Taken from a hotel room in Hong Kong, ca. 2005:

I just can’t get on board with the Tesla and SpaceX hatred so popular in the leftist community.

Our society needs more big, outlandish projects, not fewer of them.

And with Solar Roof and related technologies, Tesla will probably reduce carbon emissions more than all the leftist carping and caviling has done in the history of the world.

Are these the right big outlandish projects? Maybe not. But most of the left’s idea of a world-changing project is to scold someone for cultural appropriation if they eat Chinese food.

Who is going to win that battle of ideas?

Hint: it won’t be the idiots grousing that some white woman wore a kimono.

I am always surprised by the stupid-ass garbage Democrats think they can prove with data when they don’t even understand what they are looking at.

No sociological examination of what tends to occur under conditions of economic anxiety, or what shifted those views. No comprehension of that you can’t use racism to both explain why someone voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016.

This is all to support the narrative of, “Oh, these people are just deplorables, racists, all! And going after their vote is pointless and shall ever be.”

Never mind how many of them would’ve voted for Bernie if he’d been the nominee, or that often the actual views of these “deplorables” align more closely with a socialist slant.

I know, I know, Echidne and people like her had all their hopes and dreams wrapped up in the very flawed, terrible candidate that was Clinton. I understand.

But fucking hell, at least make an effort to have some deeper outlook on it all than, “Stupid racist white people vote for the white man because they hate immigrants, Muslims, black people and always will! Screw them!”

This is how and why the Democrats will lose again in 2018, and 2020.

You can tell the war against knowledge is ramping up by how heavily philosophy is being attacked and besmirched of late.

Of all the humanities, philosophy delves the deepest into how do we know that we know something, why we believe what we believe, how to determine what we are actually achieving when we think we are undertaking something, and ascertaining if our “logical” assumptions actually comport with how the universe or human reasoning actually functions. That is, among many other topics and examinations in the field.

Thus, it is extremely, extremely dangerous. More dangerous than any “empirical*” science because it has the power to overturn entirely the way humans think about the world. To be glib, change your mind, the world changes with it.

That is exactly why philosophy and its practice is such a huge threat.

Socrates was put to death for a reason.

*I’m not denigrating empiricism per se, but rather observing that many think they are practicing empiricism when they very much are not.

Lately, the Democrat and pseudo-liberal argument seems to be “no real change is possible,” and that attempting anything more than tweaks to an immoral and human-hostile system is futile.

Meanwhile, there is Trump.

I know it’s incredibly unpopular to say this, but IPv6 was designed by idiots.

And no, it’s not because I don’t understand it. I understand it fine. Because I understand it quite well and have deployed it in the real world is exactly why I abhor it.

Can confirm this:

Except most of the time the packs are 65 pounds and the march is usually 20km.

I appreciate that Mozilla is undertaking initiatives like this. I really do.

But in the most important ways, they have become hostile to their users by destroying their add-on community and making many developers flee in disgust.

Without the add-ons that allow greater control of the browser, there is just no long-term reason to use Firefox compelling enough to matter.

It’s sad, but it’s true. Making the browser a little faster won’t change a now years-long history of terrible decisions and user hostility.

I’m still thinking about this piece, but wanted to highlight a great paragraph found therein.

His study makes no pretension to scientific, or rather pseudoscientific, quantification, for example by first defining random groups of dictators and intellectuals and then administering structured questionnaires to the intellectuals about their attitude to the dictators. This kind of precision is often mistaken for rigor, but measurement is not meaning, and humans inhabit a world of meaning.

“Measurement is not meaning.” Four words that I’ve written entire screeds about, less successfully.

To achieve success in the US, real liberals (not pseudo-liberals like Kevin Drum) will have to create their own media organizations and journalistic outlets, as any candidate remotely like Bernie Sanders will be far more strongly resisted next time by the neoliberal mainstream press.

And it can’t be measly, tiny websites like The Daily Kos, but media orgs that can rival Fox News in reach and their ability to be on message, and that while not resorting to the dupery and flimflam of Fox must still present paths to a successful capitalist- and neolib-resisting world. In addition, they must present this as a better life for everyone.

By necessity, most identity politics must be omitted, most Tumblr types excluded, and pretend resisters like Amanda Marcotte and Kevin Drum must not be allowed anywhere near it.

The focus must be on class struggle, on unity (yes, I know this is funny after talk of who must be excluded), and on how all lives — not just some chosen group of identity-politics-identified Special People — can be made better by true resistance to neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.

Fighting the mainstream media will be just as important next time as putting forward viable candidates, if not more so.

Invariably, websites that convert to “mobile-friendly” get far worse, less usable, and slower.

Amazing that we are going backwards so far so fast because people are idiots.

God, The Leftovers is so brilliant it’s an embarrassment to other TV shows.

And Carrie Coon…well, Damon Lindelhof said something great about her that is so apt. I’ll just quote it.

Carrie has to know that that’s a comedic reading, but Nora would not want to be laughed at in that instance — she’s so frustrated. And that’s what I think is really interesting, for someone who is so clearly in control of her own life, she keeps doing these crazy things — whether it be hiring a prostitute to shoot her in the chest or getting the Wu-Tang tattoo or locking all the doors in her house as if Kevin is going to try to get in a window. She does all these irrational, unreasonable things, yet she seems completely and totally sane and under control when she’s essentially behaving like a crazy person. I don’t know how Carrie does that. I think that if you were to ask most people, “Do you think that Nora Durst is crazy?” They would say, “What? No!” But I would like to read you from the list of 10 things that Nora Durst has done and ask you that question again.

Carrie is such a wonderful actor that she’s doing all these deranged things yet she brings you into her own world so skillfully that it all seems reasonable. But if you actually think about them for a moment they are all FUCKING INSANE.

Also, there has never been such a good show that deals with the issues of why the stories we tell matter, what they say about us, and what us listening to and believing in each other’s stories gives us, takes from us, and obligates us to be and to do — and to hope for.

I read the Fabius Maximus site because it often has cleverly correct ideas and conceptions of the world intermixed with ludicrous, absurd or offensive ideas. Sometimes, I am not sure which is which — and that is exactly why I do continue to visit.

Like in this post.

The whole idea of “beta males” is an absurd oversimplification of something occurring to the social realm as society and its relations changes. I just skip over those parts.

However, these paragraphs are stunningly perspicacious.

For centuries every generation of the West has been a journey into the unknown, with social change the only constant. We have consistently stumbled our way to success, with the occasional failure like those of the communist and fascist nations. That those were intellectual experiments should worry us, since we too are making radical changes based only on ideology — abandoning our successful strategy of incremental changes.

The most common reaction in comments to this series is that “nothing much will change.” That’s delusional. We have had the current social system of romantic love and nuclear families for an eyeblink of time in humanity’s long history. It is no more natural than the many other systems our species has used.

Something that I’ve been concentrating on more lately is the persistent denial of the huge social alterations that have occurred in my lifetime and immediately before. Many people insist that nothing has changed or that if it has changed, it doesn’t matter, or that I’m just delusional.

I think because I’ve never been strongly connected even to my own society and culture that it is easier for me to perceive these shifts, and also because I’m never quite “in the moment.” Wherever I am, I am always elsewhere too. Watching and not immersed.

Regardless, the obliviousness to enormous social alterations is something I’m very interested in sociologically. That someone else has noticed that in a different context is heartening in a way.

“Regulations” need better branding.

I propose we call them “protections” instead.

Instead of building regulations — building protections.

Instead of fire regulations — fire protections.

Environmental protections.

Safety protections. Traffic protections. Etc.

No, it won’t solve the world’s problems. But semantics matter. It influences people more than I think we want to believe.

Here’s to all the protections we enjoy so that some rich men can’t eke out a few percent more profit at the expense of all our lives.

Ah, Omni.

I had a subscription to that magazine starting when I was nine years old. I begged my grandparents for it. After that, it became a Christmas gift.

That means I read it from 1985 until it closed its doors in 1995. Even as I started reading it, I knew that at least half of it was unalloyed hogwaysh and hooey, but what I loved about it is that it presented a future that I’d actually want to live in.

Well, this article said better than I can why I loved it.

By coupling science fiction and cutting-edge science news, the magazine created an atmosphere of possibility, where even the most outrageous ideas seemed to have basis in fact.

I learned how to lucid dream from Omni. I was exposed to ideas and ways of living that I never otherwise would’ve encountered in my very small, extremely conservative hometown. It more than any other single publication changed my sense of the world and of myself.

Omni was a huge part of my childhood, and a catalyst for learning to be a different person than everyone thought I should be, and wished that I were.