Leibniz Clockwork

BLARGH

Never go to school, kids. Herd goats.

There are two basic aspects of identity and a third in reality: what you do, who you think you are, and how other people see you. We sometimes deny the third, but there’s no end of research that shows how people perceive you affects how you perceive yourself and how you act.

For the blog post, let’s confine ourselves to the first and second.

The former is the old ‘someone who’s nice to you but mean to the waiter isn’t a nice person.’ Let’s throw in that person might think of themselves as a nice person. However being mean is a habit, and habits become default behavior. If you want to know if someone’s going to be nice to you in the future, how they habitually act to others now is probably the best way of predicting that. There’s two-way dependency wherein who you are is and is determined by what you do.

If you want to understand someone, you must know how they see themselves. That’s the filter through which they will perceive all of your interactions. If the interactions themselves are of import, if the relationship matters to you, you need to know what’s happening on their side. Imagine a bridge over a canyon. You can’t build just one side of a bridge. Without a foundation for the bridge to land, the bridge will collapse, and with people, that foundation is often who they think they are.

To understand someone, you need all three.

The other shoe finally dropped.

The job situation has been a little complicated for a while now, and the writing has been on the wall. I got the chop just now.

To start something new or finish the degree? I don’t know. I’m close, but graduation is a moving target. The damn contraption still doesn’t work.

TiH is moving, finally. I’m really getting progress on it. It’s going to require an entirely new ending, but that was expected.

I’m going to finish TiH and the PhD. I won’t be happy about it, but I’ll do it. I’m not sure about how I’m going to pay for either.

But I’m going to nap so hard I’ll wake up as Gandalf the White.

I need a heavier font for my puns. When I drop a weighty bit of humor, I want it to hit hard. My puns deserve an impact.

I want Finger-Guns, the Font!

I hate having to say things like pun-intended. Of course it’s intended. Even if that pun was accidental, it’s intended now.

I like Thomas Hundal. The guy’s a nutbag, and someone should restrict his caffeine intake. Still, he has a lot of car enthusiasm. His hot takes come from a place of ‘I like cars and care about them way to much.’

The Garmin Swim 2 is an utterly crap watch.

Positivity for later, this is crap. I walked three miles with a pulse of 198? Seriously? Am I dead?

You pick a good name for a character and write a hundred pages before googling his name. Then you find out he’s a struggling actor in Omaha and spokesman for an incontinence medication.

Settle for the win. When in doubt, settle for the win.

Agreeing with a political position is political.

If Alice thinks the Democrats are right 90% of the time and votes accordingly, she’s a Democrat. That’s what that means. If she supports the Democrats in conflicts with Republicans because while she might not agree with the Democrats right now, she knows she’s probably going to agree with them in the future, that’s being partisan. That’s what that word means.

Looking at the Uri Berliner affair, I think way too many people in NPR think, “But of course we’re all Democrats. We agree with them!” The NPR staffers aren’t lying. They’re not siding with the Democrats out of vindictiveness or funding desires. (The GOP has been sawing on ‘defund NPR’ for a while, so siding with the Democrats could reasonably be interpreted as a self-serving move for NPR staffers.) People tend not to carefully silo themselves, so the various positions might blend together.

But if everyone at NPR is a Democrat, that means everyone at NPR is a Democrat. And if they show the world as they see it, that’s going to be a very slanted worldview.

I looked at Uri Berliner’s essay at the FP and Maher’s reply at NPR. Katherine Maher does not seem to address any of the points Berliner raised. She doesn’t address newsroom bias, she doesn’t really talk about ideological conformity, nor the ‘lecturing tone’ Berliner criticizes. I was unconvinced.

I’m a Subaru-driving, PhD student at a private university in Denver. I listen to a lot of radio and read a lot of news. I’m NPR’s prime target, and I don’t listen to them.