Border Hoarder

I'm a papier mâché cartographer, the map will become the territory

Night of the Living Duckstack

Art: Far Traveler, by Jeff Christensen

Welcome to the First Ever Duckstack, for the 93rd time. I hope you’re just as excited for this new substack, just as much as you were two years ago, in fact I hope even more so. I hope every single Duckstack has roughly doubled your excitement levels in general. Since we are now on the 93rd Duckstack, your excitement should at this point have overcome your mortal frame and everything else in your life, converting you to a little human¹ shaped sun of excitement just vibrating and spazzing out in white hot blistering excitement spilling over onto everyone around you and melting them like magma, boiling through drywall, ceramic, brick and stone to form a little crater around your fountaining excitement which you are helpless to stop. If you have been reading since the beginning, you should have at this point 4951760157141521099596496896² excitement.

Power Users: Against Trampling Daisies

Why are there all these bulls in all these China shops, who is sending them. Send in the matadors

I spent a bunch of time this week with something called “power tools”, so named because the invention of each new tool gave rise to a new ruling political party in the Chinese dynasty. But that’s a tale for another time. The point is that it was very masculine, and dangerous, and that grinding cement creates a lot of what is called in the peasant tongue³ “dust”. Anyway the dust gets in your air and the air gets in your lungs and the dust throws a redecoration party and starts driving nails through the walls and its a real mess, and so it occurred to me to wear a mask, we have a lot of masks from our time doing chemo at the hospital, why not economize on costs in the market surplus and all that. So i wore a mask, which was immediately overcome because the air was 70% concrete 30% air, I was basically swimming in it, also I could not see, but that is a story for another day⁴

So despite my rigorous preparations with the fans and vents and all that there was just, way too much dust, so I had no choice, I broke out our family gas mask⁵, and with it I was able to sort of breathe. Still tough, but it was because breathing wearing a respirator is hard, not because there wasn't in a very technical sense “air”. With proper safety equipment, power tools are fun, friendly, and functional.

It made me think about fluid dynamics, psychology has a lot of fancy labels for it such as “ingroup behavior” and “bias” and “theory of identity” but the most common form you’re going to see is the pejorative “nationalism” so that’s what I call it, it cuts through a lot of the fuss⁶. Anyway if you think of nationalism as a dynamic that can apply to groups as small as two people⁷ it works fine. But in any group you are going to see ingroup dynamics arise- social codes for how to act, and flags (usually not literal) distinguishing them from “the outgroup”, and none of this is bad. It can be, but tools are invented for a reason, and behaviors arise for a reason also.

So you get a bunch of social boundaries, and you get a bunch of friend enemy distinctions so that people don’t make basic mistakes like stepping in minefields without proper equipment and stuff. Sometimes these boundaries are poorly drawn, sometimes they’re drawn just right- especially when they’re highly localized, such as a game community, when everyone follows the “manners” everyone wins, so you “gatekeep” your hobby or community or whatever to make sure that the thing stays pure and that nobody has to waste time trying to culture-course correct later. Think of how much energy is being spent trying to “course correct” the modern culture wars! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

So lets say you’ve got yourself a little secret society, maybe a cult involving just your immediate family or whatever, and you’re asking yourself “how can I be a good mom? How can I be a good dad?” because that’s feeling like a pretty pertinent question rn. And what I would advise⁸⁹ is “don’t sperg on everybody¹⁰”. But this is what I often see, which is that when people are interested in purity they go to amputation, and they draw this really amateurish friend/enemy distinction clear as day and just try to torch everything. I see this most commonly in liberals who end longstanding friendships with me because I am conservative, but I’ve seen it in plenty of conservative friends too, when you just get too interested in justice and don’t feel safe erring on the side of mercy. I think I have a better framework, by way of analogy.

In wartime, you have allies and you have enemies, your enemies want to hurt you and your allies want to help you, but in real life it is kind of a prick move to go around ranting about your problems to everyone as a loyalty test to see if they’ll “side with you” on some random nonsense they don’t care about. So if you care very much about your little war, I think that is fine, I think its good for people to take their little toy soldiers and fight over territory and such, I just think its discourteous to drag other people into it, y’know? A little bit of a drama queen thing to do. In reality, you can be friends with many people who hold many different opinions, if you are both mature meaning you are both not trying to hurt each other¹¹. Its a third position beyond ally and enemy in war- sweden

Or if you like, “they’re not necessarily an ally, but they are a trading partner, and we have a short/long-standing relationship of some mutual benefit to us” and maybe that mutual benefit isn’t as much as a fully ally would have but maybe your kids can still play together and stuff. Or maybe you both can still talk about anime and games. And a lot of good can come of that, and I believe in good.

So this is another part of my solution to the big frenzy we find ourselves in, a way to avoid getting totally obliterated by overdosing outrage politics. Because there’s a ton of difference between someone trying to hurt you or your friends, and someone who just doesn’t really know any better or understand. And how you treat the two should be different too! People came to Christ with various questions throughout his life, and you can see he treated them differently. Pharisees would come up with disingenuous questions to hurt him, and he would give a tricky sarcastic answer that would make them mad, or ignore them, or be generally just kind of flippant, and then other people would come to him and you can see he would just look at them and be like “I would hope we would be allies, but certainly you can at least be a trading partner” and he would give them that which they were willing to receive. And you can usually¹² have whatever kind of relationship with people that you want, if you can figure out the right attitude. So when you see a terrible take, you can ask, “are they malicious or just confused? Do I really need to join this pile on?” And sometimes the answer is yes, you do need to join the pile on. Sometimes you can make a difference in a way no one else can, but even then you can make a lot more of a difference if you’re willing to lay off.

D&C 121:43 Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy.

The Made Hatters

u made bro?

The Made Hatter. They had never seen someone so full of hat. His clothes, his shoes, his skin. He was convicted daily of hat speech but he always told police that he didn’t hat anybody, that he was an honorable guy who strived for temperance and didn’t want to hat anybody. He would explain in desperation that he didn’t want to be a hatter, he never asked for this, and he could not help being made this way. What was he supposed to do? He just kept getting more and more made. But nobody had sympathy for him, insisting he was made to be full of hat, and all his protestations came from the hat in his heart. Unlistened to, he gradually made more and more and snapped, and started madely hatting everybody, with no discrimination. His reign of terror lasted for days, and when he was through, everyone in town was just as made as he was. But they could not hat him, for all he had done had merely revealed the hat in their hearts.

History

Okay just some quick history stories before I go to sleep

With terminal cancer I am learning, you go through a lot of chocolate milk. I'd say its kind of special diet but we've long since given up on nutritionists, the boy just won't eat anyway, so if chocolate milk will go down then the cons of fire hosing sugar down him just don't outweigh the pros anymore, but the problem is that all we have is packets so 50 times a day when he comes to us saying he wants chocolate milk we have to mix up a whole new glass and then import the brew to his special sippy cup (again, not a diet thing, he just won't drink out of anything else) and this whole thing is very labor intensive. I'm going to start buying chocolate milk by the gallon from the store but I don't know if it will be enough. I bet that never, at any time in history, has anyone so desperately needed chocolate milk on tap than us

Jethro is enjoying his radiation baldness. “what can we do to not let my hair ever grow back, so we don't have to wash it?”

We did a barbecue for mothers day. Jethro said “What will we barbeque?” And my wife said “I don’t know, maybe lemon poppyseed cake?” and he said “Silly mama! You can’t put cake on a barbecue! It will melt!

Jethro continues to be very sweet and affirmative. He asked mama to play a game with him and she put it on and he told her “High five for clicking zombies vs plants, all by yourself!”

The toddler has adopted a pet rock. I don’t know what this means to him but he’s got this rock from our garden that he just carries around with him everywhere and I don’t know why. Its not like, chewy

Shoes are an endangered species in our house now, the stuff of myths. This is because the toddler hides them. We have lost half of all of his pairs of shoes, ever. I don’t mean we lost the pairs, I mean we lost exactly one shoe of each pair. Always.

The toddler’s favorite word is “no” now. Jethro never had this phase, but the toddler just says no to everything, its a power trip, but it always backfires on him because we’re usually offering him like, chocolate and stuff and he’s like “No!” and we’re like “umm okay no chocolate for you then” and then he breaks down and throws a fit because he can’t connect that he can’t be stubborn against everything and also get things that you want at the same time. But can any of us connect that, really? What is a toddler but an honest adult? God must think we’re so silly. Assuming you don’t believe God gets exasperated¹³.

TRADE IMPORTS

A box of brainstorming by our boy Bennett

You may be surprised to hear this, but I’m not the only one worried about the incel apocalypse. Dropping fertility rates mean youth labor, anything that needs a lot of strength and energy, is about to become an exponentially scarce resource, meaning every fast food chain is in massive trouble, and then every real life chain is going to be in massive trouble. As I’ve explained¹⁴, imagining a world with a surplus of needs and a shortage of labor paints a fairly bleak picture for quality of life and, well, pretty much everything else.

Bennett is well connected, and he’s found that within his network there’s actually quite a bit of anxiousness about these things, from many fairly big names. Heck, Elon Musk was tweeting rather worriedly about it just a few months ago. We’re not just online weirdos¹⁵¹⁶. So Bennett and some others are hosting a conference about it, which he is calling Natalism Conference. Like any conference it will have speakers and panelists and workshops, and tickets are far more expensive than pretty much anyone I know could afford, but the concept is interesting. Because if you knew an apocalypse was coming, wouldn’t you want to identify ways for your family to thrive in it?

#48: Natal Conference 2023

1. Or I mean whatever shape you are

base = 1

for i in range(93):
   print(base)
   base = base * 2

2. So I guess its just up to you to decide what 1 excitement is. To check your math, after reading this, are you now at 9903520314283042199192993792 excitement? Yes or No

3. Probably most other tongues as well. But we will not be examining tongues today.

4. Its the exact same story except instead of my nose its my eyes

5. An ancient heirloom passed down in our family for generations

6. It does not, it creates a lot more fuss by using loaded words, but it also contextualizes what you’re talking about so that there’s less risk of people missing the real world applications when thinking about it, so it balances out in aggregate

7. I think nationalism can go even smaller but our Duckstack Mathematicians are not up to the task yet

8. All Duckstack typos are intentional

9. “But that’s not a typo!” whos the boss here, you? or me.

10. crystal clear pragmatic advice like this is why you guys pay me the big bucks

11. rarer than u think these days smh

12. More exceptions than all of us would like

13. Fear God says the scripture

14. You guys love hearing me explain this, I assume

15. Citation Needed

16. Okay, we’re definitely online weirdos. But we’re not JUST online weirdos!