Borg

"something harmless" and its a white person not even giving proper credit on WHERE the ube ice cream came from. no one will know which country it came from if he just said AAPI because AAPI is ALL of asian americans, not filipinos.

So, I took multiple classes on Moby-Dick as an undergrad & one of the first things you learn is that Ishmael is NOT his name; it’s an allusion to Ishmael from the Book of Genesis (the exiled son of Abraham, of whom it was prophesied, “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”). The narrator imagines himself an outcast, rejected by society & forced to seek his destiny on the high seas. His self-understanding is beautifully transformed during the scene in which he shares a bed with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg, who becomes his bosom friend. As his heart softens, he writes, “I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” Love has come to redeem him. He is Ishmael no more.

Guess the city without cheating?

Zuck’s boat arrives to Seattle the day that Meta cuts their workforce by 20% in area. Can’t make this up.

Christopher Hitchens identifies the creation of identity politics as the moment the left lost. I wonder if he imagined the damage it would still be causing nearly sixty years later.

Generally correct on all 3 counts, but I think he's missing the second part of the story. Marx's theory of value (and the derivative concept of surplus value, which he personally considered to be his most important contribution) was already on the rocks within a couple of years of his death. By the 1890s century, it had been decisively refuted on theoretical grounds. By 1910 it had also been shown to be mathematically impossible to reconcile to itself. Marx's theories of history and class conflict similarly faltered between 1880-1910 as almost all of their predictive claims failed to pan out. Lenin had to substantially modify the order of Marx's theory to shoehorn Russia - the place that Marx described as least-suitable for a revolution of the type he envisioned - into becoming its model exemplar. And then there was the whole matter of the Soviet economic catastrophes that followed from implementation: a string of major famines accompanied by heavy political repression as forced central planning failed at its goals. By the end of WW2, it was pretty clear that doctrinaire Marxism was on the rocks. And Heath correctly notes as much, including its effects in academia. But that's where things get interesting from today's perspective. In the 1930s the Soviet Union rescued a couple of obscure discarded notebooks from Marx's early works that had never been published - the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse. Both contained precursors to the "mature" phase of Marx in Das Kapital and similar writings. But they also contained elements of arguments that Marx picked up from earlier writers, only to discard or minimize at a later point - probably because he deemed them "unscientific" and too closely connected to Hegelian or Utopian Socialist mysticism. One of those concepts was his theory of Entfremdung, or Alienation - a theory that had only a minimal background role in Das Capital, but that he expanded on at length in the two earlier manuscripts. As the Soviet-published editions started making their way into the west in the 1950s and early 60s, Marxists seized on their "fresh" material and ran with it. Marx the cranky, debunked economist gave way to Marx the allegedly-pioneering sociologist and cultural theorist. And whereas "surplus value" etc. could be easily falsified as an erroneous doctrine through economic analysis, "alienation" had a certain fluidity to it that could be applied to and wrapped around almost anything. When we encounter academic Marxists today, very few of them are the old school surplus value theory/class conflict Marxian economists. A couple of those still hover around places like the New School and University of Utah econ departments, insisting that the entirety of the discipline was wrong and peddling their epicycle theories to resuscitate Marxian economic arguments. But they're mostly relics at this point. OTOH, alienation theorists are everywhere. Marx the sociologist - the unfalsifiable explainer of disillusionment with capitalism - is everywhere. It spawned Marxist critical theory, Marxist critical pedagogy, Marxist postcolonial theory, and the ubiquitous "____ studies" departments that peddle in anti-capitalist grievances. And they have absolutely, unambiguously populated the academic humanities and non-economic social sciences with Marxist and Marx-adjacent ideologues. But there's one more final trick to this shift. The alienation theorists of Marxist sociology etc. also import Marx's economic prescriptions as if they were a given. They sidestep all of the debates from the 1880s-1940s that conclusively debunked Marxian economics. They don't even bother engaging the long-dead critics of Marxian economics either. They just sneer in derision, call them "neoliberals," and dismiss them. So you not only get the reinvented sociological Marxists of today - you also get their opinions on economic matters, smuggled into the discussion without any scrutiny by simply stepping around the economic debates that they decisively lost 70+ years ago.

The most puzzling AI-ism to me is probably the "Not x. Not y. But z." Not the em-dashes (an essential piece of punctuation). Not "That isn't x, it's y" (a useful if inelegant way to clarify an argument). But consecutive examples of what your subject isn't -- conveyed in fragmentary, staccato sentences -- before a declaration of what it is. Feel like this is an inherently irritating rhetorical device. And I don't recall regularly coming across it in pre-AI writing. So, I don't understand why LLMs are so in love with the template

Just learned about the concept of a “telescope ranch” in Texas. People pay to have their $10,000+ telescope rigs set up in the middle of TX to avoid light pollution. Every night the roof rolls back off the warehouses. Then you can remote in to your telescope and use it from anywhere in the world.

Von Neumann’s grave, Princeton, taken today

The permanent vibecession is here to stay

All of this. Trump is corrupt and fascistic in a way that's not only unprecedented in US history but in the entire developed world, and every journalist that tweets "this bozo is up to his old tricks again" is functionally pro-Trump.

Gotham's citizens are built different