I have very little time to spend on Substack, so I end up covering every topic here in a superficial manner. For instance, I’ve been writing about caring as if it were a simple matter of either/or:
Keapatisan
I recently wrote about big things happening in Indonesia, a big country almost nobody cares about in the Waste … myself included.
But caring isn’t as binary as Steve Ditko’s Mr. A.
Quantity / Intensity
There are of course degrees of caring. If I say I don’t care about Charlie Kirk, that doesn’t mean I completely ignore him.
While it is true that I have yet to read a single comment about him at Honolulu Pravda and that I stopped reading that rag’s seemingly nonstop coverage of him for the past week, I have read a few articles about him on Substack that don’t belong to the standard three moralitarian categories of Kirk Koverage:
demonization
noble neutrals bravely speaking out against the eeeevil of violence
hagiography
“I don’t care” is shorthand for ‘I don’t want to invest much time in him’. I feel that if I waste time on him, the Regime wins. They are shoving him in my face for a reason. I still have control over my attention. I can still say no. And ask what the reason for ceaseless Charlie is. Ask what isn’t being covered by the ‘news’ while its spotlight remains on him. Like this, for instance.
There are also local stories here that Pravda - and I - have been neglecting.
Attenzione is zero-sum.
Attenzione
German singer Bernie Paul’s “Attenzione! Go Go Radio” started playing in my head when I made the mistake of checking my phone for the first time in hours and saw the news.
The more attenzione I waste on Charlie - even on debunking Charlie - the less I have to spend on other things.
Every day - every time I write a post - I’m racing the clock. I have to be selective. And that brings me to another dimension of caring.
Quality / Accuracy
Two decades ago I thought I cared about Iraq. I was a neoCON blogger. I was also at the peak of my online popularity. My readers also thought they cared about Iraq. We were a (gag) caring community.
But how caring were we, really? Superficially, we had quantity - intensity. We each wrote thousands of words about Iraq, where Murrica was winning - where a new exciting post-Saddam secular society was rising like a phoenix out of the rubble. A (drumroll) Democracy™! Whiskey! Sexy!
More like idiocy!
Looking back, it’s embarrassingly obvious that we neoCONs weren’t selective. We gave no thought to the quality of our sources on Iraq … namely, ourselves.1 Not one of us knew the languages of Iraq. (I had learned to read the Arabic script a decade earlier, but to know the form of a language is not the same as knowing its content.) We were Murricans believing in myths spread by other Murricans. Yes, some of those Murricans were on the ground in Iraq, but physical presence doesn’t entail real understanding. Which we didn’t want.
I can’t speak for everyone else I knew back then, but I can say that I wanted comfort. To be a part of their community. And that meant parroting them so I could get linked back. So I could raise muh stats.
Muh Stats
A lot of our problems are due to what I call the Mismatch. We are cavemen stumbling through the cyberpunk future. Technosavages. We look down on ‘primitive’ people while failing to look at ourselves - to admit we are tribesmen LARPing as global citizens.
Notice I said nothing about the people of Iraq. Because they weren’t the point for me, no matter what I would have claimed in 2004. I’m disgusted now by how I exploited their suffering for protosocial media cred. My CONcern for them was a self-serving fraud. Here I made CONcern out to be virtue signalling, but there are other kinds of CONs too.
Barrier Heart
Farcebook has been even more intolerable than usual. A flood of CHARLIE CHARLIE CHARLIE for days. Just like my Telegram. Message after message about the martyr of the moment.
Like mine.
Don’t be like me.
Or so we believed. Ironically our beloved “Democracy Whiskey Sexy!” slogan came from The New York Times, which we all hated because it wasn’t cheerleading for the war the way we were:
In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops ….
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
I got the slogan from James Lileks. I can’t remember if Lileks credited the NYT or if he got it via Reason. While the NYT was the enemy (and still is), I regarded Lileks as One of Us and Reason as Our Magazine. Even as late as 2008 - three years after I ditched the neocons and Reason - Reason’s Michael Young wrote that
the U.S. has no choice but to stick it out in Iraq. And as the doubts creep in, Americans might want to think back to what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, who in two decades was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of nearly 1 million people.
Oh, how we cared soooo much about the crimes of Saddam. Even though I myself opposed the first Gulf War a decade earlier. Consistency took a back seat to community. I was happy to be in a herd. To be an NPC. Baa! Blech.