Sclerotic Stoic
Meditate on a mountain to gain strength. Meditate in a river to gain flexibility.
When in duckstack
Yet Another Offday Duckstack. We are still trying to find what publishing day works best with our schedule. Welcome to Monday.
Imagine a precarious tower. The most precarious tower you’ve ever seen. When you need a tower, this is NOT what you want. Experts agree.
The stability of a tower can depend in large part of its building materials. For example, if you make a tower out of steel, it will be stronger than a tower made out of paper, which is something we learned from the three little pigs, may two of them rest in peace. There are as many building materials as there are things, so don’t sweat the options too much. We have decided to build our tower out of flesh.
The real problem is that the flesh is still alive, with living ducks attached. This does not decrease the towers precariouacity. According to some experts, it might even increase it. But we haven’t gotten where we are, building a giant duck tower, by listening to experts.
The next attribute of any tower that has this attribute, is a foundation. This can be concrete, boards, whatever you want really. Our foundation is ducks. We already have them on hand and we intend to not be wasteful.
Now, you’re probably thinking that this is a crappy tower, and you could build a better one out of steel I-Beams. But have you considered playing Duckstack jenga? You can’t extract ducks from your steel I-Beam tower to see all the ducks shift and quack trying to readjust the weight. Did you ever think of that? No.
That’s value. That’s a Duckstack.
Duckstack IQ
intelligence: It isn’t for everyone.
I’m well aware that men aren’t all created equal. But some men are more equal than others, are they not? To verify you have intelligence, we have crafted this test, which will tell you a lot about yourself, which you can then make your personality and tell everyone about it and apply it to every situation for the rest of your life. I’m going to write a sentence, and you’re going to tell me how many e’s there are. Just the letter. Set a little timer for yourself, and at the end of 8 seconds, give your number. Here goes:
The feed seed fed steeds and reeds unaware it led the suspecteed felon to lie and cheet indeed, don’t you thinkeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?
War Brides
How fighters and lovers are two sides of the same impotent coin
If you were a wild animal, you could enjoy a lot of things that you currently want, like infinite sex and freedom and eating trash off the ground. You forgo these things in an act called “civilization”.
Now humans cannot read each others minds, due to a design issue which we're still figuring out, which is why humans invented manners, a complicated set of quasi-arbitrary signals that demonstrate you can be trusted to act with self discipline and to look out for the wellbeing of the group- This isn't the same as putting the group above yourself (longhousing), but to merely be aware that your actions have a broader impact, and that you will circumscribe yourself. So when two people behave with manners, then they instantly transmit a set of shared assumptions and establish a minimum standard for behavior, and even more than that, a shared orientation from which to negotiate. This doesn’t come into play as much now with things like, fork goes on left (or right, I don’t actually remember) and more with things like walking into someone’s living room and lecturing them on their design taste, something we’ve often had a problem with. There are a lot of more basic manners that we don’t even think about, such as “don’t punch random people in the face”, which is one that has been falling out of favor as of late due to the rise of tik-tok pranking videos among mall Americans.
This week, a random guy punched me in the face inside a twitter group chat. It kind of sucked, but he was happier to punch me in the face than I was sad to get punched in the face, so the total happiness in the world increased, so whatever. What happened was the dude who had made the group chat had lost his account, and so the group had no moderation- anyone could add anyone, but more importantly, nobody could remove anyone. So once this guy was added, there was no way to remove him, and he quickly demonstrated that he couldn’t be trusted to behave himself or respect anyone there or whatever, which caused some “complaints”.
In response to the complaints, he added a bunch of his buddies of similar disposition, who proceeded to spam the chat with WW2 hatefacts and calling everyone in the chat Jewish, high fiving each other for their epic dunks and in turn adding more people from their clique. The theme of this group chat was supposed to be “writers group” for publishing advice. Anyway the trolling continued for about a day before all 100 members of the group chat left and formed a new group chat without them so no harm done, sic temper trolls and whatnot. Their last words were “what, you’re afraid of ideas?” which just goes to show goading is BDSM roleplay for bad faith communicators. You can read last week’s newsletter to learn a little more about that.
Everyone is free to behave themselves or not, and something the prisoner’s dilemma misses is that power often accrues to whoever is willing to be the most obnoxious. Its a security exploit I call the philosophy of the cockroach. These guys were willing to have worse manners than everyone else, and so they “won” the group chat. Of course everyone left so they rule over ruins, but they never cared about what it was about in the first place, which is why you need the death penalty for people like this, but I digress. The shelling point of any given civilization is how much self-sacrifice you can get the constituents to accept. Incredible projects such as Notre Dame and the Salt Lake City Temple just aren’t possible if people’s investment depends on them seeing a return- the timescale these projects are measured in is centuries. Manners are the same principle, but on a much shorter timescale. You just have to get people to pass the marshmallow test1.
When you cooperate, when you pool resources, you can accomplish more than any given individual could accomplish. And then, everyone in the community can receive return benefits from it- this is the basis for the family, its the basis for civilization. If you eat the seed corn then nobody gets corn next year, but if you restrain yourself 10% or whatever and replant some of it, then everybody gets to eat next year. In economics this is called “the commons” and when people defect and pollute the commons by dumping poison in the watering hole, then this is why we can’t have nice things. This is the reason most third world countries are third world- they literally can’t cooperate. It isn’t because they can’t, I don’t think. There’s just a critical mass of people that will always knock down any houses of cards anyone tries to build, so it just doesn’t make economic sense to try. Literally, they aren’t willing to remove people with bad manners from their society, and therefore they live in poverty. And charities dump infinite resources to these countries, and it gets consumed, because they can’t afford reforestation, a state the Book of Mormon describes as “their riches becoming slippery”.
America is much closer to this state right now than to a high trust society, though it hasn’t totally degenerated you can see the fraying at the edges. A very precarious position! I can clearly observe many of the rising generation who have never known cooperation. They have no incentive to start- you need buy in from everyone around you, and that has to come top down. This cascades into men opting out of the work force2. It cascades into women voting for abortion. It cascades into divorce rates.
It cascades into dating. I see a growing number of young men fantasizing about creating their ideal world by force, driven by influencers and masculinity gurus- “maybe we can make a way without cooperation. Maybe we can find some alternative solution”. It would sure be easier if you could just conquer and suddenly everyone would align to you! But in real life, when you conquer, you have to enforce your will on slaves constantly, and then the slaves rise up in revolt wherever they can, and you don’t actually end up building anything. Conquered peoples don’t convert. They just get conquered. If you can’t cooperate you can’t build anything that lasts.
That doesn’t mean never escalate- especially in hostile environments, sometimes stakes must be learned, but you will never create a world on principles you yourself do not live. If you want cooperation, you have to first show it to others, the way a dog rolls over to show its tummy- you have to accept vulnerability, and let people hurt you, over and over and over, until you find people who won’t. You can’t wait around for someone else to enforce things top down, or opportunity will pass you by.
Designer camouflage
Looking to hide? Look no further! You’ll never find us.
Military pants are a thing of the past. Welcome to the 21st century, if you want to blend in, you need to do it in style, or else you’ll risk being the laughing stock of anyone perceptive enough to notice you. Fear not, we have several options for you, if we can find them. Somewhere around here
EYES THAT CHANGE COLOR: Nobody will be able to tell where you are looking, because your eyes will match the terrain behind you.
FINGERNAILS THAT CHANGE COLORS: Women love them! So flashy, when you catch glimpses of them against the terrain!
SHIRT: Be just a floating head and hands! The talk of the town! Everybody loves floating heads and hands!34
SHOES: People will surely envy your ability to float 2-3 inches off of the ground. People will surely not envy your lack of feet.
Historym
Toddler has scrapes and bruises literally everywhere. We have no idea how he does it.
My wife was saying something, and the toddler would repeat whatever she said. I observed “you have a tiny echo.” and the toddler goes “A tiny GECKO? They’re toooo slimy!”
My wife made salmon, and put some herbs on top of it. The toddler exclaimed “You put grass on it!”
Mama cleaning, toddler coming along behind her pulling toys back out. Baby I'm trying to clean. “Mama. I am trying to play.”
baby: “gablah” toddler: “haha! That's not a word!” baby: “ah ahhhh” toddler: “yep, that's a word!”
We went sledding this week on a frozen lake. I was telling the toddler about how the water freezes over and he commented, “cars should not swim in there.”
Unprompted: “clouds have tummies. And mouths!”
The toddler told us “The dinosaur museum is my special place.” But then he had to think of special places for everyone else. “Costco is grandmas. yours is… The house. Mountains and castles are papas. And sister’s is… The car!”
The toddler brought me one of his winter boots. It was full of popcorn. I admit the solution was innovative in shape and form, but I think there are some factors he overlooked.
The baby was babbling and the toddler started getting mad. “She says its a giraffe but it isn’t!” The baby cannot speak.
The toddler skidded a little bit on some icy deck, and said “I slipped on the snow rocks”
Somehow the toddler has renamed the smallest chicken from mira to “donkey kong”.
Ducksnax
Skinsuit
Saw a tweet the other day that proposed the reason the smartest animals out there, dolphins and such haven’t formed a civilization is that they’re too busy having sex. That’s not a whole picture, but there is something to it- if all your energy is going towards mate acquisition, and if your society doesn’t have monogamy (or, like Latter-Day Saints practiced, an extremely tightly regulated polygamy), then every other man is a potential competitor. You cannot have cooperation under these conditions.
last stat I saw said more women work than men do, in America. like 60% of the entire work force is women. This is risky at a minimum due to the difference in preferences and dispositions between men and women and the uneven distribution of meaningfulness across jobs
Based on a focus group study of n=2 participants, The Duckstack is not liable
