Jeremiah

Unfortunately, this is more likely to apply to us than just about anyone else.

I visited an AA meeting in Akron (where it all began!) as a somewhat skeptical but interested observer, and found it unexpectedly beautiful. It was a place where people who would otherwise never seek each other’s company—young and old, educated and uneducated, a PhD and a gruff man with a white Amish beard who never learned to read or write—met in complete honesty and unaffected equality, encouraging one another and striving, together, to live better lives. It was one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had in a long time.

how it feels to drop a perfect arigato gozaimasu for the cute waitress at the hot pot restaurant (she’s latina and the place is korean)

you're probably underestimating how crazy things are

A funeral. A place haunted by childhood memories and past selves. The lingering of winter.

A guy who never moaned about his feelings, just stole those pears and then never thought about it ever again.

I've been reading very slowly to the kids through Frances Hodgson Burnett's *A Little Princess*. It's my first time reading it, though I remember watching and loving the movie as a kid. (I just found out today that it was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, and I also realized that watching it as a child may have had some role in my continued fascination with India.) Anyway, it's been awhile since the pure goodness of a character has brought tears to my eyes, so I'm grateful for that.

Warning: Do not adopt any new code editors this month. Beware the IDEs of March.

@johnmilbank3 @Handre @SewellMartin Cf: open.substack.com/pub/onancientp… , open.substack.com/pub/onancientp…

@Handre @SewellMartin Try reading the Church Fathers on private property…Even for Aquinas it was the result of the Fall. Most Christian reformers have wanted to at least constrain it.

Karl Marx gave humanity its most murderous idea: that human suffering stems not from scarcity and the human condition, but from private property itself. This bearded parasite—who never worked a day in his life and lived off Engels' textile fortune—convinced generations that voluntary exchange was exploitation while violent redistribution was justice. The body count speaks for itself. Stalin's forced collectivization murdered 6 million Ukrainians through engineered famine. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed 45 million through sheer economic illiteracy. Pol Pot slaughtered a quarter of Cambodia's population. And every single time, the intellectuals proclaimed it "wasn't real socialism." The pattern is identical across continents and centuries: seize private property, centrally plan production, watch millions starve. But the intellectual foundation was always rotten. Marx's labor theory of value—the notion that labor alone creates value—was already debunked by Austrian economists like Böhm-Bawerk before the ink was dry on Das Kapital. Value is subjective, determined by individual preferences in voluntary exchange. Marx simply couldn't grasp that the capitalist performs the crucial function of time preference—sacrificing present consumption for uncertain future returns. Even "democratic socialism" in Western Europe required massive wealth transfers from productive individuals to bureaucratic parasites, creating permanent dependency classes and stagnating growth. Venezuela had the world's largest oil reserves and still managed to create toilet paper shortages. Cuba turned a Caribbean paradise into a floating prison where doctors flee on rafts. Every socialist experiment ends the same way: empty shelves, secret police, and intellectuals explaining why the next attempt will be different.

@redtachyon @getifyX Heck, I’ve had Claude get stuck for hours trying to fix css overflow issues (which it caused).

BTW if you agree with this, you don't work on difficult enough problens

“Eight million four hundred thousand species of living beings, classified under four broad divisions, inhabit land, water, and air. Realizing the whole world to be pervaded by [God], I bow with folded hands.” - Tulsidas

stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle's support bot is free:

@No5mallf3at Hmm, odd L take

If you believe anything about consciousness because of reading DBH you need to take some time alone with your thoughts to evaluate where you’re at as a thinker. Ngl this shits so shallow it’s insane. Pretty words, puddle deep ideas.

You know how Aquinas sometimes refers simply to “the Philosopher” with nothing else needed when citing Aristotle? Pavel Florensky does the same thing in The Pillar and Ground of Truth, except he is referring to Solovyov. ❤️

BREAKING: machine trained on 70T words to sound exactly like a human sounds just like human

David Bentley Hart on the challenge for American religiosity. He wrote this years ago, and I think it only proves ever more prescient 👇 "It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture – whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times. Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense? Does it know of any city other than Babylon the Great or the New Jerusalem? For all the moral will it engenders in persons and communities, can it cultivate the kind of moral intelligence necessary to live in eternity and in historical time simultaneously, without contradiction?"

this kid was someone’s whole world when you think of each kid that was killed by america and israel, you have to imagine how many worlds they killed and the generations of trauma they created if it happened to americans or israelis, they wouldn’t shut up about it for 100 years

@bilbosfootcomb Except it looks like she might have just been promoted to a brand new scheme being cooked up

Told you guys

Saint Mark the Ascetic is celebrated today, March 5. "Each man's knowledge is genuine to the extent that it is confirmed by gentleness, humility and love."