Today’s idiot story, I forgot to zip last night’s Gord’s Gold into one file then upload it to Mixcloud. It’s uploading now but that means it’s late. I promised people it would be up at noon, now it’s 2:03 PM. There’s ten minutes more to go. Since we cut the cable cord uploads go slowly. How slow? Now there are 14 minutes remaining. It’s slowing down. It also speeds up so it will probably take less than that.
Yesterday’s lack of adventure was my Donut Walk™ then picking up my prescriptions then buying eggs. That end up being more than four miles. That counts as a success. My TV adventures the last few days is watching The Flash which reached the point of being so stupid I couldn’t finish the episode, Hawkeye, which is wonderful, and The Expanse which is not just the greatest science fiction show ever but perhaps the best show. The contrast with the Flash couldn’t be starker. It’s not that I expect the Flash to have the scientific accuracy of The Expanse, it’s a comic book show, a fantasy. It’s that the characters have become caricatures of how Donald Trump views progressives. The Flash’s Nemesis who has killed multitudes attempts a massacre just to draw in the Flash. Not to kill the Flash but to ask for his help, he’s going to cease to exist if they don’t. He says that if he lives, he’s going to continue his life mission of killing the Flash and destroying all he loves. Their response is to say, “We are the good guys, we have to help him.” Arrgghh! On the Expanse they have to make tough moral decisions all the time knowing that people will die or at least be at risk no matter what they choose. They don’t cop out and find impossible solutions. It’s war and the Trolley Car problem is all too real.
Today’s idiot story, this is two days later than when I wrote those first two paragraphs. I never finished the entry. I was not too busy, I have not left the house. Now I’m going to have to write this fast as I want to leave the house while it is still light. You know what? I’m going to delay this even longer and go shopping now. I’ll finish this later.
I’m back and I remember a few of the many things I have wanted to write about. Einstein said, “Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.” This was not his area expertise, but he nailed it. The way I have been thinking about it is that our ideas of the way things are supposed to be, are laid in between the ages of 10 and 22, the age depending on the subject and the individual. As in so many lines of my thought this started with baseball. Fans think that the way the game was played and understood when they were 10 is the way baseball should always be. I come across this attitude all the time in my baseball groups. I can plead guilty myself when it comes to the Designated Hitter. I cheered Crash Davis when he said that there should be a constitutional amendment banning artificial turf and the designated hitter, in the film Bull Durham. While I agree with artificial turf, I was wrong about the DH. It doesn’t not ruin baseball or even change it that much. The NL had the DH in 2020 and I adjusted immediately. Baseball looks wrong on artificial turf, you have to check the lineups to know that the DH is in effect.
In my baseball group I hear people rant about every change in strategy and every change in how we judge players. What I noticed was how much they sounded like political reactionaries, especially of the Trumper type. I started checking profiles and saw that the same people that rant about analysis and modern strategies are disproportionally Trump supporters. This is virtually always true of the type that has to rant in the comments any time someone makes a post about analytical stats like WAR or speaks favorably of defensive shifts.
It’s been documented that most people’s musical tastes are set by the time they are 22. That’s where that number comes from. What inspired me to write this was one friend in her mid-30s saying that the music that moves her the most is from her teen years. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s the way people are built. Musically that’s not true of me but show me TV shows from the 60s and early 70s and I feel it.
Other studies have shown that people’s politics is largely determined by what was happening as they entered adulthood. Sure, some people change, but staying the same is the norm.
The social issues that divide society are largely determined by this. People that grew up in a world where gays kept to the shadows considered a world where gays were not visible view the world where gays can get married as abnormal. A world with visible Trans people as bizarre. We can change, there was a huge shift gay marriage, but the general difference is still huge. Even Trump supporting young people accept gay marriage and gays in general. This is why it was important to make gays visible; it was the only way for queerness to stop being, well queer. It took some people being brave and accepting abuse to pave the way for others.
Charles Strouse who wrote the lyrics of Those Were the Days, the theme song for All in the Family understood this. Look at the lyrics, Archie’s prejudices come from feeling like he’s not in the world he grew up in. The “normal” world. A world where blacks, “knew their place,” and there weren’t people speaking foreign languages, and a woman’s place was in the kitchen. These lyrics put it so well.
I’ve even heard these kinds of complaints from the left. One that sticks in my head was to the effect, “Space travel is done by the government, not by private companies.” There was no argument on why this was better, just that it was the way things have always been done. I was skeptical when Space X and the other private companies were founded but they have proved their worth. They did what the government has not been able to do since the space shuttle, get Americans back into space. It works. Elon Musk might be a schmuck, but a schmuck that accomplished something. That was my thought from today’s walk, Musk is the new Henry Ford. Ford was much worse that Musk, a virulent anti-Semite who used his wealth and power to spread anti-Semitic propaganda. He also transformed the world and changed cars from a toys of the rich to something affordable for most. But that’s a comparison for another day.
Keep in mind that we are people, and we share these prejudices. The trick is to be aware of them so that we aren’t ruled by them. When something strikes you as wrong consider that it might be because it’s simply different from what you are used to. All change is not for the good, and we shouldn’t fetishize novelty, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it either. As so many things that I’ve written it comes down to the most difficult thing, thinking about each situation on its own merits.
Wise Madness 