thejdizzler
1d ago
What an amazing article! Thanks for this!
thejdizzler
1d ago
Is there somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user?
thejdizzler
3d ago
I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!
Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.
Background
I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.
David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.
I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.
Culture is not entertainment
I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.
Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.
Drugs are bad, actually
The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.
Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.
This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.
Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)
I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.
Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.
The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.
From Hans Bertens:
If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.
I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.
First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.
Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.
Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.
thejdizzler
3d ago
I don't run with my phone or headphones at all. There could be exposure to plastics from my dry-fit shirts.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Yea I can run a full marathon in Sub 2:35, so fat gain probably isn't the culprit.
thejdizzler
3d ago
We went to an art activity (really fun) and then dinner (not as fun) and then I walked her home. Art activity was 2 hours, we had an hour before dinner reservation, then dinner was like 80 min, then walked her home.
thejdizzler
3d ago
A friend of a friend works Rhythm health, which does mail-in blood tests, and I got a free test last week from her. Despite nearly passing out while collecting blood from myself (this is the #1 reason I am not a medical doctor), I managed to do the collection successfully, and got my results back on Sunday. Everything looked fine or even good except for two things.
1). Low HDL. This has been a problem for the past few years, and I think it is because I don't eat any dietary cholesterol because I'm basically vegan other than eating a small amount of fish and shellfish. I had a long discussion with my boss about this, and our conclusion is that this isn't really a problem. HDL is a cholesterol scavenger that brings back extra cholesterol from tissues to the liver. My tissues probably need all the cholesterol they have (/synthesize it through the squalene pathway) so that would explain why my HDL is low.
2). High estrogen. This one was more concerning to me. My estrogen was 38 pg/dL (normal is 20-30). I have two theories about this. Firstly, I eat quite a bit of soy, so the test could be picking up phytoestrogens from that, artificially inflating the reading. The second is that I unfortunately have gained a bit of fat since 2023, which could also be increasing the amount of estrogen in my body. In either case, I'm going to bring it up with my PCP during my visit next Friday.
thejdizzler
3d ago
- Work: Need to get some projects off my plate, as I feel like I'm juggling too many balls right now. Still on track to graduate next May, if not sooner.
- Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout again this morning: 40 min tempo at 5:40 pace, which is around
15-20 sec/mile faster than my planned Boston pace! Nearly bonked at the end, which means that I'm not fueling as well as I could be. - Intellectual Stuff: Pacific trilogy is done, and working on finishing Italian book. After this is done I'll be working through Game of Thrones (in Spanish) and trying to finish Indigenous continent. Also starting After Virtue by MacIntyre for philosophy book club, which should make for some good discussion.
- Finances: Over spending targets last month by about $220, but still had a 7% savings rate because it was an excellent month for dividends. First part of parents' transfer(120k) came through and I liquidated it a few days ago and am keeping it in a 3.5% MM fund until I decide what to do with it. Have already put ~8k of it into my IRA. This coming month expenses should be under 3.2k, even if I do end up signing up for a 70.3 in Madison in September.
- Dating: Had a date with the Saudi girl on Saturday, which was fun for about 2 hours, but not so much for the other 3! Will not be seeing her again.
- Tarot: No session this week.
- Socializing: Went back to Spanish happy hour and silent book club this week. Also stopped by a furry convention in downtown Baltimore and had a good laugh.
- Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
- Mental health: think anxiety is probably screen time and nutrition related! The anxiety is often accompanied by hunger. Will continue to observe and hopefully get to the bottom of this.
thejdizzler
6d ago
Finished the final book in Ian W. Toll's Pacific War trilogy Twilight of the Gods last night. I didn't like this one quite as much as the other two, partially because it was nearly 50% longer, but mainly because after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the outcome of the War in the Pacific became extremely clear, and so all the tension of the previous volumes was no longer present. The book also began to be a little repetitive: Toll covered ground he had already tread pretty extensively in the last book with covering the submarine war, and there is a tendency for biographic details about the American commanders to also be repeated between books. That said, I learned a lot from this book about the war, and am excited to move on to another period in history (although may have to check out various recommendations from other users on the forum). Some more specific history thoughts below.
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The Japanese high command knew that the war was over after the battle of the Philippine Sea, but they couldn't make peace for another year for internal reasons. They basically needed either a huge victory that would bring the Americans to the negotiating table, or a huge defeat to break the power of the army/navy. The high-ups (admirals, generals, etc.) were beholden to the ideology of the mid tier of officers (captains, majors, etc.) that would have launched a coup if they knew that peace talks were happening. In fact, some officers in Tokyo did try and do this the night before Hirohito's surrender speech was released to the public, but they were foiled by the non-cooperation of key army officers. It was this same extremism in the officer corp that caused Japan's initial descent into fascism, and I wonder where the initial drivers of this ideology came from, considering that Toll points out that the philosophy of the militarists was quite different from both traditional samurai honor and the Meiji code of conduct.
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In contrast to the last book, the Japanese leadership began to make tactically very smart decisions during the island hopping campaign. No more banzai charges or wasting air and sea power on stupid resupply, but defense in depth relying on elaborate fortifications and underground bunkers that were resistant to air strikes (maybe a lesson for the current Iran war). Kamikazes were also brilliant and presaged the age of guided missiles, which would challenge the supremacy of aircraft carriers. Americans overcame these barriers through material might and bravery on the ground, but it cost them a lot.
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This book is very critical of two American commanders in the Pacific: Bill Halsey and Douglas MacArthur. Halsey makes a huge error at the beginning of the book where he sends his whole fleet to chase the Japanese carriers (and win glory for himself) rather than effectively protecting the landings on Leyte, making them extremely vulnerable to a surprise attack by the Japanese surface fleet, which only failed because of luck. Halsey also sails the fleet into two typhoons, and refuses to ever admit he made a mistake at Leyte, which doesn't help his case. MacArthur doesn't make as huge of tactical blunders, but conducts himself like an ass with the other theatre commanders, and declares that Manila has been liberated when there's still three months of fighting left to go. Neither man is really punished or censored because they're both so popular with the press.
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Service rivalries in both Japan and America played a big part in decision making. The island of Pelieu, which probably could have been bypassed on the way to the Philippines for example, was invaded at least partially because Nimitz wanted to maintain command of marine divisions for a little longer. On the Japanese side, the entire Pacific War was the result of a service rivalry: the Navy needed a war of equivalent size to the one in China to justify its share of the budget. I wonder how large of an issue this is today, and if steps have been taken to unify the American command structure to prevent these kind of clashes.
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This book at least partially convinced me that most of the fighting in the Pacific War was pretty unnecessary. Americans effectively had air supremacy over Japan starting in late 1944, and the combination of bombings and submarine attacks could have completely destroyed the Japanese economy without invasions of Okinawa or the Philippines at all, much less the planned invasions of the home islands. Of course hindsight is 20/20, and these things weren't so obvious at the time.
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When I used to go to Catholic Church more and hang out in Catholic spaces, I always heard that the Nagasaki cathedral was the planned ground zero for the second atomic bomb, and that this somehow represented that America was using world war 2 to secretly destroy catholic hegemony (with other evidence from Monte Casino and other battles in Italy). Like all good conspiracy theories, this one contains a kernel of truth: the Nagasaki cathedral was destroyed in the blast, and a lot of Japanese catholics died. But the bombs original target wasn't even Nagasaki, but nearby Kokura. Only a series of hilarious mishaps and mistakes lead it to being dropped on Nagasaki, and the target was, if anything basically at random because visibility was so poor. Toll notes that the Shinto shrine in Nagasaki was spared from being destroyed, which many Japanese took to be a sign of the strength of their indigenous faith.
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I was incredibly surprised by how quickly the Japanese people seemed to about-face and accept their occupation with good spirits. This was partially due to the fact that Americans behaved much better than expected, but also I think because the hearts of the Japanese people hadn't really been in the war since at least mid 1944, and they were ready to ditch the militarism, which was a historical aberration in any case. In this sense, the American maintenance of the authority of the emperor was very smart, as it allowed the Japanese to feel like they were returning to some tradition, rather than having their society totally disassembled.
thejdizzler
7d ago
Link doesn't seem to be working for me
thejdizzler
7d ago
I second this motion. I have blocked him, but I would like the forum to be populated with higher class discussions.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I don’t understand your definition of a genocide. Genocide means an elimination of an entire race. If the population of a race is increasing in an area it’s not a genocide, or at least it’s a very bad one. What’s happening in Gaza looks very different from actual intentional genocides in the past, which involved deliberate mass murder of civilians. What the Israelis are doing looks much more like war, with a lowered tolerance for civilians casualties.
thejdizzler
8d ago
uhh I think we would do this without Israel pretty readily because oil.
thejdizzler
9d ago
A couple factors that make it much more difficult
- Israelis have the bomb.
- 6 million is a lot more than 750k, especially when almost every single person has significant military experience.
- Who's gonna do it? The Arabs? They've never won a war against the state of Israel. The West? Good luck dealing with the optics of destroying the only functional government in the Middle East to appease some Blue-haired leftists and Neo-nazis.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I do not believe in apartheid, but the status of Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel is unclear. Arabs in Israel have full rights, but Gaza and the West Bank are still occupied territories under martial law. If that were to change and Palestinians were not granted full rights, I would consider it apartheid.
thejdizzler
9d ago
No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.
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First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
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Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
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Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
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Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
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Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Medication free!
thejdizzler
10d ago
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Work: Had a mild freakout at work when my (published) software wasn't working. Part of it was a quick bug fix, part of it was the user not exploring the parameter space correctly. Worked a bit extra today and fixed it. Planning on getting some Claude Code help with cleaning up the GUI (back button, fixing weird window pop up, etc.) by the end of this week. Other than that experiments are going to plan!
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Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout this morning: 2 x 20 min at 5:55 and then 5:37 pace. Feeling on track to run sub 2:35 at Boston. Annoyed at the Baltimore youth for stealing my nice UA jacket.
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Intellectual Stuff: Very happy with Marx blog post. Wrapping up the last half of Toll's final Pacific War book, and then really trying to finish my Italian book. Spanish surprisingly has not suffered from my lack of practice, and I still speak fine during my weekly lesson.
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Finances: Expenses are no longer so low this month because I went to a jazz show when my friend was in town and booked a flight to Florida to see my other friend. Parent's transfer kicked off successfully, and will gradually be liquidating the assets over the next few years until I need to buy a house. Now that it's spring I'm realizing how little I actually need a car, so that may not be happening after all.
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Dating: Still seeing the same girl, but I'm no longer very enthused about it. She's began to come off as very childish/delusional which I don't want to deal with long term.
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Tarot: Good session last night
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Socializing: My friend Simon was here this weekend and we had a great time biking around Baltimore and hanging out.
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Screen time: 1.2 hours.
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Mental health: have been very anxious for some reason waking up. Would like to get to the bottom of this.
thejdizzler
13d ago
Final book in Toll's Pacific War Trilogy! Also still chugging on the Golden Compass in Italian, and we've started After Virtue in philosophy book club.
Indian Wars: Battle of Little Bighorn
Spanish-American War: None
WW1: None (was surprised by this)
WW2 (Pacific): Pearl Harbor, Java Sea, initial campaign in the Philippines in WW2, Battle of Savo Island in the Guadalcanal campaign.
WW2 (Europe): Kasserine Pass, Market Garden.
Korea: Yalu River
Vietnam: None
Gulf War I: None
Gulf War II: None
Afganistan: None
thejdizzler
13d ago
Wow love that Djikstra essay!
thejdizzler
13d ago
This is my least favorite of his books to be honest. The best in my opinion is A Brightness Long Ago
thejdizzler
15d ago
I did get a lot of out of it, so it wasn't a total waste, but yeah the theory doesn't really fully clarify things. Back to being a pretty shelf decoration I guess.
thejdizzler
15d ago
No I think we have the same understanding here, I think there's just a confusion of terms. If you're in a factory making widgets, maybe the first twenty have a positive use value for you (maybe you can feed your robot pet with widgets). After that the use value of each widget quickly approaches 0, so you'd rather sell them on the market. The same is true for any commodity you might produce, as a subsistence farmer or otherwise. The only situation in which use value and exchange value are exactly equal (or use value is always higher) is when you have a society of hunter gatherers, as you note.
This is amazing thanks man!
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