On getting away from it all

+ a melange of brain spasms from and after the road

Paying subscribers just got an extra 3 months on the house¹² after a month of no Rarely Certains. However insistent Substack's many 'growth experts' are that you must be posting constantly, I neither force this thing nor abuse the trust of people who pay upfront. All this to say that for the last few weeks I was focusing on research for a website and book on the squadron who liberated my town. Then I hit the road, to follow their journey across France, Belgium and into Germany for a while.

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On the road I reflected on a friend's words.

'You have different thoughts when you travel'

This turned out to be a bit true.

There's a quality of my being that seems different, away from home. In quotidien spaces and routines there's a tension between moving on autopilot and being fully present. Even with a formal daily mindfulness practice I'll typically revert to what my best friend calls 'lurching'; where your body moves without noticing that it occupies three-dimensional space.

So I'll ricochet off the corner of a worktop or crash into a door jamb en route to another room or cripple a toe on the leg of the bed while straightening the quilt. Arriving in a room, then wondering what the hell I came in for. Totally normal. Sometimes I'll reach a certain point on a walk with no memory of the moments that brought me there.

What annoys me about this is the wasted appreciation of precious time. How stupid it would be to reach the end of life having never really dwelled in so many moments that are gone forever. I have probably spent decades on autopilot, if you added it up.

There's also a quality of anonymity to being in unfamiliar places. This is kind of liberating.

So it was a road trip during which I felt especially present and free.

The point of the trip was mostly to get a 'feel' for part of the journey undertaken by the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized), who have assumed a sacred place in my life since beginning research into who they were, what they did and how crazy it is that they aren't better known.

Having also noticed that spontaneity is almost entirely absent in my steady-state life I chose to force some by planning as little in advance as I dared. Sometimes I didn't know where I'd be sleeping the next day; a nothingburger for many but quite the deal for me.

A propos of my friend's observation, I thought quite a bit less. And I thought more simply.

I kept thinking about the futility of thinking too much and believing too strongly. How unqualified we mostly are to justify our intuitions in the way we do and how stressful it is to feel that we must always justify ourselves in case someone thinks we're ... <insert atonal orchestral cinematic horror moment stab> wrong about something.

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I've probably been wrong about most things forever. This will probably turn out to include everything I think now. Caring less about this is part of Rarely Certain practice. Honestly, it's great. The pressure to be Right About Things sucks and I don't miss it.

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Randomly, in Hameln (of Pied Piper of Hamelin fame) two scoops of artisanal ice cream come to 3 euros and I think they've undercharged me.

Time was when I had the student politics view that wealth redistribution is obviously the correct way of arranging things so that those with materially less can have nice lives too. Whereas now I think that a burgeoning economy is probably a more effective way of helping everyone. I might be wrong about that and I don't care. The people who would insist that I'm wrong probably haven't evolved their own thinking beyond youthful intuitions so that's that. None of it matters.

When I pay something like 8 euros for the same amount of ice cream in France it's because the tax and social charges here have to be passed on to the consumer.

I despised Margaret Thatcher and her epithets, like  "the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" until I lived in a country with a strong socialist bent and it was my money running out.

Everyone I know, at home in France, complains endlessly about inflation and tax while also demanding that their extraordinary state largesse is maintained so that they can enjoy 20-30 years of retirement, instead of the 10 or 15 years they might once have had.

So, crossing borders reinforces my disappointment that socialism isn't as obviously great as I once thought and makes me more economically right-wing. I now think it's kind of sad that someone truly poor couldn't afford a nice ice cream with the same alacrity with which I treat myself to one because the state takes so much money from the less well off to help the ... er ... the less well off.

Not saying it's bad that people can retire young, on the state's shilling. Am saying that it comes at a price for the, er, less well off. I get the very worst of it, because approximately 50% of my money is taken by the state, while I accrue almost none of the benefits (as a non-citizen). There's nothing like paying for things you can't have to make you notice the bill. I am fine with being a Bad and Selfish Person to think this way.

Then again, I lose patience with paying for parking everywhere in Germany. And the number of trucks on the road. That economic muscle is great on paper, but I wouldn't want to live with it all the time.

So I love being in Germany as a consumer. But I love living in France as a human.

Trade-offs, baby. It's all about trade-offs. Which is why 'one solution' ideologies seem so stupid to me now.

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After Holzminden and heading for Visbek I pick up a guy who's thumbing a lift. He is a sorry sight in the soft rain of a very grey day, carrying nothing but an umbrella.

I'm feeling very 'pro-social' at this point, so I actually turn back to help him out.

My previous night's host has explained that Michael Rother used to stay in a medieval building nearby, with a stone bed. So I'm streaming his Katzenmusik album, which I found in 1979 in the import racks at Migrant Mouse in Chester.

Being on the open road in Lower Saxony, soundtracked by a Krautrock hero all these years later, is a spiritual experience. Not joking. So the thought of Being Kind to a German guy is imbued with extra appeal. 

My good deed is rewarded by a smell so noisome that the memory is still visceral, over a week later. Odours are rarely memorable, beyond an abstract recollection that a smell was a certain way, but my passenger smells so extraordinarily fetid that I have to open the window almost immediately.

He also turns out to be incontinent. When he gets out again there is a stain of something on the seat. My efforts to clean it with antiseptic wipes are in vain.

Thank goodness for my host that night. A request to borrow cleaning materials is met by Irmgard explaining that she is an old hand at this. There is apparently a taxi firm in the family and she knows all about dealing with organic detritus in cars. She does a cracking job, while her husband proudly declares her the best cleaner in the world.

I'm amused to notice my discomfort in this scenario, after decades of conditioning under anglophone liberal culture's fondness for promulgating various isms to abolish stereotypical sex roles. So I'm vaguely uneasy chatting with a man who is proud of his wife's cleaning chops. These are 'unreconstructed' people and genuinely lovely, even as Irmgard labours under the oppression of her internalised misogyny. Lol.

My car smells fresh again and Irmgard looks as satisfied as I look grateful. Don't tell the sisterhood or they'll be round there to police this home.

I wonder about my passenger. He didn't speak much English and I've forgotten most of my German, so all we established was that his objective that day was to go to bed and that he had once worked in the US.

There is a possible version of this world in which it is me in that condition and people are fighting back their gag reflex around me. I have some sadness that he asked me to let him out much sooner than the town he had said he was heading to. I guess he knew why I opened the window of a climate-controlled car within moments of him getting in. He didn't seem stupid. Just not in a good place in his life.

I reflect on the 'discourse' between right and left about dealing with people who cannot or will not live the way the rest of us do. And, as usual, I feel more contemptuous of the flattening of these things by the modern left than I do of the 'meanness' of the right, which merely seems honest.

When Jordan Neely started making people afraid on a New York subway someone put him in a chokehold which killed him. "Neely was executed for being poor, Black, and disabled" said the Left Voice, which insisted that he should have been treated with compassion. Later it emerged that Neely consistently refused help. Many say that this was his human right. The right to be mentally ill without forced intervention.

My smelly passenger has brought up all kinds of thoughts around being exposed to broken people and especially about how hard it is to meet the criteria of 'good person' in certain left liberal circles. I revisit the beautiful nuance of Freddie deBoer's piece about the binary propositions we are instructed to accept in cases where people are obviously unfit to be among us.

I wasn't expecting to confront 'issues' like this when I set out on a fun break, but they're all around us and many of them seem impossible to solve without unpalatable trade-offs. On balance, for the sake of other 'pro-social' drivers, I think that my passenger needs an intervention that includes forcing him (if necessary) to be cleaner.

Trade-offs have replaced ideology in my thoughts. They're often ugly, but usually not as ugly as the results of dogmatic insistence that there is only one way to solve a problem. My passenger would probably have got to wherever he was going to quicker and Jordan Neely would probably be alive today, given mandatory intervention to save them from themselves.

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Belgium is a strange place.

Even blindfolded you would know when you crossed the border because the roads are instantly uneven and potholed.

Google Maps actually has a warning(?) that says 'this route crosses Belgium'. It doesn't say this for the Netherlands or Germany.

When did you last hear of anything at all about Belgium in the news? Apart from when that Islamic death cult wreaked their usual havoc there, a few years ago, which wasn't anything really to do with Belgium anyway.

I go with a friend to a concert in Antwerp, where they speak Flemish. The band is Irish and they keep referring to everyone speaking 'Dutch'. Not that this is technically incorrect, but even I'm squirming. You’d think Belgium was a Creole culture rather than a sovereign European state. Liberalism dies hard in me and it still feels important to respect this important linguistic nuance of north Belgian identity by at least naming their mother tongue correctly.

Anglophone people, please don't erase Belgian Flemish speakers. Lol.

There are election posters everywhere at the moment. The gnarly faces on most of them are so obviously the right-wing candidates that I make a mental note to look into the research sometime about discerning political opinions from appearance alone. After all, stereotypes are typically well-founded.

There is no escaping politics. Especially the US election.

A WhatsApp arrives from a red-pilled Trumpian lady in the US. She 'heard' that Emmanuel Macron lost the French elections this year but was 'reinstalled' anyway. 

By 'heard' she means that this is what the websites she goes to were saying. She has previously explained to me that her 'search for the truth' takes her to many 'places that most people don't see'. But that the time when everyone will know what is really happening is coming. Yes, she is exactly like this. Bless her.

Then I listen to a podcast (you need entertaining on the extraordinarily dull autobahns) about 'disinformation' and 'free speech' and the participants are doing all of the usual wondering about what to do about 'disinformation' and where the limits of 'free speech' should lie.

I'm thinking all the time about how ridiculous free speech is and how ridiculous it is to limit speech that isn’t already unlawful.

That evening I'm skimming through Substack Notes, which seems to be increasingly like Twitter/X as more people with Very Strong Opinions About Things weigh in with their thoughts.

One Note has attracted a lot of engagement.

It's about this.

A teacher in Ireland who got suspended (on full pay) for breaking school rules on pronoun use has just been sent to prison. The Note is about this jailing and people on Substack Notes are furious about it.

Well, wouldn't you be? Someone getting jailed for not agreeing to call someone 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she' or whatever happened in this case. Seems too bad to be true.

And, of course, it is. However Woke Ireland is (which is very) you don't get imprisoned there for not being Woke enough.

There is a single reply, amid the clamour for an armed revolt against the evils of Wokeism, explaining that the reality is quite different.

There was an injunction against the teacher being on site, pending his investigation by the school. He has repeatedly broken the injunction by turning up there, putting him in contempt of court. This is why he has been jailed.

Conservatives can be weird. They want order and structure. The law provides this. But they don't disapprove of a man being in contempt of court if he is breaching an injunction for reasons that they approve of.

It doesn't take much effort to establish what has happened. Effort that most people haven't bothered to exert.

Is the Note about him being in prison for not agreeing with gender ideology 'disinformation'?

Clearly, yes.

But here is where I depart from the usual conversation on this issue.

There is a naive dichotomy established at this point between free speech and censorship.

Free speech absolutists think that labelling things as misleading is censorship. These people are stupid.

But ...

Disinformation obsessives think that doing nothing about misleading rubbish on the socials is dangerous. These people are stupid too.

I am weary of the handwringing about 'what to do' about what people say online.

Why do anything?

Why not simply let the information environment become polluted with nonsense?

We have laws in the civilised world that seem to work quite well. Sometimes you'll get a January 6th moment, on the basis of false beliefs, but a small number of extremely worked up people doing something stupid can be dealt with by existing laws - as it was in that case.

What is really behind this relentless desire to police what others see and think, while promoting your own preferred version of things, if not Nietzsche's Will To Power.

It seems outrageous to suggest abandoning all attempts to ensure that 'truth' rises to the surface. To allow a free-for-all information and opinion maelstrom, with no attempt to control it.

But this is only because we cling to the comforting notion that it can be controlled. And that it would be good to control it.

Well, it would be nice and good to end all war too.

Accepting that something is inevitable and uncontrollable is not the same as accepting it in a moral sense.

It irritates the fuck out of me that the guy on Substack Notes blithely misled everyone who read his stupid post about someone being jailed for not respecting rules about pronouns. But it also irritates the fuck out of me that hardly anyone bothered to find out that his post was misleading.

Then there were the people who - when the facts were pointed out by the one person who checked - said it didn't matter what he was jailed for because it was all because of him being against pronouns anyway, so he's still doing time for not being Woke.

No, you morons. No he isn't. He is in prison for contempt of court after repeatedly breaking an injunction.

Clearly it suits them to believe that he has been deprived of liberty for not being Woke.

This is why poor information is really a demand-side phenomenon and not really a result of supply. So, if you want to control speech, you have to address the demand for it and no one ever talks about that.

Well, I have the answer anyway. The magic bullet.

Stop people wanting duff information.

Yes. It's a stupid suggestion. That's the point.

The question 'what can we do about fake news' will always be stupid.

And that's even before we are forced to confront the grain of truth that often lies at the heart of a false story.

My Trumpy WhatsApp contact believed something that wasn't true, about Macron being reinstalled in office despite losing an election (he wasn't up for reelection) but that doesn't mean she is entirely wrong.

As it happens, the elections for France's lower house this year eventually resulted in a majority of votes going to a leftist coalition known as the Nouveau Front Populaire and yet we now have a more conservative government than before.

How exactly is she wrong about democracy? How wrong is her sense that people often don't get what they voted for? Leave aside that she is materially wrong about the mechanics, what truth that really matters is missing from her worldview because she is reading bonkers right-wing websites? How do we make her understand?

This is where I wish I had an answer too.

I'm joking. Because that is what everyone says. That we need a solution to a problem.

But since there isn't an answer I'm leaning increasingly toward the emerging information anarchy as an inevitable condition that we worry about too much.

Freedom of all kinds inevitably involves excess, if you think about it. This is why you now have reactionary and 'post-liberal' thinking from influential voices like Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin striking such a chord with many people. The Dark Enlightenment is an inevitable consequence of liberal ideologies advancing beyond 'reasonableness' (my personal favourite example being Stonewall's 'no debate' stance on their obviously debatable gender ideology demands).

If you can be expected to accept scores of gender identities and label the reproductive binary of sex as nasty, mean, right-wing bigotry I don't really see why you can't also have the right to any ‘bespoke reality’.

Not that I think either of those things are healthy. More that it's hypocritical to celebrate one obvious set of fictions while condemning another.

Yet another person was outed recently for constructing a fictitious identity around being special. These things are now routine and arguably normal.

Paul Edward Driskill called himself 'Qwo-Li' (Two-Spirit) and claimed to be of African, Cherokee and other cool descents. Nice. Even better, he is trans and his pronouns are s/he, they and hir. Bless him. Or hir. Whatever.

As a well-respected, oft-awarded and much in demand speaker (of course he's an academic) things went south for Paul when some actual native Americans who have had enough of all the white dudes and women piggybacking their heritage called him out.

Inevitably the right are loving this latest car crash in the world of liberal extremism and I am too.

But think about this for a moment. This kind of silliness isn't just the fault of the left.

I'm old enough to remember unbridled choice becoming not just more desirable but totemic. It was a right-wing thing in the 80s, when Margaret Thatcher started going on about how we should all be able to choose everything for ourselves rather than having the state foist services upon us.

All that Two-Spirits Paul is doing is choosing his identity the way the rest of us choose anything.

I happen to think that it's all bollocks, in the same class of bollocks as all the right-wing misinformation that people wring their hands over.

Reality is disappearing behind a fog of people's ideas and thoughts whether we like it or not.

A few years ago I would stress all the time about how people might be persuaded to see reality. Now I mostly smile and touch real trees in real woodland each day and connect for a while with what is rather than what I happen to think today about anything. I may be eccentric, but it feels good.

And I am gradually a bit less negatively aroused by silliness and the choices other people are making about what they believe.

Let it all fragment. And just choose your own niche.

I'm part of that pattern too. I'm becoming less a part of the brotherhood of mankind and more of a discrete entity, with my own obsessions, chief among which is how the heck to maintain contact with reality.

It's getting trickier by the day to discern 'reality' in the face of all-encompassing artifice. I wrote a whole piece failing to adequately answer that question.

Things have only become less real since I wrote that.

Another manifestation of the widening gap between our assumption of how things are and what turns out to be really happening comes from the world of music.

It turns out that almost no published mainstream music at this point is 'real'.

There's a YouTube channel called Wings of Pegasus in which a musician reveals well-known singers in every context (live as well as recorded) routinely digitally 'pitch-corrected'. Even re-released music from decades ago now features 'autotune' on the vocals. This is now the default condition for vocals, in every context.

Think about this. Even a 'live' album from the 70s may no longer be a true record of the original music if you buy a recent copy.

This is not the same as studio overdubs to improve 'live' recordings. That always happened and resulted in some classics. But altering a singer's voice? Long after the fact? Why do that? 

So, while everyone else worries about fake news, I'm troubled by fake music.

And that's when the artist is bothering to sing at all. Concert-goers are now unwittingly paying to see Serious Rock Bands lip syncing.

Of course, Amazon Kindle Store is full of AI-generated books, but only the naive and stupid will buy those. YouTube is full of AI-generated content designed to keep children mentally anaesthetised by strangeness. And people on social media keep swooning over AI-generated images depicting 'amazing' things and places that don't exist. Fakery is a default state in business and the 'attention economy', but even though music is a business too I retain idealism with respect to authenticity there. Bless me.

Mind you, even reality has a dreamlike quality at times. (Thinking of that clip of Yahya Sinwar's final moments as a perfect illustration).

So, one of the things I enjoyed about a road trip in the footsteps of my cavalry heroes was how in touch I felt in every moment. In touch with myself and the unfolding different world around me.

Perhaps this is what people mean when they say they went off somewhere to find themselves.

I was like 'hi Mike, nice to meet me' the whole time.

And increasingly I’m thinking …

Someone posted this on Tumblr and I cannot find it again, or any other source to credit this image 🙄

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Postscript

We blithely talk about being grateful and probably often think that we really are grateful for many things. But I just got a message from a squadron research contact that pulled me up short. He and his family live in Asheville, North Carolina, devastated last month by Hurricane Helene. He just had his first shower in three weeks. Their tap water is still not drinkable. In the most advanced country on Earth. I just glanced up at my kitchen area and felt genuinely grateful.

1. If you are currently paying and didn’t receive your 3 month complimentary subscription extension tell me. There was a difference between the number of paying subscribers in the dashboard and the slightly smaller number that came up when I filtered the total list to award the extensions to.

2. Incidentally, after comping all paying subscribers with an extra 3 months my heart skipped a beat when I received emails saying each one was now ‘unsubscribed’. When I asked Substack if I’d just killed off my entire subscription revenue they said ‘no - they are just paused for the period you comped’. I don’t do this for the money, but your support does make a material difference to my life now that I would miss. I hope you enjoy your 3 free months and stick around when it goes back to normal.