#a posteriori next week!

[waitmyturtles]

[nya-minister]

[Fic] Second Declension

“Er... I don’t think the Prime Minister’s got as far as the second declension...” - Bernard, in “The National Education Service”

Jim tries to prove he's not a philistine, for the noble purpose of getting in Humphrey's pants. [1704 words]

(With apologies to anyone who actually speaks Latin, because I do not!)

It was late on a Wednesday, and Jim Hacker had just made the dreadful mistake of misusing a Latin idiom. At least, he thought it was an idiom.

Bernard's eyes lit up, as they always did when an opportunity to talk about linguistics presented itself, and indeed, often when it didn't.

"Ah, actually Prime Minister, I believe you meant to say a posteriori evidence, not a priori. You see, a priori evidence relies on axiomatic truths - it is of course a latin phrase, meaning 'from the earlier', while a posteriori, which in Latin means "from the later", describes evidence derived from empirical evidence. Now, in Latin, this..." the young man barely seemed to take a breath, and Jim decided he ought to cut in to stop him from suffocating.

"Alright! Alright. Yes, thank you Bernard, very informative. Now, moving on, the matter of the-" he stopped himself. "Actually, Bernard..."

"Yes, Prime Minister?

"You know, I've been thinking. I really ought to- Well, I would like to- ...could you teach me some Latin?"

"Ah. Why, certainly, Prime Minister!" A slightly cheeky expression crossed Bernard's face. "Never too late to begin one's educat- Er. Sorry... What did you have in mind?"

"Have in mind?"

"Well, er, what did you plan to use it for?"

"Use it for! Right, of course."

A series of concerned expressions played across Jim's face as he considered the question. In truth, he was planning to use it to seduce Bernard's boss, but he couldn't very well say that. Really, this was Humphrey's fault for being so bloody difficult.

For the last few weeks, he and the Cabinet Secretary had been involved in some sort of romantic entanglement. Probably. At least, Jim was fairly confident. They had kissed (briefly) and had sex (somewhat less briefly) and done all manner of things which would imply the presence of a romantic relationship, but apparently not confirm it. Perhaps it was really only sex, just a relief of tension, but that thought didn't sit right with Jim. There was something so delicate and vulnerable about the way Humphrey laid his head on Jim's shoulder, pressing their bodies together in that perfect moment between climax and his almost immediate pivot into a lecture about commercial zoning laws.

Since then, Jim had been trying to charm him into opening up. His usual tactics (dreadful pickup lines and a winning smile) had failed, but perhaps Humphrey needed something a little more intellectual. Thus, Jim had formulated a plan to take him out to dinner and dazzle him with wit... or at least, something smutty that also proved he could, in fact, speak Latin at a third grade level.

"Er... Prime Minister?"

"I'm sorry, what was the question? Ah- right, yes, well. I was just curious. That's all. And the leader of the country ought to know these things."

"Well then, I would be glad to indulge your curiosity! Shall we start with basic grammar?"

"Right, yes, grammar. That shouldn't be so bad."

"Now, as I'm sure you recall, Latin is a highly inflected language. This allows for a more flexible sentence structure, but also requires that words be modified according to various factors, such as their case - that is, their function in a sentence. Now, there are six cases in Latin, which are: the Nominative - the subject, the Genitive - possessive, or to express an object that is "of" something, the Dative - the indirect object, the Accusative - the direct object, the Ablative-"  "Prime Minister? Is everything alright?"

Jim narrowed his eyes.

"Bernard... do you think you could give me a sort of... executive summary of all that, perhaps?"

"Ah, well, I think it all boils down to Latin being a highly inflected language, which allows for a more flexible sentence structure, but also requires that words be modified according to various factors, such as..."

"Yes, I see." Jim said, in his most scholarly tone of voice. "Right."

"Erm, Prime Minister, if I may be so bold as to ask. This wouldn't have anything to do with Sir Humphrey, would it?"

"Humphrey?!" Jim's eyes went wide in panic. Was Bernard wise to his scheme? How could he have figured out- "Oh, because of our little tiff over Latin in schools! No, no, no. Well, Bernard, if you must know, it's my wife's anniversary - er, our anniversary - next weekend, and, well, I thought she might find it charming if I were to... In another language, that is."

"Oh... Oh! In that case, you have nothing to worry about. Your anniversary isn't for another eight months."

"It is? Wait, how do you know that?"

"Well, I marked it in your diary. You do remember a few years back, when we had you double booked - or triple booked, in fact, and, well, I thought it was better we didn't repeat that disaster."

"Yes, yes, alright. I can see what you mean."

"But if you did want to learn how to say something, erm, romantic."

"Yes?"

Jim took out a little notebook and started scratching at it in shorthand.

"And, erm, Bernard, how would you say..." Jim wasn't quite sure he could say it out loud, so he made an obscene gesture with his hands, which on mature reflection was certainly far worse.

"Oh! Oh, my. I think Sir H-Mrs. Hacker"

"Mrs. Hacker." Jim corrected sternly.

"Yes, well, she would be. Um. Well, it's rather a complicated question - you see, in Latin, and indeed Greek, when proposing sexual acts, one's choice of word often depends on the gender of the parties involved and on whether the speaker is in the, erm, active or passive role. Even this component is not entirely cut and dry, as these acts are, on a grammatical level, handled quite differently to their english-language counterparts. Irrumare, which is a passive verb in English - that is to receive fellatio, is in fact an active verb in Latin - something which one actively does. Of course, one would typically use some degree of innuendo while discussing such topics, and Latin has a wide array of interesting options, which, as in most languages, evolved over time such that ordinarily innocent words acquired sexual connotations. As a rather amusing anecdote, officium, which can be loosely translated as "duty" or "service", though it also refers to "office" - that is, a political office - gained the connotation of pathic behavior - which means that the latin term for permanent undersecretary - princeps officii - sounds rather like-"

"Yes, thank you Bernard! That will be all!" Jim said, still reeling from the apparent depth and breadth of Bernard's sexual vocabulary. "Erm... Do you have a dictionary I can borrow? I think I shall figure the rest of it out on my own."

"Oh, of course." he said, pulling out a gigantic tome that looked old enough to have been penned by a native speaker.

Jim sighed, and got to work.

***

It was easy enough to get the Cabinet Secretary to dinner. He loved a good meal at an expensive restaurant, especially when someone else was paying. Plus, they had plenty of work matters to discuss, and that was before they even began to address their impossible-to-define pseudo-romance nonsense. Humphrey's true intentions were hard to read even without bringing something as perplexing as romance into the mixture, so it was little wonder that Jim never knew whether he was coming or going. He rather hoped tonight it would be the former.

This evening, Humphrey was dressed in a very sharp three-piece ensemble with a purple tie and matching pocket square and his hair coiffed just so. He looked terribly handsome, and Jim briefly entertained the thought that perhaps Humphrey had dressed up for his sake. He smiled at the idea, even though it probably wasn't true.

Owing to the possibility of official secrets being discussed, and simply to their stature, they were seated in a closed off area of the restaurant, out of sight and earshot of the other patrons. Discretion was still of the utmost importance, but even if it weren't, Humphrey would still have gone on about the most mundane of topics for the first hour or so. It was always an heroic effort to get him onto casual conversation.

By the time they polished off the main course, Humphrey's posture had relaxed ever so slightly, and Jim - who was by this point a couple of drinkies in - seized his chance.

Humphrey's eyes went wide, and for a moment, he was speechless.

"I... Good Lord... Latin?" he stammered out, a sweet little flush colouring his cheeks. A curl of his hair seemed to jump out of place of its own volition. Mission accomplished!

"Yes it is!" he giggled. "Bet you didn't expect that!"

"No, I certainly did not... And neither would the Romans. his voice dropped almost to a whisper, "Make would go...." his voice dropped almost to a whisper "insert?" Is that supposed to be something vulgar?"

"O... oh, dear. I must have gotten my declensions mixed up. I thought I had it down. Where are my notes?"

"Notes?!"

"Well, you see, it was my first time learning a language, and the... In English, it was supposed to be- ah, I'll tell you later. Here comes dessert."

Humphrey found a sudden fascination with his pastry, while Jim was left to stew in silence.

Finally, Humphrey looked up.

"Right, well. We'll not be having any more of that nonsense, Prime Minister."

"No, no... Of course not. I apologize."

"As you should. A most dreadful butchery of the language. Besides. I think a more appropriate phrase would be..."

Humphrey said something in Latin, and Jim nodded sagely in the hopes that it would look like he understood it.

"And, of course, in English, that would be..."

Humphrey glanced furtively to his left and right, then leaned in, close enough that his lips were almost touching Jim's neck. Then, he whispered something quite unexpected.

"Oh, my, Humphrey!" Jim said, far louder than he intended, then quickly silenced himself. "With... with me?" he mouthed, "Tonight?"

Humphrey seemed to drink in the sight of Jim floundering, a predatory light gleaming in his dark brown eyes. He smiled, in an infuriatingly self-satisfied manner, which was unfortunately also very attractive.

"Ita vero, Prime Minister." 

================================================

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Notes:

Clearly I don’t speak Latin, so any jokes at Jim’s expense are also at my own. That said, I did a lot of googling for this, and so, some fun facts: it turns out there isn’t a word for “yes” (or no) in Latin, though “Ita vero” (closer to “indeed” or “certainly”) is commonly used. Humphrey’s classic “yes and no” answer would probably be translated as “Sic et non” ([it is] thus and [it is] not). At least... I think so. If anyone reads this, please do send me corrections!

Regarding Bernard’s speech about smutty Latin: ever since his fabulous “Oh, could we! [subsidize sex]” line, I’ve headcanoned him as a bit of a quiet achiever in that department. He knows exactly what his bosses are up to, and could probably save them months of romantic angst and mutual pining with a couple of off the cuff remarks. The officium/officii/officiosi thing relies on my incredibly shaky understanding of grammar, and from this passage I found in a book from the 80s about smutty latin slang:

(Pathic/patientia is an old-fashioned way of saying “bottom/bottoming”.)

[fratresdei]

Spirituality Defined

Where did our working definition of spirituality come from? How has it evolved over centuries of research, ritual and belief? Philosophy grad Brayte Singletary stopped by the blog this week to take us on deep dive into the ever-elusive meaning of spirituality. Enjoy!

What even is spirituality? Rachel asks that very question in one of this blog’s first posts, and gives her answer there too. It’s one of the fundamental questions of spiritual direction. Those seeking or giving spiritual direction are liable to stumble on it sooner or later, through education or reflection. This post is one of those trips—and since it’s a bone we may need help chewing, I attempt to shine some Sirius-light on the best research I could dig up. Hopefully it’s illuminating.

In 2016 some researchers in Germany and the U.S. published the results of a formal investigation into the meaning of spirituality [A]. They based their investigation on a 2011 survey of Germans and Americans that asked, among other questions, “How would you define the term ‘spirituality’?” Approximately eighteen hundred different definitions came back, about forty percent German and sixty percent American. Quantifying these samples, the researchers started running statistical analysis.

First they looked for categories of response, grouping similar categories together and narrowing the list down to just those that make the most sense of overall response patterns [B]. They found that ten basically distinct concept clusters [C] come under the heading of spirituality, almost always in some combination [D]:

A keenly-felt connection to and harmony with nature, humanity, the world, the universe, or the whole of reality.

Dependence on, relationship to, or union with the divine; a part of religion, esp. Christianity.

A search for one’s higher or true inner self, meaning, purpose; knowledge of these things; attainment of peace or enlightenment, esp. in terms of a path or journey [E].

Holding and daily acting according to ethical values, especially in relation to others, one’s community, or humanity; a moral way of life [F].

Faith or belief in transmundane forces, energies, beings, a higher power, gods or God.

A noncommittal, indefinite, but intensely emotional, maybe loving sense that there is some thing(s) or being(s) higher than and beyond this world, this life, or oneself [G].

Experience and contemplation of reality and the truth, meaning, purpose, and wisdom, esp. if considered beyond scientific or rational understanding, inexplicable and indemonstrable.

Awareness of and attunement to another, immaterial or supernatural realm and its denizens (spirits, angels, ghosts, etc.); feeling their presence; using special techniques to perceive and interact with them (tarot, crystals, seances, etc.).

Opposite religion, dogma, rules, traditions; unstructured, irreverent, religious individualism.

Individual or private religious practice; prayer, worship, or meditation; relationship-deepening or connection-fostering personal rituals and devotional acts. 

Doing the same grouping and narrowing to unearth anything deeper, they found that all of these ten clusters fall somewhere on three scales, which they call the dimensions of spirituality [H]:

I. Vertical vs. horizontal general terminology for transcendence [I]

II. Theistic vs. non-theistic specific terminology for transcendence

III. Individual vs. institutional mediation of transcendence

Finally they found that this analysis confirms their larger research team’s theoretically-grounded hypothesis that the root definition of spirituality is:

Individually-mediated, experience-directed religion, esp. among religious nones [J]: i.e., religion oriented away from mediation through institutions, dependence on organizational structures and absolute authority claims, toward the immediacy of firsthand experience, emancipatory independence and value relative to the individual [K].

All this verbiage cries out for explanation. But for the moment let’s step back to marvel at our good luck in having research like this. Its conclusions about the meaning of spirituality—at least the ten concept clusters and three scales—came through something nearer experimentation in a laboratory than reflection in an armchair. In philosophical jargon, this argus-eyed approach was a posteriori rather than a priori; in anthropological jargon, emic rather than etic. As a result, we better see wrinkles in the meaning of spirituality, including internal inconsistencies that a cyclopic definitional scheme might smooth over, e.g., as a part of religion (2) and as opposite it (10).

For starters then, we see that this definition of spirituality is tripartite: “individually-mediated”, “experience-directed”, and “religion”. Since spirituality here is a kind of religion, religion is the core concept, so we’ll take it from there. That will lead to the three scales of spirituality, ‘vertical vs. horizontal terminology’ (I), ‘theistic vs. non-theistic terminology’ (II), and ‘individual vs. institutional mediation’ (III). “Individually-mediated” will come along with the third. That leaves only “experience-directed” and closing remarks. Now where did I put my patience for dry exposition…?

If none of it jibes with your own sense of spirituality, all the better! We all have much to learn, and outliers—you whose lives are led under stones yet unturned by science—have much to teach us.

First “religion”: For these researchers religion is any socially constructed system of symbols and rituals that interprets transcendent experience in ultimate terms [L]. This applies even to people who don’t consider themselves religious, including those who would self-describe as “spiritual but not religious”. But precisely what do transcendent experience and ultimate mean here? Transcendent experience—or simply ‘transcendence’—is any experience of “distance and departure from [the] everyday”, above and beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience [M]. More than just extraordinary, it exceeds our expectations of life and the world as we know it, e.g., by excelling in its class or defying classification (almost) altogether: the weirder and more wonderful, the more transcendent. So transcendent experience is often what we would traditionally call ‘religious experience’, but they make the distinction that it only counts as religious if on interpretation it’s cast in ultimate terms. Turning to “ultimate” then, here this is really elliptical for ‘of ultimate concern or importance to a person’. The ultimate is what “gives depth, direction and unity to all other concerns”, as theologian Paul Tillich puts it, from whom they draw the idea—e.g., our answers to basic questions about the world and our place in it [N]. Bringing these ideas together, a merely transcendent experience becomes genuinely religious when we see in it something all-important to us, and it becomes full-fledged religion when we build around it a symbolic-ritualistic framework of beliefs and practices. One’s framework needn’t be grand or widely-shared: it might be a slim private affair, like a single-person tent that’s as easy to pitch as to pack up and carry. Likewise a person can bring to transcendent experience a religious interpretive lens, or craft one afterwards just to come to terms with it. Either priority fits.

Before we move on to the next concept, let’s clear up some potentially misleading language in this definition of religion. To start, “socially constructed” here doesn’t necessarily mean ‘made up’, ‘fake’, or otherwise unreal. It just means that if nobody thought or talked about religion, there wouldn’t be any: its existence depends on its exercise. Likewise the claim that it “interprets” transcendent experience doesn't imply that it therefore misinterprets it. Indeed the opposite may well be true. Even elementary sense perception needs interpretation to become understanding: naked experience unclothed by categories or classifications is at best a muddle—e.g., in rounding an unfamiliar corner in the city or in coming out without warning on an open expanse in the country, when the sudden change of scenery produces a visual experience of undifferentiated shape and color, it’s all just optical nonsense until reason and intellect, as it were, catch up, and organize this sense data into a coherent picture: only then when interpretation goes to work does one finally know what she’s looking at. Although we may at times be apt to make meaning where there is none, often enough we find it right where it belongs. So this definition doesn’t debunk religion; it merely says that, assuming it has this experiential basis, it’s imbued with the meaning we give it, veracious or fallacious.

The terminology of our interpretation, i.e., our way of using terms for and ideas about the ultimate, admits of a couple distinctions. These are also the first and second scales of spirituality above (I-II): vertical-horizontal, and within that, theistic and non-theistic [O]. The former measures the metaphysical distance transcendent experience crosses. The latter measures the unity and personality and sometimes also the clarity of the religious object. Vertical terminology characteristically evokes what we would traditionally call the transcendent, e.g., God and heaven—generally, the otherworldly. It aims at things other than and over this world and oneself in it. Horizontal terminology tends the other way, toward the traditionally immanent, e.g., nature and humanity. Leaning this-worldly, it aims at things in and of the world and the world itself. Notably, whereas the vertical is often explicitly religious, the horizontal’s religiosity can even escape the notice of the person professing it [P]. Within this distinction is that between theistic and non-theistic terminology. The apparent presence of God, gods, and god-like beings or forces maps an important area of vertically transcendent experience, as their apparent absence does an antipodean area of horizontally transcendent experience. But this also sheds light on terminology between vertical and horizontal. This family of views sees the ultimate as in neither our world nor a world beyond, but rather in “a world behind”, i.e., behind and beneath the world’s surface appearances [Q]. Typically this is non-theistic, e.g., about ghosts, spirits, energies, or forces.

A gloss of the third scale (III) now moves into view, and with it “individually-mediated”: Individual-institutional mediation of transcendence measures the directness or indirectness of a person’s access to transcendent experience, i.e., the extent and power of the gatekeepers standing in her way. As these researchers put it, “Institutionalized mediation says that ... there is no other way to transcendence than through the church, sacraments, and priests; that there is no other truth than the sanctioned teachings; and that the ultimate concern is determined by the institution and its tradition” [R]. By contrast, and often in vociferous reply, individual-mediation says, “there is no or very little mediation of transcendence, but rather the experiential immediacy of the individual; there are no claims of absoluteness, but the individualistic evidence of experience; there is no or very little organization or structure" [S]. In this way, against so-called organized religion’s usual mediation by institutions, esp. hierarchical structures operating them, spirituality favors an unpatrolled, gates-wide-open setup. Yet it doesn’t follow from such independence that spirituality is therefore a lonely pursuit—though “flight of the alone to the Alone”, i.e., hermetic mysticism, is surely right at home here too [T]. We’re able to have experiences with others, just not for them, so it can be equally possible to pursue direct experience of transcendence with others as by oneself.

Lastly, “experience-directed”: This means that, whereas transcendent experience might play no ongoing role in a religion’s usual exercise, e.g., as none other than an oft-remembered historical event, in spirituality it takes the lead. Ritual, symbol, etc., become at best aids to pursuit of transcendence, but at worst impediments. Therefore spirituality in its purest, i.e., barest, form may focus on such experience exclusively; and since “directed” here means both ‘directed to’ and ‘directed by’, the religious ideal may resemble an upward spiral of being led from transcendence to transcendence by transcendence. Still this isn’t to say that spirituality takes direction from nothing else, or that by focusing on transcendence even exclusively, the rest of familiar religion vanishes. A spiritual purist may disavow religious side projects in pursuit of her wonted mode of transcendence, or she may simply subordinate them to it as various means to this end. Yet while she might style herself as therefore unencumbered in her pursuit of raw experience, her religious interpretive lens remains ever-present, however unwittingly. It must, or else her chase after the spiritual would be of the wild-goose variety. E.g., someone undergoing a crisis of faith might discover to her horror that she’s no longer able to participate in her favorite religious exercises, since the vinegar of doubt now spoils every well from which she used to draw joy. Since her experiences can’t mean what they used to, they can’t be what they used to either.

Let’s sum up with a little illustration. Consider this spiritual foil: one an atheistic nature lover, the other a Catholic anchoress. The former’s approach is thoroughly horizontal and non-theistic. She takes regular hikes to feast on natural beauty and sublimity, but deems it all mere serendipity in a chaotic cosmos. She’s a proficient adventurer, as comfortable with friends as without. She might not spurn a Beatrice to guide her through some earthly paradise, but her trust would be that when she came face to facelessness with wild abundance, her delight would need no shepherd. The abundance itself would call out of her everything necessary for its appreciation. In this way she mediates her own pursuit of these experiences. Their ultimacy for her comes not only from her denial of the otherworldly, but also from her judgment that nature is intrinsically, i.e., ultimately, good—or at least, that immersion in it stirs and sustains her is. Conversely, the latter’s approach is thoroughly theistic and vertical, and manifestly ultimate. She spends her life in solitary prayer. Sometimes during contemplation of the divine she has ecstatic visions or auditions. But whatever happens, her daily goal is total abandonment to God. Still even with the individuality of her self-mediating lifestyle, it retains considerable institutionality. She holds fast to piety towards the Church, its orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Yet despite this rigid adherence to ecclesiastical authority—or, she would say, because of it—, she lives as a recluse whose sole aim is attaining union with Him Whom she worships as Transcendence Itself. Both in their disparate ways are individually-mediated, experience-directed religion.

Here we are then! We’ve gained at long last the real meaning of spirituality, right? Well, maybe: We have to trust not only that German and American ideas of spirituality are the same as everybody else’s, but also that the notions of these particular people are the same as those of other Germans and Americans [U]. Moreover we must take for granted that what they put in Tweet-sized writing when a survey bluntly asked them their opinion is the same as what they think all the time, even when they’re not thinking about what they think [V]. Still science has yet to master the art of mind-reading. So even if this isn’t the definitive definition of ‘spirituality’, it’s got my money for our best guess yet.

In Rachel’s post, she’s wise to the width of variety, saying, “Spirituality has been defined and redefined throughout human history, and it is now my intention to shout yet another definition to the abyss.” For her, its definition is: “the practice of deriving any amount of meaning from any event, thought, or activity.” Looking back at the ten concept clusters above, this bears striking resemblance to parts of (3) and (7). She’s in good company. Clinicians and care professionals typically promote this conception: e.g., psychological measures of wellbeing that account for spirituality usually cast it in these terms, viz., purpose and meaning. Though some have wondered whether this confuses spirituality with a part of mental health, the findings above resoundingly vindicate it as an important part of the spiritual puzzle [W]. If they also solve that puzzle, hopefully they do so more in the spirit of Ariadne’s clue out of the Labyrinth than Alexander’s sword through the Knot. At the very least, such research is a waypoint on the path to understanding. If none of it jibes with your own sense of spirituality, all the better! We all have much to learn, and outliers—you whose lives are led under stones yet unturned by science—have much to teach us. So it’s still worth asking:

What does spirituality mean to you? Please share your definition in the comments.

Unpack what spirituality uniquely means to you through the ancient practice of spiritual direction. Schedule a free online session through the link in the comments.

Endnotes:

A. Eisenmann, Clemens, et al. “Dimensions of “Spirituality”: The Semantics of Subjective Definitions.” Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, ed. by Heinz Streib & Ralph Wood, Jr., Springer, 2016, p. 125.

B. Op. cit., pp.129-35. Before grouping and narrowing them together and down, these were the forty-four recurring categories they found:

Faith and belief, believing, belief system

Connectedness, relationship, in touch with, harmony

Individual, personal, private, subjective

Everyday, daily life, way of life, to act

Values, (higher) order, morals, karma

God (also the Father, Lord, Creator, the Divine)

Unspecified transcendent: something bigger, beyond, greater; “may be”

Feeling, emotion, intuition, empathy, heart, love

Within, self, higher Self, inner core, essence

Seeking, path, journey, reaching, to evolve, to achieve

Awareness, consciousness, sense of, feeling a presence, in tune

Supernatural, non-material, cannot see or touch

Transcendental higher power/forces/energy

Thinking about, to understand, to reflect, contemplation

Relation to the world, nature, environment, universe

Cannot be explained or scientifically proven, beyond understanding

Higher/beyond/greater/other than oneself/humans/this life

Relation to others, community, all humanity, humankind

Experience, sensory perception Spirit and mind

Rest (i.e., the remainder of uncategorized responses)

Practices, to practice (one’s faith), music, prayer, worship, meditation

(Inner) peace, enlightenment and other attitudes and states of being

Guided, destined, controlled, saved, healed, dependent

Part of religion, Christian, biblical

All-connectedness, part of something bigger

Meaning and (higher) purpose, questions and answers

Transcendental absolute, “unity of existence,” omnipresent and indiscriminate, the one

Otherworldly, beyond this world, “spiritual” realms Acknowledge, to recognize, to accept, to realize Vague, unclear, unsure; bullshit, fantasy, hocus pocus Without rules, tradition, norms, dogma, structure, directions (21) Something else than religion, without worship

Energies, vital principle, ghosts, angels and demons, spirits

The truth, true nature of existence, wisdom, reality (4) Jesus, Christ, Holy Spirit, the Son Greater being/person, deities, gods Soul

Universal category, basis of mankind Esoteric, occultism, spiritism, mystic, magic (39) Deal with, interest in, engagement, focus

Part and beyond religion Obedience and devotion Life after death.

C. I borrow the notion of concept clusters from passing familiarity with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.

D. Op. cit., pp. 137-8. Paraphrase.

E. Whereas spirituality conceived of as a part of religion (2) fits nicely with its mostly premodern history as just that, the conception immediately following of it as a journey to one’s true inner self (3) sits well with modern social movements toward individualism and subjectivism: op. cit., p. 146.

F. Spirituality conceived of as living out one’s values may partly underlie the self-identification “spiritual but not religious”. Here ’spirituality’ primarily indicates an ethical concern that being merely ‘religious’ doesn’t—not just talking the talk but walking the walk: ibid. More clearly this identification involves some combination of clusters with (9).

G. The much-maligned vagueness of spirituality’s meaning may come from this conception of it as a sense of something indefinite and beyond: ibid. N.b., philosophers of language usually distinguish vagueness, i.e., unclear meaning due to imprecise extension over borderline cases, from ambiguity, i.e., unclear meaning due to polysemy—having multiple meanings.

H. Op. cit., p. 143. Paraphrase. Their dimensions are: (I) mystical vs. humanistic transcending; (II) theistic vs. non-theistic transcendence; and (III) individual “lived” experience vs. dogmatism.

I. I use “transcendence” and “transcendent experience” interchangeably throughout this post. Though there may be other forms of transcendence than experience, talk of ‘transcendence’ as an event and not, e.g., as a divine attribute, usually means ‘experience of transcendence’, i.e., ‘transcendent experience’.

J. Religious nones get their names from those who answer “none” to demographic polls asking their religious affiliation. In other words, they are the religiously unaffiliated. Cf. unchurched.

K. Op. cit., p. 148. Paraphrase. Their definition is privatized experience-oriented religion, following research by other members of their team: Streib, Heinz, & Wood, Jr., Ralph. “Understanding “Spirituality”—Conceputal Considerations.” Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, ed. by Heinz Streib & Ralph Wood, Jr., Springer, 2016, p. 9. Ensuing fns. refer to that ch.

L. Op. cit., p. 11. Cf. Emile Durkheim’s definition of religion, popular esp. in U.S. religious studies depts.: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. trans. Carol Cosman, Oxford Univ. Press, 2001, p. 46.

M. Op. cit., p. 10.

N. Op. cit., p. 11.

O. Strictly speaking, non-theistic terminology could be either vertical or horizontal, while theistic terminology is by definition vertical. As it happens however, or at least according to this research, our thinking about spirituality typically separates out the theistic and vertical from the non-theistic and horizontal.

P. Op. cit., p. 12.

Q. Ibid.

R. Op. cit. p. 14.

S. Ibid. They also mention here sectarian middle mediation “through a prophetic and charismatic person”.

T. Famous last words of the Neoplatonic classic: Plotinus. Enneads. VI.9.11. trans. Andrew Louth, qtd. in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford Univ. Press, 1981, p. 51.

U. Cf. WEIRD bias (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), an ongoing problem for representative sampling: Henrich, Joseph, Heine, Steven J., & Norenzayan, Ara. “The weirdest people in the world?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 2-3, 2010, 61–83. In fact there were some statistically significant differences between German and American responses: American definitions of spirituality were more Christian or otherwise traditionally religious, mentioning Jesus and the Holy Spirit much more, but God only a little more—presumably because theism goes beyond Christianity. Still when they did mention God it was more often in Christian terms of a personal and sovereign lord. Likewise they mentioned faith and belief much more often, and this was more often faith or belief in something beyond, higher power(s), god(s), or God (5). Their notions of spiritual power were also further outside and over themselves, as in talk of guidance or obedience. By contrast German definitions of spirituality were warier of dogma and authority, whether religious orthodoxy or scientific consensus. They mentioned experience, as opposed to belief, more often, and were generally more esoteric, occult, and magical in their terminology, talking of the otherworldly in more universal but impersonal or abstract, terms. They were also more critical of spirituality, oftener complaining of its vagueness or even dismissing it as bovine fecal material. Still despite all this the researchers noted that American and German definitions were much, much more alike than different. These differences should therefore be understood as in emphasis, not substance. Their considerable overlap, striking in itself, forms the basis of the ten concept clusters and the three scales.

V. We must also assume that the scientific method deserves our confidence, and that the concept of spirituality, if not spirituality itself, is amenable to investigation by it. Other assumptions include those about word meaning, natural kinds, and other hot topics of debate in the philosophy of language and science—all of which would take us far afield of the present discussion. May curious readers experience transcendence of this post!

W. Eisenmann, Clemens, et al., p. 147.

[ohioja]

Settimana scorsa è stato Otsukimi, la festa della luna piena di autunno, e una delle figure (la più carina) legata a questa festa è il coniglio lunare (月の兎 tsuki no usagi) una creatura immaginaria presente nella mitologia e nel folklore giapponese. Si tratta per l'appunto di un coniglio che vive sulla luna (questo perché è possibile vedere, negli avvallamenti della faccia illuminata della luna piena, la figura di un coniglio seduto sulle zampe posteriori a fianco di un pestello da mochi) ed il suo mito si ricollega ad una antica fiaba buddhista, la Śaśajâtaka. ********************************** Last week was Otsukimi, the Japanese festivals honoring the autumn moon, and one of the figures (the cutest) linked to this festival is the moon rabbit (月 の 兎 tsuki no usagi) an imaginary creature present in Japanese mythology and folklore. It is precisely a rabbit that lives on the moon (this is because you can see, in the depressions of the illuminated face of the full moon, the figure of a rabbit sitting on its hind legs next to a pestle to make mochi) and its myth it is connected to an ancient Buddhist fable, the Śaśajâtaka. #amigurumi #tsukimi #tsukiminousagi #amigurumiusagi #japanesefolklore #crochet #ohiojalovesjapan #yarnlove #crochetgirlgang #japan #kawaii https://www.instagram.com/p/BoYneZVFiiM/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1dekdiubyhqs9

[amimcmullen]

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies

How do cryptocurrencies work? There is a very wide variety of cryptocurrency, such as Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin,… But the best known cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which was invented in 2008 by a mysterious inventor. This is based on the technology of "distributed registers", a database shared and synchronized consensually through a network distributed in several places. Instead of having a centralized system that verifies each transaction and approves them (as is the case in the Bancontact payment system for example), each network participant (each “node”) has a copy of the register of the network. all transactions carried out since the creation of the network. Each change to the ledger, for example when one person pays an amount to another person, changes all existing copies of the ledger. In practice, to perform the check, participants must enable their computers to solve complex algorithms, which is a laborious process called "mining", in reference to the extraction of gold. After being verified, the payments are consolidated into a new ledger, which will be added to the “chain” and shared with the network. As a reward, “miners” are offered a few bitcoins per “mined” block. The remuneration for the “mining” of bitcoins constitutes the only source of monetary creation, without requiring the intervention of a central bank. The software has been designed in such a way that a new block cannot be added to the chain, and new bitcoins can only enter circulation, every 10 minutes. If many "miners" wish to participate in the "mining" of new bitcoins, the difficulty of the process increases in order to always have a constant monetary creation. This ensures an independent and constant flow of bitcoins. The downside of a decentralized system is that there is no central authority to trust. How can I be sure that the person who pays me is the owner of the bitcoins that he pays me and that he has not falsified the registers? To solve this problem, Bitcoin uses cryptography and “blockchain” type databases. This type of database makes it possible to store data in an encrypted manner, which cannot be modified a posteriori. Each user has an encryption "key" to carry out their transactions, so they are the only ones able to use their bitcoins. As a result, there is no risk that some users will alter the transaction history to their advantage or embezzle the money for benefit. The problem is that encrypting information and adding new data takes a lot of computing power, and more and more as the network grows and the number of transactions explodes. This creates problems of slowness, some transactions taking dozens of hours to be recorded, and consume a lot of resources (computers, electricity, etc.).

Is Bitcoin Really A Currency? Indeed, to be considered as money, it is necessary to be able to fulfill three functions: to act as a medium of exchange, to be a unit of account and to be able to serve as a store of value. Bitcoin has, to a small extent, been successful in serving as a medium of exchange as some stores or merchants accept them as a medium to pay for transactions. But Bitcoin has failed to place itself on a par with traditional currencies because the price, for example, is still often expressed in a base currency, such as the euro. As the National Bank of Belgium (BNB) says, “ there is no legal guarantee for virtual money that it can be exchanged directly at its initial value. ". Traders can therefore refuse to be paid in bitcoins unlike currencies which are "legal tender", such as the euro for example, which no one can refuse. In addition, the bitcoin price is often updated, which means that once the amount is cashed in, the transaction is often directly converted into euro or another traditional currency. The reason is the high volatility in the value of bitcoin and the need for traders to earn relatively stable income. The extreme volatility of bitcoins brings us to the second function, that of unit of account. The value of a currency must be fixed so that we can express goods and services in a monetary unit . Today like next week, a chocolate cake costs 1.50 euros. As the value of bitcoin varies greatly against traditional currencies, you may need to provide a little or a lot of bitcoin to buy a chocolate cake next week as the trader is looking for a stable income. It is therefore difficult to use bitcoins as a unit of account. The third function of a currency is to be able to serve as a store of value , that is to say that it must be possible to keep money for purchases in the future. Users should therefore be confident in the persistence of its value and not fear an unforeseeable loss of value. The function is only effective if the value of money remains relatively stable, which is not the case with Bitcoin which is therefore not a safe haven. Bitcoin therefore only responds to one of the functions of a currency, and even to a very small extent. Its high volatility makes it unsuitable for the roles of unit of account and store of value. Despite these difficulties and thanks to the innovative combination of existing digital technologies, Bitcoin has been hailed by some as an alternative to the traditional payment system. The system being decentralized, intermediaries such as banks and the central bank are no longer needed. However, the reality has turned out to be more difficult than the theory. Bitcoin users have discovered that decentralized software does not necessarily lead to decentralized markets, as bitcoin transactions require such computing power that they can only be processed by a small number of people with sufficient technology. Moreover, one of the often overlooked consequences of bitcoin “mining” is the high energy consumption required and the increase in global electricity consumption that has resulted from the popularity of Bitcoin. Thus, in 2018, Bitcoin mining consumed more energy than the electricity consumed annually by countries like Ireland, Portugal or Peru. Another concern of Bitcoin comes from the time it takes to complete a transaction. While regular payment systems such as Visa are capable of making 1,667 transactions per second, Bitcoin is only capable of performing a maximum of 3 to 4 transactions per second. So, when there are a lot of people who want to make a transaction, the waiting time to confirm it can last several hours, sometimes up to 12h. Bitcoin is therefore a slow and inefficient means of payment, because its energy cost is high. So, when there are a lot of people who want to make a transaction, the waiting time to confirm it can last several hours, sometimes up to 12h. Bitcoin is therefore a slow and inefficient means of payment, because its energy cost is high. So, when there are a lot of people who want to make a transaction, the waiting time to confirm it can last several hours, sometimes up to 12h. Bitcoin is therefore a slow and inefficient means of payment, because its energy cost is high. Moreover, while cryptography, Blockchains and distributed ledgers are useful for building trust in other members of the network, they are still far from being able to replace the central authority of traditional payment systems. Indeed, with Bitcoin, there is no possible recourse in the event of payment to the wrong sender or double payment. If the “key” is lost, the bitcoins are permanently lost, and the user cannot simply call their bank to get a new card. Note also that, with Bitcoin, the role of monetary policy is completely ignored. Money creation is determined a priori and is fixed. However, the mission of monetary policy is to target the growth of the money supply in order to stimulate economic activity while controlling inflation. If there is no central bank to control the money supply, no one can intervene in the event of a spike in inflation or deflation. Without monetary policy, the economy would become more volatile, with stronger overheating of the economy and harsher recessions. Another problem is that an economy based on Bitcoin would have a deflationary effect. This is because the total amount of bitcoin is determined and cannot grow with the economy. This can cause different problems. For example, To conclude, we cannot say that Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies are really currencies. As Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB) says: “ Cryptocurrencies or bitcoins, or whatever, aren't really currencies, they're assets. A euro is a euro - today, tomorrow, in a month - it is still a euro. And the ECB is behind the euro. Who is behind cryptocurrencies? So these are very, very risky assets. " The future: blockchain If Bitcoin has failed to establish itself as a new currency, that doesn't mean that the ideal behind cryptocurrency is dead. Indeed, cryptocurrencies have spawned a distinct component of Blockchain research for financial intermediaries that they had endeavored to make obsolete. These intermediaries are now bringing the first blockchain-focused financial services to market, and more are on the way. In addition, many other industries are gradually seizing the Blockchain to facilitate information sharing, for example. Smart contracts, which automatically take effect based on incoming data, use the Blockchain to validate or invalidate contractual clauses. Blockchain technology can also be used to facilitate the shipment of goods around the world by reducing the number of checks to be carried out and the number of documents to be signed. It is also possible to ensure the traceability of a product, for example a drug or a food product because Blockchain technology makes it possible to know exactly where each product comes from and what stages it has passed. Cadastres and everything related to proof of ownership can also use the Blockchain, which provides a unique, immutable database with all its history. Automotive brands and airlines and transportation companies can also use the Blockchain to create a digital service log that keeps service history and mileage. In conclusion, the possibilities of using the Blockchain are endless and many companies are currently working on the development of such applications. It is therefore definitely a technology that will continue to be talked about in the future. To learn more about btc revenue have a look at this popular site

[keinart]

Monday Update 30/04/2018

ENGLISH:

Hello everyone. Let’s keep talking this week about what’s done or isn’t, shall we? I think I’ve already mention how I want to keep these short.

Programming

One of the hardest part that slowed down the dev progress after finishing the writing has been the programming. My previous game, One Thousand Lies, was made in Renpy. Something like the staple for indie visual novels. While Renpy works well for itself it is pretty limited once you try to go a bit further and making modifications can become complex. Also the system how Renpy manages new versions, translations and some other features is pretty pretty basic (if I had to update OTL right now for anything, I would destroy everyone save data in the process) as well as there being a few bugs I couldn’t never get rid off while developing OTL (like the Gallery not working properly RANDOMLY for example). I tried to use Renpy for some time despite all this, but I had to switch to something else at some point if I wanted to step up some features.

So my adventure looking for a new engine began. Among all the possible choices the new Visual Novel Maker for example, from the same guys that make RPG Maker, is probably the strongest VN engine oriented right now. However it is pretty new, so there’s not much documentation and once again it is hard to do anything beyond what it brings by default. Not impossible though, but hard, since everything is based on Javascript and I pretty much hate that programming language (sorry for those 2 of you who actually like it).

There are more engines I’ve tried, but at the end I went for what every indie does, and for a reason: I’m using Unity.

At the end of the day Unity is powerful enough for anything I may need now and in the future (reminder that this is an episodic game so I want to release several games and have an engine that can keep up with any new ideas I may want to try), and it is free for indies unless I make a lot of money so there you have it. Worth it.

Combined with the asset Utage, a japanese Visual Novel engine, Unity becomes a pretty powerful weapon. All the text part is handled by an excel file meaning it is really easy to edit without breaking everything. This compared with Renpy that for translation would search every line in the code then export them to a new file is a lot more convenient. Renpy had the nuance that any little change at the source would immediately not match with the translation and force you to copy paste them again, delete the old one, and if you wanted to keep some order you had to go through the code to make sure everything is in their right place.

For a Visual Novel, where changes to the text happen every single day, let it be for typos or editing, handling a translation was pretty much hell. With Utage however they are just two excel columns, one next to the other, making it extremely easy to work and edit. Even animations are included within the Excel document, meaning I can handle scenes easier always keeping control.

There are more functions like the file system management so you can even handle downloads of assets by batches, pretty useful for the phone version of the game to don’t destroy internet connections and to avoid compatibilities issues if you update the game. Another function for dicing images that I would probably talk about at a different update but that reduces the game size by A LOT. The main issue is that some (not all) of the engine documentation is in japanese, so is not really accessible for western developers, but the creators give support in english if needed.

In any case it took long to get the engine working to start scripting. But it is finally happening and all what’s left is just getting assets and spending time putting them all to work. This takes me to the next point...

What’s left?

For music we have some songs done already, but at the same time I don’t want to show them yet for particular reasons that I will explain when the time comes. Music production got delayed a bit but I hope I can give you guys more info soon. For Graphic Design in our team we have Winter. Graphic Design started a bit late so for now we only have the Textbox finished as you can see with the first image, and the logo is almost done (I wanted to finish it before announcing the game actually...). We have a lot of ideas and great designs coming for all the other menus and you have probably already noticed that the buttons at the screenshots are a bit unusual... Look forward for them!

Then for art we do have all main characters designed, but work for sprites is still needing around 4 characters (I will announce them as soon as they get done!). And from there we will go into CG work. CG will probably take the longest since they are really high definition and complex pictures, but you have seen what Naguri can do already so I’m sure you will love the results.

For backgrounds we are almost halfway done. 10 backgrounds finished, but we are going for a bit over 20. They are really detailed as you have seen already so they take some time but the quality is top-notch. At the end of the day quality is our main concern after all.

So there’s still a lot of work to get done. As I mentioned before the story is finished. Generally most indie VN devs has the issue that they don’t have their text finished and their development fail at some moment where they realize their story is not really that good, or they need to do many changes, and all their assets become unusable. This is something that many of you have probably already seen a few times with some Kickstarters for example. I wanted to make sure with Lotus Reverie that that wasn’t the case, that’s why I finished the entire episode text before getting assets, and that’s why it took so long to announce. Personally I have never understood those games promising more text and content for their projects if they reach some goals. I think any story has an optimal amount of words, making it longer doesn’t necessarily make it better, the opposite, it can affect the pacing and make it boring, and for that reason I wanted to make sure that part is handled beforehand properly.

In exchange the work that is left can be “reduced” to getting assets and putting them all together. This of course requires work but more than anything is just time and money. The story won’t change and there shouldn’t be situations where the entire development shifts to a new directions going into dev hell. However I hope you guys understand how I have real life responsibilities and work, and because of that I can’t really dedicate full time to the game. At the end I don’t really have much time neither money, but no matter if it takes longer or if it costs more than I expect, the game will come along. This is a project of passion first and foremost.

Until next update!

ESPAÑOL:

Hola a todos. Voy a seguir hablando esta semana sobre lo que ya está terminado y lo que no. Vamos al lío que como ya dije quiero mantener estas actualizaciones cortas.

Programación

Una de las partes más difícil y de las que ha retrasado todo el desarrollo tras terminar de escribir ha sido la programación. Mi juego anterior, One Thousand Lies, se hizo con Renpy que viene a ser algo así como el programa estándar para desarrollar novelas visuales. Renpy funciona bien para lo que necesita pero al mismo tiempo está bastante limitado si quieres ir un poco más lejos. Cualquier modificación que vaya más allá de sus funciones se vuelve excesivamente compleja.

Uno de los mayores problemas que tenía con Renpy era la forma en la que las traducciones se llevaban a cabo. Renpy te detectaba todas las líneas de texto dentro del código y te las exportaba para traducirlas. El problema es que si hacias algún cambio al texto a posteriori después de traducirlo (algo muy normal para una novela visual que siempre se está cambiando pequeños detalles como faltas o editando algunas frases) el juego ya no te lo iba a detectar, lo que requería volverlo a exportar, y de nuevo reorganizar las nuevas líneas, borrar a mano las antiguas. En fin un poco caótico. También Renpy tenía problemas con por ejemplo cualquier actualización o parche que quisieras sacar del juego, si actualizase OTL ahora mismo para cualquier cosa destruiría todas las partidas guardadas de los jugadores inexorablemente. Incluso también tenía algunos problemas con bugs bastante aleatorios como la Galería no funcionando A VECES al desbloquear imágenes. En definitiva, que Renpy ha sido el motor que he intentado usar durante bastante tiempo con LR pero estaba bastante limitado en muchos aspectos.

De ahí empezó mi aventura buscando un nuevo motor. Hay muchos y los he probado todos pero por ejemplo diría que Visual Novel Maker, de los creadores de RPG Maker, es el más potente de todos. Es muy nuevo y lleva poco tiempo en el mercado lo que hace que haya poca documentación y nuevamente, ciertas limitaciones, pero lo recomendaría sin duda si no fuera por un detalle: requiere Javascript si quieres hacer tu propio código para lo que sea. Cualquier modificación fuera de lo que ellos ofrecen se vuelve nuevamente más difícil de lo que debería y más si hay que usar Javascript que es el lenguaje que más odio (lo siento por las dos personas que os gusta esa cosa).

De manera que he acabado haciendo lo que todo desarrollador indie acaba haciendo: usar Unity.

Unity al final es lo suficientemente potente para hacer lo que sea tanto ahora como en el futuro. Mi plan es sacar varios episodios de LR al fin y al cabo por lo que voy a necesitar un motor que pueda soportar cualquier futura idea o problema que pueda surgir conforme pasen los años, y Unity además es gratis de usar para indies siempre y cuando no ganes mucho dinero así que es la conclusión lógica a elegir.

Combinado con Utage, un engine japonés para hacer Visual Novels de la Asset Store de Unity, desarrollar una VN se vuelve bastante más conveniente. Todo el texto lo lleva un excel de manera que es muy fácil de editar cualquier cosa sin romperlo. A diferencia de Renpy tengo los idiomas en columnas del excel de manera que puedo cambiar lo que sea en uno u otro sin romperlo. Incluso las animaciones las puedo manejar con excel permitiéndole tener todo mucho más ordenado.

Hay muchas más funciones como el manejo de archivos que me permite organizar descargas a través de grupos de manera que para teléfonos móviles puedo reducir la cantidad de archivos que se van descargando para no destruir conexiones lentas y también permitir que juegues mientras se va descargando todo de forma paralela. También puedo actualizar el juego sin destruir archivos de guardado o crear incompatibilidades de versiones. Más funciones incluye el Dicing, que sirve para reducir el tamaño de las imágenes enormemente y del que ya hablaré en más detalle en otro momento.

El mayor problema que tiene es que no toda la documentación está traducida, lo que lo vuelve algo inaccesible a desarrolladores no japoneses. Pero los creadores ofrecen ayuda en inglés si la necesitas por lo que si eres un desarrollador creo que es una buena idea si estás buscando un motor con el que trabajar.

En cualquier caso me ha llevado mucho tiempo hasta que pude empezar el scripting del juego debido a la búsqueda de motores, pero eso ya está encaminado y todo lo que hace falta es terminar el resto de elementos y ponerlos juntos, que viene a ser una cuestión de tiempo más que nada. Lo que me lleva a mi siguiente punto.

¿Qué queda?

Para música tenemos unos cuantos temas hechos, pero al mismo tiempo no quiero mostrarlos todavía por razones particulares que ya explicaré cuando llegue el momento. La producción música se ha retrasado un poco pero espero poder daros más información pronto.

Para diseño gráfico en nuestro equipo tenemos a Winter. El diseño gráfico ha comenzado algo tarde por lo que por ahora tenemos es la caja de texto como habéis podido ver en las capturas. El logo está casi acabado sin embargo así que espero poder mostrarlo pronto e ir ya de lleno al resto de menús y otros elementos con el que tenemos muchas y muy buenas ideas que espero que os gusten (imagino que ya os habréis fijado que los botones de las capturas son un tanto particulares...).

Para arte ya tenemos a todos los personajes principales diseñados, pero queda trabajo de sprites para 4 de ellos. Espero poder anunciar poco a poco los personajes que quedan de la plantilla tan pronto como sus sprites estén finalizados. Tras eso iremos a por CG, que es la parte más larga y compleja ya que son imágenes de alta definición y complejas, pero ya habéis visto lo que Naguri puede hacer por lo que estoy seguro que os encantará los resultados.

Y finalmente para fondos estamos a medio camino de terminar. Llevamos 10 fondos de unos poco más de 20 que el juego tendrá en total. La calidad y el detalle de los mismos es impresionante como ya habéis visto por lo que lleva un tiempo acabar cada uno de ellos. Nuestra prioridad sin embargo es la calidad por encima de todo por lo que espero que comprendéis este ritmo.

Así que todavía queda mucho trabajo por delante. Como ya he mencionado antes la historia está finalizada. La mayoría de Novelas Visuales independientes tienen el problema que el texto no suele estar acabado conforme empiezan el resto del desarrollo, y aunque esto es más inteligente desde el punto de vista de tiempo suele dar el problema que la historia acaba cambiando o los resultados no son los que se esperaban y se entran en situaciones complejas. Arte que deja de ser utilizable, canciones que no encajan en ninguna escena, fragmentos de la historia que cambian completamente. Incluso en más de algún caso de Kickstarter muchos habréis visto como los desarrollos cambian por completo y se tiran años hasta poder tener un producto listo.

Eso es algo que quería evitar con LR, por eso la historia está finalizada. Nunca me ha parecido bien esos juegos que prometen “más escenas” o “más contenido” durante sus campañas. Es algo que no comprendo porque añadir más texto generalmente no suele ser sinónimo de mejor, al contrario, puede destruir el ritmo de la propia historia. No pienso hacer grandes cambios a la historia y el texto se va a quedar como está, garantizando que todo lo que queda de desarrollo es simplemente terminar el resto de elementos y unirlos. Esto al final es una cuestión de tiempo y dinero. No es que tenga mucho de los dos por desgracia, pero al menos puedo garantizar que no tarde más o menos, cueste menos o más, el juego acabará saliendo y no recibirá mucho más cambios. Este es un proyecto de pasión por encima de todo, y cueste lo que cueste le daré la calidad que merece.

Hasta la próxima actualización.

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Stories by Tomas Pueyo on Medium)

What Should the US Federal Government and the States Do to Fight the Coronavirus

My two previous articles, Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now and The Hammer and the Dance, have gathered over 50 million views together and have been translated into over 30 languages each. This article focuses on the situation in the US as of March 31st 2020.

Summary: It makes political and economic sense for the US to suppress the coronavirus. For that, states and the federal government each have their own roles that they need to adjust.

The US is now the country with most coronavirus cases in the world. It is likely to keep that title in the history books. Two key reasons are government decentralization and concerns about the economic impact of aggressive social distancing measures.

Here’s what we’re going to cover today, with a lot of data, charts and sources:

What’s the situation in the US and its states

Why the coronavirus should be a bipartisan issue

The economics of controlling the virus

Which decisions should be left to the federal government or to states

Here’s what you’ll take away:

The coronavirus is growing everywhere in the US. Some states are on their way to controlling it. Others have massive outbreaks that make China’s outbreak pale in comparison. Many are unprepared, and will suffer some of the worst outbreaks. All voters care about this, Democrats and Republicans. Democrats were hit first. But Republicans have more to lose. They’re older and more likely to die. Most hesitation comes from the perceived cost of suppressing the virus. Fortunately, it’s cheaper to suppress it than to let it run loose. We should do it. But right now, states are left fending for themselves. It’s a mess. They are competing against each other instead of collaborating. They might be forced to seal their borders with each other. There is a role for states and a role for the federal government. The federal government coordinates, the states execute. If both step up, we will save lives and increase the GDP.

OK, let’s do this.

1. The Current Situation in US States

A few weeks ago, I shared this graph to alert people of what was to come in other countries.

This is an update four weeks later on all these countries that appeared so small above:

In the previous graph I showed countries with 50 cases or more. Now I’m showing countries with 1000 cases or more. There’s 181 countries with coronavirus cases, or over 90% of the total.

Note that now I’m adding China, which tells you how bad the situation is. The vertical axis has gone from a maximum of 6,000 to 200,000. A factor of 33x in four weeks. We quickly forget these orders of magnitude, but it’s worth remembering: three weeks ago, the US had less than 1,000 cases and there was still a debate of whether there would be an epidemic. This is what exponential growth looks like.

And you can see the trajectory.

It’s not good.

Let’s zoom in, looking at the state level.

New York used to dwarf everything else, but now New Jersey is joining it. Note that as of 3/31, only four countries have more cases than New York. And it’s still adding thousands of cases a day.

Remember how we zoomed in to the bottom right corner to see the emerging coronavirus countries? Let’s do that again, this time with states, taking New York and New Jersey out.

Oh, and just for context, this is the point at which Hubei shut down.

I use absolute numbers (total cases) instead of relative numbers (cases per capita) because here we’re trying to assess whether there’s an outbreak or not. Absolute numbers show if there’s a cluster and how big it is. Per capita doesn’t show this. Eg, if Liechtenstein had 5 cases, it would look like a national emergency in relative numbers, but it’s nothing. When assessing outbreaks, absolute numbers are more relevant. When assessing how bad the situation was a posteriori, relative numbers will be more relevant. The other reason is that relative numbers are much harder to process.

From now on, I’m going to use “Hubeis” as a measure, because everybody has a good sense of what happened there. A Hubei is a region that has more cases than Hubei when it was shut down. Hubei shut down with 444 confirmed cases, and ended up with close to 70,000 cases and 3,200 deaths. As a rule of thumb, a region that has more cases than Hubei but hasn’t taken the same measures as Hubei at least as early as them is very likely to end up with both more cases and more deaths than Hubei.

So now we have 33 states (34 including DC) with more cases than Hubei when it shut down (accounting for 92% of US GDP). I had to rebuild these charts 3 times in 5 days because they quickly became outdated. There were “only” 13 Hubeis in the US on Friday; now there are 33.

33 US States have more cases than Hubei when it shut down

Here’s a geographic visualization of all the counties where there’s cases.

But that’s not real cases. It’s just official ones. How close are official cases from real cases? It depends on how much you test:

This chart shows the share of tests that are positive. In the case of Spain, with 50% of cases positive, it’s very likely that they are missing a lot of cases. As a result, it’s very likely that Spain has many more cases than the 100,000 it reports.

We can see that countries that are doing a good job at controlling the virus understand the situation because they identify most cases. Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Germany all have less than 4% positives. They are still probably undercounting, but probably not by much.

So what does this look like in the US?

If you’re looking for testing sites close to where you live in the US, here’s a good resource

There are a few states that have good enough testing to be close to the true number of cases: New Mexico, Hawaii, the Dakotas, or Minnesota have testing levels similar to South Korea’s. But all of them also have few cases. As soon as a state has an outbreak, it gets overwhelmed, can’t keep up with tests, and undercounts the true number of cases.

So how can states assess how many cases they truly have?

Assuming a fatality rate of 1% (one in 100 cases dies), you can back out one estimate of true cases:

This approximation would double the number of official cases, from ~200,000 today to ~400,000. This is still likely to be an underestimate, because people take on average 3 weeks to die from the coronavirus.

If instead we use the back-of-the-envelope calculation from previous posts, where one death today means 100 cases three weeks ago (1% fatality rate), and these double every week for three weeks, so end up becoming 800 cases today, the situation becomes much more dire. Even if we assume cases doubled only two times in the last two weeks because of social distancing measures, this is what we see:

According to this, hundreds of thousands of people are already infected in the US, and most states would have thousands of cases.

So let’s summarize so far: we are in a situation where the US has 33 states with more cases than Hubei, and probably many more, but it has no way to know for sure because it’s not testing enough.

2. The Bipartisan Case against the Coronavirus

You might have noted that, as a rule of thumb, the states that have more cases lean Democrat.

The Coronavirus Hit Urban Areas First

Big urban areas are usually more connected to the rest of the world via travel. That means they’ve imported more cases, faster.

They also have a higher urban density, which means a higher transmission rate of the virus. The more people are close by, the more you meet every day, and the faster the virus spreads.

Because the vote in urban areas tends to lean more Democrat, states controlled by Democratic governors today have been impacted by the virus earlier, so they have taken measures earlier. It’s not a coincidence that New York is Ground Zero for the coronavirus in the U.S., and that the San Francisco Bay Area was initially among the worst impacted. Maybe that’s why San Francisco ordered a shelter in place on 3/16, California on 3/19, and New York on 3/20 — well before other major cities and states.

The fact that democratic-leaning states have been hit earlier explains why Democrat voters have been worried about the coronavirus earlier. As more and more cases have appeared in different states, concerns about the virus have grown on both sides.

Source: Civiqs, via the New York Times

This chart was only updated two weeks ago. What does that polarization look like today?

last cut at this. you can see pretty clearly how responses to Covid19 were quite partisan until Trump/Republicans/Fox News started taking it more seriously. final code can be found here (incl. models controlling for covid19 cases): https://t.co/0a8oGpcoEw https://t.co/NvpCYJSzLD

 — @i

Now, both parties are equally concerned. That’s important, because the virus is about to hit Republican states hard.

The Coronavirus Will Hit Republicans Too

This is the growth of Coronavirus cases in states that have a Republican governor today:

There are 16 Hubeis among Republican states (states with more cases than Hubei when it shut down). With the current growth rates, by next week there will be 22. As a reminder, Hubei ended up with over 70,000 cases and 3,000 deaths.

Not surprisingly, both Democrat-leaning and Republican-leaning voters strongly advocate for measures to curb the virus:

Link to article

It is notable that a majority of voters from both parties support every single one of the measures above. Voters want tough measures against the coronavirus.

So what measures are Republican-controlled states taking?

Coronavirus Measures in Republican-Controlled States

Details of measures per state can also be found at the Kaiser Family Foundation site. Updated as of 3/29/2020

In a thoughtful decision, all fifty states have at least issued a State Emergency Declaration, and many are much stricter. For example, Alaska, despite a very low population density, has mandated strong measures, such as a shelter-in-place, travel bans, and wide business closures. West Virginia established a shelter in place with just 40 cases.These measures make sense given the unique challenges of delivering healthcare across Alaska and the fact that West Virginia has been ranked 44th in overall health and 48th in clinical care.

But most are still very short of the measures they need to take. For example, Florida still has no ban for large gatherings, no business closures, and no stay-at-home orders beyond quarantines for travelers. Yet it leads all other Republican-controlled states in terms of cases. Even worse, Florida has just exported back across the United States countless spring breakers who hung out together in mass gatherings, especially on beaches the state refused to close.

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: https://t.co/3A3ePn9Vin

 — @i

Georgia, another leading state in terms of cases, has taken similar measures to Florida, except that bars and restaurants are still open with limited service, and high-risk groups are asked to stay home.

Meanwhile, Mississippi, with nearly 1,000 cases, requires a fever of 100.4 AND severe cough or chest pain is required to receive testing, and on March 24th, the governor reversed non-essential shutdowns applied by local jurisdictions.

Countries like South Korea or Singapore can get away with light social distancing measures because they have extensive testing, contact tracing, quarantines, isolations and travel bans: thanks to these measures, they can quickly identify cases and prevent them from infecting others.

That is not the case for many of these states. As we saw, most have poor testing. Contact tracing is worse: no state in the US has a good process as of today. That’s why most states need to apply The Hammer — a strategy of heavy social distancing for a few weeks — to control the virus and buy themselves time to set up these measures. But many states aren’t doing that either, especially when governed by Republican governors:

Chart updated as of 3/29/2020

Republican-controlled states have had a huge advantage: They have seen what has happened to their Democratic-controlled brethren, but because they are on average more rural, the coronavirus took time to reach them. But it will reach them. Some rural states, like Alaska or Idaho, have taken advantage of this delay. Others, like Oklahoma, Mississippi or Missouri, are not taking enough measures to contain the virus: It will continue spreading invisibly, infecting the people of these states.

Update: the states of Mississippi, Nevada, Georgia and Florida mandated statewide directives for citizens to stay home the same day as this article was published.

State lawmakers consider many things when deciding what measures to take, primarily health and the economy. Another factor that is surely in their mind, but isn’t discussed much, is political calculation.

The Coronavirus Kills Republican-Leaning Voters More

Most readers are acquainted with fatality rates per age group:

What I haven’t seen much is the overlap of this graph with partisanship:

The older you are, the more likely you are to both vote Republican and die from the coronavirus. Voters aged 80+ are 80 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than those under 40 (16% fatality rate vs. ~0.2%).

This effect is strong enough that people who voted for Trump in the 2016 election are around 30% more likely to die from the coronavirus than Democrats. In some swing states from the 2016 election, such as Pennsylvania, if the coronavirus were to run wild, this effect alone could have wiped out up to 30% of the gap between Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 election.

Infected Republicans are 30% more likely to die from the coronavirus than Democrats because of their age

This shows the loss of voters from coronavirus deaths. It doesn’t account for other effects, such as the votes of the family members of the deceased who might be angry at politicians for the avoidable death of their loved ones, or collateral damage of people who might die due to a collapsed healthcare system, or the family members of those people, or other secondary effects.

Many other factors will hurt rural voters more than urban ones. For example, the healthcare system has much less capacity in rural areas. The rural population tends to have worse health, so a higher likelihood of comorbidities that increase the fatality rate of coronavirus. On top of that, they don’t even get more spared by infections: the flu season tends to be delayed in rural areas compared to urban ones, but when it hits, it hits much harder.

This graph shows how flu epidemics impact 600 US cities based on their size. Bigger cities are more to the right and have bigger circles, so the small bubbles on the left show smaller cities. The vertical axis represents how concentrated the flu season is in particular weeks. We can see that big cities concentrate at the bottom right, which means their epidemics are spread over many weeks. Conversely, the smaller cities are, the more they tend to be at the top left, meaning their epidemics are concentrated in fewer weeks. This is believed to be caused partially by the fact that there is always some transmission, and hence ongoing herd immunity, in urban areas. This won’t be the case with the coronavirus, since there’s no herd immunity yet, but what this does illustrate is that smaller cities don’t get spared because they’re small. They do get hit, and when they do, the epidemic also hits hard.

To the extent Republican governors are hesitating to strict containment measures for political reasons, it will eventually become clear that they got the politics exactly backwards: instituting stricter measures early-on would have helped keep their most loyal voters alive.

3. Coronomics

The main hesitance of some American policymakers to take strong, early action against the coronavirus comes from economic tradeoffs between two very different approaches.

Mitigation: Take some measures now but don’t be too aggressive. Just flatten the curve, go through the epidemic, build herd immunity, and go back to business as usual. This has the benefit of avoiding an economic shock early on because the economy doesn’t shut down for a few weeks or months. But during the epidemic, people will avoid going to work or consuming, for fear of getting infected. That ongoing panic can strain the economy for as long as people believe the epidemic is uncontrolled.

Suppression (The Hammer and the Dance): Apply a “Hammer” early on and shut down the economy for a few weeks or months. That will bring infections to nearly zero while giving time to organize everything, from testing to contact tracing. Once testing data indicates it’s safe, move towards the “Dance,” a period during which social distancing measures are reduced, but some measures might still be needed nevertheless, depending on the situation.

Both approaches have ramifications and costs. For example, the heavy psychological toll of the fear of the virus or the loss of a job can depress consumers and their income, reducing their spending. The resulting demand shock could put companies out of business if they don’t have enough cash and banks don’t want to lend. If too many of these companies go out of business, the financial system itself could be imperiled. Consumers, particularly shocked by losses in their retirement accounts could significantly increase their savings rate — which means significantly reducing consumption for years.

So, on the balance, what’s the economic impact of each?

The Big Picture of Pandemics

Before we jump into the comparison, it’s useful to take a step back and put the entire pandemic thing into economic perspective: How bad is this going to be economically over the next few years? These are the potential scenarios:

There are 3 scenarios:

We can go back to normal. BCG and the Harvard Business Review call this “V-shape”.

We can go back to growing like we used to, but having lost enough GDP that we never gain that growth back, and take some years to go back to the same level of the economy. We can call this “U-shape”.

The slump is big and afterwards there’s some lingering issues in the economy and we don’t quite go back to the same level of GDP growth. We can call this “L-shape”.

These can impact the level of the GDP as well as its growth.

Which scenario each country will go through depends on how we react, but in the grand scheme of things, after a year of pain, it is likely that we will go back to normal. Let me explain.

A recent analysis showed that the 1918 pandemic reduced GDP per capita of the average country by 6%, and consumption by 8% for a year.

And yet, for most pandemics of the 20th century, the economy went back to normal afterwards.

Link to source

This is important because it puts the entire discussion into perspective: What we decide today will impact lives and the economy in the short term. There are also risks in the economy today that are different from the past. However, what history teaches us is that, usually, after a pandemic, the economy goes back to normal. The decisions we take will have a tremendous impact this year and next, but economically, in a few years it’s likely that the impact will be minimal.

So Which One Is Better, Mitigation or Suppression?

The complexity of mitigation and suppression economic outcomes is such that it’s very hard to model. If only there had been a real-life test where we could compare the different strategies…

It turns out, there is.

In the 1918 pandemic, different US cities had different approaches to the pandemic. Some took it easy, like Philadelphia, with measures that came too late and for a short period of time. Other cities, like St Louis, took measures quickly and for a longer period of time.

I’ve already talked about these cities in the past, but only about fatality rates. A crucial paper that came out on Thursday, March 26th, now also compares their measures with their economic outcomes.

Before showing their results, it’s important to ask ourselves: What should we expect to find?

It’s crucial to understand this graph. On the horizontal axis, we have mortality. On the vertical one, as a proxy for economic growth, we have the growth in employment. This graph illustrates the hypothesis, not actual data: Red dots are hypothetical cities that impose few social distancing measures, while green dots are cities that take stronger social distancing measures.

If indeed social distancing measures had been bad for the economy, what we should see is that cities with higher mortality rates (because they applied measures that were too little too late) had a bigger economic growth in the years after.

Is this what we actually found?

This is one of the more complex graphs in this entire article, so let’s explain it a bit. Red dots are cities that had weaker social distancing measures than the average city. Green dots are cities that had stronger social distancing measures than the average. The line shows the trend: more mortality meant less employment after the pandemic. The grey area shows the confidence interval: the true trend is likely to be within that area, meaning that it’s extremely likely that it was a downward trend. Because the virus hit the East Coast first, cities in the West had time to learn from cities in the East and take stronger, faster measures. That, however, generates a bias. There are more biases, such as that wealthier cities could manage the healthcare crisis better, but might be hit worse by the virus, or cities with more density could be hit more. So researchers controlled for factors such as density, wealth, population… Their controls were the 1910 agriculture employment share, 1910 manufacturing employment share, 1910 urban population share, 1910 income per capita, and log 1910 population.

Researchers found the opposite of the hypothesis. “Mitigation”, the strategy where the measures taken are weaker, was much worse for the economy than “suppression”, heavier social distancing measures.

As you can see, most green dots are at the top left (fewer deaths, more economic growth) and the red dots are at the bottom right (more deaths, less economic growth). Together, they form a trend: the more people died (because there were weaker social distancing measures), the weaker the economy was afterwards.

Not only that, but this was true for both how long measures were taken and how fast they were enacted. And it wasn’t just due to losing more workers: It remains true for other economic indicators, such as growth in manufacturing value and growth in national banking assets.

From the charts below, the quick takeaway is that more social distancing measures was better for the economy, now matter how you look at it.

Here are some quotes directly from the paper:

“Our findings suggest that pandemics can have substantial economic costs, and NPIs can have economic merits, beyond lowering mortality”

“Cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively experience a relative increase in real economic activity after the pandemic”

“More severely affected areas experience a relative decline in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output, bank assets, and consumer durables.”

“The declines in all outcomes are persistent, and more affected areas remain depressed relative to less exposed areas from 1919 through 1923.”

“Reacting 10 days earlier to the arrival of the pandemic in a given city increases manufacturing employment by around 5% in the post period. Likewise, implementing NPIs for an additional 50 days increases manufacturing employment by 6.5% after the pandemic.”

Obviously, there are differences between the 1918 flu pandemic and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic: This one affects older people, it has a lower fatality rate, the healthcare system is stronger, people can work from home more, we’re much more connected so the virus spreads more quickly everywhere… We don’t know what would be true for this pandemic. But… the only economic evidence we have of social distancing measures is that they helped, rather than hurt, the economy.

What other data points can we look at to assess how bad suppression could be for the economy? What about the markets?

How the Chinese Equity Market Valued the Hubei Lockdown

China is the only good example to understand how the markets value a massive outbreak, because it’s the only country that has had a huge one and that has (apparently) been able to control it.

When Hubei shut down, the markets panicked. But as soon as they were down, they started going back up again. By the beginning of March, they had gone back to nearly normal, their level before the lockdown, and a similar level as the year before. What that means is that investors believed a full shutdown of an area of 60 million people barely registered in the grand scheme of things.

Only when the coronavirus became a pandemic did investors start worrying again. But what matters here is how they valued the cost of the lockdown. The answer appears to be: Not much.

Incidentally, the day President Trump announced the National Emergency, markets went up.

This is not much information, but we need to realize that we’re making decisions that might cost millions of lives with very little data. Any information we have needs to be part of our analysis. And so far, all the evidence we have suggests a suppression strategy would not be more expensive than mitigation, but rather the opposite.

Ok, let’s take a step back. Now we have some evidence that:

21st century pandemics have tended to have a short-term effect on the economy

Quicker and longer social distancing measures probably benefit the economy

A lockdown that can control an outbreak was enough to increase the confidence of investors to bring the Chinese stock market back to the levels before the lockdown.

Based on the little we know today, it looks like Suppression is economically better than Mitigation once you have an outbreak.

The Price of a Life

One of the core challenges lawmakers have when comparing Suppression and Mitigation is that tradeoffs between life and money are hard. The major benefit of Suppression, the lives saved, can’t be translated into money.

But it can.

The cost in deaths to the US would range between $750 billion and $15 trillion.

We do that all the time. In insurance, pharmacology or healthcare, for example, society has to decide how much a life is worth.

This is a painful reality in healthcare: We don’t have infinite resources. We can’t, unfortunately, treat everybody for everything. Otherwise, we would go bankrupt. As a society, we are forced to make decisions: How should we spend the limited resources we have? What measures are worth paying for, and which ones are too expensive?

The way we calculate this is by asking ourselves: How much are we willing to pay to extend our life? In healthcare in the US, that number turns out to be between $50,000 and $150,000 per year.

If we assume the average age of death for coronavirus is 78, these people have on average 10 more years to live, which means the average coronavirus patient would pay up to $1.5 million to avoid death (10 years * $150,000 per year).

We don’t live to make money. We make money to live.

In my previous post, I explained how direct deaths from a mitigation strategy in the US could range between 500,000 and over 10 million. As a quick back-of-the-envelope reminder, it’s the result of assuming the share of the US population that gets infected ranges between 40% and 75%, and the fatality rate ranges between 1% (currently 1.5% in South Korea, the country with some of the best testing and healthcare system) and 4%. That does not account for collateral damage (other people who die because they don’t have access to urgent healthcare), which could greatly increase the death rate.

If we account for how much we value life, the cost of the coronavirus in deaths for the US would be between $750 billion and $15 trillion. For context, that’s between 4% and 75% of GDP. The cost in lives would be staggering.

Let’s summarize all this information

Notes: some people have asked me how it is possible that the value of some people’s lives is comparable to the size of GDP. GDP is broadly the value created in a year, not the total wealth we have. The total wealth we have in the US is approximately $1 million per person on average, which means the US’s wealth is ~$320 trillion. That does not account for the wealth in terms of life, but puts the cost of $15 trillion in lives into perspective. Also I haven’t talked about the costs to the economy of the Dance phase of the Suppression strategy, once heavy social distancing measures subside. That’s because, if done well, countries can “dance” with only a small subset of measures that don’t cost much: testing, contact tracing, quarantines, isolation, hygiene education, and travel bans. Note finally that a suppression strategy would cost all of society but would benefit older people more, as they are the ones most likely to be saved by these measures. As such, they are a transfer of wealth from all of society towards our seniors, who in the US tend to vote Republican.

Some societies are adopting a “survival of the fittest” approach, exposing their populations to the virus and letting the weak die. But it looks like that approach might weaken these societies more, making them, in turn, not be the fittest they could be in the face of this epidemic.

All these numbers, with the surprising conclusion that a Suppression strategy would likely be less costly than a Mitigation strategy. But these numbers obscure a larger truth:

We don’t live to make money. We make money to live.

And the best way to illustrate that is through war.

4. Out of Many, One

This is War

President Trump put it very clearly on March 18th: This is war.

He compared the sacrifices we will need to make to those of World War II. This is exactly how we should be looking at the problem.

Imagine we had foreign agents. They have infiltrated the US. They are invisible. They are spreading across the country: slowly, silently. And then, they strike: rapidly, randomly. People start falling left and right. Over a matter of days, the death toll of 9/11 is passed, and then dwarfed. At some point, it becomes clear that the death toll will be worse than Iraq. Worse than Vietnam. Worse than World War II. Worse than all of America’s wars combined.

If this was happening, the US would stop everything it’s doing and single-mindedly focus all of its attention and money to beat this enemy.

That’s why the US has the mightiest military in the world. That’s why it spent $2.4 trillion on the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s why, during World War II, two-thirds of the American economy had been integrated into the war effort: to beat the enemies that threaten America.

This is what should be happening now. The fact that our enemies are invisible viruses and not invisible agents doesn’t change much. If anything, it only makes it easier, because we’re smarter than them and we can beat them.

But only one entity can declare war and harness the resources we would need: the federal government.

Survival of the Fittest

China had a centralized response to the coronavirus. South Korea had a centralized response. Taiwan. Italy. Spain. France. UK. Poland. India. All centralized responses. Meanwhile, so far in the US, we have let states take the lead.

There are many situations where that approach is reasonable. But waging war against an exponentially growing threat that all countries face at the same time is not one of those situations.

We have a $2 trillion package to fight the coronavirus. It’s a war-like budget, but without war-like measures. The government has invoked the Defense Production Act, for example, but hasn’t actually used it yet. As a result, states and companies are struggling to face the challenge, but in some places, they’re drowning.

Trade War over Supplies

One of the best examples is the purchase of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks, goggles, gowns or gloves.

Traditional medical distributors such as Cardinal Health or McKesson are doing what they can to get PPEs from the manufacturing center of the world, China. Except that China has been closed for business for nearly a month. Just as the supply plummeted, demand exploded around the world, with orders of magnitude more requests from all countries in the world for more of everything. Even if China wanted, it couldn’t supply everything. That’s assuming that China wants to. In the middle of a trade war with the US, and with a grey market that is much more profitable than the official one, the traditional channels don’t work. Suppliers are selling to the highest bidder.

When there’s will, we can overcome these challenges, such as the recent airlifting of medical supplies spearheaded by the White House. But this is piecemeal right now, not a systematic approach.

Homegrown Mess for Protective Equipment

The country is mobilized. Everybody wants to help, from tech to education. In healthcare, hundreds of initiatives have sprung up to produce the PPEs our healthcare workers need. Manufacturing plants across the country are trying to change their production towards masks, face screens or any other PPE. But they don’t have the money, designs or logistics to start, and they don’t know where to sell. Dozens of organizations have sprung up to help, such as the PPE Coalition. But we need one master effort to coordinate immediately all the manufacturers, financiers, designers, lawyers, logistics experts, and customers in one place.

If we had months, the private sector could figure it out. But we have days. When you need speed, you need a single actor coordinating everything, and the obvious one is the federal government.

But the response so far has been for states to figure it out by themselves. The federal government has told state governors to find ventilators by themselves. That is tragic.

Fratricide for Ventilators

First, states are not experts on this. They don’t have their own CDCs. They don’t deal with ventilator markets. They don’t know where the supply is. Every day counts, but instead of mandating what needs to happen, thousands of state employees are trying to become overnight experts in ventilator and PPE procurement.

But even if they were experts, they couldn’t do it. Because now every state is fighting for itself. Every state needs ventilators, either because they need them today, or because they will need them tomorrow. This is a matter of life and death, so they’re bidding against each other. Ventilator and PPE providers are looking at this and selling to the highest bidder. Survival of the fittest.

States are bidding against each other for ventilators and protective equipment. Survival of the fittest.

A coordinated federal response would eliminate all these problems: it would harness the experience of the best experts, it would determine the prices and quantities to be manufactured, and it would distribute assets based on needs, not on whoever is fast and rich enough to buy them first.

Unaffordable Testing Kits

Arguably, the single most important measure against the coronavirus is to test as many people as possible to identify all the infected, isolate them, trace their contacts, and quarantine them. This is the bread and butter of how all East Asia countries have controlled the virus. It’s how we’ll know how when, in a Suppression strategy, it’s time to switch from the Hammer (total lockdown) to the Dance (relaxed social distancing measures).

But in the US, not only do we have a very hard time testing. It’s unaffordable. If testing for the virus was as simple as getting a test covered by your insurance, that would be easy. But that’s not how it works.

People who are symptomatic and seek care may be billed for a visit with a doctor, an influenza test, a chest x-ray, and bacterial, viral, or blood culture tests. These costs can add up very quickly, particularly for people with no insurance or who have high-deductible health plans. — Castlight Report

With all these, a simple coronavirus test can end up costing people over $4,000. That does not include the treatment. There is no way you can test everybody with that price tag.

Contact Tracing and Quarantine Enforcement

China had 1,800 teams of five people each figuring out every single person that a coronavirus patient might have infected while out and about. These techniques were extremely advanced, looking at mobile phone location or credit card data, cross-referencing with mass transport tickets, and using other tools to identify every single potential contagion.

Meanwhile, in the US, we’re leaving all of that to the states.

Quarantine enforcement is equally technologically-advanced and time-consuming. Some countries use apps, while others track the movement of your phone to know if you’re still at home and call you if they suspect you left your phone home.

None of this exists in the US. As we know, the NSA already has a lot of this data. The government is already using it, they’re just not using it for this yet, and 50 states can’t be expected to all figure it out on their own.

The government doesn’t need to do all of this, but it needs to coordinate it. We will go much faster if we develop a single app for all states and we tell everybody to use that same app. We will also need software for contact tracing workers to do their job. States can employ these workers, but with the time we have available, the fastest way to get this done is through a the federal government, even if it’s through a public-private partnership between with tech companies.

All of that can be done while maintain privacy like, in Singapore. And if people don’t want to use the app, they can opt out like in Poland and just expect random visits from state enforcement workers.

The Weakest Link

All of this puts US states in a very tough situation. The richest ones might be able to organize all of this and develop the technology required. But many will not. These states will suffer outbreaks they can’t see or control. That will create difficult dynamics between them.

Imagine Alaska applies a costly Hammer and locks down the state for weeks. It manages to control the epidemic, and sets up great testing and contact tracing processes. Meanwhile, maybe Texas doesn’t want to do the same, and there’s an uncontrolled epidemic.

What will Alaska do? Will it let Texans come, at risk of seeding new outbreaks? No, it will want to ban them from traveling to Alaska. Clever Texans will just travel to another state and go from there to Alaska. So Alaska will be forced to seal its borders. And every state that takes the coronavirus seriously will have to seal its borders too. This is already happening.

If you think that’s impossible, legal experts disagree: states can close their borders to other states.

When the federal government treats every state like an independent country, the states require the same tools as those of independent countries. Even though Spain is part of the European Union, as an independent country, it sealed its borders.

Individual states are only as strong as the weakest link. Either the US mandates measures at the federal level, or states will be forced to behave like countries and eventually seal their borders.

What Should the States and the Federal Government Do?

The takeaway is that both states and the federal government have their own roles to fulfill. So far, states are taking the lead, and many are doing what’s needed. But some haven’t. And even the best ones still need coordination in some areas. These are the ones where the federal government should step in.

Based on all of this, here are some key measures the federal government should contemplate:

Healthcare Supplies: Centralize the purchase of critical supplies (ventilators, PPEs, test kits…) and allocate them to states, allowing them to distribute within the state. Provide supplier guarantees so that they don’t underproduce in fear of ending up with too much unsold inventory.

Homegrown Production: Support the homegrown production of critical supplies, including financing and supplier guarantees. Determine a clearinghouse so that supply, demand, and philanthropic help know where to meet. Either build one through a public-private partnership or anoint one of the existing platforms, to speed up market making (eg, Google for ventilators, PPE Coalition for PPEs).

Centralize Contact Tracing: Build with a public/private partnership the technology needed to trace contacts easily. Create a law that requires companies to hand over the data needed to make it work and allows its use by federal and state employees. Provides the tools for states to actually carry out the contact tracing. Create the tools in a way that privacy is optimized, and add an automatic expiration date to the law.

Either mandate country-wide social distancing measures, or provide very specific guidelines for states and clarify their ability to seal borders with each other. The application of social distancing measures should adapt to the reality on the ground: What works in infected cities with lots of work-from-home ability might not fit rural areas with low density, no coronavirus cases, and predominant farming activity. If a federal mandate is unworkable, use access to other resources and funding for compliance.

Speed up decision making or get out of the way when states need agility. For example, testing kits could arguably be better off without the heavy oversight of the FDA, given all the international best practices and the speed of local laboratories. Use the FDA recommendations as guidance and best practices, rather than as a gate.

Lead an initiative to guarantee free coronavirus testing to citizens, all costs included.

Actively update travel bans: Right now, they are mostly from China, Iran and Europe, but that doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground anymore. There are as of today 23 countries outside of these places with more than 1,000 cases, and many more quickly growing.

Support states with advice and money to educate the population on the importance and best practices of social distancing and hygiene.

Conclusion

The United States is the strongest country in the world. It has the most vibrant economy, the mightiest military. It has inspired democracies through history, and shines the values of freedom around the world.

All of this originated two and a half centuries ago, when a group of ragtag colonies, subservient to a remote king, decided to band together to overturn a tyranny.

That triumph emerged from the union of the original thirteen states. Independent, they couldn’t beat the mighty United Kingdom. Together, they did.

This is why the US is called the United States. It was the union that brought the force. It’s why the seal of the United States of America declares: E Pluribus Unum.

Out of many, one.

We are facing the biggest battle of our generation, and it all comes down to today. We have two options on our hands: Either we unite as a country, or we will crumble as individual states.

The margin of error is so small. A few days off, and thousands more die. Our healthcare workers are already dying on the lines. They’re willing to give their lives for all of us. Because that’s what living is about. We, too, need to fight for every life of our compatriots. Because we know, when we add up these lives, this will make the difference between winning and losing. Between living, or letting our loved ones die.

I want to be on the winning team.

If you believe this article, or any other similar article, can help your lawmakers make the right decisions, please share it. Millions have done it with the previous articles, and they might have saved countless lives.

If you want to receive the next articles, sign up here:

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If you agree with this approach, consider signing the White House petition.

This has been a massive team effort with the help of dozens of people who have provided research, sources, arguments, feedback on wording, challenged my arguments and assumptions, and disagreed with me. Special thanks to Carl Juneau, John Hsu, Genevieve Gee, Matt Bell, Elena Baillie, Xianhang Zhang, Jorge Peñalva, Pierre Djian, Mike Kidd, Yasemin Denari, Eric Ries, Castlight, Berin Szoka, Andy Skrzypacz, Shishir Mehrotra, Dan Hess, Mudit Garg, and many more. This would have been impossible without all of you.

[thenormativesuperintendent]

The Schwarzschild radius

One of the most common complaints among people who begin treatment with SSRI's is that they reduce their ability to feel, and that this is definitely a bad thing, and therefore all psychiatric drugs are bad, Prozac is bad, Zoloft is bad, Big Pharma is bad, and then the patient gets depressed again and now feels even worse because, like, I can't take sertraline, can I? I wouldn't feel anything! "I knew I had to get off Zoloft because I couldn't even cry at my brothers wedding!" - Random woman whose name I can't recall. I can sympathise, this would indeed be a little jarring and disconcerting, but you know what else is bad? Depression. I don't mean to make a mockery of her plight, I understand what it's like to suffer from depression, but my annoyance at the time came from her anger towards the drug. I understand you were upset you couldn't feel that happy for your brother, but this is how SSRI's work, ok? Numbing to initiate action, action to improve your circumstances.

I'm going to palm this off to my favourite blog, and probably one of the smartest/most insightful people alive, Hotel Concierge, in this essay here, because he's written a far more eloquent, well articulated set of reasons as to why emotional analgesia is a good thing, and how this effect is leveraged to facilitate therapy. Also, if you have ever undergone the burden of mental illness, this essay is literally, for me, life-saving. I sincerely hope that it helps you too.

Second point: I find alarming the claim that, fundamentally, most antidepressants work via the same mechanism. I debated whether to tap out this text file on the point of not wanting to offend anyone/appear to be a pedantic asshole, but recently, this, courtesy Slate Star Codex:

“Increasing BDNF is the best option we have” NO[1]

Can I write "disagree" and then underline it, and then highlight it several times? I think this view -that it’s really just a landscape of SSRI’s- is flat-out wrong - I don't think it's necessarily dangerous per se, but it vastly misrepresents the state of play in psychopharmacology, and I want to put forward my arguments to rectify that.

Firstly, from the wonder of modern pedagogy that is Stahl:

Complex.

The idea behind these diagrams (the textbook is brilliant) is to give you a visual representation of the various binding affinities these compounds have for different receptors; the larger the shape, the greater the binding affinity.

Now let’s take a look at two similar antidepressants from the SSRI class: Lexapro and Zoloft (escitalopram and sertraline) The primary mechanism of action in both is occupancy of SERT (the serotonin transporter); normally serotonin gets slurped back up into pre-synaptic neuron, now it can’t because said slurpy protein is full, this leads to serotonin lingering in the synaptic cleft for longer which leads to an increased chance for it to bind to serotonin receptors on the post synaptic neurone. Voila, more activity in serotonergic neurons. Could be inhibitory, excitatory, changing receptor expression in the surface of the neuron: a multitude of downstream effects. Give two weeks for gene translation to occur and there you have it.

Serotonin is involved, in a broad, upstream kind of way, in regulating mood. More specifically, if thoughts[2] are constituted of different circuits or clusters of neurons firing, then serotonin plays a role in regulating affect by changing the activity of these cells (by the probability that they release/don’t release an impulse) that are poorly understood.

Posteriori, it’s no surprise that “pure” SSRI’s compress your emotional bandwidth concomitant to dose; we developed the saying “carrot and stick” for a reason; if emotional circuitry is closely related to System 1 thinking (Kahneman & Taversky - please don’t make me cite) then we need happiness and reward as well as sadness and grief. The two in partnership give us a map to help steer our actions away from what might harm us and towards what might be beneficial. If depression isn’t sadness (it isn’t) then lower serotonin levels lead to loss of any feeling, and your subjective cognitive interpretation of this is depression. You feel, not nothing, but hopeless. You lie there doing nothing; there’s no carrot, there’s no stick, everything just sucks. You’re not sad, you’re not crying, there’s just no point doing anything. Going upstream to jack up extracellular serotonin levels makes sense; sure, you might cap out your happiness by increasing the overall activity of all those serotonin pathways, but now the affective system has some life in it, you can get up and move about, think and cognise. Hooray, now therapy can work.

Except what if we could do better? We recognise that blocking the transporter means more serotonin everywhere, serotonin everywhere = emotional numbing. What if we could go further downstream and just target the receptors we want directly? Don’t jump to the conclusion that morphine is a good thing right now, if you’re suffering from depression and thumbing through your contact book to find a dope dealer, you have my sympathies, and far bigger issues than I can help you with. I wish you luck.

But there is no such thing as a pure SSRI; Zoloft has a weak, but clinically significant effect on other proteins (transporters and receptors); Lexapro is about as close to a pure SSRI as we currently have, but Zoloft seems to have some decent dopamanergic action going on in the frontal cortex.

And this is exactly the issue. I’m not debating that the primary mechanism of effect in both these drugs is interfering with serotonin metabolism, I’m saying that the subjective experience of being on sertraline is going to be different to the subjective experience of being on escitalopram. How do you quantify a slight uptick in dopamine? Chemists and pharmacists might say “well, it’s nothing, it’s really just an SRI” except: how in gods name do you qualify the subjective difference of “minor increase in dopamine”?

This isn’t a theoretical consideration; what appears on paper to be a bunch of drugs with minor differences, will, I am confident, have wildly different effects on different patients. Forget neurotransmitters, forget HAM-D scales. What if you just gave each patient four weeks on each of these different drugs and asked them to keep a daily journal of their subjective experiences? Which pill would they prefer? My best guess is no clear answer would emerge: minor differences on paper lead to concrete differences to different patients, and this is a very real, tangible, beneficial phenomena. Vortioxetine is indeed exciting: heavily antagonising HT2C sub-receptors tends to have good clinical effects, as evidenced by the fact Agomelatine seems to work well for some people. “But couldn’t that just be its beneficial effects on sleep and MT1/MT2 agonising?” Sure, except melatonin decreases dopamine release, which is the current leading hypothesis of seasonal affective disorder. Try popping 20mg of melatonin and tell me how you feel the next morning. Not enough dopamine means a malfunctioning reward/motivation pathway and shoddy cognition[3]. Combining SERT occupancy with serotonin antagonism on certain sub-receptors is a legitimately neat development. Mirtazapine is a potent drug, perhaps makes some a little too edgy or sedated (sedation can be a useful tool, see: insomnia) and it just antagonises the bejesus out of histamine, adrenergic, and serotonergic receptors.

The problem is that once people see “SERT” on a drug, everything else gets sucked into that vacuum, compressed into a black hole and all nuance is lost, and in the delicate balance of various ratios of neurotransmitter levels, nuance is everything. There’s no way to qualify the subjective experience of “minor increase/decrease in transmitter X/Y/Z” so stop pretending that these drugs are all basically the same; similarity on paper != similarity of experience.

(Endnote: SNRI’s tend to work well, slightly paradoxically, on anxiety. Why? Because increasing norepinephrine levels leads to agonising the alpha-2 autoreceptor, this shuts down the firing of the pre-synaptic neuron. Of course, individual mileage may vary and standard disclaimers apply. Just don’t be surprised if you fall asleep in class six hours after you’ve taken your Cymbalta)

I hope I haven’t offended anyone - my aim is simply to push back against a perceived hopelessness at making new antidepressants, and to argue that there are demonstrable, subjective (which in psychiatry is almost everything?) differences in each and every anti-depressant out there.

[1] It was (still is?) trendy to say that increasing BDNF ameliorates depression, but I’m pretty confident BDNF has very little to do directly with depression. Yes, depressed people show low levels of BDNF, and drugs like Zoloft can increase BDNF and synaptogenesis (they can also not do that) So does exercise. And yet exercise is much more efficacious at doing so than Zoloft, but no-one successfully gets through clinical depression by doing laps across Greece like 300 lives depend on it. Don’t get me wrong, exercise is fantastic, for mental and physical health. I’m just saying that nothing increases BDNF like exercise, and yet it doesn’t work as well as antidepressants in most cases. That NSI-189 failed to differentiate from placebo is perhaps the most unsurprising result since Karl Popper put pen to paper.

[2] Ontology question: what’s a thought?

[3] My leading cause of frustration with the nootropic/biohacking/transhumanist community: “give me all the dopamine you can!” Oh, so you want schizophrenia? Dude, you don’t need pills, you need to stop avoiding study. To quote Hotel Concierge, “your rationalism is inseparable from your anxiety”

[myyoungadultangst-blog]

Morals and Justification

(No song this week, I couldn’t come up with anything)

This week we talked about Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote a lot about authority and morality, which makes sense because he was writing during the Spanish Civil War. He opposed many of the revolutionaries who adopted a more fascist ruling style like General Miguel Primo de Rivera and Francisco Franco. One of the first questions the presenting groups asked us was whether humans need a higher authority telling them right from wrong. I’ve kind of talked about this questions in a few of my other reflections. I really think that in order for society to function, there does need to be an established moral code by everyone involved. Naturally, there must be some sort of higher authority—government, leaders, church, etc.—that makes certain that this code is followed, but the concept of morality originates communally rather than from these enforcers. However, I think that people within a society should have a healthy skepticism about those who enforce rules because there is always the potential to abuse a power system. Although this opinion slightly differs from my own, I really liked what was said by a girl in the front of the class. That there are two types of people: those who flourish underneath authority and those who drastically oppose it. I think my answer, along with other aspects of my life, place me in the category of preferring to live under authority. This does not necessitate that my personality is entirely submissive (because I am far too stubborn for that to be true), but rather that I would rather have someone tell me the difference between right and wrong rather than make that distinction myself. What also gave me a little pause about this concept of thinking is that it is mostly harbored by religious people and I am not a religious person. I think the most interesting section we talked about in class was whether or not humans are able to justify our actions before or after we act. Although many of the people in our class made a good case for justifying our actions before we make them, I think the quote the group provided clearly displays we cannot. Unamuno says that “I must point out that our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are no more than a posteriori justification of our conduct” (157). What Unamuno is saying is that even if you are actually justifying your actions before you make them because you are expecting a certain result or you feel it is the right thing to do, that those preconceived notions about your actions ultimately originate from an after of either yours or someone else’s actions. For me, this concept become clear when looking at how court precedents affect current law practices. Although that justification can be used before an action by a judge as proof, it had to come after some other ruling at some point in time to be accepted as common practice. We can try to justify our actions before, but it’s ultimately the after that can confirm our justifications. I’ll talk a little about what the first Heidegger group talked about next week when I have a little more information from him.

[wrestlingcultur-blog]

Impact Wrestling

Tonight, Impact Wrestling returns with a new weekly episode that will air on the American channel Pop Tv from the Impact Zone in Orlando, Florida. The company has announced several fights for this special show known as " Under Pressure ", and in this news, we will provide you with an advance. Below is the preview of the matches that will be broadcast tonight. - Pentagon Jr. (c) vs. Austin Aries for the Impact Wrestling World Championship. These two fighters have not yet met in an individual fight since Pentagon Jr. snatched the championship in a triple threat. Last week, both saw their faces again in a team match in which The Son of the Phantom and Matt Sydal also participated. Who will leave "Under Pressure" with the championship at his waist? - Allie (c) against Su Yung for the Knockouts championship! Something is changing in the champion, especially since she received a doll with the spirit of Rosemary. Last week, Rosemary was buried and burned alive, and Allie will not only seek to defend the championship in "Under Pressure", but will also seek revenge. - Tessa Blanchard against Madison Rayne. Since arriving at Impact Wrestling, Tessa Blanchard has been bluffing and talking bad about the other competitors. Last week, he fought Kiera Hogan, beat her and tried to humiliate her a posteriori, but Madison Rayne decided that that must end. This has led us to the fight to be held next week, although Madison yesterday sent a warning to Tessa: he said he will put it in its place. - Eli Drake against Scott Steiner. Former champions in pairs will face each other to resolve their differences. After losing the titles in pairs to Z & E, Steiner became very nervous and faced the new champions in backstage last week. Eli Drake tried to calm him down but all he managed to do was face his partner. In addition, we will have a fight between Brian Cage and Dezmond Xavier. Cage has been traveling around the world and it's time to return to Impact Wrestling. Will he continue his winning streak? Note: This page will be updated with results soon. Read the full article

[a-ordinary-life]

When Clothes Become Fashion Ingrid Loschek

-Duchamp’s conclusion can be transferred to fashion, inasmuch as the viewer ‘makes’ clothing into fashion. This meets the extravagant haute couture model’s claim to be fashion, just as an item of clothing becomes the fashion only when it is worn by a specific group  within society. (p11)

-In contrast to art, little or even no substance is expected of fashion due to its assumed mundanity. In fashion, an increase in cultural evaluation is achieved by declaring the intentions of the visible, for example in the case of intellectually connoted models by Alexander McQueen (cf. p. 55) or Hussein Chalayan (cf. p. 63). (p12)

-Systems like fashion (and the same applies to economics, science, politics, sport etc.) offer no access; they have no social address. In other words, ‘fashion’ is entirely without leadership and centre; there is no logical place where it can be reached. Neither organisations like the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode in Paris nor New York Fashion Week, nor so-called fashion institutes or fashion-industry associations provide a central address for ‘fashion’ as such, and they do not define what becomes fashion, but try to pinpoint trends. (p24)

- Fashion follows the binary code of ‘in’–‘out’, which implies fashionable–old-fashioned. By contrast, the system does not distinguish between beautiful and ugly. This attribution arises from outside as a social understanding, a social negotiation, and also involves individual taste. (p25)

- The paradox lies in the creation of value by means of something with no value; arriving at something positive by means of something negative.In fashion, for example, luxury brands like Hermès or Louis Vuitton introduce limits on certain articles like the Kelly Bag in order to achieve their aim for desirability and exclusivity—so that a product becomes a fashion. In this way, they (consciously) increase the ‘danger’ that the article will be copied. In turn, the copy prompts many people—also those outside the ‘luxury society’—to want the article. As a result, it becomes the fashion (fashion is not fashion until a group within society has agreed on it). The paradox lies in the promotion of distribution and desirability, including aura, by means of limitation. (p28)

-Strategies of Invention in Fashion: (Provocation) 

-The provocation lies in the crossing of borders and rules, on both real and intellectual levels, as well as in a deviation away from perceptual and emotional norms. Provocation can be understood only against the background of the times and local conditions....Provocation develops when the ‘communicative contract’ between the clothing and the consumer is broken, resulting in shocked rejection or euphoric acceptance. (p39)

- Fashionable provocations from the street (as long as they are not tolerated) are disproportionately greater than those from the catwalk, since they emerge in public space and not within the exclusive context of a fashion show. (p40)

- If the limits of social tolerance are crossed, the outcome is a provocation. However, the limits of social tolerance are subject to constant change, which is the very reason that innovative creations and thus new fashions are accepted. (p41)

- To this extent, the semiotic definition of fashion is subject to a communicatively negotiated, social process. Fashion extends far beyond the objective aspect of the product, clothing. It gives this clothing a social purpose, above and beyond those of function and aesthetics. Clothing is supplemented by semblance and illusion, which are defined as increased value or additional usefulness; in short, as fashion. (p134)

-The designer employs ideas, imagination, fantasies, emotions and his or her ability for realisation to make plausible an infinite generation of the new. This means that there will be no end to innovations in clothing. Proof of this is provided by the designer shows that take place every six months in Paris, Milan, London and New York with their approximately 50,000 extremely individual models. These models by designers are termed—because of their creativity, unusualness, aesthetics or provocation—fashion (which implies unwearability to some extent) as opposed to clothing. This is a further example of the conceptual impurity of the word fashion. (p135)

-A priori, the creatively anticipated, like John Galliano’s ideas expressed as models, for example. The creatively anticipated may remain a prototype or unique work, but it can also be copied and so assert itself as a universal fashion, regardless of an apparent unwearable quality—for example the crinoline, corset or high heels. A posteriori, the clothes that a community decides to wear are in fashion.(p136)

-The definition of when clothes become fashion originates from the observer. Fashion is defined not by the object, clothing, but by observation—that is, by the signal and the recipient, the observer and the observed. (p138)

-The fashion designer communicates his creative ideas (cf. p. 33) or established parameters by means of—usually textile—material via the product clothing/accessory. Parameters (design tools) may be laid out in so-called style guides, which are developed by commercially operating trend offices, trend scouts or fashion institutes in order to agree on shared parameters of style, cut, quality, colour and pattern for some time in the future, usually for the season after next. Looking ahead, they provide guidelines in order to avoid lack of orientation and so minimise failed attempts at acceptance and therefore at commercial success. (p139)

-After the product clothing has evolved as a communicative process, the next communicative step follows from the model, via presentation and distribution, to its public perception. Via another step, that of socially negotiated acceptance, the product becomes fashion. (p139)

-The fashion show presents the actual binding and transient fashion, which, however—and this is the paradox—is never worn in this form by the consumer and thus on the streets. Mass fashion also waits until the time is ripe for acceptance before it enters fashion. For this reason, there is always a time gap between avant-garde and mass fashion irrespective of quick response. (p143) [apart from the manufacturing time, could designers present two seasons ahead because of the time needed for the public to accept]

-Fashion requires publicity in order to function—that is, before clothes can become fashion. It requires publicity in order to convince others that it functions—as communication. (p150) [hence my research into fashion journalism]

－Fashion is something about which a community or a group within society has reached agreement. Fashion is a personal aesthetic perception in the collective. （p154)

-Concepts of fashion are oriented primarily not on its utility value or value as a commodity, but on emotional and communicative values. The function of protection—whether as protection from heat, cold or nakedness—reduces fashion to clothes... Today, a crocodile on a T-shirt provides information about the social value of the garment, and fashionable jeans signal an insider. In this way, people manipulate and communicate their appearance.(p155)

-the quality of a design does not lie in its craftsmanship (not given), but far more in its aesthetics, functional and usable value, form, emotion and communication. These (new) emphases of valuation are overtaking haute couture, or rather they are the factors to which it must adapt to today if it wishes to survive. Haute couture can assert itself no longer because it is the highest art of tailoring, but because it is luxury design...Remember—the designer designs not fashion but clothes, which are credited with the attribute fashion or accepted as such as a result of communicative observation. The definition and answer to the question ‘When is fashion?’ (as with ‘When is art?’ and ‘When is design?’) is given by the viewer. Fashion is an object of the second order—that is it is defined by observation and not through the object itself; it is the clothes that are the object of the first order (cf. p. 27). The generative moment lies in the creative design and the key factor of something new. (p176-177)

[waitmyturtles]

[michaelshanesimpson-blog]

Shelving Beliefs

At the age of 21 the world is wide and full of possibility.  You can have a thousand new experiences in a day and, in the next, still have a thousand more.  The importance of experience cannot be stressed enough because it is our beliefs that either hold true or wither away as we gather new experience.  I do not necessarily refer to sensory experience either as the empiricists believe or have believed for a long while. Experiences, in the case of this essay, can refer to both the sensory and ethereal, that which we can see and that which we can reason.  Can we take our knowledge and dictate that we know it?  How do we know what we know?  Is there a point to expanding our beliefs?  Oftentimes, it seems, there is more to life than just those initial beliefs and there might be more for us to look at beyond our original assumption, our original knowledge.

At the age of 22, now my age, I take what I used to know and throw it out the window, simply because I know there could be more out there than that which I may know.  There’s always more to what a person may know.  What is the point in believing you know everything?  There’s no way to take everything and filter it so it is better to start from scratch every once in a while and to not pursue every bit of knowledge that could go your way.

As we grow older, we develop certain beliefs for ourselves, taking into account what our parents had believed and the environment in which we grew as individuals.  Aetius, a pre-Socratic philosopher, said this: "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon.”  Each person takes what they see and what they hear and form a worldview around it. Where the empiricists are incorrect is their inability to see that reason also is taken into account in the development of worldviews from a young age upward.  What we must do is take into account both the experiential and reasonable to create our beliefs.  It is not rational to take only one into account and not the other when questioning or developing beliefs.  Should our beliefs be purely sustained by what we reason them out to be?  If we take a picture of a leaf with two leaves on it and see that it is green, does it matter if we reason it out to be green through argument?  Both should be seen and taken into account.

What happens when we have developed a belief of some sort?  What must we say when we have formed the bases for our argument?  As we develop and sustain these worldviews, it seems to me that what we believe may not necessarily hold up to the standard of scrutiny that it should.  When we were young, we believed, of course, in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but as we grew older and saw evidence to the contrary, we realized that there were no such beings.  It was simply two stories that parents gave us to either teach morality (as in the former) or to entertain (as in the latter).  Once certain evidence came to our attention, such as parents telling us they were lying or finding it out the hard way on the playground, we take those beliefs and discard them as being wrong and childish.  We only believed what we did because we were told to believe a certain way.

“Reasoning is something we do. Experience is something we suf­fer (Short 2).” Experience is far less narrow a term that observation, which is how, according to empiricists (those who believe we gain knowledge solely from experience), we actually gain knowledge. “In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence (Hume).” We take what we see and we either conform it to our worldview or we let it conform us to its worldview.  There are several philosophers who would disagree, though, with that line of reasoning, believing that our senses and observations are too inaccurate.  We must be able to logically reason a belief before accepting it as accurate to our life.  This is why I do not believe in a god and would not accept any evidential arguments.  If a position cannot be reasoned from logic as well, observational evidence is not enough to convince me.  

We as adults now have certain beliefs, whether political, philosophical or just about life in general, and one can never be too sure how well it holds up under the scrutiny of actual evidence.  Do I believe the way I do because I was born under the proper conditions to believe that way?  Of course, you believe that way and feel are right to believe that way as it is the correct way to believe, but can you honestly say you looked at your belief and critiqued to the point where you feel comfortable saying that you believe that way because YOU absolutely believe it?

At what level do we take our beliefs and say that it is good enough to believe it?  There are thousands of groups devoted to Bigfoot and the possibility of Sasquatches but the amount of evidence for there being an actual Sasquatch seems small.  It requires what seems to be a lot of faith to believe in this being without ever seeing it, relying on rusty eyewitness accounts and old journals from former Presidents.  Terrible videos later proven false tend to bring out the influence that there is a Sasquatch.  So many live under the belief that there is a Bigfoot based on slim evidence and reality television shows.

Imagine a seven-year old who believes that the ice cream truck will always stop at a certain place each day at a certain time to sell ice cream.  If the seven-year old wanted to be sure of his belief, what evidences would he use to confirm or deny his belief?  Perhaps, he would use sensory experience in this case.  He sees the ice cream truck at noon each day in front of his school building just in time for his lunch hour.  This happens every single day of the school week.  Now, if this were to happen every day, he could reasonably assume that it will happen again the next day because the experience provided him.

An easier way to gain knowledge is a posteriori. If he really wished to know when the ice cream truck came, it would be very easy to find out.  After all, somebody must, reasonably speaking, drive the ice cream truck and, unless the kid is mute, he would be able to ask the ice cream truck driver if he was going to keep coming by every day.  He could, further still, ask someone in a position of authority at the school.  Would it be reasonable to believe that somebody gave the driver permission to sell ice cream at the lunch hour?  What is to stop the kid from finding more information about who set up the permission and thus know more than before?

How do we take into account emotions in our pursuit of change and in our reasoning?  Should we discount it entirely in our pursuit of the self?  Plato did not feel we should rid ourselves entirely of emotion but we must keep our soul properly ordered for ‘passions’ to overwhelm us into the bad qualities that emotions may have.  “But in a disordered soul its passions nourish exaggerated aggression and vainglory (Dabrowski 8).”  His pupil, Aristotle, felt that emotions were based on beliefs, meaning that what we believe will dictate our emotional state and well-being. For example, if you live an entire life believing a certain group of people are bad, emotions towards said people will be dictated on that belief (Dabrowski 9).  Hate leads to anger, after all.  When our emotions dictate action, therein lies our moral state.

“The challenge for a man was to know and accept the nature of things, his own emotionality included (Dabrowski 12).” The importance of finding oneself includes finding where our emotions come from and why we do or must feel certain ways.  Why does my heart skip a beat when I see my friend?  Is the emotion that I feel positive or negative, and for what reason is either?  As we change belief or look at our own belief, it is important to note that sometimes our passions for our previous belief may change.  Oftentimes, we may feel disgust for what we had believed previously.  The changes within ourselves may even bring about disgust or dislike.  It is natural and healthy.

Sometimes, in belief, it is better to not settle once you are no longer convinced that your belief is not the proper one.  For a time, when I was younger, I wasn’t entirely convinced of Christianity so I instead dabbled with Buddhism and incorporated those ideas into my belief system.  I was influenced by a summer camp I had gone to the summer before my senior year.  My course I went to (it was an unusual camp, dealing primarily with those whom could pass a rigorous application) dealt with purely philosophy.  It was the most fun I ever had in a class before, expanding what I knew and convincing me there was more out there than before.  However, I could not fully get a grasp of my belief. “Philosophy is in large part concerned with questions that we have not yet found a satisfactory and systematic way to answer (Searle 544).”  That which I knew were the questions previously unanswered or of which I was unsure. There is not always a good answer to a question and the point of philosophy is to pursue the answers that make you feel most uncomfortable.  As a Baptist Christian, anything that did not conform to my worldview would make me uncomfortable.  The class did not make me feel uncomfortable because I was not yet ready to fully question my own worldviews.  There were several moments when that which was said was also accepted in my pubescent mind.  It was wrong to do this and it was wrong to do that simply because someone reasoned it from Scripture and reasoned it from what another pastor said.

Maybe this is a better example for you. Imagine your parents teaching you that all cats are bad creatures and give you several reasons to fear them: scratching and biting, potential to be allergic, feral tendencies in the wild. It is possible to convince a younger person that something as benign as a cat could be mean or evil towards them and thus needs to be avoided.  That could be enough for anyone if your parents have convinced you of their evil. Take it one step further.  Let’s say they let you near a cat one day and the cat was feral.  They convince you this is the example of a cat, and this cat is representative of all cats.  Now, it is based on your experience that all cats are evil based on the one example you are given.

The above example sounds like how racism is indoctrinated into younger people; give a bad example of a person and chalk it up purely to race.  It happens quite often in other countries and happens here in the United States.  In reality, one could create an assumption around a religion, gender or sexual orientation, making them an evil to the individuals being taught.

Unfortunately, poorly-evidenced beliefs and bad assumptions are a dime a dozen in society and are generally held by most people, regardless of the make or take of the belief.  It seems impossible to change ones’ belief with or without evidence affirming or denying it.  What an individual can do, however, is take what beliefs they know and recognize in having and seriously regarding them, looking at what evidence supports or denies it. Take an analytical approach to who you are as a person.  One can never be too honest with themselves if action is the next step.

Plato described the process of removing bad beliefs in an allegory.  Imagine being in a cave where you have been tied to a wall since birth.  The only thing you are able to see is the shadows in the wall directly in front of you, shadows cast by a fire behind you.  The shadows come from the people behind you, and their voices seem to come from the shadows because of the echoes in the cave. You will spend your entire life believing this to be your reality because this is all you know to be.

The prisoner, in the allegory, is freed and takes a look around him.  The fire directly behind him blinds him, so he is unable to see all that is behind the fire.  He walks around and stumbles out in the bright light, and it is difficult to adjust at first, being used to the total darkness.  The freed prisoner doesn’t know how to comprehend what is around him. It takes time to adjust his eyesight and mind to the new images around him.  He sees the trees and beauty around him once he does.  Everything has changed for him.

Once he goes back to the cave, his eyesight is only adjusted to the outside world, so it is the equivalent of being blind in the darkness of the cave.  He cannot free the other prisoners there, those who see reality as the shadows on the wall.  Because he is blind, the other prisoners believe that what has happened to him is a bad pain.  The only way for them to leave the cave now is by kicking and screaming.  They don’t wish to change their reality.

Several scholars have taken Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and analyzed it to the point of beating it like a dead horse but it is important to understand Plato and what he means by this imagery for our own philosophical journeys.  If there was a philosopher I would recommend first in the overall scheme of exploring your own beliefs, Plato would be the first to read.  You can find the Allegory in “The Republic.”  

We can relate the Allegory back to our discussion on sensory knowledge and its non-reliability as the sole way of gaining knowledge.  “What we see in the physical world, compared to true, intelligible knowledge, is like shadows cast by fire on the wall of the cave, compared to the reality of the objects outside the cave that cast these shadows. (Contemporary Psychoanalytical Studies 42).”  Of course, we must take into account that which we see in our pursuit of what is true, but what we see is not always true.

What we can take from what we read here is actually quite applicable to our lives.  It is important to note that changing belief can be harmful to our interpersonal relations or own selves.  The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community has experience with “coming out of the closet,” or revealing their identities to closest family members, friends or society.  To become an atheist in the mid-South (born and raised in a decent-sized town in Kentucky) was not a pleasant experience for me, in way of changing belief. I had been an atheist for a while, but felt uncomfortable with expressing that to others.  I really was not sure how my family or friends would react to me.  Both my foster mother and father were strong Christians when I had been growing up and had instilled everyone in my family with a strong sense of belief (they all strayed but stuck to that belief in god).  I was hesitant to say the least.  

Those who had been around me when I was a hardcore Christian saw the difference as hostile towards their own beliefs.  As I grew as a person and in my beliefs when I was 20 years old, I realized that I did not have enough evidence to support the idea of a god.  Experiential evidence and environmental bias was not nearly enough to believe in a god who I believed was, at best, not a strong position I could argue.  I believed in the Christian god because I was instilled those same values as my other family members were.  From an early age, I was taught that those who did not believe in god but it was my duty as a Christian to bring my beliefs to those around me who did not.  My teenage years, I was obsessed with proselytizing and sharing that belief with as many people as I could.  It made for many awkward exchanges and conversations, those individuals expressing discomfort but with my push and non-hesitation.  I was obsessed with the concept and read as much as I could that confirmed my beliefs.  It is quite easy to mold that which you read to your own beliefs.

Does what we believe force us to be obligated to those beliefs?  Let’s say we do believe in a god and that there are those who do not believe in god. If we did not share our evidences for a god and there were to be people condemned to hell because we did not share, the pain is on whose hands?  Where does the suffering of those people go and who should be held accountable?  The same must be reversed.  If we knew a belief to be false and people were to waste their lives when they could do something universally useful, who is truly at fault?

At church, oftentimes, I would sit uncomfortably in my chair as it was explained to me that homosexuals were going to hell. Scripture was taken and analyzed on this large front screen in the front, a PowerPoint pointing out specific verses that mention that certain people will go to hell.  They would tell me that it is never okay to have an abortion, and then other churches would tell me there are exceptions.  Who was guaranteed to go to hell no matter what? The ideological practice enforced it within me a severe discomfort with whom I sat, looking upon and believing were going to one day burn in hell.  They had convinced me that it was my duty to convince those people that this god had loved them but their beliefs and identities must completely change to fit with my own ideologies and worldviews before being able to experience love from this god.

“Very young children apparently have a different conception of the relation of belief to truth from that of adults (Searle 553).” This means it is quite easier to convince a child of a false belief.  Belief is far stronger when enforced at a young age.  You will notice programs are developed in churches specifically geared towards students and children so they may learn about those beliefs. I dislike the comparison but one could imagine Hitler Youth going along the same lines.  Create an official ideology, force the adults of society to voluntarily let their children participate in a group that will convince them of this ideology, and, in no time at all, you have raised generations devoted to your cause, devoted to your ideology.  Hitler had a lot of success.  The Hitler Youth formed their own units towards the end of the war just to fight those invading their native homeland.

Many will take into account only the evidence that supports their position best.  I would read Christian apologetics that would confirm what I already believed. I did not start from the base premises and think about it from there.  Is there a god?  Why would there be a god?  In order to fully understand theology, history must be taken into account.  What basis was there for a belief in divinity? Our own beliefs do not necessarily have to conform to what has been accepted, historically, but should at least take into account what has been thought previously.  The past is important in that role, bringing us thoughts that do not align with our own beliefs and forcing us to examine what we believed previously.  

As my beliefs shifted and my views changed, I became less convinced that any person was going to hell.  Of course, the primary argument against my new founded beliefs was that it was my human understanding was getting in the way. This was leveled at me whenever I made mention of my atheism to those Christians around me God’s way were so far above my own that we could not understand why a loving god could not accept those people into his heaven.  It seemed strange to me that other practices would take it further and say that our belief only exists because this god inspired it within us and that we were chosen by him to believe in him.  Do not take me as an anti-theist though.  Later essays in this series will show that I believe that there are several good qualities to religion, and religious concepts of compassion and non-selfishness should definitely be admired.  Atheism does not need to equate hatred towards religion or religious groups, but merely a general distrust in the idea of there being a divine being.

There are philosophers who believe it is impossible to not believe in a god because where would there be morality without a god of some sort?  Immanuel Kant felt that not believing in god would lead to ‘moral despair.’  You lose a certain aspect of morality when you lose a belief in god.  Tied into directly into his argument is that there must be an overall morality and that it is objectively true, created by an otherworldly being.  This being is what makes and dictates the rules for humanity (Van Impe 766).

Does it mean I am no longer a moral person when I do not believe in a divine being to give me the rules?  No, not necessarily.  Moral subjectivity is a strong view that branches out into what we dictate as our morals to be.  Who should define what our morals should be?  As I wrote this essay, I wondered where I would like to culminate the idea that we should shelve beliefs and critique all we know.  I do not mean to make a single person lose all that they hold dear, but, if all held dear happens to never been analyzed, can those ideas be truly accounted for?  What is next once you realize your beliefs may be wrong or you do throw out your set of beliefs?

It takes a lot of proper research and finding oneself to accumulate valid beliefs.  By finding oneself, I mean to pursue knowledge that will make your life worthwhile.  What should I pursue?  Once, I believed that god or gods were the meaning of life, but now, the question of the meaning of life is open-ended.  I pursue lines of thought oftentimes, asking myself about what life is for me, and where it leads.  The sinnsfrage, the meaning question, asks us what features go about bringing meaning to life, and what we should ask ourselves about life (Rowlands 379).  If you find yourself lacking in belief after soul-searching, it is time to look for that which is meaningful to you and grow as a person.

This New Year, take it as a personal challenge to take your views and look at them a different way.  Find someone who believes the opposite you do and listen to them and see what they say.  If your belief can be researched, research it and find out why it may not make sense to another individual.  I am not asking you give up your beliefs as I would never do that.  I will not tell you atheism or agnosticism is the only to believe or that if you do not believe it, you must be a purely irrational creature.  I ask you to look at your beliefs because of the Shakespeare quote, “To thine ownself be true.”  Why believe in something if it is not true?  Why believe in something, more importantly, that isn’t true to you or you cannot fully prove to yourself that it is true?  The only thing you have to lose, in your search for knowledge, is a false belief and what you could gain is a stronger belief or a better belief.

Works Cited

Dąbrowski, Andrzej. "Emotions In Philosophy. A Short Introduction." Studia Humana 5.3 (2016): 8-20. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

Hume, David, and Tom L. Beauchamp. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

SHORT, T. L. "Empiricism Expanded." Transactions Of The Charles S. Peirce Society 51.1 (2015): 1-33. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017

"Notions Of Truth In Philosophy." Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 22.(2016): 39-69. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.

Rowlands, Mark. "The Immortal, The Intrinsic And The Quasi Meaning Of Life." Journal Of Ethics 19.3/4 (2015): 379-408. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

VAN IMPE, STIJN. "Kant's Moral Theism And Moral Despair Argument Against Atheism." Heythrop Journal 55.5 (2014): 757-768. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

SEARLE, JOHN R. "The Future Of Philosophy." Nova Et Vetera (English Edition) 14.2 (2016): 543-558. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.