Umbrius Quinctius Cincinnatus

A sad war makes my brain play this in the background :(

@TheRabbitHole @apascoe33 If individuals need laws to be defended from the collective, that collective is lost already.

Individuals > Collectives

@musllaq @boguswaves1 Not saying Marx and science aren’t important but it is also ok to depart from both if it helps advancing communist or anarchist principles even within a strong republic.

@boguswaves1 Marx le da el carácter científico al movimiento comunista, y sin eso no se va a ninguna parte.

I think it's actually pretty bad that communist has become synonymous with Marxist

@millerman Resonates with founding principles of duty and virtue, which are central, not optional for a republic. But too easily shrugs off civilian control and checks and balances on central military power. Kinda makes the manifesto look like virtue signalling, just to drum up business.

On the viral Palantir thread (overview of their arguments from The Technological Republic): did you disapprove? Okay, well, let's state the opposite thesis to the ones listed. This isn't perfect; you could take issue with the original framing or premise. But it is still helpful. 1. Silicon Valley owes nothing to the country that made its rise possible 2. Apps are our greatest invention and crowning civilizational achievement 3. Free email justifies elite decadence. Economic growth and security are not important. 4. Moral harangues are politically effective without hard power backing them 5. Our adversaries won't develop weapons that are harmful towards us but will rather indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of development such technologies 6. Citizens should have a disproportionate share in the risk and cost of war 7. We should let our debates about the appropriateness of military action stifle the development of military capability, denying soldiers access to improved weaponry and software 8. Public servants should be our priests; the federal government is as fiscally responsible in compensating federal employees as private sector companies are in compensating theirs 9. We should not tolerate the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche when dealing with public figures; nobody should be forgiven for anything; entering public life should mean instant exposure to life-destroying shame 10. We should rely on politics to nourish our souls and rely heavily on our internal life finding expression in people we've never met 11. We should rejoice at the vanquishing of our enemies 12. We are not entering a new era of deterrence built on AI. We remain primarily in the atomic age. 13. The United States is not unique among the countries of the world in offering opportunities to those who are not hereditary elites 14. It is not true that too many have forgotten or take for granted an era of relative peace made possible by American power 15. Postwar pacification and neutralization of Japan and Germany poses no threat to Europe 16. We should not applaud builders like Elon Musk, who deserves our scorn and whose inventions and contributions should be dismissed 17. Silicon Valley should play no role in addressing violent crime 18. We should not foster talent in government service; empty ambition is enough 19. Public figures should prioritize caution and safety above all things, making sure never to rock the boat with what they say or do 20. Elite intolerance of religious belief is good and reflects the openness of elite intellectual life 21. Either no cultures have produced wonders or all cultures have; either no cultures are middling, regressive, and harmful or else all of them are. 22. We must not resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. National cultures should not be defined. Vague inclusivity is preferable to distinctions that risk excluding and offending.

@ole_b_peters I worked on Simon’s bounded rationality. Feel like there’s a connection between satisficing and ergodicity breaking.

@thefirstutopian That's precisely where it sits: one reason why game theory looks so different when agents move from optimizing expected utility to optimizing long-term outcomes under repetition.

In the infamous coin toss, the individual loses while the collective gains. Forget that this is often illustrated with dollars. The point is: the act is self-destructive for the individual, yet beneficial for the collective. It's a nucleation problem: one alone cannot do it, but a few individuals sticking together can access the collective good. #ErgodicityEconomics

@Kulambq Can confirm, worth it.

Swiss Alps.

@BevansAdvocate @Maze_s_Center @MarcDunkelman Best people and big projects instead of best people and small projects.

This book by @MarcDunkelman is probably the closest thing I'd describe as the anti Seeing Like A State, a pretty convincing defence of professional bureaucracies with broad remits to address societal problems

@fiddesmark @ProfSunnySingh Hey! Don’t knock pulp fiction lol

@ProfSunnySingh While the Iranian Ambassador quotes Jane Austen, the US Minister of War quotes Pulp Fiction believing it to be The Bible.

Iran’s diplomat makes a Jane Austen reference. White British male newscaster does not get it. SO much of contemporary British cultural hubris and ignorance (even of themselves) encapsulated in this clip.

@morallawwithin That’s not philosophy. That’s misosophy

Philosophy is the most wonderful thing in the world, but so many people use it as an unnecessarily complicated way to lobotomize themselves

@spqr_sulla Religiousness in all its variations, has the practice of faith in common. Faith in a specific set of rules for how reality works. Even atheists typically have faith in the consistency of principles discovered through observing evidence, for example. Religio is inevitable method.

IMO the chief mark of religion is belief that the supernatural affects the temporal. Being a master on Thomism doesn’t make on religious. Praying to God or making offerings and actually believing it will change things marks one as religious

@cognuminous @spqr_sulla That’s also religious.

@spqr_sulla What if you believe in God, and angels, and demons, and the power of prayer, but not in the purported distinction between “natural” and “supernatural”? Anything God makes is real, & therefore part of nature; any conception of nature lacking it is incomplete.

@Naturalphilosy @RyanHaecker Sadly there’s also a lot of luck in that. It’s a good measure of a society when all those around a man are capable and virtuous.

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

@freganmitts @lymanstoneky All you have to do is ask how do they make you feel? Swntiments are the real rationalisation :’)

@freganmitts @lymanstoneky Many other arguments against the hive mind. Don’t think one needs such a micro-valuation their ethical monotheism to decide that we should fight and get rid of them.

Yglesias is correct. The current pervasive frameworks for thinking about these issues don’t allow us to articulate what most of us already know. That’s why THIS was one of the boldest moments in recent television history:

@martinez_j7902 @Lowkey0nline lol Biden really sucked. Democrats are so fucked

@Lowkey0nline No matter who you vote for the rich stay rich , the poor stay poor. And the bombs never stop

Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. He ordered ten times more drone strikes than Bush and even joked "I'm really good at killing people."

Would go so far to say that Obama was worse than Trump. Pretends to be a virtuous man, is actually also a narcissist.

@hartsellml @ProfHall1955 Yes! Everyone’s quoting Carnegie instead of Nietzsche today. “I don’t believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.”

@ProfHall1955 Entrepreneurs replaced the philosopher as the highest men of the city (civilization)

Listen, Thiel and the other poundshop philosopher-kings, stop saying democracy is not OK while systematically miseducating people and dumbing down popular culture. The rest of you, stop listening to these money-grubbing midwits. Have you got that? Good.

@StocksandSpurs @AaronBastani Or people who can’t justify supporting other humans are the real wimps. You can’t deal with the world changing and you resent it. But you’re not gonna steer it in the direction you’d like it to go, because you’re actually a pussy.

@AaronBastani I agree but aren’t you the big baby who had to take 6 months off work with depression when someone in your family died? Imagine if we all did that. Ah my hamster died, I’m depressed. I need 6 weeks off work. What happened to the backbone of our society. Most are wimps.

“Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more serious than that”. - Bill Shankly. 🐐

@iamnopilot @EtheHerring We’ve hacked ourselves.

im moving to new york to befriend this guy specifically