We are great! --- a sarcasm fail

This post is an antidote to answer the question asked last Friday Oct 20th – Has evil won? That post is too depressing. I’m not depressed. I have anxiety and I worry. The primary symptom of anxiety is worry. I worry about depressing depressed people. The primary symptom for depression is shutting down and tho I haven’t experienced depression on this level it’s my understanding that depression is painful. While, I don’t want to delete last Friday's blog post, I also don’t believe evil has won… completely. 

Just FYI I’m no good at sarcasm, ask anyone, even those who only know me via chatting in social media. I’m actually literal. It’s easy for me to state that evil has NOT won on the scale of the global perspective or when data from all of human history is the foundation for contrast. 

a "door" from the past, mine from 1994

Metaphor – Time is a hinge. Now is a door. It’s not a door with a window, and we don’t get to choose between door number one or door number two. Now is just here, now. We can’t see what is behind the door now, because behind the door, the hinge of time has swung, and beyond now is the future. We can only make a guess based on the past because, reality. 

To understand now we must learn from the past. In the context of human history the voice of the people has come a long, long way. Democracy is like freedom, justice, and liberty for all in that if we take these for granted, all is lost. 

After World War II, after the great depression, a significant effort was made in the US to end famine (a.k.a. The dust bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl). And the good news is they totally succeeded. They being the US government working with farmers. If you look back at both human and global history a state of abundance such that the poor are fat, has so rarely been achieved that I can’t find a record of it EVER. (Maybe in some historically remote village with a pork eating festival, but neighbors on the same continent were simultaneously starving, anyways). 

The poor being fat was a contentious joke written in Shakespeare’s play about the history of democracy. In the play ‘Julius Caesar’ quote, saying to Brutus, "Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” 

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar is expressing that he believes fat and happy people are less likely to be dangerous, as they are more content with their lives.

Fat and happy. We did it! Look at any grocery store in America and tell me, has there ever been a civilization in human history with this abundance of food? Please fact check, triple check, it is spreading to other countries, this phenomenon of food abundance that leads to the poor being fat. Global hunger is decreasing in all nations within the reach of our century’s brand of free market capitalism. In the USA, this abundance seems to have peaked in the 1980s, with the oil age, peak oil in the 1970s. And now we take it all for granted and complain about our diets. Yeah sure, heart disease has been the number one leading cause of death in the USA since the 1950s. It’s impossible to mentally separate the word fat from the dank shadow of the number one leading cause of death. But, it’s equally impossible to quantify the joy food brings to people, or measure the lack of suffering. If you ask any American today if they have ever gone hungry for a single day, it’s significantly tough to find anyone who has gone hungry in America for long enough to starve.... except for those who fast on purpose. — THAT is GREAT! Like really, actually, in the scope of all human history in the entire world, impressive and great.

Art by Douglas Coupland

Speaking of taking things for granted that are impressive and great – the internet. In the previous post the first line after the title. Has evil won? then the line …Has evil won the internet? And with the "interwebs" the whole wide world? Yeah, sarcasm fail. We talk about net neutrality. That’s really boring and I’ve already typed too many words so I will let someone good at sarcasm cover the topic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality_(Last_Week_Tonight_with_John_Oliver) 

I’m attempting to write a blog post about why we are great, and how evil hasn’t won, yet. Using my freedom of speech, and hinting at democracy has come a long way baby… in the context of world history, since the assassination of Julius Caesar by a group of Roman senators in Pompey during the Ides of March, 44 BC. 

Don’t take for granted YOUR public library. In the United States, it is estimated that libraries purchase approximately 10-15% of all books sold. Public availability of literature of edited source checked published quality is the receiving end, the quarter-back, of freedom of speech. 

According to the Association of American Publishers, total book sales in the United States in 2022 were $17.36 billion. This represents a 9.27% increase from 2021, and a 21.5% increase from 2019.

An important note, that dollar figure does not include all of the books that are purchased by libraries. Academic libraries and school libraries also purchase books, and these purchases are not included in the American Library Association's statistics.

Okay boring right? And we snooze over the news of the religious right banning books. And I complain about giant corporations sorting social media feeds by popularity, effectively silencing the voices of every day folks who only text one or two lines for public consumption into the post boxes on their platform of choice when they have some time in their busy work weeks. How laughable is that in the context of communication abundance and freedom of speech over human history or around the globe? Even today where entire nations of people are censored, via the internet we are information gluttons. And we are so great that we take our public library’s importance in our society and culture for granted, in much the same way we take for granted the food abundance of our grocery stores and restaurants.

The third way we in North America are great is another thing we take for granted – we the people value individual liberty and justice. This is a “pretty broad” statement, but you may be happily surprised to know that is it statistically measurable and that sociologist have been taking note of the actions of crowds that prove we care about and value the life and rights of other individual people. Since it’s science, they don’t prove we “care”, they measure how we gather (or not) in public spaces and if a society is individualistic or collectivistic. Sociologists measure walking pace from city to city, personal space nation by nation, greeting formality everywhere people greet one another,  etc… But, when I was reading some books on the topic of crowd mentality, one aspect where Americans stood out was trampling injuries and deaths at sporting events. In America we gather at sporting events in significant numbers, but we plan for the event to be safe and we don’t trample each other to death as frequently as similar scale events around the world. Prevention is difficult to measure, so if this statistic is only due to stadium safety planning alone. All those maxim occupancy signs and emergency exits, they don’t just happen. We took actions to protect the lives of people in crowds, and businesses, because we care. 

To be fair, the conditions of the worst trampling in recent history are tragic. Planners of large events are aware of the factors that increase crowd trampling risk. In the US guns, automobiles and alcohol have ruined an otherwise respectable level of event safety. And fear is the mind killer. When people feel safe we make better choices, even when in a hostile crowd mentality situation. When anyone falls in a sport event in America, athlete, bystander, coach or member of any production team, the action stops, because we care.

In another country (I have mentally blocked out where), a group of people were beating other people to death inside of a food shop, a fast food cafe. And no one helped them. People took out their cell phones and took video and just stood there. This happened more than once, I don’t know how many people they beat to death, or how many terror events with groups of passive observer bystanders there were. I don’t know if this was happening before cell phones or not. In America there are many examples of strangers standing up to and fighting off attackers, people they never met, people who just happened to be in the same place at the same time, defended and saved lives. People proved they cared with their actions, in many ways, from following maxim occupancy guidelines, or by helping others to an exit, to the extreme case of removing a gun from a shooter while other people tackled him. To the best of my understanding, if there are examples of people standing there taking video but otherwise doing nothing to help, in America it is because of a fear/power imbalance. Most commonly, this imbalance was caused because the attackers were police in uniform. And even in these cases, the bystanders are often yelling, some try to stop the police or they tell them, at the risk of harm to themselves, that they are taking a video of the attack. I believe we “care” about the lives of strangers and these actions of helping one another is part of what make us great. Fact check what I just type out in the above paragraphs. Even a chart with guns per capita (we have a lot of guns) and murders per capita, in nations all around the world, the statistics prove what I am trying to express. According to the UN report on crime. The US Homicide rate is 6.4 to 6.38 per 100,000 people, per year. To 120.5 guns per 100 Americans. Homicide rank in the world 55th/gun ownership #1. Those numbers are not great, but we are surviving, beating the odds in spite of them, in my opinion, because we care.

We are great. We just need to use what we do best to work together to save ourselves from those who seek to divide us, -- for. their. profit. What do we do best? Free market capitalism, see our food abundance and the carbon debt and health risk, and national surpluses, that we can only mitigate at the production level.  Freedom of speech, we are communication gluttons, what repercussion to history will happen if we figure out via our great experiment with democracy how to hear everyone, not just the loudest voices. And we value human rights, life and liberty for every individual. It’s not a contradiction, it is a balance of power and an awareness of what we have to be thankful for, and what we have to lose.

P.s I made this graphic in response to another graphic I didn't like. I thought, I don't like that graphic or quite a few of the concepts expressed by it, so make one that I do agree with/like and here is it. 

Has Evil Won?

Has evil won the internet? And with the "interwebs" the whole wide world? Seriously, this is the debate all things I care about are unhinged by. I don't even know where to start.

Email maybe? Personal meta-data? Art being ripped off for NFTs? Writing being ripped off for e-books sold by who knows? I don't know who these "people" are. The voice of actual humans drowned by bots, because other bots are sorting out "what's popular" -- hiding singular voices from other individual's timelines across all social media. The battle of the search engines serving up what you searched for previously NOT what you are searching for NOW, or "popular" strikes again search results instead of valid verbatim searches. I.e. verbatim also known as -- exactly what we are searching for and WHY we are searching for it. Mercy please! 

Then there's autocorrect, and worse IMO smart replies. I've already written a lot about the topic of the screen space filled with that evil "help me write" plague.

All the above is screen related. I haven't gotten to climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, tax cuts for the wealthy while homelessness is beyond anything we have seen in America since 1870 before and after the civil war. The medical industry's profits rise in parallel with the decline in life expectancy ( the decline in life expectancy is caused by deaths of YOUNG people). These deaths happened in measurable numbers seen in 2018 BEFORE the pandemic.

When I was young I recall seeing an older lady (middle aged) ranting, upset about something and I'd wonder what had happened to her. Now, I am that crazy lady. Maybe, evil hasn't won over everybody/everywhere, but it seems to have won over me, ... for now. 

It seems I've lost the battle with evil. But, how does one even complain about it without being evil? Making it worse, riling up the snakes and pissing off the good folks who are also just getting by while being attacked by the snakes? 

Can't express how much I miss that coward of a girl who I was and the world that was scary to her "then". Yeah, drugs in Portland Oregon was pretty damn bad in the 90s. But, it's nothing in contrast with the new drugs plus homelessness in Portland Oregon now. 

etching 1994

I'm not brave now, I'm still "hiding from Fate's teeth" as I put it, in my art then. 

But, my loss isn't everybody's loss, right? What's one little voice being silenced in the scheme of things? 

Thanks for listening,  + 's 

P.s. via Bard ai: ... on the topic of the decline in individual activity, there is also evidence that social media feeds are becoming increasingly dominated by popular and advertising content. This is likely due to the fact that social media companies are using algorithms to promote content that is more likely to keep users engaged. This means that individual posts from users are often buried at the bottom of the feed, while popular and advertising content is featured more prominently.

This trend can be seen on all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For example, a study by the Pew Research Center found that in 2021, the average Facebook user saw 174 pieces of content per day, of which only 38 were from friends and family. The rest of the content was from pages, groups, and businesses....

There is some data on the decline in individual activity on social media, but it is not as comprehensive as the data on the rise of popular and advertising content. This is likely because social media companies are more interested in tracking and reporting metrics that are relevant to advertisers, such as engagement with branded content and reach.

P.s. May 30th, 2026 ...(more than 2 years later).

Was thinking about this, only, it's somehow continued to get worse. A blog post from last year 'Not Going to Stop AI, Alone. It's free to read, only Un-Cat the 102,000+ word book is behind the paywall on SubStack.

Now what? That is the question

 The inevitable break-up with social media, the classic phrase fits "it's not you, it's me". 

Weary of talking about my "feelings", I just quit. Stare at plants with a wordless mind, admire the beauty of all the details of a quietly growing life. Life is good.

Carbon debt paid for all of us by Plant Blindness, plant blindness, how something breathing for you gets called a weed. 

P.s. Monday October 2nd, 2023 -- I've started drafting the next project. I may do NaNoWriMo again just to "pick-up-the-pace" force me to "word-vomit" a lot of thoughts out all at once.

P.s. #2 -- meanwhile it's October and I remembered I forgot #inktober, again. So? I'll do a bit of that. 

P.s. #3 -- A few weeks, what felt like days, October 4th, today is the 16th. I remembered that I forgot #inktober again, and thought. I can do that. That’s how I’ll “deal” with social media. But, after one day, it’s clear to me that is not what I want to do. Someone in the room said. Busy people don’t have the “bandwidth” to post, and reply to thousands of people. Unless that is your career or entertainment time, then don’t. And, they were correct. If you want to focus, sharpen a grove in mind to work like a good tool, it’s enough of a challenge just to process the day to day people around the actual space one is living in. 

A painter I admire, in Portland OR, Lucinda Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucinda_Parker 

I have a memory from the 90s, when I was trying to accept a life as an artist, I hear her saying, you have to be “selfish” to make it as an artist, ignore other people to get work done. 

We are all living in an endless river of questions, a mind is a filter, grey water and laundry, catch the “lint” of noise. Let the dust bunnies grow into dust bears, just know where their claws are.

Everyone has their own opinion. It’s endless. Level three riff raff, … until it isn’t. 

What are you going to be? 

Now, distill that thought down into a haiku? 

#haiku title: ponder alone

being together

endless river of questions

clouds carry answer

Photo from 2017, before Oregon burnt all the way to the coast in 2020.

Social Media has changed the paths in my mind

To be clear, after years of use, social media has changed my daily thought habits, therefore changed what I think about as well as the emotional content of my day. This is what the paths of our minds are made up of, our daily thought habits, plus our emotional moods, both body chemicals with their related feelings (are you hungry? etc...), and mental narratives based on events* (i.e. are you paying attention to events in the day to day around you, or to things happening all over the world?). It's not a I-kinda-think-therefore-it-is type of deal. And if I am one unit, one person who is part of the collective consciousness and social consciousness*, therefore social media exposure has done this to all who have partaken, to the degree that they were "exposed", according to what content people were exposed to, . ( *For more see collective consciousness  , or Social_consciousness. Yes, I 💖Wikipedia ). 

For me personally the reason I got into social media, and what I search for when there, was and is still about finding contemporary art and fiction writing. 

But, there is no escape from politics today, esp. American politics if you are an American Voter, like me. There's also a great sad heaps of religious crap tangled in the "spaghetti" of our lack of separation of religion and state. It's gotten so bad with The Supreme Court of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and other like minded founding fathers must be rolling in projectile vomit in their graves. 

Oh and money, is that the other one we are told not to talk about? The divide is pre-Apocalyptically bad in our current economic state. The working poor who were the middle class in the 70s - 80s are now as I understand it debt slaves to such a degree the wealthy can't even make money directly off of them anymore, instead they are selling all their personal meta-data and worse bio-meta-data to who knows who is buying. 

Did I mention how I got into social media to find art and fiction writing and to promote my own art and fiction writing? 

And how did that go? I wrote 5/6th of a political parody, something I never, never, in a trillion years ever imagined myself, ever doing. 

Sooooooooo...?* (my favorite word since 2019 is so with too many o's, as a question). 

I'm attempting to wean myself off of social media in 2023 and the ironic and pathetic part is that I still need the internet and/or a community of people to not be a lone artist with piles of art in a shack that no one will ever see until I die and someone buys our lot (including the shack) and finds this art pile. And to finished, to be, one must be read, before the piles of drafts on the top shelf of my closet meet the same fate. Tho, unlike the pottery, the paper can be burnt and the digits of computer memory can be deleted. 

Now what? That is the question! *blerg* (thanks, very much for that perfect word Tina Fey).

☮+💚🧠s @Uva_Be 

P.s. now is currently August 22nd, I posted this on July 13th, 2023. And I've been avoiding the social media except to post to unfired clay on my Unfired Clay tumblr. And a few check-ins at IG. For me this = pretty sparce to absent from social media activity. 

Sept 6th, just need a bit more time, and looking at time-lines, and motivation, reasons, explanations, and finally that "click",... maybe? Tho, the one that says "this is it!" not waiting forever for that one. 

Got happily lost reading a bit about chiliasm.

 What interested me most wasn't the turn of the millennium exactly as I got lost reading a bit about chiliasm.This pigeon language PIE from trade routes and massive movements of people that all the other Latinized languages the Indo-European people of the world were using. It was that feeling we get in the fictional worlds of The Hobbit or Game of Thrones or even the Naruto world. Where it's not Asia or Europe or the Americas. 

There's a very nicely done animated svg gif graphic on the PIE wiki page. 

chiliasm (n.)

1600, from Latinized form of Greek khiliasmos, from khilias, from khilioi "a thousand, the number 1,000," which is probably from a PIE *gheslo-, source also of Sanskrit sahasra- "thousand" and perhaps also Latin mille, but the exact original sense of the root is unclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language 

PIE "PIE" and "Proto-Indo-European" redirect here. For the people, see Proto-Indo-Europeans. For other uses, see PIE (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Pre-Indo-European languages or Paleo-European languages.

and

*gheslo- / Indo-European roots

Examples of words with the root gheslo-: chiliad, Hazara, kilo-, mil, mile, milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millenary, millennium, millepore, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million, millipede, per mil.

gheslo-

Seen by some as a base for words meaning "thousand"

Oldest form *g̑heslo-, becoming *gheslo- in centum languages.

1. Suffixed form *ghesl-yo-. chiliad, kilo- from Greek khīlioi, thousand.

2. Compound *sm̥-gheslo- (*sm̥-, one; see sem-¹) Hazara from Old Iranian *hazahram, thousand.

3. mil¹, mile, millenary, millesimal, milli-, milliary, millime, million; milfoil, millefiori glass, millefleur, millennium, millepore, millipede, per mil from Latin mīlle, thousand, which has been analyzed as *smī-, "one" + a form *ghslī-, but is of obscure origin.

Note to self. millepore is a coral. and millipore is a filter, made from cellulose acetate membranes, capable of removing very small particles. Related to nanopore A pore, of nanometre dimensions, in a membrane. 

Milliary related to latin for mile and milestones.

Miliary for Millet the seed, used to describe millet sized symptoms of a disease, example lesions of tuberculosis.

THIS and actual thousands of other word examples is why I fight with Grammarly and Autocorrect. I choose the words, trying to express or understand a specific meaning, NOT what is the current most popular word with a similar spelling.

What I hate most about AI

 Yes, I used that four letter word. I'm not talking dislike, or a slight annoyance. I HATE some of the newest AI features and how these "bots" bombard my life in an extremely negative way -- torturing us daily. Forcing us to retype, sometimes three times, to not have Autocorrect change the meaning of what we are attempting to say. 

The RED crayon is @GoogleAI, just today, looking at my phone. Two different unrelated Chat conversations.

Google sends an email. Let's chat about Google I/O 2023  and I mark it, because I have been contacting support / Feedback, begging them to shut off the damn digital torture. I have logged in to my settings. The only setting I can find to turn off the "Smart suggestions" is in the Chrome browser, I can't even see that setting to turn off the "Help me write feature" on my phone. I've turned them off so many times in Gmail, the settings menu has changed, moved around and changed wording. Gmail's "Help me write feature, Smart Reply, whatever they are calling it now. 

I'm having a serious and private* (not social media) Chat conversation with my elderly family. We are BRCA1 cancer survivors, my family. We are trying to stay positive in an unoffensively realistic way, and keep in touch, painfully aware of the remaining days we have left to chat and talk. 

                  [ Why that's great! ]-   -   - [ Send a photo! ] -   -   - [ Love that photo! ]

First of all, the "Smart Reply" button that says, Love that photo!, to me, when I am the one who sent the photos (often to have "something" to say, in hopes of being life affirming I send photos). True it's annoying to accidentally hit a "smart" reply button that will annoy my actually smart Boomer Mom who doesn't own a smart phone, use or understand social media, and if she wants to Send a photo! she has to ask Dad, who has a digital camera and uploads them, it's a process. Anyway, she reads, Love that photo! She's with it enough to know she didn't send any photo, so why did I text that?  But, that's only the tiny snowball that starts the avalanche of sad. 

The buttons are large and in the way. If we on either end of the conversation accidentally hit one, (there are four of us in this conversation on various devices), We can't undo this "smart" reply. It's in the Chat thread "forever" until we lose it, or lose them -- actually forever. 

When texting with a loved one, you need to hear their words. And the more trivial and less generic, more personal experience related the actual words from your loved one are, the better, to relate with them. Especially if they are not okay, and the AI is feeding you all these "easy" or "nice" -- actually in the way of the keyboard to type, words. You read them, they are in your head, and it is still not okay at all with them or how anyone feels or what the people in the conversation need to say. It's really, really tragic for someone to be ignoring their parent or their child by hitting the auto reply AI buttons instead of actually choosing the words to say, that the other family member or loved one needs to hear. 

And I can't emphasize this enough. We are talking about important end of life conversations. Possibly some of the last things we may ever say to one another. GOOGLE! PLEASE, PLEASE, TURN THE SMART REPLY BUTTONS OFF!!! 

Okay, I have more, much more, but I'm going to stop now. Because one battle at a time. One human against a bot (an actual army of email and text crawling AI) that can "read" and "type" I don't even know how many times faster than an actual human. There's a limit to what is helpful, and me being angry, at the digital tide invading the details of my life, this isn't it.  +  Uva Be

Tune in next blog post when I rant about Autocorrect! And Google Photos Magic Editor! 

P.s. After I don't know how many searches attempting to turn off Smart Replies, and only finding the settings in the browser, I finally got the search result that seems to have turned them off on my phone. The place with the least space/most easy to accidentally ""click". It was right there on top with settings/more, as if I was/am the crazy lady, again. 

P.s. 2 years later. I turn smart reply whatever they are calling them now, off after updates, again, and again. My Mother is dead now. The last couple of years were really difficult. I'm thankful I was able to spend some time with her, not just chat about what she was looking at outside her window.

😐

P.s. #2 weeks later. I have turned smart replies a.k.a. those boxes of crap filling up the screen space on my phone twice now. Three times if you count me driving to the air-port and someone who just landed calling me and me hitting the box that creepily said. "I'm driving, can't chat now." When actually they needed to know I was there to pick them up, don't get a cab, or get on the bus. :(