On 2/11/25 10:15 AM, glen wrote:
There's a Nurse Anesthetist I sometimes drink with who is dyslexic. He once described how difficult it was for him to get through his schooling and how it seems to compare to his wife's experience getting through her Nurse Practitioner schooling. I waffle between wondering if this guy's actually 100x smarter than the people around him, which is what allowed him to grit his way through that; versus the perspective that we *all* have persnickety little details about how our bodies work that somehow evens out the struggle. Maybe we're all equivalently sized tensors, but the weights are differently distributed?This is how I read Vonnegut's _/Harrison Bergeron/_ (short story) when I first read it:
<begin GPT 4o offering of a summary> /In this dystopian tale, society enforces strict equality by using *handicaps* to suppress any form of advantage—whether physical, intellectual, or artistic. Strong people wear weights, intelligent people have distracting earpieces, and beautiful people wear masks. The story follows Harrison Bergeron, an exceptionally gifted individual who rebels against this oppressive system./ /It’s a satirical critique of forced equality and government control, with Vonnegut exploring themes of individualism, freedom, and the dangers of extreme egalitarianism./ /</end AI provided text>Vonnegut, true to form was caricaturing something and I (also true to one of my forms) was seeking the counter-example/argument and wanted to notice that *everyone* is (dis)advantaged across a spectrum of (Assembly Theoretic) composition of nature/nurture precursors to the imminent next-state.
The conclusion in HB was in the spirit of Ghandi's "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." Pretty much what MAGA seems to be lining up on? And perhaps what they percieve "wokism" to be leaning toward as well?
If the latter is the case (which I tend to believe - maybe confirmation of my rejection of the Great Man theory and meritocracy), then the appreciation for a well-timed meme or a pithy/profound tweet (neither of which I have) is on par with an appreciation for, say, Paradise Lost or whatever book allows one to virtue signal to one's MENSA buddies.I think this is a deep (and possibly fundamental?) observation but I'll be damned if I can un-pack/tangle/fold it effectively.But even if the latter is the case, my perspective on it still seems individualistic. The appreciation for snark and sick memes still resides deep in one's psyche. It's centralized. The compute isn't on the leaves as it is with something like mob mentality or that exhilaration you feel at a rave or a protest.
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