One of the main reasons I am not able and will never be able to get on board with the liberal project fully is that an article of faith (and I use “faith” here deliberately) among most of the left is that people should live in immiserated conditions as a punishment for past sins.

I don’t think this is the way the world must work, or even can work, even in the context of attempting to mitigate or adapt to climate change. If I thought it’d even help, I might have some tolerance for this self-flagellation. But alas this idea of redemptive suffering — firmly a Judeo-Christian ideal from those who mostly claim to be agnostics and atheists — has no moral or expiative value of any kind.

It’s a dead end ideologically and pragmatically. Most people who aren’t die-hard liberal flagellants will never get behind such an undertaking, and certainly none of the center or the right will be much swayed by the dream of living in a concrete box and licking algae out of glass containers. It’s not so much a plan as a dream of remission of sin and of ascetic transcendence via self-abnegation, which is needless to say something most people have absolutely no interest in.

The dirty secret of calculus is that most people who take and pass calculus don’t actually understand calculus. They just memorize the 100 or so common cases and formulae, recognize those in the problem sets, transform those into what they know, and solve programmatically without comprehending what they are doing even a little bit.

To be fair, I think the above is true of most of education, not math alone. But it’s kind of funny all the people who claim to be superior intellects because they can solve a canned problem — yet they can’t think their way out of a paper bag when it’s not pre-digested and can’t at all handle a real-world problem that has no answer in the back of the book.

There’s this new 4K Falcon 9 video you probably want to watch.

I’m a-watchin’. This is the stuff.

What kind of wack-ass dipshit thought that I’d ever want a website to send me notifications of anything?