#but then again i’m not writing these as scholarly articles and purely objective. i do have my biases for sure and will acknowledge them

[ducktracy]

What shorts are you most excited to review?

TOO MANY!!! The Great Piggy Bank Robbery for sure will absolutely be my #1 i’m excited for, along with other favorites like Baby Bottleneck and Kitty Kornered… i’ll warn you in advance that i already KNOW those are going to be insanely long because i really want to talk about the most minute details (like watching Piggy Bank the other day i spent about 10 minutes thinking about why does Daffy have a mailbox? does he own the farm? that’s weird if he does. but why would only he have the mailbox if he’s a farm animal? and look! it has his name on it! he used a stencil. there was not at all intended to be so much thought put behind this but the implication is fascinating. these are the kinds of things i like to scrutinize)

HARD TO SAY THOUGH there truly are so many… 99% of the Porky and Daffy entries for sure HAHA. i try to focus on the present, but like… right now, i’m really looking forward to reviewing Porky’s Last Stand, which was the first short of 1940 and one of my favorites—before that i was excited for Wise Quacks, before that The Daffy Doc, etc. i do tend to think in terms of “what’s my next favorite” BUT i’ve learned to love many cartoons i never would have liked had i not dug super deep into them, so it’s really hard to say!! i enjoy surprising myself with shorts i didn’t know i would like in the first place… pretty much all of the Daffy and/or Porky shorts though without a doubt though

#for example Naughty Neighbors is next and i personally think it’s one of Clampett’s worst #but as i was picking through it i was like ‘oh the timing on this is good the contrast is really effective here the layouts are gorgeous ‘ #and i found myself liking it giving it that sort of scrutiny more than i would as a normal watcher. i still think it’s a supremely lame #cartoon but having the insight i do now i appreciate it much more #working in the animation industry and in a pipeline sort of reminiscent to how these cartoons were made (like SpongeBob operates with a #director and their team of plussers/revisionists much like a director and his team of animators in the golden age where you’re able to #identify each animator’s style but the director sets the overall tone of the short) so having that sort of hands on experience has been #really enlightening too. so my reviews are sort of written with that background/opinionation in mind #but then again i’m not writing these as scholarly articles and purely objective. i do have my biases for sure and will acknowledge them #absolutely but it would be so fruitless to do otherwise you know? personal voice and opinion matters #IDK WHY I’M PONTIFICATING ABOUT THIS IT’S TANGENTIALLY RELATED HAHAHAHHA BUT #anonymous #asks

[96thdayofrage]

I’m not trying to hide my personal beliefs about these people in some pseudo high-minded analysis that purports to be about something else.

If, however, you’re looking for that sort of thing (that is, if you’re looking for an example of an actual hit piece!), you will surely find no greater example than the Harvard Kennedy School’s Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news.

As far as hit pieces about the American Descendants of Slavery movement go, Disinformation creep is the one that really aspires to a kind of hang-that-sucker-up-on-the-refrigerator worthiness. It’s Harvard-certified, after all! And gosh, if there were ever an institutional badge with which all ten (ten!) authors of Disinformation creep could dazzle everyone in the rancid social-professional hierarchy they are all so obviously and desperately trying to climb, it’s certainly Harvard U.

But in fact the imprimatur of Harvard on Disinformation creep seems to serve exactly one function: to discourage the reader of the study from considering the fact that what he or she holds in their hands is utterly dishonest horseshit, a bizarre medley of unambiguous lies produced by people (again, ten people!) whose need to bathe in Harvard’s artificial validation seemingly trumped their felt responsibility to adhere to even the most basic and minimal set of ethics and standards in their chosen field of scholarly publishing.

I have literally no idea where to even begin in terms of communicating the enormity of Disinformation creep’s failure. Do you know the GIF where a cat tries to leap from a dresser to a bed and stalls out about midway and just sort of belly-flops onto the floor? That’s how Disinformation creep performs.

It is a monument to unsuccessfulness, and on every single one of its sixteen pages there is evidence of intellectual bankruptcy of the absolute highest order.

The forthcoming official rebuttal from the ADOS Advocacy Foundation does an excellent job at identifying each of these numerous lies and idiocies and countering them accordingly, but I think the report’s grand stupidity and essential hollowness can really be distilled to a single aspect of “Figure 1”.

The above graph from Disinformation creep provides a visual representation of the daily number of tweets “specifically using the #ADOS hashtag” over an 11-month period. These tweets are what the authors use to assert that there is an observable pattern of high Twitter activity within the ADOS ‘network’ around “real-world events” (e.g. MLK Day; Chadwick Boseman’s death; Kamala Harris announced as Biden’s VP pick, etc.), and that the content of the tweets on these days reveals how the “ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party.”

OK. Welp. By including screenshots of some of these tweets in the graph, the authors allow us to see for ourselves the kind of content they supposedly carefully analyzed in order to support their hypothesis. Notably, on August 2, the second largest spike in tweets using “#ADOS” is shown to have occurred. The authors identify a total of ~7,000 posts that day.

Incomprehensibly, the authors used a tweet about a cryptocurrency scam that translates to “‘The question is quickly answered’: many French #teens have dropped out of school, thinking to become [stock] #trader[s] in buying #formation kits. They fell into the trap of #Melius, based in #Dubai and known by other names. L’AMF and #Miviludes are seized.”

In French, “ados” means “teens”. And because the social media staffer at Mediavenir — when they were writing that tweet — slapped a hashtag in front of it, it eventually came to be swept up into Disinformation creep’s “dAtA sAmPLe sEt” despite having literally nothing what-so-fucking-ever to do with the actual #ADOS political movement which Harvard is asking the public to trust that they have specifically and diligently studied.

How does this happen? How does this glaringly and utterly irrelevant tweet manage to be not just included in the dataset but held up as somehow representative of the black-targeted misinformation content dump that the authors claim defines the ‘ADOS network’ on ‘high-activity days’? What about other tweets that include “#ADOS” and which similarly have absolutely no relation at all to the political movement, such as this one, or this one, or this one?

How many of those are part of the daily totals? I know the authors use a bunch of real fancy-sounding, applied science-y jargon in the report to describe their process (e.g .”computational grounded theory”; “structural topic modeling”; “inductive thematic analysis”), but like, despite these apparently sophisticated tools, there is still clearly a presence of laughably irrelevant tweets to be found among the collection of data.

Does it matter? Should it? Um, probably, yeah, if your intent is to not undermine your own work’s quality, to say nothing of your own dignity. More importantly, how did this get through a peer-review process? Who were the peers? Drooling invalids that were instructed to blink if they thought the study passed muster and was ready for publication? Some poor low-tier academic saps who were brought to a dingy basement somewhere in Kendall Square and made to strip down to their underwear while Harvard data experts stubbed out lit cigarettes all over their flesh and barked at them to sign off on Disinformation creep’s patently bunk methodology?

These sorts of scenarios rush in to try and explain the pure absurdity of the report, to fill in the vacuum occasioned by its vast gaping absence of basic evaluation standards in scholarly publishing, criteria that one might reasonably anticipate being insisted upon by an institution like Harvard which openly fancies itself as being like the sacred flame of academia or whatever.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you are actually not surprised at all. Maybe you know that since Disinformation creep aims to portray the #ADOS movement as irredeemably toxic simply because it represents the possibility of actual repair and freedom for the descendants of chattel slavery, Harvard would in fact happily become much more lenient and accommodating in their standards if it helps to kill the vehicle for that possibility.

After all, this is the same institution whose lawyers just successfully litigated the University’s retention of property rights to photographs of slaves following a lawsuit that was brought against Harvard by Tamara Lanier, a woman who — as a descendant of the father and daughter that are pictured — argued that she was the rightful owner of the images.

This is the same institution whose administrative staff just recently reminded the school’s highest-profile black faculty member that he could expect Harvard to extend him about as much freedom and protections in his work as a white landowner would have conferred upon his black sharecropper in the Mississippi delta in 1896.

This is Harvard, after all, and good old-fashioned racism is still very much alive and well in this vaunted cathedral of higher learning.

The hope is, I guess, that outward actions like the school’s appointment of a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer will distract you from the institution’s complete inward deformities of racial injustice that have defined both its past and present. The hope is, I guess, that Harvard can just kind of jot off one of its total bullshit-y pronouncements of ‘solidarity’ whenever the continued fever of American racism spikes, as if the institution itself has not always been right there helping stoke the fire to its full strength in the body of society. The hope is, I guess (and Disinformation creep proves this), that Harvard will never have to confront a real, organized threat to the fact that the institution pretends not to continue to fatten itself on the misery of ADOS.

But which is why — with the abysmal failure of Disinformation creep — Harvard should be very worried. The timing of such a cack-handed, deeply stupid effort by ten writers united in their ineptness to make ADOS an object of reactionary horror could not be worse for the institution.

Let’s deny the descendants of slaves rights to photographs of their ancestors! Let’s refuse tenure consideration to one of the premiere black intellectuals in America who’s spent his career advocating for black people! Let’s mobilize in dishonesty *against* the movement now trying to secure justice for that very collective!

What a hapless, blinkered, and desperately clumsy bunch of white supremacists over there in Cambridge, huh? Pointy-headed ninnies all cloistered away from every conceivable brutal reality of ADOS life and who all seemingly decided one day that it was their God-given right to root out the seeds of possibility that the #ADOS movement is planting in this country.

This is what the academics at Harvard are doing to help America’s bottom caste as the world around these people skids into the abyss. They are publishing their little ‘scholarly articles’ replete with lies so vulgar and obvious that it stands to reason the authors involved in the writing undertook the project with one single expectation: that they would be able to freely invent whatever filth they wanted to about ADOS and no one would question a word of it simply because the report came out of Harvard.

Indeed it is a direct testament to how much contempt and disdain Harvard has for the plight of ADOS that they would even consider publishing such an obvious clown car of researchers in the first place. Fully six of these goblins have no previously published content that has been accepted into the Web of Science (which, to be kind of crude about it, you can think of as sort of like the IMDb of academics; WoS catalogues the number of citations, and thus, provides the basic metric of impact/importance of research).

In other words, these writers have about as much authority and credibility in this space as a group of elementary school children who were all collected at a rural bus stop, given pencils and notepads and juice boxes and told to ‘write about those baddies in the #ADOS movement’.

Who are these people? Are they just bored? Unloved? And how are they so very bad at what they do?

They should wake up embarrassed.

They were tasked with not even creating but just building upon one already existing lie: that the #ADOS movement is essentially an online factory of misinformation (indeed, the original architectress of that lie is Jess Aiwuyor, and Disinformation creep reads very much like a sad, dull and weird extension of her own body of work, which is essentially one sad, dull and weird neurotic meditation on ADOS).

People paid the scummy little clan of Disinformation creep writers handsomely to gussy up that original lie a little bit — to give it a little slick veneer of scientific observation — and in the end these pedantic cretins who evidently think they are so much smarter than everyone else couldn’t produce a remotely convincing or even vaguely entertaining case.

But of course Disinformation creep failed. Of course it did. And that’s because, at the end of the day, there are only so many ways to dress up what these people are really doing when they write shit like this, which is that they are trying to make the #ADOS movement the scapegoat for the deficiency-ridden politics of the Left.

That’s it.

You can distill the entire genre of anti-#ADOS ‘criticism’ down to that single impulse — that tightly wound coil of emotion, of melancholy that lives at the heart of these people’s obsessive determination to get rid of the movement. For them, #ADOS functions purely as a scapegoat for their own failed postwar utopias and workers’ revolutions. And what Disinformation creep proves is just how completely exhausted the genre already is after a mere two years. How utterly lacking it is in its efficacy.

What it proves is that the harder they try to hurriedly scuttle the most potent justice movement since the Civil Rights era off the scene, the more they manage only to reveal a basic, repugnant truth about themselves: their determination to further dispossess the very people whose suffering and deprivation they all spill so much ink over, and waste so much breath claiming to be so very outraged and heartbroken about. Just look at Harvard.

All Harvard succeeded in doing was exposing itself. It confirmed what’s becoming blindingly apparent about so very many of our elite liberal institutions in 2021: that these privilege farms don’t function all that differently than they did in the plantation days. They just as nonchalantly enrich themselves off the wholesale spoliation of ADOS, and they’ve been able to feign innocence because of a movement-free, symbolism-intoxicated climate that not just permits but encourages such despicable action.

Well, Harvard, the #ADOS Advocacy Foundation has three words for you: We’re here now.

[tortuga-aak]

What it feels like to be enlightened

Flickr Creative Commons/Hartwig HKD

Mysticism has been on my mind again lately, in part because of the success of Why Buddhism Is True by my friend Robert Wright. During a mystical experience, you feel as though you are encountering absolute reality, whatever the hell that is. Wright explores the possibility that meditation can induce powerful mystical states, including the supreme state known as enlightenment.

I ventured into this territory in my 2003 book Rational Mysticism. I interviewed people with both scholarly and personal knowledge of mystical experiences. One was the Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor, a profile of whom I just posted. Another was a professor of philosophy who prefers to remain anonymous. I’ll call him Mike. I didn’t tell Mike’s story in Rational Mysticism, but I’m going to tell it now, because it sheds light on enlightenment. 

Before I met Mike, I read an article in which he claimed to have achieved a mystical state devoid of object, subject, or emotion. It occurred in 1972, while he was on a meditation retreat. “I had been meditating alone in my room all morning,” Mike recalls,

when someone knocked on my door. I heard the knock perfectly clearly, and upon hearing it I knew that, although there was no “waking up” before hearing the knock, for some indeterminate length of time prior to the knocking I had not been aware of anything in particular. I had been awake but with no content for my consciousness. Had no one knocked I doubt that I would ever have become aware that I had not been thinking or perceiving.

Mike decided that he had experienced what the Hindu sage Shankara called “unconsciousness.” Mike’s description of his experience, which he called a "pure consciousness event,” baffled me. Can this be the goal of spiritual seeking? To experience not bliss or profound insights but literally nothing? And if you really experience nothing, how can you remember the experience? How do you emerge from this state of oblivion back into ordinary consciousness? How does an experience of nothing promote a sense of spirituality?

Mike, it turned out, lived in a town on the Hudson River not far from my own. Like me, he was married and had kids. I called and told him I was writing a book about mysticism, and he agreed to meet me to talk about his experiences. On a warm spring day in 1999 we met for lunch at a restaurant near his home. Mike had a ruddy complexion, thinning hair, and a scruffy, reddish-brown beard. Eyeing me suspiciously he said, “A friend of mine warned me that I shouldn’t talk to people like you.” His friend’s advice is sound, I replied, journalists are not to be trusted. Mike laughed and seemed to relax (which of course was my insidious intent).

Grilling me about my attitudes toward mysticism, he compulsively completed my sentences for me. I said that when I first heard about enlightenment, my impression was that it changes your entire personality, transforming you into... “A saint,” Mike said. Yes, I continued. But now I suspected that you can have very deep mystical awareness and still be... “An asshole,” Mike said. “So that's what you want to think about?” he continued, scrutinizing me. “You want to think about whether enlightenment is really all that cool?”

Mike’s edginess lingered as he began telling me about himself. Especially when instructing me on fine points of Hinduism or other mystical doctrines, he spoke with an ironic inflection, mocking his own pretensions. His fascination with enlightenment dated back to the late 1960’s, when he was an undergraduate studying philosophy and became deeply depressed. He tried psychotherapy and Zen, but nothing worked until he started practicing Transcendental Meditation in 1969. Introduced to the west by the Indian sage Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Meditation involves sitting with eyes closed while repeating a phrase, or mantra.

“It was magic, hugely effective,” Mike said of TM. Over the next decade, he became involved in the TM organization. “I hung out with Maharishi a fair amount.” He distanced himself from the TM movement after it began offering seminars on occult practices, notably levitation. “I did that technique,” Mike said. “It was an interesting experience, but it sure as hell wasn't levitating.” The Maharishi also proposed that the brain waves emitted by large groups of meditators could reduce crime rates and even warfare. “I thought it was silly,” Mike said, “and I didn't want to be identified with it.”

Mike pursued a doctorate in philosophy in the early 1980’s so that he could defend intellectually what he knew to be true experientially: Through meditation we can gain access to realms of reality that transcend time and space, culture, and individual identity. Yes, as William James documented, mystical visions vary, but mystics from many different traditions, including Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Judaism, have described experiences that are devoid of content. These are what Mike calls pure consciousness events.

“If you say all crows are black, all it takes is one white crow and you've blown the thesis,” Mike said. “We got a whole range of these white crows.” Mike noted that if he and I described the restaurant in which we were eating, our descriptions would almost certainly diverge, even though we were seeing the same restaurant. Shankara, Meister Eckhart, and the Zen master Dogen described their pure consciousness events in different ways, but they were experiencing the same deep reality.

Our conversation then took an unexpected turn. I said I was mystified by the notion that enlightenment is nothing more than a “pure consciousness event.”

“That's not enlightenment!” Mike interrupted. He stared at me, and when he continued he spoke in clipped, precise tones, as if trying to physically embed his words in my brain. The pure consciousness event is just a stepping-stone, at best, to true enlightenment. Pure consciousness events and other mystical states are “fascinating, interesting, very cool things. But they are shifts in perception, not shifts in the structure of perception. And that's, I think, when things get very interesting, when structural shifts take place.”

Mike held up his water glass. Normally, he said, when you look at an object like this glass, you sense a distinction between the object and yourself. He set the glass down, grabbed my pen from my hand, and scribbled on his napkin. He sketched the glass, complete with ice cubes and lemon, and an eyeball staring at the glass. During a “pure consciousness event,” the object vanishes and only consciousness remains, Mike said, drawing an X through the glass.

There is a higher state of awareness, however, in which consciousness becomes its own subject and object. “It becomes aware of itself. And there is a kind of, not solipsism exactly, but a reflexivity to consciousness.” Bending over his napkin again, Mike drew an arrow that emerged from the eyeball and curled back toward it. “It's like there is a self-awareness in a new sort of way.”

Our Caesar salads arrived. As the waiter grated parmesan cheese over our bowls, Mike told me about the final state of enlightenment, which he called the “unitive mystical state.” In this state, your awareness enfolds not just your individual consciousness but all of inner and outer reality. “What you are, and what the world is, is now somehow a unit, unified.” Mike drew a circle around the eyeball and the glass.

Are there any levels beyond this one? I asked, pointing to the circle. “I don’t know,” Mike answered, looking genuinely perplexed. “I haven't read about it, if there is. Some people want to say that there are, beyond here, experiences. But I'm not convinced of that.”

So are you enlightened? I asked. “As I understand it, yes,” Mike replied without hesitating. He had been expecting the question. He scrutinized me, looking for a reaction. “See, that's tricky. I just gave you a pretty tricky answer. Because I define this stuff pretty narrowly.” He might not be enlightened according to others’ definitions, but according to his definition he reached enlightenment in 1995.

Mike hastened to disabuse me of various myths about enlightenment. When he started meditating in the late 1960’s, he believed that enlightenment “was all going to be fun and games.” He emitted a mock-ecstatic cry and waved his hands in the air. “Just heaven,” he added, snapping his fingers, “like that.” But enlightenment does not make you permanently happy, let alone ecstatic. Instead, it is a state that incorporates all human emotions and qualities: love and hate, desire and fear, wisdom and ignorance. “The ability to hold opposites, emotional opposites, at the same time is really what we're after.”

Enlightenment is profoundly satisfying and transformative, but the mind remains in many respects unchanged. “You're still neurotic, and you still hate your mother, or you want to get laid, or whatever the thing is. It's the same stuff; it doesn't shift that. But there is a sort of deep”--he raised his hands, as if gripping an invisible basketball, and uttered a growly, guttural grunt—“that didn't used to be there.”

Far from fostering humility and ego-death, Mike added, mystical experiences can lead to narcissism. Enlightenment is “the biggest power trip you can imagine” and an “aphrodisiac.” When you have a profound mystical revelation, “you think you're God! And that is going to have a hell of an effect on people… All the little young ladies run around and say, ‘He's enlightened! He's God!’”

Have you struggled with that problem yourself? I asked. “Sure!” Mike responded. When he first began having mystical experiences in 1971, he was on top of the world. “And after a while they sort of fall away, and you realize you're the same jerk you were all along. You just have different insights.” Mike resumed psychotherapy in 1983 to deal with some of his personal problems. “It was the best thing I ever did. Been in it ever since.” (What would it be like, I wondered, to be the therapist for someone who believes he is enlightened?)

Contrary to what some gurus claim, enlightenment does not give you answers to scientific riddles such as the origin of the universe, or of conscious life, Mike said. When I asked if he intuits a divine intelligence underlying reality, he shook his head. “No, no.” Then he reconsidered. He sees ultimate reality as timeless, featureless, Godless, and yet he occasionally feels that he and all of us are part of a larger plan. “I have a sense that things are moving in a certain direction, well beyond anybody's real control.” Maybe, he said, just as electrons can be described as waves and particles, so ultimate reality might be timeless and aimless—and also have some directionality and purpose.

Evidently dissatisfied with his defense of enlightenment—or sensing that I was dissatisfied with it--Mike tried again. He has an increased ability to concentrate since he became enlightened, he assured me, and a greater intuitive sense about people. “I can say this without hesitation: I would rather have these experiences than not,” he said. “It's not nothing.”

A few days later, I went running in the woods behind my house. After I arrived huffing and puffing at the top of a hill, I flopped down on a patch of moss to catch my breath. Looking up through entangled branches at the sky, I ruminated over my lunch with Mike. What impressed me most about him was that he somehow managed to be likably unpretentious, even humble, while claiming to be enlightened. He’s no saint or sage, just a normal guy, a suburban dad, who happens to have achieved the supreme state of being.

But if enlightenment transforms us so little, why work so hard to attain it? I also brooded over the suggestion of Mike and other mystics that when you see things clearly, you discover a void at the heart of reality. You get to the pot at the end of the spiritual rainbow, and you don’t find God, or a theory of everything, or ecstasy. You find nothing, or “not nothing,” as Mike put it. What’s so wonderful and consoling about that? Does seeing life as an illusion make accepting death easier? I must be missing something.

I was still flat on my back when a shadow intruded on my field of vision. A vulture, wingtips splayed, glided noiselessly toward me. As it passed over me, just above the treetops, it cocked its wizened head and eyed me. “Go away!” I shouted. “I’m not dead yet!”

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