time, because they felt too much the same in voice and eeriness. Still, great writer.