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One like, one hot take time.
One like, one hot take time.
1. Any good definition of "people" includes great apes
2. Elephants and most whales are on the fence when it comes to full personhood. Even so, abusing them is something much worse than the same thing done to dumber animals.
3. That nuclearizing the grid isn't a topline priority for any major political faction is as good a sign as any that our society has become Byzantine.
4. Liberalism doesn't work without virtue.
5. Anarchy works great without virtue, as long as you're packing roughly as much heat as your nosy neighbor or the local hill tribesmen.
6. Small polities floating in wider sea of anarchy is roughly where we're headed, so I'd prepare for that if I were you.
7. I was right, y'all were wrong, the CHAZ didn't evaporate after 72 hours.
8. Start taking autonomous zones seriously, because you're gonna be buying your drugs in one in a year or two.
9. Alternatives to the modern state will be tried often and in diverse places in the coming years. At least some of them will work really well.
10. Internet rationality is to progressivism as Luther was to the papacy.
11. Lesswrong has very strong "95 theses" vibes.
12. If anybody is gonna try to pull a coup between now and whenever Trump leaves office, it'll be somebody McRaven, and he'll have the full backing of mainstream progressives.
13. Assuming Biden wins in the fall it's gonna be hilarious watching him and the gang try to impose their vision of normalcy on *all this*.
14. Everybody thinks the big downside risk of the woke nuts taking over is something like the Cultural Revolution, but no, it probably looks a lot more like the Great Leap Forward.
15. Restating the above: the real danger of woke nuts is not how they might persecute ideological enemies, it's how they might fuck up the economy during an attempted reorg.
16. Given state of things, I recommend getting your hands on a rifle and convincing all your friends to do the same. It'll be nice to have that guarantee of political agency lying around, trust me.
17. The point of guns has never been recreation, it's been self defense in both the micro and the macro context.
18. Communications systems determine the scope of polities, weapons systems determine their character, social systems determine their longevity.
19. The civil unrest we're seeing has a lot more to do with the elimination of sports than a lot of people would like to admit. I shudder to think what will happen if football doesn't come back this fall.
20. Personal moral disorder is underrated as a driver of unhappiness.
21. Kindness is somewhat overrated by people who think that there is no acceptable alternative mode of interaction and wildly underrated by people who confuse it with coddling.
22. Relatedly:
Linus Torvalds is blameless in all things and can do no wrong.
Linus Torvalds is blameless in all things and can do no wrong.
23. Evolution is in some sense just one big rolling extinction event.
24. Most academic "science" done today is the product of high-output low-impact research cartels finding ways to spend their grant money.
25. The vast majority of "experts" who are cited in the press are actually just administrators who might not even deal with indentured grad students anymore.
26. The scariest thing about the university system collapsing is that we don't have a replacement waiting in the wings because that would be impermissible in a university-dominated culture. The collapse itself is long overdue and well-deserved.
27. Though I use it a lot, I'm skeptical of the word "institution", which seems bound up in industrial bureaucracies that clearly no longer work.
28. Proust questionnaire answers are only interesting when viewed longitudinally.
29. The "replication crisis" is a very self-serving frame for institutionalized social science to critique its bullshit production process.
30. Clausewitz famously said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means", but I think that that's inverted. Politics is war by other means.
31. Most of the evidence of Sino-Roman relations is underwater. If maritime archeology were somewhat more sophisticated I think we could build a much, much more interesting picture of Eurasian antiquity.
32. Culture moving more slowly than technology is an artefact of modernity. Premodern societies had astonishingly complex cultures that could change a lot despite underlying agricultural occupations remaining static. Catastrophe brings change, and we know they had a lot of that.
33. We know way more than we need to about the fall of Rome and way less than we need to about the Bronze Age Collapse.
34. Sinophobia and Russophobia are very real strains in Anglo politics, but far nastier, far more open Anglophobia is a central strain in Chinese and Russian politics.
35. Russia is the successor state of the Golden Horde and mostly still behaves like it.
37. Systematic, large-scale voter fraud happens all the time in the US, usually in the form of dead or demented people voting absentee in Democratic primaries.
38. Fraud is, by its nature, difficult to detect directly, but it's not hard to see when you look at demographics. Either Detroit or Chicago have many times the proportional number of politically engaged centenarians than Okinawa or something is fishy.
39. The "there are almost no convictions for voter fraud" line reflexively trotted out by Democrats is correct, but only because we spend next to nothing on election integrity and investigating or prosecuting voter fraud.
40. This is unfortunate, because the primary victims of voter fraud are Democrats running against big city political machines. Early-20th century-style fraud on a scale significant enough to tip general elections at the state level doesn't happen much anymore.
41. 0.999... = 1
42. You are obligated to hit like on videos that you enjoy, but not obligated to subscribe unless you enjoy three or more of a channel's videos.
Brief interlude to promote my homie @ThomasDFish's hot takes: https://twitter.com/ThomasDFish/status/1274805251099496449
Let's see, who and or what have we not flamed yet?
43. Lorne Micheals is personally responsible for making mainstream of American comedy devolve into a series of inoffensive chuckles.
44. The hardcore blue routine trend of the post-2000 era was an equally lame reaction to this.
45. Joe Rogan is a much better interviewer than he is a comedian.
46. "Starship Troopers" is one of the greatest scifi novels ever written, and the vast majority of people don't understand why.
47. "Starship Troopers" is not about militarism, that's just the topsoil that the movie burrowed into. The bedrock of the story in the novel is an examination of human nature in extreme circumstances, all the way down to how soldiers become attached to working dogs.
48. Western society will pay dearly for its hostility to family formation.
49. Electronic music is having a moment again, and I think it's because we're all in need of a soundtrack for the future.
50. If life is going to increasingly resemble a Gibson novel, we owe it to ourselves to at least dial in the A E S T H E T I C S
51. If you're not closely following the homefab (mostly 3d printed) firearm world, you're missing something truly earthshattering.
52. It's not just the ability to fabricate firearms, it's the ability to fabricate complex tools and equipment that can operate while subjected to bullet-like forces. The technical fan-out is gonna be insane.
53. If you like to talk shit about the mainstream press all day but you don't send at least a newspaper subscription's worth of money each month (assuming you're not broke, etc) to independent media operations whose content you consume, you are a huge poser.
Re the above, I think the folks at @bellingcat and @PopularFrontCO are particularly deserving of your financial support.
54. Homefab firearms are the violent end of capacity diffusion, but it's important to pay attention to the healing end as well. Groups Four Thieves Vinegar Collective have made huge strides in homefab pharma: https://fourthievesvinegar.org/our-mission
(* "Groups like Four Thieves...")
55. If you can do complex chemistry precisely at a small scale, those advances can feed right back into the fabrication processes discussed above. We may soon be able to access the tools for high quality healthcare at minimal cost and with no state gatekeeping.
56. If you're not already picking up on the theme here, I'll make it explicit: we're marching in the direction of something resembling anarchy to the steady drumbeat of technological progress. This isn't some political programme that can be rolled back.
57. I have no better word to describe NYC fireworks discourse than schizoid. Also, what kind of halfassed urbanite are you if you're disturbed by the occasional loud noise late at night?
I'm going to bed, BUT...
Vote on what topic we should examine next:
Vote on what topic we should examine next:
58. Wolfram's NKS theories are canon, the universe emerges from automata, we just haven't found the right rules yet.
(pictured: a textile cone sea snail with the Rule 30 cellular automata pattern on its shell)
(pictured: a textile cone sea snail with the Rule 30 cellular automata pattern on its shell)
59. Lots of people died. https://mobile.twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1240680270988292100
60. Our collective bitter resentment of society for its failures needs to be channelled productively or we're in for some ugly days ahead.
61. The reckless disregard for its pricing power is one of the West's most reprehensible qualities.
62. That pricing irresponsibility is not a problem with markets, it's a problem with the behavior of state-backed market actors.
63. American ethanol fuel production screwing with global food markets is an excellent example of this. We further impoverish the world's very poor because of regulatory capture by the farm lobby.
64. "Let's have a 'free market' but screw with so many elements of it that we get planned economy-style failures all over the place" seems to be the Anglo economic ideology. Worst of both worlds.
65. That's not to say certain things shouldn't be subsidized, or even directly controlled by some set of infrastructural commons management agencies. But we should roundly reject stupid shit like the FAA-secured monopoly on American-made passenger aircraft that Boeing holds.
66. FDR was an actual fascist autocrat.
67. The state that emerged from the New Deal was explicitly modeled on Mussolini's Italy, all the way down to the cult of personality around the leader.
68. Thankfully Anglo liberalism has very deep roots and made it out mostly alive, albeit very damaged and distorted.
69. By far the worst threats to the liberal order come from self-professed "liberals" like FDR acting like a wannabe Eurofash dictator or from the the Kennedy gangster dynasts nearly getting us into a nuclear war multiple times.
I'm getting called a fascist at least once a day now, shit is ridiculous.
Throwback to when the anime avatar Nazis convinced themselves that I was a communist at the exact same time that woke nuts were calling me racist for using the term "ethnic" to refer to prison gang organization. Still winning the ratio though. https://mobile.twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1267168639746260993
Which is a good segue to...
70. Leftists are really good at organizing prisons and if they all got dumped in the US prison system at once they would quickly find themselves at the top of the inmate power structure. This has happened everywhere that leftists are jailed en masse.
70. Leftists are really good at organizing prisons and if they all got dumped in the US prison system at once they would quickly find themselves at the top of the inmate power structure. This has happened everywhere that leftists are jailed en masse.
Picking this strand back up on the request of @bayes_baes https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1274596825790656512
71. Dutch civil engineering practices are going to take over every populated coast on the planet, and it's going to completely change the physical dimensions of existing cities, to say nothing of the new ones we'll build in the next few decades.
72. Fact of the matter is that absent some Herculean effort to proliferate nuclear reactors inside the next decade we're going to see sea levels rise by a lot. We may even be underestimating how quickly the polar caps will go, if methane release from permafrost is a real thing.
73. The billion people who will be displaced by flooding in the next few decades are going to need to go somewhere, and chances are they'll stop asking nicely after a while.
74. The industrialized world's authorities know that this is going to happen, but they have no plan and no interest in coming up with one. When the cards are on the table, the first world's leaders are totally fine with mass drownings. That's morally unacceptable.
