FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
-C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948)
There's an upper limit on how concerned Christians are supposed to be about physical survival.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
Can you give some examples where the "more" would diverge meaningfully from the "sheer destructive power"? What's an example of a "mature civilization" with minimal destructive potential? The Amish?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I'm actually a moderate fan of the guy he's mocking, but yeah, pretty much this. There's already discourse around indie devs trying to build a following by posting video of their in-development projects to social media, and some prompter scoops their game mechanics and hits market shortly thereafter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.
We don't have a working, common understanding of what is right. Like, at all. The social cohesion is gone. The common values are gone. The common history is gone. The good will, good faith, brotherhood, all gone. You are an alien to me. Who is "we", Kemosabe?
I understand the historical context of the sorts of appeals that you are making here, but it's an organic process, not an incantation, and organic things perish.
We move away from defined-by-birth absolutely-no-exceptions-closed-to-new-entrants societies, and towards a more universalist ethics, or
There is no universalist ethics available; this is not how humans work, it is not how humans have ever worked, it is not how humans are ever going to work. Even Christianity cannot accomplish this: from the crooked timber &etc.
We condemn our posterity to endless who's-in-who's-out conflict and a grim dark future in which there is only war.
Alternatively, we fight for a while and then have peace for a while, as we've done many times before. "History Continues" seems like a pretty viable third option, your declarations to the contrary.
This was the case sixty-two years and one month ago, and it remains true today.
They failed sixty-two years and one month ago, and in all the intervening years, and it turns out that the resources burned on these attempts were scarce and could not be fully replaced, notable among them social cohesion. This is sort of the problem of running a system on vibes and zero accountability: sooner or later, reality intrudes, and when it does you're down all the resources spent on vibin'.
You are not being 'replaced' just because people exist near you while being of more distant blood-relation than you are used to.
Of course not. It's the part where people who do not share your values assemble a coalition that wins the vote, and then uses the power of the state to shut you out of political power long-term, deprives you of equal protection under the law, and then uses explicit or implicit state power to dance on your head. The problem is that once the "people exist near you while being of more distant blood-relation than you are used to" is accomplished, the rest of this sequence can happen without any good options available to arrest the process cleanly and with minimal chaos.
Do you understand that while in one sense anything can be voted on, there is another sense in which some things aren't up for a vote? Or do you believe that Democracy is a universal solvent to all the contentions of mankind, and that any human conflict can simply be resolved by voting on it? If by importing multiple millions of foreigners in a relatively short timeframe has the result of putting things up for a vote in the first sense that aren't up for a vote in the second, what do you suppose happens next?
Given the facts of the matter up to the morning after, which I think you would agree ought to be the cut-off point, I do not think you or others can define a clear standard of behavior that would a) keep one on the correct side of the dirtbag line, and b) be even roughly compatible with the sex-positive liberalism that has ruled us all since the 60s.
The working definition of "slut" is one question. Whether this particular woman is a slut is a second question. A third question is whether we collectively are capable of object-permanence. We have been here before. Jackie's story, Mattress Girl, the Dear Colleague Letter, Believe All Women, TeamHarpies, Duke Lacrosse, the decade-plus abuse of Title IX, affirmative consent baked into state law... This isn't a conversation we could potentially have in advance, it's a conversation we as a society already had, in exhaustive detail. What the fuck are we doing here?
...I would rather this not be a tribal thing, but how is it not a tribal thing? "Woke 1 was so crazy, lol," so what is this?
Can you argue that even now, there's anything resembling a legible public consensus that group sex or gangbangs or whatever label we're applying here makes one "a dirtbag", such that these guys should have known going in how their behavior would be perceived? I'm not opposed to shaming everyone involved, hell, I'm all for it! But notably, that isn't happening, and I don't believe even now that any sort of actual standard is being set here. People are calling these guys rapists, and I see no reason to believe that they could have anticipated that label being applied to them given the choices they made. No one of any prominence is actually out there saying publicly that if you participate in a gangbang, society will collectively coordinate the ruin of your career and prospects. I think that would be a pretty good rule, but it needs to actually be a rule that people have a chance to internalize, not an ad-hoc result arrived at by lying about the particulars of a given incident!
As-is, the woman in this case appears to me to have the worst behavior, by far. She appears to have been a willing participant in the activities from beginning to end, and then tried to convert it into rape charges when she was shamed to a limited degree for her behavior. That is wildly unjust. I would prefer not to join either of the teams you mentioned, but I do not think there is a reasonable way to engage with the facts and the general social consensus without either endorsing injustice or coming down hard on this woman's behavior. If the answer is "Men need to be at permanent, severe, unilateral legal risk in all sexual encounters, and also we need to lie about this fact and its consequences forever", well, I don't think that's going to be a winning pitch going forward, but it would at least be honest, and therefore preferable to what I'm currently seeing.
At some point, some women in some situations are going to need to take an L, and the rest of us need to be okay with that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
From which bills did the priors originate from?
They didn't originate from bills, but from my understanding of AI safety discourse, the version of that discourse being presented by the lab leadership, their calls for regulation, their market position, and the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents that don't seem organic and do seem to bolster their calls for "regulation".
Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D.
...how is this not a moat?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
what is an a16z type person?
More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.
Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Cow Question
With the caveat that I do not follow Aella directly and am getting the gist third-hand, in the course of organizing prostitution-based social activities, she had prospective attendees fill out one of her sexuality questionnaires, with one of the questions being whether the attendees would prefer intimate relations with a live cow or a dead one.
I'd like to take a moment to comment on a bit of controversy below.
With the AI safety discourse escaping containment and what might be described as the cold light of day falling across Yudkowski's forlorn-hope coalition and its personalities and practices, we are treated to an actual test of how the Rationalist movement has done at systematizing winning, particularly in the subcategory of allocating weirdness points. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem they've done especially well. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.
Scott Alexander, apparently feeling the pinch, decided to put his oar in:
Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?
This is certainly one of the defenses of all time. Alexander has always been witty, and I get the feeling, possibly mistaken, that he kinda swung for the fences on this one. "Kolmogrov Complicity" and "no one actually cares about monogomy" pretty much put a cap on my ability to respect his opinions, but he's had a tough road, even if much of his own making. Let him rest.
Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme, and that discourse has continued here on the Motte, in this thread. Several commenters spoke up in support of Scott's argument, and I think it might be best to address them collectively:
To those of you who thought Scott's argument was in some way a reasonable one, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of you either participated in or at least had a reasonable familiarity with the Atheist internet wars. Can any of you recall a single time in that era when you heard of a prominent Conservative Christian caught in a sex scandal, where you saw it argued in good faith that actually, getting caught with a hooker was fine, because Jesus also associated with prostitutes? Can you claim to me, with a straight face, that you would consider this, then or now, a reasonable defense of a Conservative Christian influencer attending an orgy? Why do you think that is?
It's one thing to argue that Christian rules are stupid. That's understandable from non-Christians, though it's kind of neat how the logic convolutes in cases like the Cornell 7. And it's understandable for non-Christians to heap scorn on Christians who fail to live up to Christian standards, and even to then scorn all Christians for having such standards. It's not charitable, and it certainly isn't rational or principled, but humans inevitably human. When the argument is that behavior that Christians find deplorable, behavior that Christians police other Christians over, behavior that non-Christians scorn Christians for engaging in when they're caught doing so, is actually comparable to the behavior of Christ, it's time to examine the question of what further discourse is actually expected to achieve.
Scott's argument is a contemptable language game. I do not believe Scott nor anyone else is actually confused about any of the particulars here. Jesus did indeed associate with prostitutes; he did not partake of their services, nor did he employ them on their backs for horizontal forms of evangelism-by-the-hour. Christians' moral objections to Aella's activities and to the Yudkowskiites' exploitation of them for tactical advantage are straightforward and unimpeachable from within the Christian frame. There are no meaningful parallels here to the life or ministry of Jesus Christ, and implying otherwise is merely a demonstration that Scott and those agreeing with him are willing to say pretty much anything if they perceive tactical utility in doing so.
I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized are offering a "message of compassion" any more than Aella or her cohort would accept that I am motivated by genuine concern for their welfare and eudaemonia, no matter how (sincerely!) I might argue that this was the case; we do not share anything remotely resembling coherent values, and it seems to me that one of the prerequisites to even attempting communication across that divide is to refrain from this sort of chicanery. My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.
There's likely more to say, but why bother when people can simply pretend to not understand?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
I'm split here. On the one hand, I consider the concept of "Free Speech" to be about as thoroughly discredited as a theoretical construct can possibly be.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Speech is in fact significantly freer in all the ways I value in the US than it is in Europe, and further than to the extent that speech continues to be free in ways I value in Europe, it is heavily dependent on material and ideological support from America to maintain itself. It seems to me that speech-hostile-from-my-perspective European and American governments have repeatedly recognized this reality and taken serious steps to attack American speech as a necessary step to stronger speech controls in their own areas.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
given that the farmer is now publicly embarrassing them by contradicting the official account and reporting that the government hasn't contacted them for a witness statement, I'd say probably no.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I have a backlog of replies from @FCfromSSC and others that deserve thoughtful responses but my emotions have cooled and I don't really want to get into more arguments this second.
I'd definitely be interested in them if you ever wish to continue the thread. My replies this time around were prompted at least partially by your comments on the subject some months ago. These things take time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
do you know of any publicly-accessible scrapes of the old subreddit?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Hobbyist gun-owners face gun-abolition threats from Dems precisely because 2nd amendment nuts oppose sensible limitations on mentally ill and untrained gun-owners.
Name a sensible limitation on mentally-ill and untrained owners.
Read Lamentations or the Prophets sometime, or the last five chapters of Judges. Or if the New Testament is preferred, Jesus cleansing the temple is overdone as a reference, but there's no shortage of other examples in the gospels ("brood of vipers", sons of satan) from Christ himself, or if you prefer something a bit more visceral, there's always the Whore of Babylon.
Your observation fits me as well, I think. On the Red side, there is a pervasive sense that things are very bad and probably going to get a lot worse, and that very likely it is not going to be possible to do anything about it. It's acutely frustrating from the Christian perspective because, as many of us see it, Christianity and the Christians in it have been trying to accommodate the secular world for quite some time now, trying to find some way to fit the secular image of what Christians are supposed to be, and at this point it seems pretty clear that this was never going to be possible and many of the compromises we made appear to have been foolish in the extreme. On the one hand, this world is not our home, and so the amount that the present decline can matter to us ought to be sharply limited. On the other hand, we do have to live through it, and it does seem quite woeful.
When I was young, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. When I got into my teens and started grappling with theological questions seriously, all the social push was toward Liberalism; we looked at the previous generation, and we asked, "isn't this too rigid and hidebound, too legalistic, too dogmatic?" We looked at a structure that claimed it was the one correct way to be a Christian, and we asked, "Is it really plausible that the codified rules of this one group of churches in late-90s southern America is the only way to follow Christ?"
Looking back, that question was dishonest in several ways, but none of us noticed at the time, and we, for lack of a better term, declined to harden into the shape the previous generation sketched out for us. If all humans fail, sin, go astray, then no church has ever been what Jesus wanted us to be. If we presume that at least some Christians are doing the job that Jesus laid out for us, then it follows that the job does not require perfection, and further that there must be a channel of acceptable Christianity, not a single line. And so we, well to the conservative side, opened up to the idea that those further out from us might nonetheless also be Christians attempting to follow Christ to the best of their knowledge and ability. Despite the questionable starting point, it seems to me that this was a good conclusion to arrive at.
Coming back to the church after some years away, though, I noticed that this logic only ever ran one way. It was always applied from a "conservative" position toward "liberal" positions, but I noticed how neither I myself nor anyone around me ever ran this logic the other way, to the people more conservative than ourselves, whether in the previous generation or throughout history. We were open to considering the idea of a looser Christianity being valid, but not a tighter one. We entertained the idea that the Unitary Universalists might be in some way valid Christians, but never the Westboro Baptist Church. I get why the secular world might prefer it to work this way, but it's not clear to me why, from a Christian perspective, drawing the boundaries much too tight ought to be considered a worse failure than drawing them much too loose. If Christianity is a channel, and perhaps even a wide channel, why suppose that the center of that channel is the midpoint between modern liberal and conservative Christians, rather than somewhere like the midpoint of all Christians since Christ? Should one argue that the only true understanding of Christian love, charity, etc is the one from some particular tribal slice of post-2000s American Christianity?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
you really ought to watch Death of Stalin. It's probably the best black comedy of the last decade, maybe longer.
I suspect they might not be smart enough to do some of the most complicated tasks proficiently.
Again: I am absolutely not dogmatic about the following, just groping for description of my experience.
They seem smart enough to do almost anything, but only when actual crystalized smartness is arranged in a properly-aligned constellation around them such that the focal geometry works properly. As soon as the alignment is broken, they get real stupid real fast. From this I infer that they are not themselves intelligent; the constellation is where the intelligence is, they're only focusing it, or channeling it, or pumping it.
Actual intelligence would actively align itself, would internalize the constellation in a cohesive way. And the AI seems to do this, just to a very limited degree? Maybe, even probably, it'll do it better as the tech matures? Certainly I can imagine an AI actually built for the work I'm trying to do with it, which has in fact internalized these specific constellations to a degree indistinguishable from a human expert, and we just aren't there yet for 1900s-era tank cannon design simulations.
In any case, it's not that it's stupid; as you say, humans are stupid too. It's the way it's stupid, how stupidity spikes massively and unpredictably. The "channeling intelligence" model would seem to imply that this is going to be a chronic problem in the long term, but I'm just some dude bullshitting on the internet about my bottom-tier subscription shenanigans. I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.
But their inability then didn't mean they weren't intelligent, just that their intelligence was weaker.
Is a for loop intelligent, in any meaningful sense? are intelligence and automation synonyms, and it really is just a matter of scale? I would bet no, at least in terms of practical scale, but I'd readily admit that my position is largely held by inertia and that I'm standing to be corrected here. There's very plausibly going to come a point in the next year or two when the focal geometry auto-focuses in real-time and you can't find the seams any more, and the question becomes something you should probably just ask the machine itself and accept that the answer is the best you're going to get.
on to the more contentious part:
Lobotomies also work, it's just that they aren't really helpful.
This statement is fundamentally wrong. Lobotomies do something; they aren't a sugar pill. They absolutely do not work, as in do the thing their developers and promoters claimed they did to get them accepted as a valid medical treatment. The difference, I think, ought to be instructive in a context where I am pointing out that your claims vastly exceed the empirical evidence.
OK, so they oversold what could be done with crude brain surgeries.
And the field and the public at large overbought. And this pattern repeats itself everywhere throughout the history of psychology as a "science". You yourself are, I argue, overbuying the claim that "the brain is a computer". If the brain is a computer, it is a computer that we do not know how to do any computer-specific things with or to, and that is an observable fact.
But wireheading definitely works, there was that woman who rubbed her thumbs raw against the button. How is that not direct interaction with the brain?
We have heroin. how is heroin addiction not direct interaction with the brain? Show me how wireheading can be used to actually control people as one controls a machine, in any one of the millions and millions of ways that being able to control a specific person as one does a machine would be immediately and obviously useful. This is my understanding of your claim, and it is the claim I am disagreeing with. You said:
The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.
My understanding is that you are claiming the brain is a machine. I am asking you to show me a way that we can do machine shit with it. Smashing a machine with a baseball bat is not using it as a machine. Melting it into a brightly glowing puddle is not using it as a machine either. sitting it on a turntable and spinning it also is not using it as a machine. If the brain is a computer, show me code executing arbitrary operations, the way computers do. If the brain is a can opener, show me how you open a can of beans with it. And show me how you do these things against the will of the person currently occupying that brain, which is the obvious contrary hypothesis that is supposed to be refuted here.
But eventually something like that is going to be possible.
It might be. I'll believe it when I see it. Until I can see it, I'm going to point out that this is a faith-based claim.
Brain surgery is a real thing. This would just be an extension of brain surgery.
The mechanics of brain surgery are well understood in most cases, as they are an extension of the mechanics of regular surgery: stuff has been broken apart, you stitch it back together so it can heal. As noted above, this has not resulted in the development of mind surgery, despite a bunch of prominent scientists claiming it absolutely had, and then brain-damaging a bunch of people in a wildly irresponsible manner before common knowledge accumulated that they had lied.
Why are you so skeptical of this?
Because vast evil has been resulted from people being insufficiently skeptical of "scientific" "materialism" that was neither scientific nor materialist, and lobotomies are the very least of it. Similar claims about this specific subject have caused significant individual and collective harms over the course of the last century, because trusted authorities asserted them in a confident voice and sufficient skepticism could not be mustered to dissuade them. A huge portion of the culture war has been directly driven by these sorts of claims.
You are presenting this:
But eventually something like that is going to be possible.
...as a scientific, materialist claim. It is not scientific, and it is not materialist. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it means it can't actually be tested via the scientific method and the results observed. You think it ought to be true, that it is highly likely to be true, by inference from other scientific, materialist claims that have been verified, and that is well enough. But there not only is not solid, direct evidence that this is true, but there is solid evidence that it is not true: all the previous theories attempting to act productively on it that demonstrably failed when implemented, and the subsequent retreat into Determinism of the gaps.
Cheap, precise, non-invasive, long-lasting, permitted by the ethics board... That's the missing part, there's no actual impossibility.
I'll believe it when I see it. I used to be 100% on board with the idea that the brain was a computer and all that this would imply. But a big part of what made me on board with it was that I wanted to believe it was true, because I'd been sold all the shiny ideas and cool things we could do if it were true. Then I got the other half of the pitch, and my conclusion is two-fold: firstly, we do not actually have a solid basis to claim that the brain is a computer, and secondly, if the brain is in fact a computer, I very much hope I'm safely dead before they figure out mature brain-computer-science.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I'm aware of the general vibe you're pointing at, but I've honestly never come across a strong claim by someone I'd consider a serious scientist (i.e. someone who has made a meaningful contribution in some scientific field) that resembles anything akin to mind control or mind reading, that's more or less the domain of speculative fiction authors.
At least arguably Freud, depending on how much weight you're willing to give to his motte-and-bailey caveats.
At least arguably Dewey and many of his disciples in the blank-slate educators camp.
Marx, notably not a scientist, but a whole lot of scientists don't seem to have been able to tell.
What is commonly argued, and what I personally also find defensible given what we know about material reality, is that the human brain, which for the purposes of this argument is assumed to be equivalent to the mind in terms of functional behavior apparent to outside observers, is in principle a deterministic material thing and thus predictable just like any other material system is, again in principle.
I have zero argument with an axiom that the human mind is a materialistic machine, so long as it's recognized that this is, in fact, being used as an axiom, not as something that's been empirically proven. My objection is to the often-conflated claim that the brain has been empirically proven to be a machine. I object to this because the great majority of useful things that we can do to and with machines that make the label such a useful one, we can't actually do to or with the brain.
I'm hearing good things about Ozempic, though it's not as effective as it is with hunger.
I'm on Ozempic, and it's not exactly a silver bullet for hunger either. But in the case of both alcohol and Ozempic, we're still a long, long way from mechanistic interactions, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
I was picturing more this sort of situation, but one must admit it's a phrase with endless possibilities for interpretation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
while scrolling the firehose view, I misread #2 as "This Toilet Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", and must admit some disappointment now that I've corrected the misimpression.
It's not like you have to care, of course, and plenty of people on this board have made it clear that they don't. But being broadly pro-Trump was very common for younger Reds in Europe in 2023: Farage rallies etc. were full of Trump supporters (like me) and now you can barely find any.
What would you have us do? Your governments are no longer a threat to you, because a threat implies eventuality, and there is nothing eventual about the ruin they are inflicting on you. Your red analogues failed and were utterly suppressed, or in some cases their leadership openly betrayed them in a bid to secure Blue approval. Those governments are still an active threat to us, in that they have not yet suppressed us, but are actively working to do so. Ignoring that threat materially decreases our chances of survival. If we survive, we might be able to offer you more direct aid in the future, but if we fail as you have then there is no hope at all.
European/Western governments actively participate in the American political process, and they participate uniformly in support of Blues, and have done so for decades. Well, that's a two-way street as it turns out, and no amount of smoll bean pretense changes the logic.
And none of this is an argument that the way we're doing this is the best way possible, or even not a mistake; Trump is very far from an ideal tool for securing better policies, given his numerous evident failings. But what is the better option?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
You're familiar with the term "manipulation of procedural outcomes", I presume?
It’s not news that I believe the Cathedral is evil. And since it’s 2008, you’d expect evil to have not only a name, but a blog. And sure enough it does. Evil’s name is Timothy Burke, he is a professor of history (specializing in southern Africa) at Swarthmore, and his blog is Easily Distracted.
The great thing about Professor Burke is that he appears to have a conscience. Almost every post in his blog can be understood as a kind of rhetorical struggle to repress some inner pang of doubt. He is the Good German par excellence. When people of this mindset found themselves in the Third Reich, they were “moderate Nazis.” In Czechoslovakia or Poland they “worked within the system.” Professor Burke is nowhere near being a dissident, but there is a dissident inside him. He doesn’t like it, not at all. He stabs it with his steely knives. He can check out any time. But he can never leave. His position is a high one, and not easy to get.
The entire blog is characterized—indeed it could serve as a type specimen for—the quality that Nabokov called poshlost. Simply an embarrassment of riches. I am saddened by the fact that, as a new parent, I cannot devour the whole thing. But as a case study, I have selected this. The whole post is a treat, but I am especially tickled by the line:
I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.
“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb.
Sounds like a win. When have the scheming eunuchs ever led us wrong?
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