Tag: Kirn Quibbles
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Not new
Kirn is musing on the arbitrary definitions of recession and inflation. The whole late 20th Century notion that your immediate experience is less reliable than information broadcast on electronic screens needs to be reconsidered. It was a case of mistaking science fiction for fact and stemmed from a kind of daft optimistic boom-times delirium. Well,…
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Islands
Kirn is active tonight! No man is an island, but perhaps ten thousand people can be an island, and society can be a chain or network of connected yet still largely self-sufficient islands. This ever- enlarging, ever-consolidating pyramidal model is showing its age. = = = = = START REPRINT: Hawala or scrip is the…
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No quibbles on this one….
Question by Kirn, and excellent answers by the responders. After a point, the main thing money can buy — that I can see — is more money. Yet few seem to stop at this point, or even slow down. So maybe there’s something to be had in life I don’t know about. Power? Is power…
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Convergence is a big word
Kirn’s love for the Beats is misplaced, but his mention of the science-based conformity of the 50s is a solid and strong point. Conformity in a tech context means losing old information and old devices that were valid and functional. The scientific consensus of the ’50s was good on “climate” and excellent on viruses and…
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More Zirn Zibbles
Kirn is praising the Beats again: All the worst bland utopian conformist “scientific” aspects of 1950s culture which the Beat writers eloquently reviled and Hollywood and popular music then spent decades satirizing are present again today at stultifying levels. But where are the peers of those writers? Absent. More than a quibble again. The premise…
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More Xirn Xibbles
Kirn is making a strong point here, but I can still find a way to quibble! Note to my bumptious unorthodox younger friends: Lots of tricky “honey pots” on this site right now meant to draw you by degrees into anti-whomever grunting neo-primitivism so you can go on a big list to be used against…
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No quibbles this time
A nice long interview with Kirn. Highly needed compensation after this morning’s demon strike. Kirn stands back from all branches of nonsense, tribal and partisan and generational, and sees the BIG picture. The best part of the interview starts around 11 minutes, when he takes his father’s experience as a patent attorney dealing with inventors,…
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More Cirn Cibbles
Latest from Kirn: They’re really mainstreaming prison culture now. Everyone has to pick a gang, time outside is a privilege granted by the warden, hard drugs are available but cigs are rare, and the guards stand around and do absolutely nothing while the prisoners get violent. Mostly wrong. An excellent author like Kirn should avoid…
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Back to Kirn Kibbles
Back to quibbling mode. [I’m not proud of doing so many derivative ‘reactions’; this blog is meant to hold new animations and new thoughts. Shannon information, not mirrors. But I’m in a dull period now, and the reaction stuff keeps the routine going until the graphics juice returns.] Latest Kirn provocative thought: I remember the…
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No quibbles at all
Kirn hits the mark precisely this time. One clever way to fight the power is to get onboard in a totally inert way with absolutely everything it does, to comply unenthusiastically with every last little dictate, forcing the system to carry your dead weight in full, along with everyone else’s. This is the ONLY way…
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More Girn Gibbles
Kirn’s latest pithy point is offbeam. Perhaps the most disabling glitch affecting political conversation is people’s inability to grasp that the other side is sincere in its beliefs and views the “facts” which support them as authentic. What’s missing here? Most beliefs are NOT sincere when declared by the politicians and influencers. Deepstate writes a…
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More Quirn Quibbles
Kirn’s latest pithy point: How many times have I heard it argued that God’s apparent silence argues for his non-existence? Well, mountains exist & they are silent, mostly. Indeed, I’ve come to feel that the most silent things around us exist more durably than the noisy ones, which merely come & go. Yes, but mere…
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Make it look horrible
Kirn points out the cover of the latest Economist, which has returned to “Climate” Emergency as a brief break between “Virus” Emergencies. The cover is a stalk of wheat with skulls instead of grains. Horrible. (Kirn wasn’t really talking about the art itself, but some of his commenters brought out the connection.) This crystallized a…
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No quibble this time
Kirn gets a bit too ethereal at times, but here he’s rigorously and strictly practical: Free speech is a property right. It is the right to bring to market, in a form that can be valued & used in trade, the products of your own thinking & inner life. To unduly inhibit people’s speech is…
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More Kirn Kibble
Since I’m quibbling with Kirn today, here’s another. You went to college and want to learn to write well? Here’s a tip. Vanquish from your mind the entire slate of terms you heard only in classes & used only in papers. Ditch “hegemony.” Forget “problematic.” Scuttle “instantiate.” Excellent and very old advice. Most of the…
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