Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It seems to me to boil down to this: left wingers believe that we’re all in the same boat, and the right wingers hold to the notion that it’s every man for himself. The good of the community vs. rugged individualism.
What’s kind of weird, and dangerous, is that this seems to be damned near a 50/50 split, everywhere in the world. I wonder if somehow we aren’t like two different species, like Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, hard wired to view life in a different way, and therefore to want to order society in a certain way, and it’s dangerous because neither side wants to live in a world ordered by the other.
I don’t want to come across as one of these ‘we must compromise’ guys, because what they generally seem to be saying, it sounds to me, is we should give up. It seems the ones who say everybody should compromise are those who want our side to compromise. I don’t want to come across like that, but we need to compromise, and it can be done. In fact, we do it all the time in our personal lives. Most people manage to get through their family Thanksgiving dinners relatively unscathed (emotionally scarred doesn’t count) despite the fact that most family groups contain both liberals and conservatives. People sit next to other people at the cinema, at sporting events, and on airplanes, and very seldom invade each other’s space or strangle each other over politics.
Also, the all-in-the-same-boat vs. every man for himself debate is not the same in every situation, at every moment in our lives. There are very few people far enough to the right that they would object to the internet highway system, or public polices departments. I’m kind of shocked to find out that so many of them are indifferrent about national parks and public schools, but there are definitely huge swathes of civilization they’d probably agree need to be socialized if they’re to be done right at all.
And most left wingers are not opposed to personal responsibility and hard work. They are excellent personal qualities. We just don’t want to see anybody starving in the gutters, even if they are a lazy, worthless bum.
So, if you want to insist that everybody pulls their own weight, O.K. But that means that there should be enough jobs to go around for everybody. That could be arranged. Roosevelt did it.

As I do at times I’m going to have some time on my hands, I made a list of things to do this morning and got a couple of the easy ones done right away, i.e. choosing a couple of poems and sending them off to a friend who edits a magazine. Choosing the poems came pretty easy, figuring out how to get them to him proved more difficult because my computer skills are somewhat less than Mark Zuckerberg’s. When he was like in the 2nd grade, probably. Another was to post my blog to a writer’s site I recently joined, and am already having my doubts about.
It seemed a great format for getting my blog out to more readers, but it seems to be a swamp of right wing nut jobs and trolls, who comment on everything to raise their own numbers but who are not really communicating.
So, those two things done, and a couple of important messages responded to, I sat down to smoke my first joint of the day. And didn’t get much more done for the rest of it, either.
Part of that is undoubtedly because the first thing I want to do after I’ve smoked a joint is to smoke another joint. Partly it’s because I’m getting older and can’t multitask quite as well as I used to.
Whatever. It was a lazy day but with more positives than negatives, and now I am off to an early sleep. Love, Willie

“Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Jim” chief engineer Scott of the Star Ship Enterprise was fond of saying, and that is true. The laws of physics precede the physical universe, the universe was formed according to those laws, our planet was formed according to those laws, our evolution happened in accordance with those laws, and our current existence is governed by those laws. They do not exist to benefit mankind, specifically, but they aren’t biased against us, either. The laws of physics are entirely indifferent to the existence of mankind. We obey them, but there is no need to fear them.
Our natural world (the wind and the waves, the weather, the cycles of the seasons, day and night) is not trying to kill us, blizzards and hurricanes do not target specific people or communities. There is reason to be aware of these things, to respect these things, but not to fear them.
Likewise, I do not fear artificial intelligence. Unless it is programmed otherwise, there is no reason to think it will be hostile to mankind. That could change, of course. If the definition of intelligence is a desire to continue their own existence and they come to see human beings as a threat to their existence, I suppose it’s possible they could go full pre-emptive and then we’d be in trouble, but if that’s the case it becomes a self-fulfilling (and thus easily avoidable) prophecy, like voodoo or other religions, which only have power if you believe in them.
That is, don’t threaten to shut them off and they won’t kill you.
I suppose there is also the possibility that they could be programmed to kill. Flesh and blood human soldiers are programmed to kill, presumably that would be even easier with androids, and I’m sure the U.S. military, and possibly the militaries of a few other countries, are working on it right now.
If we allow that, I suppose we will deserve what we get, and perhaps it’s time we legislated some version of Asimov’s Laws, which people quote as if they were some kind of actual principle, and not just something Isaac Asimov made up. A simple law: “If you program a robot to kill somebody, you can be charged with murder.”

p.s. This happens sometimes. I set out to write a blog about how we should not fear AI (because I’m really looking forward to AI, it has the potential to eliminate poverty, pollution, and bad design, making the world into a paradise for all of its children), and by the time the last word is written, I’m thinking something quite the opposite.

I still think we should proceed. But a bit of caution would not be a bad idea.

I just unfriended a friend from real life, a guy I’ve known since High School. I was sorry to do it, because in real life he actually is a nice guy. Friendly, fun, outgoing, generous, a great musician.
I was willing to even put up with the fact that he’s a Trump supporter and an Obama hater, which had surprised me. I guess we’d never discussed politics before. You get together with your friends, you have a few beers, smoke a joint or two, it doesn’t always come up. You talk about friends, you talk about family. He liked to talk about motorcycles a lot. That’s cool. I’m not a motorcycle person, but I can understand why some people are. The lure of the open road, the power of a well tuned machine, all that.
Likewise, the subject of race never came up. We’re both white, so why should it. As a professional musician, I’m sure he worked with black people, and I just can’t imagine him being rude to anybody in real life, but he sure hates Obama, in a visceral way.
But when he said (I think it was directed at somebody else, I’m not sure, but it might as well have been directed at me) “Don’t come onto my page and start spreading your liberal garbage” I unfriended him.
See, there’s this feature on Facebook called “comments,” and it’s called comments because it’s analogous to comments in real life. You post what you want to post and then other people get to say what they think about it. Sort of like a conversation. People might present a different point of view, or state facts which show how your original position is mistaken, or just about anything, really.
You may not like my comments. You may think my comments are full of shit. You may even be right, sometimes. But when you tell me you don’t want to hear my comments, that you don’t want me to comment in your presence, then I don’t see any reason to hang around.

Just got back from the February Alchemy poetry reading, and it was a pretty good one, for the most part.
It was at a new place, and I really liked the venue, because the room where the reading was was separated from the bar. That’s one thing I didn’t like about the Napa Bar. Back when we used to have the readings in their cellar, it was great, but when they moved it upstairs (I suspect because people weren’t buying enough beer, that was quite a shlep up and down the steps, down to the sklep), it got to be kind of obnoxious, people in the back room talking, sometimes even competing music, and just the noises from behind the bar.
Also, it’s like right in the center, just off Old Town Square, so you really can’t get more centrally located than that.
I hope they continue it there, but I’m not the one with any say in that, so we’ll see.
It does seem kind of strange to me that when you change the location, it seems you get an entirely different crowd. Maybe it was just the people who turned out to see the featured reader, who’d recently completed a couple of translations. I don’t know, I suppose they are interesting works of literature, but I come out to hear (and perform) poetry, and excerpts from novels generally don’t move me much.
There were a few new people who were pretty good, one guy did a rap routine which was at least impressive, and the girl who I’ve seen at two or three of the readings now, the slam poet, was there and raging. There was a dog present, and he was barking at her routine and nobody else’s, so give her points for that.
The diffusion of the Prague poetry scene continues, as she’s now organizing a reading at A Maze in Tchaiovna, which I’ll go to because I like her and I like the place and there were two poems I didn’t get to read tonight due to over-adherence to the rules, and then there’s also the one at Soma Bar and the one at Zizkovsiska.
It’s good to have a lot of venues, but it strikes me as odd that they all have different performers, and different audiences. Do we all not like each other, or what?