Water

@RodericDay Wow, who knew sneering was so revolutionary!

"On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects." — Karl Marx, unassigned work (1867) x.com/cafreiman/stat…

Marx kinda ruined economics, politics, and philosophy as professional academic fields. Ever since he jumped in and showed that dutifully-pursued they lead to revolution, the three were gelded. Schools now do weird contortions to avoid him. Only sociology remains a little brave.

Aristotle: “A tyrant…[favors] those who keep him company in an obsequious spirit, which is the function of flattery. This makes tyranny favor the baser sort, in the sense that a tyrant loves to be flattered, and no man of free spirit will oblige him. Respectable men…refrain from flattery” (Politics, Book V, Chapter XI)

@ThomBrady5 @0x49fa98 @bronzeagemantis Lol, retards on here thinking other retards are geniuses

we already know who a couple of the generational talents were, his name is @0x49fa98 and @bronzeagemantis , and a book publisher should've signed him to a 3-book deal 4 years ago, but nobody ever did. Clear example of a global best-in-class talent being overlooked.

@ThomasWayneRil1 Is this in reference to paving part of hole-in-the-rock? While, yes, I wish that weren't so, most of Grand Staircase will remain beyond what most who go down that paved part are willing to do

Keep Grand Staircase Wild

Within one 24 hour period, Trump: - got out of a $100 million IRS fine - secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends - created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters - was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion All of the obvious things to say about this are true. It's bad. Nobody even tries to defend it. The closest thing to a defense you get is something about how "but Democrats suck" and "woke was also bad," which is not a defense, but rather a kind of moral blank check made out to the administration to give them the right to do anything. But what I'm most curious about is whether this sort of lurid corruption creates a countermovement that successfully returns government to rule of law or whether it's establishing a norm of executive imperialism that every future administration will use to achieve its ends, which can always be justified by the moral blank check of "the other side is worse, so let us do whatever we want."

@pauljpastor @JoyceCarolOates Twitter still has all the niche topics: photography, music fandom, history, etc. Does Bluesky have that?

@JoyceCarolOates Yes, this is my sentiment exactly and the reason it’s the only social media I find tolerable. Twitter is like a crusty dive bar where you may well get jumped before you stumble home among the throng of other idiots, but it is one million times better than, what? A Panera Bread?

@shagbark_hick It is odd, esp. considering Trump and MAGA types seemingly making a big deal earlier of how great it was going to be. Beginning to think it'll be as cheap and poorly thought through as many of Trump's branding efforts

Something tells me we're not going to have this kind of energy for America's 250th. You'd think by now I'd be seeing "250" everywhere but I honestly do not see it anywhere. I mean this is a quarter-millennium here. You'd think we'd be exceedingly hyped already?

@arctotherium42 @tracewoodgrains You really need to reconsider how much people can have a wide range of moral traits and views. Or at least in your enemies, as you seem to do fine with it in your friends

@tracewoodgrains I think the fact that the Civil Rights movement was full of guys who loved Mao and Stalin really should make you reconsider how great it was.

on the one hand, the dissident right are basically correct that the civil rights movement was overwhelmingly driven by socialists aside from, like, the NAACP on the other hand, I think that mostly just makes the rest of us look worse and socialists look better

@samhaselby This is actually completely true no matter how bad you think his own methodology is

There is a grain of truth to Pinker's complaint (though the reason is more complex and interesting than he claims). But his books reject historical method entirely in favor of trying to write history using bits and bobs of psychology, economic theory, and tautology.

@arctotherium42 Best examples?

The most common institutional media trick is to present true information in such a way that almost every non-painstakingly-careful-reader will have a false takeaway. I view this as worse than directly lying.

@GWHayduke97 Made the trip across 50 several times. Each time was on my way somewhere, and each time wanted to just turn South on one of those roads headed to nowhere and get lost.

These circles each have a 100km radius. That results in an area of 31k sq km (12k sq mi). Each circle here has under 1500 people. In an area larger than Massachusetts, half that of WV, and one fourth that of England. Large swathes of the mountain west are almost unfathomably empty.

Part of the "death of the frontier" actually has nothing to do with a lack of wild space that adventurous people could settle. It instead has much more to do with the amount of OPTIONS that the modern industrial communications and mass transit systems offer us. There's no "going and never coming back" anymore, and it seems that settling rough, isolated places successfully does involve a high degree of that. In the olden times, there was no flight home. No second chances. No Zoom calls with mommy. You spent every penny on a daredevil chance and once you got there, there was no way out but "through." Not true anymore at all. Even if you go to the Aleutian Islands or some far-flung zone in Labrador, you can get back to civilization fairly quickly by using a combustion engine. With Starlink, too, you can call home even if you're in the most isolated places on earth. So nobody is really "all in" anymore, not like they used to be. Gasoline and internet allow us to really be "here today, gone tomorrow" when the temptation strikes.

@atlanticesque Yes. See Coase and others. You can even look to biology, etc. for how it is often the case that certain principles working at one scale or level are needed to enable completely different principles working at another scale or level.

“Central Planners™ are good, as long as there’s many of them and they compete with one another in a decentralized market economy” What are we doing here

@xwanyex But once you find a way to make money off of repeating simplistic ideas . . . .

@xwanyex @gholz0hrz Well, you are easy to model. But not for his type

@aakashgupta But many children her age don't react that way to seeing trains for the first time. There is wide variability in how children of similar ages react to novel things.

This is what a brain looks like with no priors. Your brain is a prediction machine. Every sensory input gets compared against an expected input built from prior experience. When reality matches your model, you feel nothing. When reality breaks your model, you feel wonder. She's around two. Her model of the world is microscopic. A train is 200 tons of metal moving 50 mph through her field of view, and her brain has no template that fits. The prediction error is so large her face becomes the prediction error. This is Karl Friston's free energy principle in real time. The brain minimizes surprise by updating its model. Children update constantly because almost everything is new. Adults update almost never because almost everything matches a prior. That's why adults can stand next to the same train and feel nothing. Their model already contains it. The signal gets predicted away before it reaches conscious awareness. The wonder window narrows as priors fill in. After that, you have to manufacture novelty. She still gets it for free. You used to react to everything this way. Then your brain finished its training run.

Of all the things I’ve said in defense of unpopular Catholic moral teachings over the years – on abortion, sexuality, social doctrine, or what have you – I don’t think anything has generated more undiluted hostility and unreasoning, spittle-flecked rage than what I’ve said against intentionally killing civilians and obliterating civilian infrastructure during wartime. It is truly extraordinary. I never would have guessed it. Make of it what you will.

@xwanyex Boy, you were really spun by that *tweet* weren't you?

@hemantmehta @IChotiner Meh. I would have thought worse. These guys beclown themselves much more on their own.

Oh my god, MAGA pastor Mark Burns agreed to do an interview with @IChotiner and it went exactly how you'd expect. newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/w…

@PhilWMagness What are the best debunking things to read?

1. Polanyi's book was ahistorical conspiracist nonsense that has been repeatedly debunked. 2. It's had a massive resurgence in the past 30 years in academia, and particularly in its many socialist and "neoliberalism studies" iterations. So unfortunately, it is widely read.