Muh Stats

When I used to care about them

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.

We are surrounded by numbers almost none of us understand. What percentage of people took at least one statistics course? I’m not in that percentage. What percentage of that percentage still retains what they were exposed to? Really learned it, as opposed to remembering it just long enough to survive a test? Retention is the elephant in the schoolhouse, the beast almost everyone ignores.

Amnesia is a major yet oft-forgotten component of the human condition. We live in the now, and for most, school subjects are part of the then, the irrelevant past. Which is why I can’t do calculus anymore. I can’t even remember what it was. I took an AP exam on it, and then I never did any higher math again.

I’ve ‘regressed’ to the low-math mindset of our forebears even though I’m typing this on a product of higher math.

At least I can still count. I haven’t gone Pirahã yet. That people in Brazil traditionally had no words for numerals: hói was ‘lesser quantity’ and hoí was ‘greater quantity’. (The two words have different tones; a high tone is marked with an acute accent on different vowels.) I suppose the Pirahã use Portuguese numerals now.

They’ve got numeritis. They’re becoming part of a world where almost everything is quantified.

Like time. People did without clocks for 99.99% of human history … but now I keep my eye on the clock in the bottom right corner of my screen. That clock even keeps track of the seconds.

I time my baths to make me conscious about conserving water. My iPhone’s stopwatch shows hundredths of seconds. Imagine going back in time and telling the Greeks at the ancient Olympics about such a precise timepiece. Would the ability to measure to such a minute (pun unintended) degree mean anything to them?

The ancients certainly understood the concept of measurement. Proto-Indo-European had a root meʔ ‘measure’: the me of measure (earlier spelled mesure; the a is an unetymological addition) and the me of meter. In the east, the root became Sanskrit mā ‘measure’ (pictured in the Siddham script, my favorite Indic script).

Sanskrit mā ‘measure’ is the root of amita ‘unmeasured’ with the negative prefix a- (like the a- of atheist).

Amita travelled as far east as Japan, where it became Amida, as in Amidabutsu, the Buddha of Unmeasured (i.e., immeasurable) Light or Life. (Butsu is ‘Buddha’.)

Statue of Amidabutsu, c. 12th/13th. c. AD, Tokyo National Museum. Photograph by Daderot made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

When that statue was made - or even not so long ago - a lot more was amita ‘unmeasured’ than now when we try to quantify as much as possible.

We can point to a number on Facebook and say we have X number of ‘friends’. (Note the scare quotes. Not going to rant about the overuse of the word friend here.)

Here I can apparently see stats on how my Stack is doing. I say “apparently” because I’ve never done it. I did notice the number of my subscribers at first, but I’ve long since given up. It’d be funny if I somehow got thousands of subs and was totally unaware of that. That’ll never happen. Even if by some miracle this Stack got mass appeal, I’d be flooded with notifications. I’d know I had a lot of readers.

For all I know, I have none. I’m assuming there are no notifications for unsubscribing. In theory everyone could have walked away. That would be fine.

I do this for me. And by that I don’t mean the sort of me who craves attention or money. I’m not getting much of the former here, and I don’t expect to get any of the latter. Again, that’s fine.

I mean that I do this to better myself. To organize my thoughts so that they might make sense to strangers, even if strangers never read this.

You may think “organize” is the wrong word because this post is a mess jumping from topic to topic. It’s still clearer than the mush in my mind. A chaotic sea of ideas. I pluck a few of them out of the water and build a crude tower.

The foundation of this tower was a post that

RegretLeft

linked to. A post that took me back two decades …

… back to when I was (barf) a neoCON blogger. When I was at the peak of my online popularity. When I was CONtributing to “a flood of noise and nonsense, a raw sewage pipe of slop”.

I was a copium dealer selling to my fellow addicts trapped in what

Neoliberal Feudalism

calls

the modern spectacle, where political and social issues are churned through a constant feedback loop of entertainment and distraction while preventing real change or accountability.

We dot-com neoCONs didn’t want “real change”, much less “accountability”. From our comfy homes in the USSA, we wrote ignorant, toxic nonsense about Iraq and Afghanistan without consequences.

I cannot bear to look back at my output from that period. It was worse than garbage. Most trash was once useful. My writing was useless, even dangerous - and not to the Regime, which it served.

I was a tool for Dubya. I never liked him, yet I still supported his agenda. Sort of like how I didn’t like Trump anymore while still intending to reluctantly vote for him as a ‘lesser evil’ last year. Glad I didn’t make that mistake again.

Two decades ago, I was having too much fun to even notice I was a propagandist for the Empire. Enjoying myself making excuses for killing. For free. No one paid me.

Who is worse, a shill or a volunteer like me? A shill might be aware of the truth and not care as long as he’s paid to sell lies.

I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t even looking for the truth.

I was riding a wave. A bloody, destructive wave. And while Afghanis and Iraqis suffered and died, I paid no attention to their numbers … because my eyes were stuck on my stats.

My hosting company had a dashboard with data about my readers. Their numbers went way up after I lucked out by being linked by a ‘name’ blogger who recommended my site.

I linked them back, of course. We cross-promoted constantly. The war was just a backdrop for selling ourselves. For trying to ascend to the next level in the Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem.

In 2004, Early Modern Notes described the appeal of the Ecosystem:

You find yourself going around comparing your rating to your blogging neighbours’; you cackle at finding they’re lower than you in the scheme of things; the green-eyed monster taps at your shoulder when they’re above you.

We were more interested in our ‘neighbors’ - in bloggers we almost never met in real life - than in the Iraqis who paid the price for the policies we pushed. And we had the gall to pretend we were “Friends of Iraq”:

From the top of The Truth Laid Bear blog ranking page from twenty years ago

We weren’t Islamophobes. We were Amerifools who had convinced ourselves that inside every Iraqi was a Murrican waiting to get out after Our Heroes had deposed Saddam.

That stance was particularly ridiculous for me because until I got into the neoCON blogosphere I had zero affinity with the USSA. But I let peer pressure get to me. With limits. For instance, I never posted the American flag. I thought that was cheesy.

I rationalized my stance by telling myself that I wasn’t an American nationalist - I did not like that N-word back then, as it sounded Nazi (!). I thought of myself as a universalist who only happened to promote the United States because it was the closest thing to a manifestation of my (gag) ‘ideals’.

My naivete was off the scale.

As was my need to belong.

To parrot the slogans of my parasocial tribe, of people I mostly never met in real life. Remember “Democracy Whiskey Sexy!”?

I give Playful Primate James Lileks credit for not taking down that April 3, 2003 entry. It has not aged well.

Most of the neoCON bloggers I knew eventually stopped cheerleading for war. None ever publicly said they were wrong the way I did. One got microamnesia and now acts as if he had been anti-neoCON all along.

By the time I made my admission of error on my blog, I had long since stopped looking at my stats. I’m sure my readership had dwindled to nothing.

When I ceased to offer slop, my readers didn’t write me hate mail. They just moved on to other sewer pipes. There were so many. So interchangeable.

Morality aside, what was awful about the neoCON blogosphere was the lack of insight. The repetition. Everyone wrote the same thing at different lengths and with different ‘tudes from bland to spicy.

Sound familiar? Fast forward two decades.

Rurik Skywalker

describes the CONvid Stack scene in my all-time favorite comment:

most of substack is failed writers and covid commentary. idk why anyone would pay to pretend to understand all those doctors rechewing and reanalyzing the same data over and over again proving that people got scammed and screwed by the covid hoax. death by data. I suppose they are holding out hope that criminal trials will be held soon?

I feel like I’m living through 2005 all over again.

The neoCONs I knew who fell for Dubya are now falling for Trump. They learned nothing.

And those too young to remember “Whiskey Democracy Sexy!” are repeating the mistakes of their elders.

The demand for a “wizard, a transmuter to be specific, whose one magic spell is to take any situation no matter how dire, and how obvious a loss, and to try to spin it into a win”, is as high now as it was at my blogging ‘peak’. The guys who think the Tsar is winning in Ukraine sound like the guys who thought the USSA was winning in the sandbox. The spell still works. It always will, because most people are suckers.

I was a sucker too. Maybe I still am. Right now I’m probably being fooled in ways I don’t realize yet. But at least I have some degree of self-awareness as I strive to be a Stalker in the Rurikite sense. And I know better than to get sucked into the numbers game again.

The game is worse than last time. It involves money. Who wants truth when you can get profit - and make others feel better with cope for cash? Bill Rice, Jr., estimates that “approximately 53 newsletter authors in [his] list [of “The Top 137 ‘Covid Contrarian/Freedom’ Newsletters on Substack”] generate a gross income of at least $50,000/year” off their Stacks.

What would endanger that $50,000 a year? Rejecting what Sage Hana calls the Tier Two narrative. The Regime’s prefab memeplex for rebels.

Rice estimates that “approximately 20 to 25 percent of Substack’s estimated 18,000 authors could be described as ‘Covid contrarians’ or ‘freedom’ writers. This would mean the total number of such authors might be approximately 4,500.”

How many of that 4,500 dream of making a dollar off their repetitive content?

Of being “in the upper echelons of the group of brave, dedicated and ultra-talented writers who are producing much-needed content that will never be produced by ‘journalists’ working in the captured mainstream media”?

LOL at the hype. “Needed” by whom? How many times do we need to hear Jabs Bad? Or until recently, Brandon Bad. Kackling Kamala. (When I finally happened to hear her laugh, I didn’t think it was anything special.) The subjects of the Two Minutes Hate change, but Baudrillard’s simulation remains.

We are currently deeply enmeshed in Baudrillard’s conception of stage four [of his four stages of reality] and can see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. […T]he relationship between the underlying event, if one even exists, and the hyperreality created are entirely different things: the created hyperreality both supplants actual reality and then morphs actual reality into something totally different. […] What matters to our elites is controlling the production and interpretation of information in a given context. The MAGA right unfortunately seem to totally fail to understand this point and engage with the simulation on its own terms, per Academic Agent where he argues that “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.”

Substacking is not real politics.

If everyone on Substack died, nothing would change.

Nothing important, anyway. Stackers changed me. Woke me up. But I don’t matter.

I no longer believe that online activity is Doing Something. Changing the world.

Changing me is hard enough. Making myself stronger. Strength is Rurik Skywalker’s first principle. And mine.

Strength takes many forms. Like a command of the language of the gods. I’m going to wrestle with Sanskrit after I publish this. Or a clear mind. Precision in thinking. Writing gets me closer to all three goals. I write Sanskrit by hand every day. I write on Substack every day (even if I fail to publish in time before midnight). I’m on track to read the beginning of the Rigveda in April. (My Sanskrit has become stronger since my last attempt to wrestle with “अग्निमीळे …” almost exactly three years ago.)

A “popularity contest”, as RegretLeft described the Top 137 CONvid Stack list, makes me weaker. Rewards me for pandering. Parroting. Regression to who I was twenty years ago.

I don’t want to be CONvid Stacker #____.

Been there, done that. Where am I on The Truth Laid Bear list? How many views did my warblog get this week?

Who cares?

Not me anymore.

Stats are for scammers and suckers.

Not Stalkers.