You can tell someone is a centrist when they get all haughty because you refuse to vote for the lesser evil. See that word “evil” in there? It means something.

Anyway, centrists are really just puppets of the rich, so who gives a crap what they say or think? This country’s problems are probably beyond being solved by politics alone.

I don’t know why anyone gives a fuck abut anything Kanye West says. He made three or four pretty good songs. That’s all. He’s kind of like Oasis — ok talent, enormous ego, but good enough to pull off a few decent works. Taylor Swift has more good songs on a single record than he has had in his entire career.

That library will get you any book you want through the Alaska State Library’s Interlibrary Loan System, who will fly it north for you FOR FREE so you can read it in their warm reading room, or at home. Libraries, if they didn’t already exist, would sound like a naive fantasy.

— Dork Money Defeats Dark Money (@Pinboard) October 11, 2018

Yes. If libraries had never been created, they’d now sound like the wackiest fantasy in Wackytown, and you’d have people screeching about Communism and the satanic evil of such a patently absurd, unworkable idea — it’d be like the idea of free university but worse as it’d be even more likely the poors would use a library.

To most people, what exists before they are 12-16 or so just seems to be the natural order of things — nearly unquestionable. Because libraries exist, they are seen as uncreated, given, just the way things are. But of course, they are human creations and not predestined.

In a way, this does not give me hope for putting in place other similar community goods because people seem to be unable to connect libraries with other initiatives, like free university or universal health care. When I bring this obvious connection up, the response is often, “Well, libraries are different.” When, of course, they are no different. Very little conceptual transfer for most people, in any domain, because they have no coherent viewpoint on much.

Here is ol’ John Stuart Mill expressing something very near the Bryan Magee quote I excerpted a while ago:

“It is true that similar confusion and uncertainty exist respecting the first principles of all the sciences without much impairing the trustworthiness of the conclusions of those sciences….[T]he detailed doctrines of a science are not usually deduced from, nor depend for their evidence upon, what are called its first principles. […] The truths which are ultimately accepted as the first principles of a science, are really the last results of metaphysical analysis, practiced on the elementary notions with which the science is conversant; and their relation to the science is not that of foundations to an edifice, but of roots to a tree, which may perform their job equally well though they be never dug down to and exposed to light.”

This seems completely obvious when you think about it for a bit, but as it’s contra how all of science likes to present itself and how we’re taught about science, it seems odd at first.

For sometimes understandable reasons, science and scientists (politicians are often complicit, too) like to present their findings as unimpeachable edicts, handed down from the empyrean heights of reason, when in reality we’re all just a bunch of simians hooting noises at one another that we suspect might have some relation to some reality somewhere. From time to time, they actually do.

Even when I was kid when I heard someone use the insult “treehugger” I wondered why exactly it was an insult.

Trees never hurt or bully you, and they provide convenient shade. They don’t do anything stupid, which people seem to do constantly. And they never betray you.

Then as now, trees seemed like pretty good people to me.

To all the liberals and other assorted idiots who advocate silly, puerile shit like banning straws in the face of the vast calamity ahead of us: fuck you very much. You are the problem. You are no better than climate change deniers in the grand scheme of things. You are not part of the resistance, the revolution, or anything otherwise useful. You are water carriers for the 1%, all of whom will dance on your graves when you are gone and who will laugh from their armored New Zealand enclaves as your children starve. Get the fuck outta here with your straw bans and organic quinoa.