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Finally smiling
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Quoting myself
I’d forgotten about this one – I forget where I originally got it
Superman living in a world of kryptonite is the best description of modern life I can think of.
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Quote of the day
You know the classic definition of a Marxist? “People who love humanity in groups of one million or more.”
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The upside of the current debate over gun control
It’s vastly overshadowing the shooter himself – it’s been just a cursory look at whatever he is and then back to our usual gun control argument. A hugely positive development; attention paid to the shooter is some part their motivation. A desire for infamy is quite baffling, but that does seem to be a common theme amongst these monsters.
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An interesting discussion on white collar drug use
From Hacker News – it’s interesting throughout – particularly interesting is how everything is clustered.
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Raingear
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Isaiah’s Job and the Thousand True Fans
I never thought of the similarity between Kevin Kelly’s One Thousand True Fans (from 2008) essay and Albert Jay Nock’s obscure epic Isaiah’s Job (from 2006) – both are about eschewing mass market appeal – and narrowing in on a select group (Kelly’s thousand true fan’s – Nock’s the Remnant) who truly understand whatever it is your’re doing. The similarities are rather odd.
I just got memoirs of a superfluous man on kindle – I guess I’ll have to check and see if there are any similarities to classic issues of Wired…
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Assorted links
- By raw coincidence from – here is this line from McSweeney’s – specifically regarding prayers to end war and murder
Mudslides, freak lightning storms, untreatable illnesses–those are God problems. But YOU killing each other with killing machines YOU created to kill each other seems like a YOU problem. Go do something about it! But, hey, that’s just this God’s opinion.
As Hoffer put it – we walk between the devil and the dragon.
- My favorite SMBC so far – sort of related to my “Let’s Kill Hitler” book idea.
- One of Tyler Cowen’s better posts – regarding Moore’s Law and Social Media – some nuggets
Manipulable people can be reached with a greater flood of information, so over time as data on them accumulate, they become more manipulable.
It is often easier to manipulate smart people than stupid people, because the latter may be oblivious to a greater set of cues and clues.
There is a performative dimension that renders both sides more rigid and dishonest.
The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry. The socially insensitive will either jump ship into the camp of the socially sensitive, or they will cultivate new methods of detachment, with or without Stoicism. Straussianism will compete with Stoicism.
Social sensitivity is the nugget of wisdom – that seems like more of a spectrum disorder (to use the parlance of our time)
- By raw coincidence from – here is this line from McSweeney’s – specifically regarding prayers to end war and murder
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With mermaid hair
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Taking a knee, and the decline of American Communication
Something I wrote on another email exchange
Communication enhancing technology seems to have the effect of reducing our natural ability to communicate with each other – I guess they’re substitutes, not compliments.andI do think Americans are largely losing the ability to have effective conversations with people even slightly different than them, as well as losing faith in their deeply held ideas.Quoting my own emails is the height of pretension, but I do find two of these ideas interesting, namely- Communication technology is a substitute for communication ability
- We are losing faith in out ideas – even though we cling to them more tightly.
It seems that we have no hope of convincing anyone else of our beliefs, either due a lack of faith in our abilities, or a lack of faith in the veracity of our beliefs.