Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022Liked by Stacey Eskelin
One of the most confounding (to me) battles I've ever waged with my beloved partner was when we disagreed on the merits of Jeff Bezos launching celebrities, gazillionaires and other self-centered morons into sub-orbital space. Hubs maintained that it popularized the notion of space travel and "you, of all people, should appreciate that." I had to explain in measured terms (and breathing deeply), that, first, "you, of all people" were fighting words and, second, the popularization of space travel was the last thing the world needed for many reasons—far too many to enumerate here. Bezos, I argued, was turning an incredibly dangerous and astronomically expensive scientific effort into an amusement park ride. And that the public should never assume space flight to be safe flight, nor anything remotely akin to commercial aviation. I failed in making him understand why I found Bezos' Blue Origin sub-orbital flights ludicrous and offensive, and Musk's SpaceX enterprise a little less so only because Musk was actually fulfilling the terms of a hard-won NASA contract for crew rotation and cargo resupply to the International Space Station which is, by design, a low Earth-orbiting laboratory. Then there's Musk's Tesla stunt that I, too, find horrifying. If the impact of a micrometeoroid can cause such damage that ISS crew are forced to shelter in an area of the station in case they need to abandon ship, so to speak, imagine what running into a car up there might do! After all, the ISS is moving at 17,500 mph (28,000 km/hr), completing an orbit every 90 minutes.
Then there's the idea of Jeff Koons launching anything off Pad 39A, much less an expression of his so-called artistic vision (and I use that term loosely). There's the commercialization of space exploration, which I accept as an economic necessity. But I reject, strenuously, the bastardization of space, just as I reject the militarization of it. In exploration, there is discovery which, to my mind, is a honorable and beautiful endeavor. What Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Koons and others of their ilk are doing is taking the ugliest part of the human spirit to unparalleled heights.
What you wrote was totally badass. Consider me a fan. I am HONORED to share an opinion with someone as thoughtful and articulate as you. So, hear hear!
Stacey, your opinions are so beautifully voiced and crafted that I find it impossible not to be inspired to respond. Our mutual friend Tony would agree. By the way, I've never in my life been considered a badass... except for the time I mowed a particular expletive in our front yard when my first husband (long gone) refused to cut the grass, and inadvertently impressed the hell out of the too-cool-for-school teenager who lived across the street.
Oh, actually appropriate here: Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, discusses virtue and its context sensitivity. This is actually one of the most amazing parts about that book, since he is outright dismissing the idea of an absolute Good or an absolute Bad. One of Aristotle's examples is the athlete Milo -- evidently a real person, and evidently one seriously Mongo bruiser. Well the diet that is appropriate to Milo would be hideously inappropriate to the beginning, training athlete. (Adding some color to the historical record, Milo could evidently eat an entire cow at a single sitting, scarcely chewing before he swallowed. Me, I get seriously slowed down by a half-pound burger.)
Well, along these same lines, the virtues appropriate to ordinary people are different from those appropriate to the very wealthy. Ordinary folks ought to be generous (neither profligate nor stingy.) But the wealthy, by virtue of their wealth, have a much greater burden to bear. Their comparable virtue to generosity is Magnificence. But this is not a matter of personal display. This is a contribution to the entire community. The temple of Athena on the Acropolis (indeed, the entire hill) is an example of magnificence. Built by the wealthy, it was nevertheless a contribution to the entire city.
There is nothing magnificent in our wealthy. Everything they do is for narrowly conceived ends of personal glory that contributes nothing to the community. Even Gates and his foundation, when you look at how it actually functions, it strangles any possibility of creative work in order to advance just and only Gates' (monumentally uneducated) vision of how things ought to be.
Love it. We were at dinner last night (their view of the Umbrian countryside would make anybody weep), discussing Game Theory. As it turns out, Game Theory isn't much different from Cipolla's Matrix of Stupidity, which I wrote about last week. Both dovetail in some important aspects, perhaps the most important of which is the idea that unless everyone benefits, over the long term, everyone loses.
Our American rich don't understand that. Or if they do, they don't care.
John von Neumann, one of he inventors of Game Theory, used the "prisoner's dilemma" to argue that the US should launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR. (No, seriously, he meant it.) However, when one runs a "generalized" prisoner's dilemma game (which wasn't developed until after von Neumann died), the only strategy that makes sense is mutual cooperation.
I mentioned on FB Heinlein's famous story, "The Man Who Sold The Moon." While a bit tongue in cheek, the story is really about a business man dreamer who just wants to go to the moon. He's ultimately denied that dream, because his heart won't stand up to the strain. Point being, Heinlein idolized the lone hero but was incapable of imagining the pathological narcissist that is today's norm. (In a second story, the business man pays a group of pirate/smugglers to get him there. In his space suit, he sits down and dies sifting moon dust through his gloved fingers, reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's epitaph.)
I mention all of this because the animals we find ourselves dealing with are not dreamers, they are low rent carnies. Koons is a denigration of the very idea of art as a complete, consumatory experience. (For anyone who is curious, I'm echoing John Dewey in "Art as Experience.")
None of the established treaties ever took into account this kind of private abomination. No *nation* can lay claim to any piece of land that is not on Earth, and can only claim sovereignty over those things they have directly made and sent into space. (So, for example, China cannot pillage the remnants of our lunar landers, not that they'd ever wish to do so.)
But nothing in these treaties places any limits on what private citizens can do. The only remaining legal strictures are, strangely (or not) enough, maritime law. Right now, there's now international agreement (that I'm aware of) on such things as pollution and garbage dumps from luxury liners. There are no laws about defacing the surface of the moon because it just never occurred to anyone that such a thing was even possible.
One last note, about Musk's stupid space coupe, people generally have no idea how big space really is. While Low Earth Orbit ("LEO") is getting ridiculously crowded, it still remains the case that the odds of an accidental collision with space junk are absurdly low. (Though they've now reached the point of being mathematically possible.) The idea of contamination from Musk's car is frankly pretty silly. I've a better chance (by many orders of magnitude) of getting a date than that car has of ever hitting anything. And if ('per impossibile') it did hit anything, the heat of impact would be, shall we say, sterilizing.
Regardless of the odds, it still doesn't give Musk or Koons the right to piss on the corner of the house. This is territorial marking. And the only way most people understand it is if I talk about another country (in this instance , Japan) doing the same thing. We'd be outraged. Or let's say Putin decided to launch a version of his stupid house, in miniature, to live in perpetuity on the moon.
The hubris is astounding. And no one (except you, me, and a handful of other folks) sees it or cares enough to even say anything.
Agreed. The reason these psychopaths* can get away with it is because they "private citizens", and not bound by the existing treaties.
(As you know, I use "psychopath" advisedly as akin to sociopath, but the "socio" indicates the person is generally unable to function in social situations.)
One of the most confounding (to me) battles I've ever waged with my beloved partner was when we disagreed on the merits of Jeff Bezos launching celebrities, gazillionaires and other self-centered morons into sub-orbital space. Hubs maintained that it popularized the notion of space travel and "you, of all people, should appreciate that." I had to explain in measured terms (and breathing deeply), that, first, "you, of all people" were fighting words and, second, the popularization of space travel was the last thing the world needed for many reasons—far too many to enumerate here. Bezos, I argued, was turning an incredibly dangerous and astronomically expensive scientific effort into an amusement park ride. And that the public should never assume space flight to be safe flight, nor anything remotely akin to commercial aviation. I failed in making him understand why I found Bezos' Blue Origin sub-orbital flights ludicrous and offensive, and Musk's SpaceX enterprise a little less so only because Musk was actually fulfilling the terms of a hard-won NASA contract for crew rotation and cargo resupply to the International Space Station which is, by design, a low Earth-orbiting laboratory. Then there's Musk's Tesla stunt that I, too, find horrifying. If the impact of a micrometeoroid can cause such damage that ISS crew are forced to shelter in an area of the station in case they need to abandon ship, so to speak, imagine what running into a car up there might do! After all, the ISS is moving at 17,500 mph (28,000 km/hr), completing an orbit every 90 minutes.
Then there's the idea of Jeff Koons launching anything off Pad 39A, much less an expression of his so-called artistic vision (and I use that term loosely). There's the commercialization of space exploration, which I accept as an economic necessity. But I reject, strenuously, the bastardization of space, just as I reject the militarization of it. In exploration, there is discovery which, to my mind, is a honorable and beautiful endeavor. What Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Koons and others of their ilk are doing is taking the ugliest part of the human spirit to unparalleled heights.
What you wrote was totally badass. Consider me a fan. I am HONORED to share an opinion with someone as thoughtful and articulate as you. So, hear hear!
Stacey, your opinions are so beautifully voiced and crafted that I find it impossible not to be inspired to respond. Our mutual friend Tony would agree. By the way, I've never in my life been considered a badass... except for the time I mowed a particular expletive in our front yard when my first husband (long gone) refused to cut the grass, and inadvertently impressed the hell out of the too-cool-for-school teenager who lived across the street.
Oh, actually appropriate here: Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, discusses virtue and its context sensitivity. This is actually one of the most amazing parts about that book, since he is outright dismissing the idea of an absolute Good or an absolute Bad. One of Aristotle's examples is the athlete Milo -- evidently a real person, and evidently one seriously Mongo bruiser. Well the diet that is appropriate to Milo would be hideously inappropriate to the beginning, training athlete. (Adding some color to the historical record, Milo could evidently eat an entire cow at a single sitting, scarcely chewing before he swallowed. Me, I get seriously slowed down by a half-pound burger.)
Well, along these same lines, the virtues appropriate to ordinary people are different from those appropriate to the very wealthy. Ordinary folks ought to be generous (neither profligate nor stingy.) But the wealthy, by virtue of their wealth, have a much greater burden to bear. Their comparable virtue to generosity is Magnificence. But this is not a matter of personal display. This is a contribution to the entire community. The temple of Athena on the Acropolis (indeed, the entire hill) is an example of magnificence. Built by the wealthy, it was nevertheless a contribution to the entire city.
There is nothing magnificent in our wealthy. Everything they do is for narrowly conceived ends of personal glory that contributes nothing to the community. Even Gates and his foundation, when you look at how it actually functions, it strangles any possibility of creative work in order to advance just and only Gates' (monumentally uneducated) vision of how things ought to be.
Love it. We were at dinner last night (their view of the Umbrian countryside would make anybody weep), discussing Game Theory. As it turns out, Game Theory isn't much different from Cipolla's Matrix of Stupidity, which I wrote about last week. Both dovetail in some important aspects, perhaps the most important of which is the idea that unless everyone benefits, over the long term, everyone loses.
Our American rich don't understand that. Or if they do, they don't care.
John von Neumann, one of he inventors of Game Theory, used the "prisoner's dilemma" to argue that the US should launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR. (No, seriously, he meant it.) However, when one runs a "generalized" prisoner's dilemma game (which wasn't developed until after von Neumann died), the only strategy that makes sense is mutual cooperation.
I mentioned on FB Heinlein's famous story, "The Man Who Sold The Moon." While a bit tongue in cheek, the story is really about a business man dreamer who just wants to go to the moon. He's ultimately denied that dream, because his heart won't stand up to the strain. Point being, Heinlein idolized the lone hero but was incapable of imagining the pathological narcissist that is today's norm. (In a second story, the business man pays a group of pirate/smugglers to get him there. In his space suit, he sits down and dies sifting moon dust through his gloved fingers, reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's epitaph.)
I mention all of this because the animals we find ourselves dealing with are not dreamers, they are low rent carnies. Koons is a denigration of the very idea of art as a complete, consumatory experience. (For anyone who is curious, I'm echoing John Dewey in "Art as Experience.")
None of the established treaties ever took into account this kind of private abomination. No *nation* can lay claim to any piece of land that is not on Earth, and can only claim sovereignty over those things they have directly made and sent into space. (So, for example, China cannot pillage the remnants of our lunar landers, not that they'd ever wish to do so.)
But nothing in these treaties places any limits on what private citizens can do. The only remaining legal strictures are, strangely (or not) enough, maritime law. Right now, there's now international agreement (that I'm aware of) on such things as pollution and garbage dumps from luxury liners. There are no laws about defacing the surface of the moon because it just never occurred to anyone that such a thing was even possible.
One last note, about Musk's stupid space coupe, people generally have no idea how big space really is. While Low Earth Orbit ("LEO") is getting ridiculously crowded, it still remains the case that the odds of an accidental collision with space junk are absurdly low. (Though they've now reached the point of being mathematically possible.) The idea of contamination from Musk's car is frankly pretty silly. I've a better chance (by many orders of magnitude) of getting a date than that car has of ever hitting anything. And if ('per impossibile') it did hit anything, the heat of impact would be, shall we say, sterilizing.
Regardless of the odds, it still doesn't give Musk or Koons the right to piss on the corner of the house. This is territorial marking. And the only way most people understand it is if I talk about another country (in this instance , Japan) doing the same thing. We'd be outraged. Or let's say Putin decided to launch a version of his stupid house, in miniature, to live in perpetuity on the moon.
The hubris is astounding. And no one (except you, me, and a handful of other folks) sees it or cares enough to even say anything.
Agreed. The reason these psychopaths* can get away with it is because they "private citizens", and not bound by the existing treaties.
(As you know, I use "psychopath" advisedly as akin to sociopath, but the "socio" indicates the person is generally unable to function in social situations.)
Jeff Koons is the Donald Trump of the art world...and those ten worlds are ten more than he deserves.
BAHAHAHAHAHA! That's about as perfect as it gets, my friend.