I like Ada Palmer, but here she is completely wrong.

It’s vogueish now in the world of history to claim there were (and can definitionally never be) dark ages or renaissances, and that the Renaissance did not exist. Too much to go into here, but this is the au courant belief for a variety of reasons, among them that these historians are attempting to push back as a political project against the idea that society can be improved as that implies some eugenicist goals.

People like Palmer misrepresent both the causes and the advent of the Renaissance. They portray the people like me who believe the Renaissance is a useful way to divide up history as believing that one morning people woke up and were like, “Hey, it’s the Renaissance! Awesome!” No one, of course, believes that. It was a gradual transition from the Middle Ages, which used to be (for very good reason) referred to as the Dark Ages.

But the reality is that the Dark Ages occurred, and so did the Renaissance, no matter how much clownish historians deny them. For instance:

And no handy-dandy chart, but after the fall of Rome people forgot to how to bake fucking bread. And pottery quality reverted back about two thousand years. Among many, many other apocalyptic changes.

You can actually read writing from the time of people saying, “This is the end of the world and nothing will be good again.” And they were right — for about 800 years.

I hate this modern trend of denying very clear, very obvious occurrences and historical changes for political reasons. Come on, Ada, ain’t nobody gonna CRISPR your baby to have blond hair because you think the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happened.

Washed.

Wake up, new stupidest tattoo just dropped.

Why…why would anyone do that to themselves?

Basically, the right is ruled by people who don't read books and are proud of it, while the left is ruled by people who say "read a book" in response to everything without reading any books themselves. https://t.co/lz0yIP3rOQ

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) March 30, 2025

Largely true, alas. The Right wants to be appear dumb while actually being the dumbasses they valorize, while the Left pretends to be intelligent intellectuals while also being the dumbasses they make fun of and disparage.

None of it is any good.

I’ve become an expert at hacking, whacking and cracking Mozilla’s anti-user features. Just spent part of the afternoon manually editing a Firefox sqlite database to get around another anti-user feature they claim is for “security” but is really there just because they like being petty authoritarians.

Ain’t no Mozilla clown can hold me down.

The primary unfairness in dating — and one thing incels are completely right about — is that mediocre women get 100x as much attention and interest as even above average men. To receive the attention that a totally average woman gets, you need to be a top 0.1% man.

And that’s actually a pretty huge and psychologically-damaging inequity. It doesn’t make how incels deal with it likely to work or morally correct, but they are not wrong at all with their diagnosis.

After the State Of Minnesota told State employees for years that Telework full time would remain permanent, Tim Walz has ordered all State workers within 75 miles of an office to return by June 1st for 50% of all work days. Why? To bring money to St Paul.

RTO of course has absolutely nothing to do with productivity. In fact, it almost certainly decreases it as who can get any work done with all the noise and clamor in an average office?

But it is being done to prop up other business interests, such as commerical real estate and downtown business owners who want to force people into an office so their businesses can make money peddling overpriced, shitty sandwiches and drinks.

I will never work in an office again. I will start my own business before that happens. I am, depending on the task, 2-100x more productive working from home.

Firefox really, really sucks. Too bad all the other browsers are even worse.

I miss how the internet/web used to be. When you were allowed to do things.

Would you eat a cockroach? What if it was sterilised? Why not?

Quit trying to make eatings bugs happen. It’s not gonna happen. Why is so much of the idiot degrowther left so obsessed with people eating goddamn bugs?