So give me the ghost, give me the crumbs, and something to help me sleep at night

[sovay]

I do not understand the phenomenon whereby actually sleeping makes me even more exhausted, but I don't like it: I would prefer to be writing things and I need to work. Have some links.

1. I am fascinated by the existence of Terence Davies' Benediction (2021), both because it's a biopic of Siegfried Sassoon and I hadn't even heard it was in the works. It has a hell of a cast, even if I will inevitably complain that it's not that hard to cast a Jewish actor for a Jewish part—he didn't start Roman Catholic. Seeing Peter Capaldi credited as the older version of Sassoon suddenly made me want to see him in Stoppard's The Invention of Love.

2. In case your life contains an insufficiency of lesbians, please enjoy Beatrice Fenton and Marjorie Martinet. Also this on-set photo from Bound (1996) and its magnificent tag.

3. Courtesy of sholio: Torchwood Three TikTok headcanon accepted.

4. Courtesy of moon_custafer: a great face on a tailoring student from 1955.

5. I had never heard of seasteading before this article: "The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world's first cryptocurrency cruise ship." I have to say that offshore pirate radio stations, thalassocracies, and the Principality of Sealand all sound cooler to me, but don't double-feature as well with libertarians walking into bears.

I finally have a lap desk for Bertie as opposed to a succession of large flat books and Autolycus wants to sleep on it instead, of course.

Comments

[legionseagle]

This Twitter thread by a maritime journalist is comedy gold (and pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine, also a marine industry journalist, was saying in email.)

[sovay]

This Twitter thread by a maritime journalist is comedy gold (and pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine, also a marine industry journalist, was saying in email.)

"I'm just here staring into camera because this libertarian turnip somehow thinks he's conceived of some sort of radical new idea that most governments and the maritime industry haven't been chewing on since the 1990s at least. What an utter cabbage."

Thank you.

[asakiyume]

Or this one: "Again, you can only really con libertarian techbros with this sort of nonsense because their understanding of regulations is the same as my cat." LOLLLLL

[asakiyume]

Oh that's wonderful. The tweet she initially was responding to was the tweet that got me to read the article, but I didn't see her thread! Fabulous.

YOU CANNOT GET HIGH SPEED WIRELESS INTERNET FROM LAND IN THE DEEP SEA. YOU UTTER BEANBAG. --dying laughing

[davidgillon]

Which reminds me that looking up the Seapods, the woo-iest bit was the invocation of getting you out from 'cities bombarding you with the EM spectrum'* and apparently all the remote controls in the pods don't work that way**. But you still get wireless internet. Ummm!

* I feel like this is missing the point of the Libertarian tech-bro market

** Either they don't understand the EM spectrum, because the easy alternative is IR, which is still EM, or they've gone for something very weird, like ultrasonics.

[davidgillon]

libertarians walking into bears.

So essentially they support the right not just to arm bears, but to feed themselves and their neighbours to bears. *headdesk*

I'm more and more convinced the average libertarian never grew out of being a 13yo D&Der who couldn't convince the DM to allow his grand ideas to work.

ETA: Still trying to work out how the fire chief's volunteering his township to be taken over by Libertarians works within this idea of individualism and personal responsibility, or is the right to set policy for others and volunteer them for experiments part and parcel of Libertarianism, as long as they're non-Libertarians?

[sovay]

I'm more and more convinced the average libertarian never grew out of being a 13yo D&Der who couldn't convince the DM to allow his grand ideas to work.

I am sure that somewhere in one of our countries exists the statistical outlier of a libertarian who's still more of a left-wing anarchist than a right-wing FYGM, but I haven't personally met them. Or read a news story about them. Ever.

[davidgillon]

I'm fairly certain I've had a left-wing libertarian turn up in my twitter, but it's very much the exception that proves the rule. And while I can't remember what he was agitating about (housing, possibly?) it wasn't any more sensible than the right-wing variant, because I remember making a deliberately anti-libertarian point.

I think I may once have seen a Guardian article about left-wing libertarians, but again exceptions, rule.

[asakiyume]

I read the story of the Satoshi and laughed and laughed--there were some choice quotes. The first commenter on the tweet that brought it to my attention got to the heart of it: people think the complexity of the world is optional and that they can just get rid of it in their created communities--but it isn't optional. Things develop the way they do for a reason, and you can't pull on one thread without unraveling a significant amount of the sweater.

... this isn't to say that we can't change things or that the world we have now is the best possible world--of course not! But only a hubristic bitcoin boy would think he has the ability to create a whole new country from the ground up.

I also think there's an impossible tension between wanting no rules (libertarian) and wanting to create a utopia. Examples of attempts at utopias are all pretty authoritarian--or very quick failures.

[minoanmiss]

people think the complexity of the world is optional and that they can just get rid of it in their created communities--but it isn't optional.

I wonder how much of this is people anbd how much of it is American Culture. I noticed, the summer I took care of little kids and therefore watched Too Many Disney Movies, how 'excessive' politeness and complex explanations were markers of evil people trying to smokescreen wrongdoing -- see Jafar and Ratcliffe for examples. And I have time and time again tried to explain complex things to people and gotten blown off because "tl:dr and you're probably making it up anyway"

Either way, reading about a libertopia sinking into the sea was entertaining.

[asakiyume]

Yeah. It's true that con men do use double talking and bad rhetoric to confuse and deceive people. But on the other hand, demagogues do the same thing with simplistic, binary talk. Looks like both complexity and simplicity can be used to deceive people!

I'm daydreaming about how to wean people off of a love of simplicity, or from a belief that simplicity was somehow more true.....

[sovay]

I wonder how much of this is people and how much of it is American Culture.

While I am not in any way discounting the force of anti-intellectualism in America, which we have all had the pleasure of watching worsen over our lifetimes, I think unfortunately it has to be people or we wouldn't see similar crashes-and-burns in other countries and cultures, including ones we didn't colonize.

Either way, reading about a libertopia sinking into the sea was entertaining.

It's very true.

[sovay]

But only a hubristic bitcoin boy would think he has the ability to create a whole new country from the ground up.

Without doing any research! I am not actually opposed to people trying wild social experiments with their consenting friends, so long as the damage is contained! But at least see if anyone before you has tried the same experiment, and if so, did they all have to sell their cruise ships or get eaten by bears?

Examples of attempts at utopias are all pretty authoritarian--or very quick failures.

I don't know that I agree that all failed utopias reduce to authoritarianism. One of the famous failure modes of communes, collectives, co-ops etc. is a reluctance to enforce boundaries, which doesn't have to mean libertarianism—which increasingly I feel is like anarchism for people who can't be bothered to do the reading—but may mean that no one sticks to the chore roster and the work defaults onto whoever is willing to put up with doing it and one day you're sitting there thinking about the success rate of utopian societies when the one person who's been doing the laundry for three weeks straight dumps it on your head and walks off to catch the nearest bus. You didn't turn into a cult or a totalitarian state. You just let the labor flow downhill and now you're going to have to wash your own socks. (This example started out fictional—I know people who have lived in successful communes; I also know people who left communes that imploded—but I feel like it may have turned into throwing shade at some of the Transcendentalists.)

[asakiyume]

Hah! I like how your hypothetical drifted toward a particular.

I don't think failed utopias reduce to authoritarianism; on the contrary, I was meaning that the failures tend to be the ones that *don't* reduce to authoritarianism. In other words, I'm saying that attempts that last tend to be authoritarian (and since that's not what we're thinking of with "utopia," by and large, I put "attempts in front). But that's overstating/overgeneralizing/maybe just plain incorrect too: I think you can have successful communes, etc., that aren't authoritarian. But they *are* going to have rules, and they're going to expect people to follow the rules. ... So yeah, not so much "authoritarian" as "have rules"--i.e., not anarchical we-all-do-what-we-want-when-we-want-forever.

[alexxkay]

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/592/

[between4walls]

It would be interesting if they had found an actor from the Baghdadi Jewish community to cast as Sassoon--which might be what makes casting this part more difficult than most cases, as an Ashkenazi Jewish actor would also be misleading given Sassoon's family origins in Bombay.

[between4walls]

Although looking more into their family history, the Sassoons only arrived in Bombay in the 1830's. I'd thought they'd been there much longer.

[between4walls]

I did not know (looking the book Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil) that at one point Sassoon and Company controlled 70% of the opium trade in India, their history is much more interesting and wilder than I thought.

[sovay]

It would be interesting if they had found an actor from the Baghdadi Jewish community to cast as Sassoon--which might be what makes casting this part more difficult than most cases, as an Ashkenazi Jewish actor would also be misleading given Sassoon's family origins in Bombay.

I agree it would have been trickier in terms of specificity, but frankly I would have loved to see it done, because I find it hard to believe there are no contemporary actors of the appropriate community, especially in the UK. Like, there are still Sassoons, and not just Siegfried's granddaughter. At the least, a Mizrahi actor would have been cool.

[thisbluespirit]

I do not understand the phenomenon whereby actually sleeping makes me even more exhausted,

I don't know if it's at all the same thing, but I find that a lot with the ME, where I've been bad, or lost sleep, I'll initially go into a sort of wired state and I can do all sorts (that, in my case, I very much should not), but the moment I catch some proper rest/sleep, I can feel exactly how awful I am. At any rate, annoying as it is, I have learnt that it is a vital step to further feeling better & judging what I actually can and can't do, and therefore a sucky positive. For me, anyway! Whatever the case for you, I hope it leads to feeling more yourself very soon instead. ♥

[sovay]

Whatever the case for you, I hope it leads to feeling more yourself very soon instead.

Thank you. I sort of default to running on cortisol and I know it's not sustainable. I just feel like I exchanged one form of dead tired for another, and I would like sometime to exchange dead tired for at least slightly rested.

*hugs*

[gwynnega]

Now I want to watch Bound again.

[sovay]

Now I want to watch Bound again.

I truly don't see how that can hurt.

[reconditarmonia]

Seeing Peter Capaldi credited as the older version of Sassoon suddenly made me want to see him in Stoppard's The Invention of Love.

Oh god *_* He'd kill! I want it!

[sovay]

He'd kill! I want it!

From your mouth to . . . however this works' ears.