All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is a direct follow-up to: Summer camp for adults, pt. 1 – The Rahh of the wild I. In the previous post I analyzed the marketing for Camp RAHH, a so-called "summer camp for adults." The whole thing made me almost excessively peevish, and I want to figure out why. Let's recap what seems to be the problem here. The ethos at play is one where the main problems are external. It's society that's creating FOMO in us; society that demands constant status updates and check-ins; society that forces booze and drugs into our hands, and makes us use them; it's all peer pressure . Them, not us. Society is preventing us from unleashing our truly authentic, uniquely personal selves . But see, all five ( five ) sections in that post were more or less predicated on the assumption that the target demographic for Camp RAHH is sane . The alternative, far more depressing than enraging, is that something is wrong. The prospective RAHHers haven't made pis...

This post is a partial follow-up to: Bowling alone, camping together I. Many posts ago I wrote about the so-called "invention of loneliness" and the intentional community of adult Cool People who volunteer at CampQuest Northwest. To be honest it probably wasn't the best editorial decision; the post seems rather disjointed, and CQNW deserves better than that. But it's from Kayla (who's a CQNW staffer in addition to blogging at Crows Against Murder ) that I learned about Camp RAHH. Camp RAHH is "Seattle's Summer Camp For Adults," and if that doesn't already sound twee-or-maybe-unctuously-startuppy enough, check out their website , and their mission statement: Let’s face it… we’ve got a problem. Our dependence on technology and the urgency of our demanding routines can often introduce unnecessary anxiety into our daily lives.  Social pressures to stay on top of everybody’s business - and to excessively share all of our own - can often...

I. Kayla at Crows Against Murder has a great post up about September—that calendrical signifier of Back To School which, for those of us in the current "quarter-life" cohort, is still about two-thirds of our entire lives, and almost the entirety of our remembered lives—and the prolonged existential crisis that is "adult life": But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore. Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more rea...

or, Notes towards a new characterization of bumper-sticker politics in the American mainstream I. I've had a reasonably long-running joke that when Subarus accumulate enough bumper stickers, they metamorphose into Volvos. Certainly bumper stickers say something about the person whose vehicle they're on. This blog post (which I mostly chose because it features a liberal-bestickered Subaru and a conservative - bestickered pickup truck) opines:   You can tell a lot about a person by their bumper stickers.  I get a kick out of reading what people have branded on the back of their cars.  Some of the stickers are political some are religious and some tell us about the kids or dogs.  If you see a car with multiple bumper stickers one thing about these people who you can count on is, they are passionate and dedicated to what they believe in. I don't think this is entirely true. Bumper-sticker politics is a derogatory term for a rea...

This post is a quickie follow-up to: Excessivisms, cargo cult politics, and #GamerGate In my previous post I posited that there was something odd about "gamer culture": Hm. There's a problem here: it feels right, like there's an analogous statement for this sort of potentially-toxic cultural attitude. I'm just not sure what the actual connection to video games is. It's not simply owning a lot of games: I own a lot of games (thanks for nothing, Steam sales) but I haven't played most of them (yet) and moreover I don't consider myself a "gamer" per se . It's not simply enthusiasm for games , at least not just any kind of game: one sort of has to be highly enthusiastic for a definite class of games, and maybe even make a show of disdaining other classes of games. And it's not simply skill at playing games , though that is a sort of factor: certainly "gamers" tend to be into the more "hardcore" games. Here...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

I. Robin Koerner, a liberty-minded Brit whom I heard speak at last year's Washington State Libertarian Party convention , has a new article out at Huffington Post called Your Problem With Guns or Gays Is Not Political . Given my moderate bias against guns, shockingly, I kind of agree with him. But I also think this is a case that nicely illustrates how the personal is (sometimes) political. I recommend that you go read the whole thing, but I also want to excerpt some juicy quotes. First, Koerner describes his own British noncommittal stance towards guns. As he puts it, "guns feature nowhere in British culture." I expect that most Americans would in practice find "taking tea" a bit odd, even though we academically know what it is from various imported movies and television shows, and many Americans like tea. But then Koerner gets into the meat of his point: Many decent people who have no interest in guns simply can't imagine what it must be like to be ...