Robbie Rambles #1
In which I deliver the first issues a couple days late...
Hey all,
Welcome to my new experiment — “Robbie Rambles”. Every week, probably on a Friday, I’m going to send out thoughts about 3-5 different things I’ve read, mostly things elsewhere on the internet, devoting 3-5 sentences each. My hope with this is twofold: to keep my writing/thinking muscles strong, and to help you find some signal in the midst of internet noise. Expect subjects such as culture, faith, technology, fitness, music, skateboarding, and maybe even politics. You can follow along here on the blog, but I’ll also be cross-posting to a Substack newsletter for those of you who prefer to get these missives via email.
Let’s get to it.
Andrew Sullivan’s recent piece on the “Biden-DeSantis rebalancing act” was an interesting look at how even quite moderate policy positions can trigger partisan howling, regardless of where one stands. For example, DeSantis’s statements about the USA’s interests in Ukraine seem to advocate for a more restrained foreign policy, very similar to Obama, yet mainstream media outlets prefer to cast him as a Putin sympathizer. Similarly, the Biden administration has increasingly moderated its position on issues such as crime and immigration, moves that, as Sullivan writes, are “not fascism,” but “a basic duty of government”. I agree with Sullivan’s assessment that these moves toward moderation are laudable. I find the “art of the possible” preferable to posturing around the impossible.
I really like Jaron Lanier’s thoughts about our primary responsibility in an age of burgeoning AI: to sanity. I’ve personally not found much use for ChatGPT or any of the shiny new toys that are coming on the market. To be honest, I have little to no interest in them. Maybe this is my own naivety at work. The other day I was in a meeting with colleagues and someone posited that soon our only options will be to either be assimilated by the matrix, or become Amish. We all agreed that it was preferable to become Amish, albeit Amish who can drink beer. My colleagues and I are tech workers, mind you. Could it be that even for the technologically inclined, reality beyond our heads is becoming more appreciated, and appealing?
Not a link, but a thought about reading, specifically reading scripture. A few friends and I were recently debating in a group text whether or not reading the Bible alone is a good idea. The framing of the subject as “a good idea” is overly broad, but it prompted some interesting discussion. I think that the way we read in the modern world overly privileges our analytical mind, which is fine, but problematic when approaching holy writ. Both Christians and Jews for much of history were functionally illiterate, and didn’t have immediate access to the Bible in its current form. They mostly heard it read, and related to it through memorization, rumination, and meditation. Theirs was a much slowerrelationship to scripture — they didn’t have the option to consume and process the same volume of information that we’re currently able to.
Tangentially related to the above, Warren Ellis published some thoughts on slowness that I really liked. It feels to me like a lot of people are recalibrating their relationship to time.
Finally, Alan Jacobs gave us "David Hume's Guide to Social Media”. Summarizing Hume, Jacobs writes,
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.
This is partly the reason I started The Gap Year — as an opportunity for friends to deliberately cultivate an appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
That’s it for this initial missive. Thanks for reading, hope you have a great weekend.
Robbie