seems like paul (saul of tarsus) is just reincarnated occasionally and that’s just one of the rules. large number of “he’s just paul” guys in western history. of course many guys are like other guys. but paul is the most perfectly, losslessly reproduced guy, and it happens a lot. too much, even

old insight (like, apology of socrates-old): speaking to publics and speaking 1-to-1 are very separable, even mutually antagonistic talents. slimy lawschool guys like vance, super talented at 1-to-1s, think this means they should run for president. wrong kind of juice; & jd hasn’t got the right kind

one big problem with mark zuckerberg is his personality

lauren@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 3h ago

ok i could buy the other jailbreaks were sorta real and not just press releases but meta's definitely just doing press releases

man does this guy not have the juice

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2h ago

JD Vance takes a big dump on American colleges and universities and college graduates

donald trump will almost certainly be remembered as the man who ended christianity in america (long an outlier in terms of % faithful among the modern countries), or at the very least dealt it the fatal blow from which it never recovered

That's a really 👀 statistic.

The Salt Lake Tribune@sltrib.com · 3h ago

More than half of young adult women who grew up as Latter-day Saints have now left the church. Many are reacting against politics, purity culture and powerlessness.

it’s weird that the dominant political mood of our age is necessitarian structural doomerism—and what seems to have generated it is a totally wild, yearslong series of totally unforeseen contingencies with huge returns to individual agency! is the lesson not, we actually have a chance to fix things?

not gonna lie, i extremely love to Seek Truth From Facts. i go absolutely hog wild for this activity

if they’re gonna do this global hegemony thing for real i feel like they’ve gotta get some big brained fellow to invent a dialect of chinese communese that doesn’t sound so dumb in english

CCP Purge Monitor@ccptracker.bsky.social · 3h ago

Very bad behaviour!

he is married to an avid Trump supporter and is notorious for having passed confidential information back and forth over the partisan divide his entire career. this is like Aldrich Ames threatening to quit the CIA.

Rory Blank@roryblank.bsky.social · 7h ago

Man it's so funny when James Carville threatens to leave the Democratic party, like oh no, now the party might have candidates who are actually popular with their constituents and have popular policy positions and win elections what are we going to do noooo don't

most of the mass-death and disaster that people semi-nonsensically blame on marxism is nonetheless quite legitimately blamed on leninism

bluesky has officially threatened to contact my wife if i don't start "Posting Better"

the idea that there is a difference between "nominal" value and "real" is fundamentally not understandable to 95% of the population, who take the Numbers on the Money as a Hard Metric of "value"; the idea that the value of "One Dollar" can change is simply not mass-teachable

Sky Marchini@sky.skymarchini.net · 5h ago

i'm increasingly coming around to the idea that while the rate of price change matters, so much of this is just "number big and the Right price is when Number Small!!" - i.e. it's mostly an objection to the fact the nominal price is high even if the purchasing power is okay.

lefty candidates with history of engagement farming online, when confronted with this or that of their bizarre old tweets by our intrepid Fourth Estate asking (with murrowish grandeur and tenacity) "Dost thou to-day by this still stand?," must learn to pronounce these words: naw, i was just Poasting

to be clear this is @theoluminati.bsky.social's fault yell at her

hong is the first "left wing / DSA insurgent candidate" so far that i think i'm actually against in the primary. she shouldn't say this stuff and she would be at too great a risk of losing in the general

Aaron van Dorn@aaronvandorn.bsky.social · 7h ago

"Least fun person in your graduate seminar" us a bold political strategy, let's see how it works out

Well, to be honest, I'm saving that for the book I'm writing on that very topic.

dracula is so bad. ugh. hate that guy

also tim heidecker

neutral@neutral.zone · 22h ago

You know what’s gotten better in the last 40 years? Me. There’s also more of me, which is probably not ideal, but you take the good with the bad.

thomas aquinas, as a poster, would be very similar to will stancil

"If you drive like a jerk, don't put a Christian fish on your car", but for online behavior. For real. If you're someone who likes to be grumpy and brusque with people online, no shade to your hobby, but you really should take your political affiliations out of your bio, imho.

Snowden St.@snowden.st · 5mo ago

and the gnarly part is: if you are high-trust, and public about it, you *really* shouldn't be a bitter turd in your day-to-day life. sorry, you don't get the privilege of publicly fuming about ignorance and being unhappy, you're depreciating the value of high-trust by doing so!

yudkowsky's "rationalism" project, designed to help ppl think "less wrong," caused precisely zero to think any less wrong (or differently) than before; but it did help many to adopt a very stupid-sounding way of talking, & some to adopt the irrationalist politics known as "fascism." so, a mixed bag

i think contemporary american slang—absolutely saturated with rationalist, economicist, biologistic, and computeristic buzzwords, and all with a smattering of direct quotations of donald trump—is very plausibly the worst slang of all time

the avg centrist is neither apollinian nor dionysian—apollinian would be great! apollo is light, form, and justice: sharp lethal arrows that never miss their mark. dionysian is cthulhu, skip it. but bureaucrat-theater-kid-combo who speaks solely boilerplate? besmirch not apollo with this association

LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍@lowrhoufo.bsky.social · 3d ago

I don't think there's some silent progressive majority out there in waiting, but I do think running candidates who are a lot less apollonian can move a significant number of feet, and the center is very bad at producing those

my crank opinion is that the economics blogworld at george mason around tyler cowen is the most destructive ideological shop in the country in terms of depth of reach and corrosive effect over time. some of its hyperrightwing children are of course more demonic and evil, but the fount? always GMU

if i wrote a like 85 page ebook essay on tyler cowen and cowenism would you read it

i would like to thank, to my best count, about half of the people i recognize on this platform for doing their part

bar none the best single thing about bluesky is that it is

Dead Carl@deadcarl.bsky.social · 2d ago

Crank convergence theory means Democrats need to be actively adversarial to conspiratorial thinking

at some point we're going to have to regulate media platforms

Scott McGrath@smcgrath.phd · 3d ago

🧪 Medical professionals are losing the attention war on YouTube. In a 3,958-video sample, independent creators produced the lowest quality content but captured the highest viewership using exaggeration. #MedSky