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thejdizzler


				

				

				

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joined 2023 April 17 18:49:42 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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thejdizzler


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2023 April 17 18:49:42 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!


Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.


Background


I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.


David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.


I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.


Culture is not entertainment


I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.


Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.


Drugs are bad, actually


The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.


Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.


This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.


Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)


I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.


Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.


The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.


From Hans Bertens:




If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.




I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.


First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.


Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.


Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't run with my phone or headphones at all. There could be exposure to plastics from my dry-fit shirts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yea I can run a full marathon in Sub 2:35, so fat gain probably isn't the culprit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We went to an art activity (really fun) and then dinner (not as fun) and then I walked her home. Art activity was 2 hours, we had an hour before dinner reservation, then dinner was like 80 min, then walked her home.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A friend of a friend works Rhythm health, which does mail-in blood tests, and I got a free test last week from her. Despite nearly passing out while collecting blood from myself (this is the #1 reason I am not a medical doctor), I managed to do the collection successfully, and got my results back on Sunday. Everything looked fine or even good except for two things.


1). Low HDL. This has been a problem for the past few years, and I think it is because I don't eat any dietary cholesterol because I'm basically vegan other than eating a small amount of fish and shellfish. I had a long discussion with my boss about this, and our conclusion is that this isn't really a problem. HDL is a cholesterol scavenger that brings back extra cholesterol from tissues to the liver. My tissues probably need all the cholesterol they have (/synthesize it through the squalene pathway) so that would explain why my HDL is low.


2). High estrogen. This one was more concerning to me. My estrogen was 38 pg/dL (normal is 20-30). I have two theories about this. Firstly, I eat quite a bit of soy, so the test could be picking up phytoestrogens from that, artificially inflating the reading. The second is that I unfortunately have gained a bit of fat since 2023, which could also be increasing the amount of estrogen in my body. In either case, I'm going to bring it up with my PCP during my visit next Friday.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. Work: Need to get some projects off my plate, as I feel like I'm juggling too many balls right now. Still on track to graduate next May, if not sooner.
    2. 

  2. Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout again this morning: 40 min tempo at 5:40 pace, which is around 15-20 sec/mile faster than my planned Boston pace! Nearly bonked at the end, which means that I'm not fueling as well as I could be.
    3. 

  3. Intellectual Stuff: Pacific trilogy is done, and working on finishing Italian book. After this is done I'll be working through Game of Thrones (in Spanish) and trying to finish Indigenous continent. Also starting After Virtue by MacIntyre for philosophy book club, which should make for some good discussion.
    4. 

  4. Finances: Over spending targets last month by about $220, but still had a 7% savings rate because it was an excellent month for dividends. First part of parents' transfer(120k) came through and I liquidated it a few days ago and am keeping it in a 3.5% MM fund until I decide what to do with it. Have already put ~8k of it into my IRA. This coming month expenses should be under 3.2k, even if I do end up signing up for a 70.3 in Madison in September.
    5. 

  5. Dating: Had a date with the Saudi girl on Saturday, which was fun for about 2 hours, but not so much for the other 3! Will not be seeing her again.
    6. 

  6. Tarot: No session this week.
    7. 

  7. Socializing: Went back to Spanish happy hour and silent book club this week. Also stopped by a furry convention in downtown Baltimore and had a good laugh.
    8. 

  8. Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
    9. 

  9. Mental health: think anxiety is probably screen time and nutrition related! The anxiety is often accompanied by hunger. Will continue to observe and hopefully get to the bottom of this.
    10. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Finished the final book in Ian W. Toll's Pacific War trilogy Twilight of the Gods last night. I didn't like this one quite as much as the other two, partially because it was nearly 50% longer, but mainly because after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the outcome of the War in the Pacific became extremely clear, and so all the tension of the previous volumes was no longer present. The book also began to be a little repetitive: Toll covered ground he had already tread pretty extensively in the last book with covering the submarine war, and there is a tendency for biographic details about the American commanders to also be repeated between books. That said, I learned a lot from this book about the war, and am excited to move on to another period in history (although may have to check out various recommendations from other users on the forum). Some more specific history thoughts below.


    

  1. 

    The Japanese high command knew that the war was over after the battle of the Philippine Sea, but they couldn't make peace for another year for internal reasons. They basically needed either a huge victory that would bring the Americans to the negotiating table, or a huge defeat to break the power of the army/navy. The high-ups (admirals, generals, etc.) were beholden to the ideology of the mid tier of officers (captains, majors, etc.) that would have launched a coup if they knew that peace talks were happening. In fact, some officers in Tokyo did try and do this the night before Hirohito's surrender speech was released to the public, but they were foiled by the non-cooperation of key army officers. It was this same extremism in the officer corp that caused Japan's initial descent into fascism, and I wonder where the initial drivers of this ideology came from, considering that Toll points out that the philosophy of the militarists was quite different from both traditional samurai honor and the Meiji code of conduct.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    In contrast to the last book, the Japanese leadership began to make tactically very smart decisions during the island hopping campaign. No more banzai charges or wasting air and sea power on stupid resupply, but defense in depth relying on elaborate fortifications and underground bunkers that were resistant to air strikes (maybe a lesson for the current Iran war). Kamikazes were also brilliant and presaged the age of guided missiles, which would challenge the supremacy of aircraft carriers. Americans overcame these barriers through material might and bravery on the ground, but it cost them a lot.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    This book is very critical of two American commanders in the Pacific: Bill Halsey and Douglas MacArthur. Halsey makes a huge error at the beginning of the book where he sends his whole fleet to chase the Japanese carriers (and win glory for himself) rather than effectively protecting the landings on Leyte, making them extremely vulnerable to a surprise attack by the Japanese surface fleet, which only failed because of luck. Halsey also sails the fleet into two typhoons, and refuses to ever admit he made a mistake at Leyte, which doesn't help his case. MacArthur doesn't make as huge of tactical blunders, but conducts himself like an ass with the other theatre commanders, and declares that Manila has been liberated when there's still three months of fighting left to go. Neither man is really punished or censored because they're both so popular with the press.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Service rivalries in both Japan and America played a big part in decision making. The island of Pelieu, which probably could have been bypassed on the way to the Philippines for example, was invaded at least partially because Nimitz wanted to maintain command of marine divisions for a little longer. On the Japanese side, the entire Pacific War was the result of a service rivalry: the Navy needed a war of equivalent size to the one in China to justify its share of the budget. I wonder how large of an issue this is today, and if steps have been taken to unify the American command structure to prevent these kind of clashes.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    This book at least partially convinced me that most of the fighting in the Pacific War was pretty unnecessary. Americans effectively had air supremacy over Japan starting in late 1944, and the combination of bombings and submarine attacks could have completely destroyed the Japanese economy without invasions of Okinawa or the Philippines at all, much less the planned invasions of the home islands. Of course hindsight is 20/20, and these things weren't so obvious at the time.
    

    6. 

  6. 

    When I used to go to Catholic Church more and hang out in Catholic spaces, I always heard that the Nagasaki cathedral was the planned ground zero for the second atomic bomb, and that this somehow represented that America was using world war 2 to secretly destroy catholic hegemony (with other evidence from Monte Casino and other battles in Italy). Like all good conspiracy theories, this one contains a kernel of truth: the Nagasaki cathedral was destroyed in the blast, and a lot of Japanese catholics died. But the bombs original target wasn't even Nagasaki, but nearby Kokura. Only a series of hilarious mishaps and mistakes lead it to being dropped on Nagasaki, and the target was, if anything basically at random because visibility was so poor. Toll notes that the Shinto shrine in Nagasaki was spared from being destroyed, which many Japanese took to be a sign of the strength of their indigenous faith.
    

    7. 

  7. 

    I was incredibly surprised by how quickly the Japanese people seemed to about-face and accept their occupation with good spirits. This was partially due to the fact that Americans behaved much better than expected, but also I think because the hearts of the Japanese people hadn't really been in the war since at least mid 1944, and they were ready to ditch the militarism, which was a historical aberration in any case. In this sense, the American maintenance of the authority of the emperor was very smart, as it allowed the Japanese to feel like they were returning to some tradition, rather than having their society totally disassembled.
    

    8. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Link doesn't seem to be working for me


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I second this motion. I have blocked him, but I would like the forum to be populated with higher class discussions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t understand your definition of a genocide. Genocide means an elimination of an entire race. If the population of a race is increasing in an area it’s not a genocide, or at least it’s a very bad one. What’s happening in Gaza looks very different from actual intentional genocides in the past, which involved deliberate mass murder of civilians. What the Israelis are doing looks much more like war, with a lowered tolerance for civilians casualties.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
uhh I think we would do this without Israel pretty readily because oil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A couple factors that make it much more difficult


    

  1. Israelis have the bomb.
    2. 

  2. 6 million is a lot more than 750k, especially when almost every single person has significant military experience.
    3. 

  3. Who's gonna do it? The Arabs? They've never won a war against the state of Israel. The West? Good luck dealing with the optics of destroying the only functional government in the Middle East to appease some Blue-haired leftists and Neo-nazis.
    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do not believe in apartheid, but the status of Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel is unclear. Arabs in Israel have full rights, but Gaza and the West Bank are still occupied territories under martial law. If that were to change and Palestinians were not granted full rights, I would consider it apartheid.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.


    

  1. 

    First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
    

    6. 



Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for March 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Medication free!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for March 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. 

    Work: Had a mild freakout at work when my (published) software wasn't working. Part of it was a quick bug fix, part of it was the user not exploring the parameter space correctly. Worked a bit extra today and fixed it. Planning on getting some Claude Code help with cleaning up the GUI (back button, fixing weird window pop up, etc.) by the end of this week. Other than that experiments are going to plan!
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout this morning: 2 x 20 min at 5:55 and then 5:37 pace. Feeling on track to run sub 2:35 at Boston. Annoyed at the Baltimore youth for stealing my nice UA jacket.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Intellectual Stuff: Very happy with Marx blog post. Wrapping up the last half of Toll's final Pacific War book, and then really trying to finish my Italian book. Spanish surprisingly has not suffered from my lack of practice, and I still speak fine during my weekly lesson.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Finances: Expenses are no longer so low this month because I went to a jazz show when my friend was in town and booked a flight to Florida to see my other friend. Parent's transfer kicked off successfully, and will gradually be liquidating the assets over the next few years until I need to buy a house. Now that it's spring I'm realizing how little I actually need a car, so that may not be happening after all.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Dating: Still seeing the same girl, but I'm no longer very enthused about it. She's began to come off as very childish/delusional which I don't want to deal with long term.
    

    6. 

  6. 

    Tarot: Good session last night
    

    7. 

  7. 

    Socializing: My friend Simon was here this weekend and we had a great time biking around Baltimore and hanging out.
    

    8. 

  8. 

    Screen time: 1.2 hours.
    

    9. 

  9. 

    Mental health: have been very anxious for some reason waking up. Would like to get to the bottom of this.
    

    10. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Final book in Toll's Pacific War Trilogy! Also still chugging on the Golden Compass in Italian, and we've started After Virtue in philosophy book club.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Indian Wars: Battle of Little Bighorn


Spanish-American War: None


WW1: None (was surprised by this)


WW2 (Pacific): Pearl Harbor, Java Sea, initial campaign in the Philippines in WW2, Battle of Savo Island in the Guadalcanal campaign.


WW2 (Europe): Kasserine Pass, Market Garden.


Korea: Yalu River


Vietnam: None


Gulf War I: None


Gulf War II: None


Afganistan: None


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wow love that Djikstra essay!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is my least favorite of his books to be honest. The best in my opinion is A Brightness Long Ago


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I did get a lot of out of it, so it wasn't a total waste, but yeah the theory doesn't really fully clarify things. Back to being a pretty shelf decoration I guess.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No I think we have the same understanding here, I think there's just a confusion of terms. If you're in a factory making widgets, maybe the first twenty have a positive use value for you (maybe you can feed your robot pet with widgets). After that the use value of each widget quickly approaches 0, so you'd rather sell them on the market. The same is true for any commodity you might produce, as a subsistence farmer or otherwise. The only situation in which use value and exchange value are exactly equal (or use value is always higher) is when you have a society of hunter gatherers, as you note.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a good question. I think the massive labor glut eventually would have happened (see the US in the early 20th century/developing countries today where people voluntarily leave/left productive farms to pursue wealth in the big city), but labor saving would probably been a priority for capitalist investment even more than it already was. I think we would also probably have a much weaker union culture, although that might be a good thing depending on who you ask.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.




Well not exactly. The enclosures act made subsistence farming less than subsistence for most farmers, so people either had to starve or migrate to cities. It wasn't a preference.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As promised my review of Marx! Blog version for nice photos


We finally did it! I started the first volume of Capital with an offshoot of my philosophy book club last July, and we wrapped up the book late last month. I’m very glad I read Marx, as I think his historical work, and some of his theories are incredibly insightful, most significantly his materialist analysis of history. However, I found myself incredibly frustrated by several of Marx’s assumptions, and his poor form when citing both sources and engaging with other philosophers. While I probably missed and misunderstood a fair chunk of the book , I think I clearly understood The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value, The Historical Development of the Capitalist System, and Historical Materialism. The second of these is by far the best part of the book.


I would recommend that most serious philosophers of history read this book, and actually not the Communist Manifesto, as the later book is largely irrelevant to modern society, while I found much to take away from Capital that seemed relevant to how the world still works today.


My History with the Book


I’ve almost always been on the left politically, despite my disdain for identity and gender politics, and the disastrous political strategy and lack of discipline of the Democrats, at least in the United States, since the 1970s. In high-school and early college, this meant identifying with people like Sam Harris, but throughout college I began to move further and further left economically, voting for Bernie in the 2020 primary, and holding many communist-adjacent ideals going into graduate school. During this time, I also read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century with my friend Billy, and found it convincing.


In my second year of graduate school however, one of my roommates gifted me a copy of James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State, which made me reconsider if I actually supported socialism or communism, as more often than not, these forms of government required coercive and damaging forms of political centralization. It was around this time that I suggested to philosophy book club that we read Marx: I wanted to understand what the problems of Capitalism that communism and socialism actually proposed solutions to, and to start to figure out if there might be other ways to address those problems besides coercive state action.


When we finally got around to reading the book nearly three years after I initially suggested it, my political outlook shifted almost totally. I became energy-pilled, and skeptical of modernity and progress in general, and a proponent of degrowth. This will be largely the lens through which I discuss Marx.


The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value


Unlike the Communist Manifesto, Capital is a critique of Capitalism, not a proposal for an alternative system. Thus, throughout the book Marx is focused exposing the inherent contradictions of capitalism, rather than proposing solutions to those problems. Two key reasons to read this book rather than the Manifesto are that these critiques are still relevant today, and that Marx’s (and his successor’s) solutions often don’t work in practice.


Marx begins the book by attempting to define what value is. He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be. If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity. Money was created to facilitate this exchange, as well as a marker of price. This dual nature of money creates the first problem of capitalism: the conflict between the need for the commodity behind money to be stable in value, but also adaptable enough to allow rapid exchange of commodities. I don’t we’ve found a satisfactory solution to this yet, given historical currency collapse following debasement. The current credit/petrodollar system doesn’t seem any more stable either.


The other issue that money creates is the mass production of commodities for their exchange value rather than their use value. This is not necessarily problematic, but tends to lead to things that certainly are. Commodity production creates a dependence on trade for subsistence, which creates fragility. The specialization inherent in specialized commodity production also alienates the laborer from the means of production actually necessary to his or her subsistence. This also leads to what Marx calls “commodity fetishism”, where certain properties are given to commodities that actually are caused by social relations. A good example of this is land rent, which seems like it comes from the “land” or “housing” commodity, but actually comes from the social relation of the landlord-tenant relationship. Neither hunter gatherers nor the Soviet Union had “rent”, so the concept can’t from the commodity in of itself.


Commodity fetishism leads Marx to the question of where value actually comes from, if it’s not from the goods in of themselves. He posits that this use-value comes from a single place: human labor, and that any profit in the capitalist system comes from stealing or appropriating some of this value from the worker. Marx was not the first to come up with this idea: the labor theory of value originates from Adam Smith, but Marx builds on this theory, and in fact the rest of the book is built on this one premise.


Unfortunately, I think the labor theory of value is wrong, or at least incomplete. The first problem with the theory is the issue of supply and demand, or put in another way, that a commodity can have vastly different use-values in different temporal and geographical locations. A winter coat will have much more value in Siberia in the winter than in India in the summer for example. Marx tries to get around this by defining only “social useful” labor as contributing to value, but this is so vague as to be incredibly unconvincing. The second issue comes from how Marx defines natural resources like land, sunlight, or clean water as “free gifts of nature”. These things are not truly free and require immense amounts of non-human labor to maintain and produce. The physiocrats were probably much more right than they were wrong.


Even if we do take the labor theory of value as true, Marx makes some headscratching exclusions. Neither merchants nor managers actually create value, despite the former enhancing use-value by transporting goods to distant markets, and the later creating value by enhancing the value of his charges’ labor.


If I had to replace the Labor Theory of Value with something it would be the Energy Theory of Value. This preserves some aspects of the Labor Theory of Value: human labor is the oldest form of energy transfer in the books, and makes space for the value added by sunlight (solar energy), the water cycle, and fossil fuels. Energy is also incredibly correlated to GDP in the way that labor value is not. Of course this still doesn’t fix the supply and demand problem, but I, unlike Marx, don’t require a totalizing explanation.


The Historical Development of the Capitalist System


After laying his groundwork, Marx then charts the development of the capitalist system, both in theory, and then in practice. Two elements are necessary to seed the creation of this system are separating peasants from their means of subsistence, and a large market for commodity trade. The first is necessary so the worker has no alternative other than to participate in the labor economy, as they are unable to go back to subsistence farming, either by law or because they couldn’t live off the land available. This part of the historical process has happened many times, from Sumner up to the modern day, but Marx most closely studies it in England, where starting with the Tudors, the government of England slowly stripped rights and privileges away from the peasantry that made it more and more difficult for these people to maintain themselves as independent farmers. The second element, commodity trade, is required to give the system a place to sell large amounts of goods, and thus outcompete artisans that don’t benefit from economies of scale.


Early capitalism developed from the medieval guild and workshop system, where the traditional apprentice-journeyman-master relationship began to breakdown and masters began to employ large numbers of journeymen or apprentices that would never have their own workshops. In this stage, masters began to try and more heavily exploit their workers through increasing work hours and reducing pay, but the amount that they could push was heavily limited due to the large amount of power that the workers had over the production process. Many societies, including Ancient Rome, reached this level of capitalist development, but were hamstrung by lack of access to critical technologies that allowed the harnessing of extra-somatic energy.


What allowed the West to break out of the proto-capitalist→collapse cycle was two things: the discovery of the Americas and the advent of truly global trade, and the discovery of fossil fuels. The former opened huge markets that would reward economies of scale much larger than could be served with workshops, and raw materials to serve these larger “factories”. The later allowed the development of machine technologies that would replace the input of human laborers. Marx calls these machines “Capital”. Over time, capitalists are incentivized to replace more and more of their workers with these machines, to increase the investment in what Marx calls “fixed” capital, rather than variable capital. The capitalist might want to do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, machinery tends to be less complicated than artisanal hand crafts to operate, meaning less skilled workers are required to operate it, meaning the capitalist doesn’t need to pay his workers as much and can profit more. Secondly, machinery allows capital to harness extra-somatic energy to do work, which is much cheaper than paying a worker. Marx doesn’t really acknowledge this second reason, but I think it’s an important addition to his argument from an energy perspective. Over time as this process snowballs, workers have less and less power to fight back against the increases in working hours, loss of wages, etc. because the labor required is so unskilled that they are easily replaceable. This kind of labor is also extremely degrading mentally and morally, and leads to psychological harm and alienation.


Capital tends to accumulate in larger and larger conglomerations, which also has the dangerous effect of centralizing political power. Piketty extensively documents this in Capital in the 21st Century: we were only saved from a snowballing capital accumulation by the massive capital destruction of the world wars.


Marx documents this process in England extensively, and most of the second half of the book is taken up with showing that this system does indeed exist in England and has become significantly more exploitative over the last fifty years, to the point where parts of England are beginning to become depopulated because labor practices chew through workers so quickly. The conditions in 19th century English sweatshops were also famously documented by Charles Dickens, and were eventually put a stop to by the government due to the action of labor unions, excessive emigration, the issue of national defense, and moral outrage, among other things.


Today we can see the same behavior from tech companies, as they attempt to replace large chunks of their workforce with AI, perhaps the biggest capital expense in the history of capital expenses, which has already resulted in massive quality of life decreases for those tech workers that remain.


Historical Materialism


The final point I want to discuss is Marx’s development of historical materialism. The philosophy of history can be split into two general schools of thought. Idealism, where ideas drive the development of human societies, was the one I was taught in school. Feudalism→ Capitalism→ Enlightenment→ Democracy→ Global Prosperity. The other school, materialism, posits that the social relations and ideas of human societies are determined primarily by their material conditions. Of course it’s not really an either/or question, it’s a both/and: ideas and material conditions are symbiotically related to each other. But I tend to lean heavily towards the material side of the question: societies with similar material conditions tend to have similar ideas and institutions, and merely transplanting an idea from one society to another with completely different material conditions rarely, if ever leads to that idea taking root. This idea is central to Marx’s understanding of the development of capitalism, which he views as a deterministic process that flows from specific material conditions. While the exact teleological implications of this are not important for this book in particular, historical materialism is important for understanding what kind of policy and moral prescriptions might be effective.


For instance, in this book Marx discusses the interplay between the capitalist system of production and family structure. While some have erroneously interpreted his commentary as advocacy for destruction of the nuclear family, Marx merely is observing that the nuclear family cannot survive an economic system where women are required to work in the same way as men. The fertility decline and all its downstream “causes” (feminism, dating crisis, etc.) are due to this fact. As I have argued extensively before, if we want to reverse the fertility decline, we have to change the arrangement of labor that brought it about. Ideas are not enough.


Actually reading this book


As much as I got a ton out of reading this book, the actual experience of being immersed in Marx wasn’t terribly pleasant. Marx is a bit of snarky asshole, and the fact that I had not read any of his intellectual enemies made this snark confusing rather than funny. He also had a nasty habit of interpreting these same enemies in the worst possible light and of poorly paraphrasing or sometimes almost completely making up sources. I can see where modern leftists get some of their worst tendencies. Because of this, I can only give the book 4/5 stars.


Anyway, thanks for reading, and I would appreciate any corrections on my understanding of Marx and materialism in general.