Asher Black @ashermost

I really don't want to hear about your cost of living and your ramen noodles if you voted for someone who voted for $70 BILLION MORE for ICE. You bought it. You eat it. I just wish, like a real conservative, you wouldn't demand my money for your social cleansing program.

Terse yet flowing prose.

We love these characters. Curmudgeonly traditionalists. English aristocrat on a sprawling estate. Member of the working class aristocracy - his home his castle. They are story logic for why tradition isn't pointless, not all change is progress, & not all progress is desirable.

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In statistics, "how people are" is best accounted for by multimodal distributions (or high heterogeneity/plural modes) rather than a unimodal (Gaussian) distribution with a clear central tendency ("normal/most") with thin tails. In other words, social science research on normality treats it as socially constructed and variable across contexts, abandoning a single "normal" state in complex societies. In fact, this emerged strongly in early 20th-century anthropology as a methodological and ethical stance against evolutionary hierarchies that ranked cultures. It emphasizes cultural variation and the idea that "normal" is a local, context-bound construct shaped by heuristics and biases. Modern sociology and cultural psychology build firmly on this. Values, norms, and behaviors are understood within their own cultural context, rather than judged against a universal or "normal" standard derived from one group (often the observer's own). That directly counters ethnocentrism. In a multimodal distribution, each 'normal' is internally coherent with its own ontologies, epistemologies, family structures, work ethics, etc., and none inherently more "normal" than others in a larger sense.

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Social science looks at status hierarchies, performative self-presentation, in-group behaviors, etc as arrested psychosocial development. Essentially middle-school emotional dynamics preserved from the conference room to the cocktail party. With deliberate maturation (via reflection, diverse experiences, or accountability), middle-school-style behaviors don't have to remain habitual. In "tight" vs. "loose" cultures or high-conformity or professional subcultures, these are especially sticky/retained. In such cases, outgrowing one's friends and colleagues is the doorway. It is, of course, possible to dump it all even in middle school. Costly. Expensive. But the head start and its countless benefits are amazing. Elite bubble cultures evidence low meta-cognition, high performative scrutiny, and status anxiety that sustains juvenile patterns. Social science explains this as an interaction between individual development and reinforcing environments—common where belonging and rank remain central currencies. But not inevitable, if one deliberately pushes out of it.

How many of us would understand that adding blue tint to the reflecting pool completely buys back the sale on its function, and reduces art to status symbol, and that those aren't the same thing. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Totalitarianism doesn't just replace art with theater; it's bad theater. Taste goes first. We get the polis our taste implies. We get the government our aesthetics deserve. foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/29/tur…

When someone gets confirmation of a fact and says, "I knew it!" but that really means "I guessed it." Which reveals they treat their guesses and suspicions and perhaps even fears in a particular way. A cognitive bias. Useful insight for character/dialogue development.

Conventional sexuality discusses positions. Libertine sexuality talks in directions.

I am not interested in performative masculinity or tribal masculinity signaling. I cringe when someone calls me a 'guy' or 'bro". That's low-resolution manhood talk and, Hell, I cringe at low-resolution life. I agree with the girls who comment that dating sites are full of boys posing in front of rugged outdoor settings to signal borrowed masculinity and using their dogs to signal sensitivity, when in fact those are distancing maneuvers that suggest they are actually uncomfortable with both. I think if one wants to emotionally connect, then a confident masculinity with emotional availability is the only option.

Neutralization ≠ maturity. And emotional neutrality is not inherently superior speech or writing. In essayistic traditions that move people, neutrality is the weakest register. James Baldwin George Orwell Joan Didion Rachel Carson Czesław Miłosz None wrote like: We are culturally conditioned toward forms of hope that often substitute for material response. They wrote like: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The creatures outside looked from pig to man… The sea around us changes color. Clarity does not require flattening. The challenge I'm working on is channeling voltage without voltage instability. Controlling voltage while wielding it powerfully. Not elimination of heat, but its selective use. Measured ferocity without escalation into relentless bombast. Modulated intensity, with cadence, poetry, authority, inevitability. Challenges like this excite me. I feel privileged to have made it far enough to take them on. And I know what to do. I don't go to how-to books or advice. I turn to the world and listen to it. Hear its breathing and pay closer attention to the beats that align. That participation has never left my perception to starve.

All comparisons are metaphor. We metaphorize to understand distinctions. We start comparing things long before we know the word metaphor. A child says the moon follows the car. An engineer says current flows. A poet says grief has weight. Different domains, same intuition: we understand through resemblance in order to perceive distinction. If we could make no distinctions, we would merge with what we observe. If two things were identical in every respect, we could not distinguish them at all. Metaphor may be among the earliest instruments of perception — shared by aesthetic and rational inquiry alike. Art and science both proceed through disciplined acts of resemblance. Symbolic language, rhythm, and music may be among our earliest forms of knowing.

Time is not limited; it’s delimited. An hour can feel endless when stranded on a highway and disappear instantly in conversation. What we call time feels less like a container than a trace left by relationship and attention. My view of time has shifted. Time may not be the general basis of process so much as something that emerges locally as we perceive relatively stable relationships among processes. And we, the measurers, are among those processes.