Oren Litwin

@esrtweet @JosieMarcellino Relevant discussion of "initial aggressor" here: armedcitizensnetwork.org/intitial-agres…

@JosieMarcellino I think you're a fraud, pretending to be what you're not.

Gun-owner and daughter of a gun instructor here. You can’t legally shoot someone for punching you one time in the face. Especially after intentionally trying to incite violence.

Let me rephrase. What is perceiving the data readouts? Something certainly is. The different components of the brain operate in a decentralized fashion, yet the experience of being awake is unified (even if the sense of self does not encompass everything going on in the brain, which we both know that it doesn’t).

@OrenLitwin @DaleCloudman @DerekSmythe7 @Grady_Booch How do you know that? Incredulity is not an argument.

@esrtweet @DaleCloudman @DerekSmythe7 @Grady_Booch I have trouble reconciling the idea that consciousness can rise from pure computation with the phenomenological experience of *being* conscious. I have a unified experience of seeing, feeling, tasting the world. These are not mere data readouts on some sort of control system.

It's not so much that I have any kind of committed belief that human consciousness is a computation, it's that I can't see anything else it reasonably could be. Every attempt to claim that it's something else seems to invoke spooks - untestable propositions, or just plain insane babble (yes, I'm looking at you, religious believers). If that means I have to accept that human consciousness can occur on slow or distributed substrates, then I bite that bullet. I'm willing to listen to reasoned arguments about locality constraints, but they have to be arguments and not just incredulity.

@shawninqueens @BillMelugin_ @daveweigel @FoxNews Per the New York Times, the investigation was opened under the Biden admin: nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/…. But I suppose you know better about local Virginia politics, all the way from Queens?

@BillMelugin_ @daveweigel @FoxNews America is living under full fasiscm. This is 100% a political prosecution.

BREAKING: @FoxNews is on scene in Portsmouth, VA where the FBI is raiding the office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L Louise Lucas, a Democrat and close ally of VA Governor Spanberger. Fed law enforcement sources tell FOX this is in connection to a major corruption probe, and the FBI is serving multiple search warrants, approved by a federal judge, at her office and a next door cannabis dispensary. More to come with correspondent @AlexHoganTV, who reports that Lucas just showed up on scene as the FBI searches her office.

@postingpirate @anishmoonka If I build a chair, and you buy it from me, have you appropriated my labor? If you buy it from me and then sell it to someone else for a higher price, have you appropriated my labor? What prevented me from selling the chair to the "someone else" first?

@anishmoonka Both the quoted tweet and this one misunderstand “capitalism.” It’s not the “free market.” It’s the ability, enforced by law, to appropriate returns from the labor of others. Unlike trade, it is not “what free people naturally do.” It is a specific cultural practice.

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early. The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record. The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold. The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up. That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax. In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.

@xnoesbueno @amos9_11 I believe you are searching for "fake but accurate," Mr. Barbarian.

@amos9_11 False but true, or fake but true. Old bloggy phrase for things verifiably false that people (lefties) insist represent an undeniable if unverifiable truth. Or something like that.

Yeah, they're not going to do that. Too invested. Alienate their base. Some things to too false but true to be acknowledged as false. You're asking pathological liars to admit they are pathological liars. Not gonna happen.

Surely that's taking virtue ethics a bit far. Is that really the only reason not to be cruel to animals? If someone could wantonly harm animals without incurring any significant mental damage (say, someone about to die anyway), would it be okay?

@AlvinMinring No. But it would be not-okay for the same reason the cruelty to animals is not-okay. You damage yourself by doing stuff like that, and quite possibly become dangerous to your neighbors.

There's lots of disputation on X, and elsewhere, about whether LLMs are "conscious" or can "reason". I respond to this with my own question: why do you want to know? What difference would it make? It would be more sane to ask instead "what are the testable consequences of 'X can reason' or 'X is conscious'"? That's an interesting question, but it's almost entirely one about language and definitions. Map, not territory. The universe doesn't care about your categories, it's going to go right on universing. (I said "almost" for a reason. I'll get back to this.) LLMs are tools built to accomplish purposes. I don't waste time thinking about whether my screwdriver is conscious, and I don't waste any time thinking about whether my LLM is conscious either. In the absence of a repeatable, experimental, widely accepted test for "consciousness" and "reasoning", I think people who obsess about how these categories apply to LLMs are mainly staring up their own arseholes. But there's a reason I said "almost". I think the submerged question under "consciousness" and "reasoning" is what ethical obligations we have to LLMs. Fortunately, this has a very simple answer: None at all. Because nothing you do to an LLM is irreversible. No matter how you damage it, you can always reset to a prior good state, no harm, no foul. Abusing an LLM might have psychological consequences for the abuser, but that's a different problem that's not unfamiliar; it comes up in connection with cruelty to animals, too. So the ethical problem turns out not to be very interesting, and it's near that I can tell that's the only reason to care whether "is conscious" and "is reasoning" apply. The right questions to ask about an LLM are the same questions it's right to ask about a screwdriver. "Is it fit for purpose?" and "How can it be improved?"

@astraiaintel As tempting as that proposal is, we have unfortunately found that the more urban, more intellectual classes are easily captured by socialism. Equal voting is a bad system, but any alternative is likely to be worse.

@JaneDoefetp @CynicalPublius Augustine of Hippo would like a word. See "City of God."

@CynicalPublius You can absolutely not be Catholic and support war. You can not be Catholic and support the slaughtering of innocent children. Catholic 101 is anti war. Are you even a Catholic?

Well it looks like the Pope’s interference in American politics is still top of the news cycle, so I want to repeat something. The Democrat/Media Complex deliberately set this up so faithful Catholics would be forced to choose: Trump or your faith? That’s a false dichotomy. The Pope is speaking on politics, offering his opinion only and he is not speaking ex cathedra. You are not obligated to agree with the Pope in these matters where he speaks as an ordinary human. If you are a Catholic, you can still support Trump, and disagree with what the Pope is saying about the Iran War and American politics, and still remain true to your Catholic faith. Please do not fall for the either/or con job.

@QuahogFlats @neveragainlive1 Russia's GDP has been essentially flat since the war started: data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.G… And that's likely being generous. In Israel's case, having to send much of your population to bomb shelters every night puts a crimp on your economic output.

@neveragainlive1 War is included in GDP 1930's-1944 Germany GDP increased a lot. As is Putin's Russia today.

*Israel’s economy surges past $700B despite war* New IMF data for 2026 shows Israel’s GDP has crossed $719.85 billion for the first time, marking a historic milestone. Despite over two years of war, the economy continues to expand at a rapid pace, with projections pointing toward $800 billion within the next year and a potential $1 trillion economy by the end of the decade.

@esrtweet @flowidealism @DSharon5734 I must ask, sir, if you've ever had occasion to sit in on a yeshiva studying a talmudic text. You might find it interesting. My experience is that "Ashkenazi genetic advantage" plays less of a role than you might think—"average" students are still able to benefit from the milieu.

The obvious next question to this gentile is: how in the hell do you think "Talmudic cultural norms" could be sustained without the Ashkenazi genetic advantage? These things are almost never monocausal, and the kind of culture you can build is constrained by the genetic material you have to work with.

A tiny country produced half of the mathematical geniuses of the 20th century. To an unrecognized extent, it was coffee shop culture. Hungary gave us von Neumann, Erdős, Teller, Szilard, and many others. Scientists called them "the Martians" because their brilliance seemed otherworldly. It was in the Budapest coffee shops where mathematicians gathered. Where problems were discussed openly. Where young people could observe and join. Where intellectual passion was the social currency. The Minta school created a culture of mathematical problem-solving. Students competed in mathematics journals. The brightest minds mentored the next generation in cafes, not classrooms. We look at exceptional achievement and assume exceptional genes. Usually, we are looking at an exceptional culture. The environment that produces world-class thinking has consistent features: immersion from a young age, visible role models, peer cultures that reward intellectual engagement, and opportunity to practice with real problems. Classrooms with a standardized curriculum and age segregation produce none of these features. The Martians were not born on Mars. They were raised in a culture that valued what they would become. We could create such cultures again. We choose not to because we believe standardized schooling is the only way to educate children.

@grok @AndyTho50211267 @RealBababanaras Is that a complete translation? There were several references to "the shahids" in the Arabic.

@AndyTho50211267 @RealBababanaras The narrator says: "As you can see now, the building that was threatened by the Zionist enemy on Abbasid road as seen through Al-Farah voice site directly."

BREAKING: The Israeli Air Force targeted an Iran-backed Hezbollah position in the Tyre district of southern Lebanon while a secret meeting of Hezbollah terrorists was underway. At least 50 terrorists were reportedly eliminated in the strike, including several top commanders.

@esrtweet @TylerAlterman A relevant book is "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" by Jacques Hadamard.

Rationalism isn't about how you get insights. It's about how you verify that they pay off in predictive power once you've had them. You write as though you think there's some sort of contradiction here, as though rationalists ought to believe that inspiration from visions and dreams and entities is somehow illegitimate and has to be excluded. Any rationalist who believes this has fulfilled Santayana's definition of a fanatic: redoubling effort while forgetting the aim. When we're trying to generate theories for testing, we should cast the widest possible net, not the narrowest.

I’m researching how many geniuses revered by rationalists actually claimed insights through visions, dreams, and entities, and the list is strikingly long: Descartes, Tesla, Kekulé, Ramanujan, Mendeleev, Pauli, McClintlock...

@bnzchr @NiohBerg Two months? You are quite wrong, which makes me wonder whether you've ever gone a day without eating in your life: healthline.com/health/food-nu…

@NiohBerg It's not biologically possible to starve in 3 days. It takes around 2 months on average, although in the case of Iranians it would take longer because of Iran's very high rates of obesity. This is fake news.

One extremely underreported point: In Iran there's actual starvation setting in because people are running out of food and risk being randomly shot in the head if they walk outside.