KingStexx

@patrickc Your observation is spot on. The Arabic (Middle Eastern) region is one of the most oppressed and suppressed regions in the entire world, and oppression cultivates deep desire to commit violence and suppress the few under your control. The region didn't see a single day of liberty

Which are the most humane (empathetic, compassionate) Arab / Middle Eastern novels? Thought behind the question: I read a bunch of these novels last year -- my selection algorithm was to sample widely among the award-winning works from the region (Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Palestine, Jordan, among others) -- and, overall, I was very struck by the darkness and violence. (Abundant rape, murder, violence, and so forth.) In trying to figure out why the outlooks are so consistently bleak, I don’t think it’s only a matter of colonialism. For example, The Blind Owl is often ranked as the best novel to come out of Iran, which was never colonized as such, but nonetheless describes an obsessive madman who kills and dismembers his partner. In Season of Migration to the North, the colonizer -- Britain -- is described as being quite benevolent at least at the object level (granting a scholarship to the protagonist; treating him unreasonably justly during his murder trial). Men in the Sun is similarly grim while taking place in a post-colonial Arab world. Even books that are sometimes described as heartwarming (such as Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy) centrally feature rape and female oppression (that Amina is not permitted to leave the home is a core plot issue). One guess is that it is a function of award selection algorithms: gritty despair is seen as high-status and structurally celebrated. Another theory would be the period: there are lots of humane novels in the Western canon (Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot…), but those are more likely to be from the nineteenth century, whereas the Arab / Middle Eastern novelistic canon didn’t emerge until the twentieth. I’m not sure this explains it, however. In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Midnight's Children are all critically-acclaimed 20th century novels, close to the top of almost any list, that one would not describe as macabre. It’s possible that I just read the wrong books and got unlucky. So: which authors from the region can best be compared to Faulkner, Eliot, Fitzgerald, or Rushdie? (And if they haven't won major awards, does that indicate that the awards have a negative bias?)

@teortaxesTex The main issue is the Turkish loves Bandwagoning. They just swing with the tides. Erdogan kept supporting Muslim Brotherhood bois from Egypt for years until he realized it's a lost cause and went to Egypt to bandwagon. They did the same with the US by buying the S400.

Tbh von der Leyen is just correct Turkish influence is a greater threat than the Chinese one. For one thing, Turks have a massive diaspora in the EU and a lot of shady activity in Asia/ME. But this mostly goes to show that vdL will never name the actual problematic influence

@kyleichan I swear, reading your tweets makes me feel that we should hand China the keys to the White House.

China has approved more than 10 nuclear reactors per year for the past 4 years with 35 units under construction. China aims to reach 110 GW of nuclear capacity by 2030, taking the world’s top spot from the US. China is also exporting its Hualong One reactors and will bring its first commercial SMR online this year. Chart: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Additional sources: caixinglobal.com/2026-04-17/chi… caixinglobal.com/2026-03-13/chi…

The decay of the collective cognitive ability of humanity can't happen any faster.

@teortaxesTex The only problem is that it's so hard to negotiate with a bunch of terrorists who seem to only understand violence. They executed thousands in 88 just like chicken. They need to face the same fate.

holy shit can we have an actual negotiation for once?

@theo The answer is always Schwab.

Robinhood refused a buy order, didn't notify me, withdrew my money anyways, and cost me over $10k in lost gains in the last 24 hours. What the hell should I be using instead?

@teortaxesTex You are so prejudiced against the yankees. Are you telling me that they are chimpanzees that can't be trusted but the innocent bois in the IRGC who bombed a community center 10 light years aways across the ocean in Argentina somehow are to be trusted? Spare them no violence.

The thing is that the US is not a party capable of negotiating or upholding agreements with human nations, so only concessions that give you short-term benefit are meaningful. You can collect tolls *NOW*, enrich uranium *NOW*, withdraw funds *NOW*. Everything else is hopeless.

@teortaxesTex His biggest mistake was not starting the air campaign with carpet bombing Tehran. The most fatal mistake was using light force that was not sufficient to break enemy morale, which he did.

> He came to president Obama. He made a presentation to ask to strike. President Obama refused. President Biden refused. President Bush refused. Probably that same Looney Tunes "presentation" from the UN. I have no doubt Trump found it more persuasive than Caine's advice.

@teortaxesTex A country can’t wield superpower-level diplomacy while acting as a de facto US lapdog. They replace their prime ministers like changing lightbulbs.

Actually remarkable that Pakistan exists. Superpower tier diplomacy, nukes, Chinese backing, sponsors terrorism and isn’t afraid of anything. All while being an inbred 4th world hellhole beneath Iran in… whatever. Somehow, they have Serious elites.

This is exactly how anyone who has worked with Chinese engineers even once in their life feels. Engineers (and companies) in China are instrumentalized beyond imagination and exist solely to serve the objectives of the functionaries.

@teortaxesTex China won't surpass the US in nominal GDP, at least not this century.

Big deal. China has finished the market share chase and is consolidating its position. Fifteenth Five Year Plan will be largely about becoming rich and developed in an undeniable way, no Doggy-style PPP adjustments needed.

@bubbleboi That’s a very long way of saying long GOOG.

People telling you today is a great buying opportunity are not your friends. Sit down and run a DCF on 185B Capex for a company that made only 132B in profits in all of 2025… This is existential levels of investment. Microsoft, Amazon, Google all want to capture the pie which is not the models it’s the infra. This is a monopoly play, they are trying to capture the market with a moat so big no one can ever compete again. Who can sustain the investment the longest, who can burn capital until the others give up? That’s the only person who wins.

@teortaxesTex Having been to numerous countries, including the US, I’d say the Pareto principle is even stronger there, it’s more like 10% of the people do everything, while the rest hide behind titles.

Another part in my long series on the abysmal quality of American experts. See one Amy Zegart. Ph.D Stanford, Harvard, Senior Fellow Hoover Institution, National Security Council etc. > does a report on DeepSeek > doesn't notice Wenfeng is CEO > hallucinates him working in the US

I'm elated that Overleaf is dead.

Amazing work by @Google. This garbage needs to be shadow-banned.

@iAnonymous3000 Portraying tracking as inherently bad is misleading. Packaging user data and selling it with PII, à la Facebook, is genuinely harmful. But using tracking to provide meaningfully better services, as Google often does, can be a net positive.

DuckDuckGo doesn’t belong here DuckDuckGo doesn’t operate its own search index. When you run a query, it gets proxied to Microsoft Bing. DDG anonymizes the request, but the results, the ranking algorithms, and the underlying infrastructure belong to Microsoft. In May 2022, security researcher Zach Edwards discovered that DDG’s mobile browser selectively blocked trackers. Allowed Microsoft’s msclkid. @BrendanEich documented the technical details: Microsoft’s msclkid exists specifically to circumvent third-party cookie protections. DDG knew this. They blocked equivalent parameters from competitors but exempted their business partner. CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed the cause: their search syndication contract with Microsoft limited what they could block. The privacy product was architecturally compromised by a revenue agreement. DDG patched this in August 2022 after the backlash. But the episode revealed something important: when business obligations conflicted with privacy promises, business won until they got caught. In March 2022, Weinberg announced DDG would begin “down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation,” specifically naming RT and Sputnik. Whatever your position on that content, this marked a fundamental shift. DDG had marketed itself as “unbiased search” that didn’t filter results based on editorial judgment. The company makes centralized decisions about what information users should see. That’s their right as a private platform, but it’s a different product than what was advertised.

@teortaxesTex The weird thing is that, even with such an immense level of self-destruction by the end of the century the US would still come out on top, showing that direction beats speed. With a fertility rate of 1, China is self-destructing at a rate that makes Japan's situation look hopeful

> Cited the UN Charter again award one of the weirdest things happening is that the US is not just losing to China as a power, it's handing over the «International Order». China is now the main support of the WTO and UN. We'll see the headquarters relocated from the NYC, I think.

@alfcnz Because you had a supportive, decent advisor. Most advisors are abusive and are only looking for cheap labor to exploit. I completely understand that this wasn’t your experience, but the main perk of having rich parents is that you don’t feel trapped, you can quit at any time.

I don’t get it. Being a PhD student was my first job, which gave me financial independence from my parents. My salary was $1.4k a month. Which was an extremely generous income if compared to that of mom or dad. Finally, I owned it by acing my bachelor’s and masters’ degrees.

How incompetent do you have to be to make 2FA for Facebook and Instagram independent when they’re the same account?

May Facebook and everything Zuck touches go bankrupt.