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I've noticed a trend among the rationalist movement of favoring long and convoluted articles referencing other long and convoluted articles--the more inaccessible to the general public, the better.
I don't want to contend that there's anything inherently wrong with such articles, I contend precisely the opposite: there's nothing inherently wrong with short and direct articles.
One example of significant simplicity is Einstein's famous E=mc2 paper (Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?), which is merely three pages long.
Can anyone contend that Einstein's paper is either not significant or not straightforward?
It is also generally understood among writers that it's difficult to explain complex concepts in a simple way. And programmers do favor simpler code, and often transform complex code into simpler versions that achieve the same functionality in a process called code refactoring. Guess what... refactoring takes substantial effort.
The art of compressing complex ideas into succinct phrases is valued by the general population, and proof of that are quotes and memes.
“One should use common words to say uncommon things” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
There is power in simplicity.
One example of simple ideas with extreme potential is Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability: don't try to prove your beliefs, try to disprove them. That simple principle solves important problems in epistemology, such as the problem of induction and the problem of demarcation. And you don't need to understand all the philosophy behind this notion, only that many white swans don't prove the proposition that all swans are white, but a single black swan does disprove it. So it's more profitable to look for black swans.
And we can use simple concepts to defend the power of simplicity.
We can use falsifiability to explain that many simple ideas being unconsequential doesn't prove the claim that all simple ideas are inconsequential, but a single consequential idea that is simple does disprove it.
Therefore I've proved that simple notions can be important.
Originally published on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tech-ceo I can't figure out the formatting in this place. Part of this piece is supposed to be in italics to differentiate past from future. You guys are smart---you can figure it out.
Jude Gabriel, enigmatic CEO of the mysterious yet seemingly omnipresent software company ‘Talos’, squints as the sunset light squeezes through a few buildings in the Seattle skyline just to assault his face at the perfect angle. Whoever thought up the idea of all-glass offices should be lined up against the wall and shot—with the sun in his eyes.
The whole gang is here: CFO, COO, CPO, CSO, whoever the fuck. He’d kill them all without a second thought in exchange for a glass of whiskey and a cigar.
He rubs his nose: one of his infamous ‘migraines’ is coming on.
It started on his 25th birthday. The whole thing is branded into his memory, for better or for worse, and will be until he dies, and for all his luck after he dies, too.
Craig had been the one who officially ‘suggested’ it, but it was really inevitable, with how into psychedelics they had all been. The moment he said it, it was more like it had manifested out of the whole subconscious zeitgeist of their friend group, and no one in particular took credit for it: Ayahuasca, that is.
One thing after another, and Jude ended up in some primitive canoe, floating his way down the shit-colored waters of the Nanay, muggy-hot and slathered in skin-irritating, carcinogenic bug spray. Nonetheless, nothing short of nuclear fallout could erase his good mood. He practically hummed with adrenaline and good spirits despite the downright horrific summer conditions of backwater Peru.
At the dock, a woman with a clipboard introduced herself as Isa and asked him to put his phone in a dented metal tin.
The intake hut was cooler. A ceiling fan wobbled, slicing the humid air into manageable pieces. The curandero sat in a plastic chair with his hands on his knees, white beard surrounding his chin, wrinkled eyes squinting cheerfully. He looked exactly like Jude had imagined: wise and ready to take them on the trip of a lifetime. He spoke, a hoarse but gentle voice, and a younger man beside him translated.
“...Why here? What do you hope to see?”
They went around the room until it landed on Jude. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the others—he didn’t want to ‘find himself’, his life was fine as it was, he had had no traumatic experiences, and he was a perfectly productive worker: at the time, he was starting up a small software company, and it had just had its first angel investor. He knew he was outgrowing these people, and it was only a matter of time before they’d grow apart.
“I want to see if there’s anything I missed.” He said, simply, not sure if they were the right words after they came out of his mouth. The curandero nodded after hearing the translation, a long, thoughtful motion.
Well, that’s exactly what he found: the thing he’d missed, or more accurately, the thing that had missed him.
If only he’d told Craig to go fuck himself.
The air conditioning beats down on Jude as the CFO, Priya, prattles on about numbers, which is what she does—that’s why we all love her.
Jude’s assistant, Ness, leans towards him.
“The demo team’s set up,” she says, ‘You want them in here, or…”
“Yeah,” says Jude,
In a few minutes, Marty, the CPO, walks over to the wall screen, which switches from spreadsheets to a map of a few high-crime blocks in Seattle, colored dots pulsing like slow heartbeats.
“This is what we’ll show the folks in Oakland,” he says, “ It’s nice, elegant, you know? Makes it look like we’re just sorting the mess, not… playing god, or whatever the press likes to say about us, you know?”
He clicks through, and a route appears through the dots.
“Two patrol cars for nine urgent calls,” he says. “The system takes the pile and says, ‘Here’s the order that gets help to the most people fastest. The car goes here first because the caller keeps hanging up, then here because the second caller is trapped in a stairwell, then this one because it’s likely a duplicate.”
Mason drums a finger. “Why aren’t we showing the cool part where it noticed the stolen Civic from last week patterns back to—”
General counsel interrupts him. “Cool’s trouble. We want ‘boring and helpful’.”
“Come on, it can be a little bit of both,” he said
“Then it wouldn’t be boring, Mason,” she replies.
Jude tunes them out. This part isn’t interesting. Besides, a familiar pressure is blooming behind his right eye, a creeping static that makes it hard to focus.
He watches as the red line from the screen somehow moves, bleeding into reality, widening, taking weight, and spreading, soon becoming a red belt crossing the city. And then he sees what it really is: crossbeams, ribs, the sketch of an inhuman skeleton, barely under the thin veneer of the corporeal world.
He blinks. The thread is small again.
At some point, someone from legal walks in—a shy, mousey blonde. The way she does so, uncertain, not willing to look anyone in the eyes, tells him it’s going to be a problem before she says the words.
There’s mention of ‘Craig Hassel’. He knows right away what happened: the douchebag thinks he made the algorithm behind the route ordering that they’ll be showcasing. Idiot. He doesn’t get it, never did. No one made any of this; it was beyond that, beyond ownership. What he wanted was immaterial: we don’t get just deserts. This isn’t a fucking movie.
He closes his eyes.
His birthday happened to coincide with the first night of the retreat: everyone claims to have planned it, but it was happenstance.
The time before—the whole ‘wellness retreat’ bullshit—passed by in a blur. He remembers staring at Maya’s ass and listening to the curandero talk about mystic-sounding Mumbo jumbo: you were once pure, and culture sullied your soul, or some wacko nonsense. Jude didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to see the world as it is, absent of everything additional, to gaze into the true reality as close as he possibly could.
Ironically, it was pretty similar to what the curandero was saying, minus the emphasis on personal growth, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to see it.
That night, they entered a featureless wood panel room with two bathrooms and a bunch of mattresses
It was strangely cold. Everyone bunched together in a circle, Maya to his right, leaning close, and Craig, who was practically vibrating with excitement, to his left. The Curandero made his last speech as he prepared the tea, and then everyone lined up to take it.
When Jude reached the end of the line, the translator asked how much he wanted. Jude suppressed a laugh and asked for the maximum amount. What was he, a pussy?
The brew tasted like burnt coffee mixed with dirt. He gulped it down as fast as he could and sat down where he’d been sitting, bracing himself for a ride.
It took an hour or two for it to actually work, during which he felt increasingly disappointed, watching people bumble around or chant like lunatics. Craig similarly didn’t feel anything. Then, it all came at once
Later, he would find out that his experience did not match most descriptions of the drug’s effects, that it was a wholly alien abomination.
Later, Craig would tell him that it had changed him for the worse, that he couldn’t stop striving towards some incomprehensible end, that it made him impossible to work with, that he was taking the company in a direction that was completely different from what they’d intended.
Later, Craig would be right.
“They intend to move ex parte for a TRO, citing emails from 2019 in which Mr. Hassel describes ‘probabilistic ordering—” begins the blonde from legal, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Right, right,” says Mason, flicking his wrist. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Bullshit that could fuck us over in Oakland,” says GC.
“We can’t afford to deal with this in court,” says Priya, “any delay could punt the demonstration months, at least.”
“Sure, captain obvious,” says Mason, “What are you gonna tell us next, water is wet? The sky is blue?”
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell when you need things spelled out for you, Mason,” she shoots back.
He snorts, looking away.
“I just got a text from him,” interrupts Ness, “says he wants to ‘solve this like men’”
“The hell does that mean?” says Priya
“It means he wants to call,” says Mason,
“Should we?” a voice inevitably chimes. Jude rubs his eyes. The room goes silent.
“Put him on,” says Jude, finally.
They put him on through the speakers.
“I see you got my letter,” says Craig, the self-righteous smugness palpable in his voice.
“What do you want, Craig?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about recognition for my work, for starters?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “You wrote a few weights any freshman can get if you give them a few weekends and a public dataset. You’re not going to court over this—I know it, you know it, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Maybe I just wanna fuck you over,” he said, “shut down your little stint in Oakland.”
“Then file,” says Jude. “Let’s see if you can afford that fight.”
The room gets tenser. Priya gives him that stare.
“Wait—” starts GC.
He lifts a hand
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the next hour, if you choose that route. We’re going to file a declaratory action in Delaware seeking a ruling of non-infringement and ownership. We’ll append your emails in full to show how little they matter, and we’ll attach three pieces of prior art from 2016 to 2018 where strangers describe the same ‘probabilistic ordering’ that you claim to be yours.”
He looks at Marty. “Pull the patents, will you?”
Marty nods.
Then,” Jude continues, “we’re going to push a limited open-source module that replicates the banal one you’re fighting over. Just the skeleton. Nothing proprietary, nothing Oakland-specific. It will be clean-room documented and intentionally boring. It’ll look like we’re being magnanimous, and your TRO will look like a toddler padlock on a chain-link fence.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line.
“You wouldn’t just open it,” says Craig, “this is your baby. I know you.”
“Yeah?” says Jude. “Try me.”
He laughs to himself.
“Jesus, Craig. You think this is it, that this is my ‘baby’? This is a step, moron. It’s a fucking brick. I’ll give you your goddamn brick.”
“But, the demo window…” says someone else.
“We’ll move it up,” says Jude. “Ness, call Oakland.”
“We should at least—” starts Priya.
“No,” says Jude, “I’m not dealing with this loser. If he thinks delaying my multi-generational project by another few months, or even a fucking year, is going to hurt me, then let him try.”
“Bullshit,” says Craig, “I can see right through this shitty performance—you’re scared.”
“You wanna bet?”
There’s another pause.
“I’ll make you look like a thief.”
“How’d that work for Eduardo?” says Jude,” Looks are cheap. Zuckerberg proved that.”
“Jude,” he begins, “You cut me out, and you didn’t have to. We could’ve shipped the same thing without this... cult you built around yourself.”
Jude laughs. “Craig, this was always your problem. I don’t think you’re an idiot, actually, the opposite, but you don’t have vision. You can’t see past yourself and your petty fucking problems. You can’t… You can’t see the future, Craig. The world that I see, it’s… Well, let’s just say we’re beyond ‘ownership’: a farcical idea, always has been.”
He looks back at the room. “Cut the line. I’m done talking to this idiot.”
“Wait—” says Craig.
Before he can say shit, the room dips into silence. No one says anything for a while.
“Let’s adjourn,” he says, and he’s already moving before anyone can respond. Velocity beats consensus. Ness calls after him, but he’s already in the elevator. The migraine feels like a lit coal behind his right eye.
He drives home without music, wincing at the glare from the piercing sun glancing off the windows, like a nuclear blast in the distance, stuck in the moment before the shockwave. The afternoon sky gives way to a bruised, arterial red, bleeding into the sides of the windows, the streets, everything the eye can see. The lights switch from green to red, the crosswalks blink, both playing their minute parts in a mechanical process leading to that inevitable future, streets like veins in some incomprehensible organism. He closes his eyes, but the glare still bleeds behind, omnipresent.
By the time he gets back home, it’s nearly dark.
He writes the babysitter a check. The living room smells like banana peels and markers. Jacob claims that Diego said a bad word. Naomi tries to negotiate staying up later, always the little lawyer. He puts them to bed quickly and sets up shop in the rocking chair by the window, cigar in mouth, glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The horizon stares back at him, at once the familiar city he knows and that unfamiliar landscape he saw, back in Peru, which he still sees to this day, every second a little clearer, every minute it converges closer—the landscape of the end of time, the barren plains, the arterial sky, the mechanical structures like ribs, protruding from the landscape.
He tried everything, every drug on the market: benzos, clonidine, weed, you name it. He tried Therapy, CBT, refining his sleep schedule, fixing his diet. He traveled the world, went back to Peru, begged the Curandero, who had nothing to say, signed up for experimental neurobiology trials in Israel, China, France, wherever the fuck, risked his own life so many times it stopped mattering to him. It did fuckall, none of it worked. For better or for worse, he had seen a glimpse of the future, and it hooked itself in his brain, a psychic parasite. He sees it when he closes his eyes, when he dreams—every waking moment he’s cursed to be an oracle, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
The worst thing is that it never stops awing him.
That megastructure in the sky, a technological monster so bright it could be the sun, shines down at him, illuminating that landscape with all the more horrifying clarity. Waves of ecstasy and terror burrow through his skin: a feeling so strong that only the most spiritual experiences of his life had ever previously come close to.
The only reason he hasn’t killed himself is his unshaking certainty that eternity exists—he’s staring right at it. Death will not release him from his bond. He has been rendered a servant of the future. His only hope, a rapidly fleeting proposition, is that this horror will spare his kids.
He takes another drink—it gives him no comfort, the taste of the cigar has turned bitter in his mouth. The only thing worse would be nothing at all.
And so we have come to this. Today I shall post a screed. Always wanted to, you know?
But let's be clear that this chapter is a work in progress and also just... I think I get to use the word 'rancorous'. It's also, independently, a complete hot mess.
After some back and forth I decided to keep chapters on schedule rather than taking a week off for a re-write. So, welcome in, mind your step and the pylons etc. You've been warned.
Oh and if you are just now dropping in and find something objectionable in the post below, ha ha, despair, for you have fallen for my devious and excessively-elaborate device: By the rules of this site you now have to go back and read everything I said in previous chapters to make sure I haven't qualified the matter in some way before you get to complain.
In which case, chapter one is here. ;)
0109 - Beautiful Lie
Bear with me for a minute.
Suppose some aliens come to Earth and offer our governments advanced weaponry in exchange for a few million humans to go back to their world and do the jobs they'd rather not. Or maybe they just have a major labor deficit and need extra workers for the simple tasks. Doesn't really matter.
Your government's hands are tied here. If they don't take the deal they'll be replaced by one that did. So one day a bunch of soldiers with guns shows up in your neighbourhood and herds everyone first onto trucks, then rockets. After a long voyage through space you arrive in the new world and it must be said that these aliens are simply bewildering to you. They're clearly much smarter in ways you can only even begin to grasp. They come off as absurdly punctual, insisting on showing up to work and meetings to the second, which you're only able to match by great and inconvenient effort. Their system of speaking and writing is incredibly complex such that only the very smartest humans are ever capable of mastering it. They seem unbelievably wise, often doing things as a matter of course which only reveal themselves to you as the right decisions months or years later.
Their society has almost no crime. They generate astonishing amounts of material goods and have no problem providing you with a higher standard of living than you'd ever have been likely to receive on your home planet. You're set to doing work that they suppose humans can do well-enough. So long as they're patient and explain your task fully it's mostly not a problem for you. In fact you're so smart that they give you a job in one of their core cities on a day-worker basis rather than being confined to the human containment zones where most are kept. They treat you with a degreed measure of respect, though filtered through enough condescension that there are days where you feel less like part of the team than like some sort of mascot.
It's an odd experience to be sure. And deep down you have to admit that it's a bit embarrassing to return from their dazzling metropolis to the fenced-in human areas, which by comparison are run-down, filthy, crime-ridden, and dysfunctional in all the ways that human cities are. It's hard to say, on balance, whether your situation on the aliens' world is overall an improvement from where you were before. You're safer and healthier and better-fed and cared-for, with access to all kinds of pleasures and entertainments unknown on Earth. But you also know that you, and your children, will never really have a place here except as dependents bordering on livestock. (The rumours you keep hearing about human zoos definitely don't help with this impression.) And no matter what else may be said for it, you hate being told what to do all the time, especially when this contradicts your instincts. Well, it is what it is. There is no way back, after all.
Only it's not long before the aliens figure out how to automate most of the stuff that they initially brought the humans there to do. Meanwhile the human population has exploded vastly beyond the original numbers which were imported and shows no signs of slowing down. What do you suppose will happen next?
Obviously the aliens see no need to include you in their deliberations. You hear bits and pieces. Many of them agree that you should all be sent back to Earth, even though it no longer has a place for you. Some have grown fond and think that you should be kept around in protective custody, even if they aren't so subtle in their implications that it would probably be a good idea to introduce certain measures of population control. Others, though, somehow arrive at the most outlandish position imaginable...
Back now to our Tidan narrative, where we'll pick up in the place we left off at the end of last chapter.
Something truly incredible happens in a place called Hajnal (that's 'HAI-nahl'; the j should be treated as an i) on the Northwestern fringe of Tidus's grand archipelago. The people there, descended substantially from the race of kings, reach heights of achievement hitherto unheard of in human history. Oddly enough the key to their success seems to be that they care less about their extended families and more about everyone else. To understand this let's first look at how things work elsewhere.
Far to the south of Hajnal, in the lands of the darkest-skinned Tropicals, society often works as follows. Each man is beholden to his relatives to the precise degree that he has resources to contribute. If a man comes upon a small amount of food, he is expected to share it with his immediate family. If he comes upon a windfall of resources, he is expected to share it out among his more extended family as far as it will go. And if he doesn’t go looking for them, they’ll come to him when they hear about it and ask, and he will acquiesce. This is on the one hand a very resilient social structure. Each cares for each other, and the great fortunes of one are dispersed among the many. Such a people can rapidly spread across an entire island chain. But on the other hand there’s a problem with it, which is that it doesn’t scale vertically.
Suppose a Tropical man comes up with a new idea to improve crop yields. Suppose he saves up money (already difficult with so many relatives coming to him for help all the time) to purchase the necessary equipment. Suppose he spends an entire season working much harder than usual to bring his plans to fruition. When the harvest comes, he may even have a gorgeous bumper crop, more wealth than anyone in his family has ever seen before — but as soon as the word spreads, here come the open palms and mouths, helping themselves to the fruit of his labour until he’s back where he started, without even enough left over to reïnvest and do it again.
Maybe this irks him a bit but you might be surprised at how little. Their phenomenology is different from yours and mine. He didn't really expect to keep it anyway. The kicker here is that it didn’t even avail him of almost any direct reproductive advantage either and so the impulse is unlikely to be passed on. Rather, these Tropicals prefer to hang around and see what opportunities might come to them, exploit those opportunities, and count on their kin doing enough of the same that they live long enough to reproduce. Which is to say that their instincts do not incline them toward such profitable long-term thinking in the first place. (The urge to organize and dominate others by force is a different trait and yes they do plenty of this along tribal lines.)
A bit to the east, where the skins are not so dark and the people look a bit more like Hajnalis, this tendency is less-pronounced. The natives of this region are still very clan-oriented by Hajnali standards but less-so than the darkest Tropicals. As such, they’ve been able to evolve the tendency toward enterprise, even leveraging their close family ties very strongly, since in their culture’s atmosphere of rampant exploitation and dishonesty it is only family which may be trusted (or else agents who are in such abject submission by threat of line-death that they dare not but be faithful). But, these people leverage those family ties perhaps a bit too closely, often being prone to, e.g., marrying their first cousins to keep wealth within the clan, which is dysgenic over enough iterations, and are extremely reluctant to engage in joint ventures with non-kin. This puts quite a damper on progress.
I'll note that Hajnali societies function differently-
But first allow me a moment of humility. I sense that it would be wrong to speak authoritatively on this subject and won't pretend to understand what has happened here. These complexities are way beyond me, ranging up into altitudes far too alpine for mine own little ape brain. Most of us see a flash of colour here; the suggestion of a line there. I think can glimpse a little bit of a whole picture, though, and what I'm looking at terrifies me badly enough that I can't stand to remain silent. So please have patience as I attempt to gesture toward a few facets of this people's unique development. I am attempting to describe; not to injure.
I think a lot of it has to do with the terrible plague that scours the region typified by the previous chapter. This wipes out so much of the proto-Hajnali population (and helpfully their neighbours as well, who might otherwise have extirpated them) that a prolonged, sustained, multi-generational boom time springs up thanks to all the social vacancies left by the dead. Recall how in the last chapter the son of the chandler did well for himself to be content with his place and not too ambitious: Well, not anymore! There's high ground (both metaphorical and literal) for the taking and all sorts of rapid social changes happening which encourages upstarts. Men of the lower reaches begin to gamble on advancement more often and, much more often, win. The optimal level for trait ambition has shifted.
Another obvious factor would seem to be their peculiar religion. For spiritual reasons Hajnalis stop marrying their cousins, or at least do it a whole lot less. They also tend to marry later in life and have fewer children, investing more in each. They marry outside their immediate circles much more often than others, partly for practical purposes — people in an area tend to be related, and their religion forbids them from marrying even god-family, which compounds the problem — and partly because again, per their religion, they have come to see those of other clans as belonging to the same identity group. Not revolting aliens, but suitable business partners, and even mates!
This part is more tenuous, but I think a further upshot of their religion is that they become psychologically-shaped to look to their own selves first as the source of their problems; that is, to be self-critical rather than blaming their enemies for failure, and to confess their shortcomings to others. Not perfectly, but very strongly, relative to other peoples, and this is prominent in the historical record. They also develop an extraordinarily strong internal capacity for guilt. I’d like to contrast this guilt with shame, of which everyone else in the world has plenty. Shame comes from without; guilt comes from within, and is far more rare. The distinction is between feeling guilty about doing something wrong simply having done it, versus feeling shame about it when caught and exposed. Yes, other peoples do experience this, but I'm suggesting that it's a matter of frequency.
Others have suggested that peculiarities of the proto-Hajnali manorial agricultural system played a big role too, and while I can see why they think so, I don't have much to add. [I should like to expand upon this in the next edition, but for now can suggest that you read https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/.]
The point is that among all these factors and any amount of happenstance, the Hajnalis end up conspicuously different from every other people on the planet.
Surging with social mobility, freed of the inability to coöperate across kin boundaries, and buöyed by high mutual social trust, the Hajnalis wield almost unimaginable capacity for joint enterprise and coördination. A true middle class springs up as never before. We should take a moment to consider what this suggests: Traits which we might describe as noble, rather than base, proliferate among the Hajnali middle to an unprecedented degree. The people on the Slopes and even many Shoal-dwellers are newly-empowered to convert cognitive superiority into reproductive advantage. Large sections of Hajnali society become capable of participating in government, including self-government, where their ancestors had been much more dependent upon organization from above. And with these traits come the inclination to liberty, previously the near-exclusive province of the nobles.
[This whole paragraph is scheduled for demolition because I really can't substantiate it and may be giving in to what amounts to prejudice; even so I have left it for you, the reader, in case you should have input.] We have established how the Tropicals never really developed much in the way of enterprise, and how the lighter-skinned ones in-between got caught in the trust gap and so found themselves limited. Another civilization, farther to the east, ended up about as intelligent as Hajnalis if not a little more. The major difference, though, was that those island chains tended to end up under the rule of a single Emperor, who controlled society all the way down and had a way of executing anyone beneath him who showed too much invention or initiative, as well as their entire extended families, sometimes out to a really staggering breadth. These people became optimized for submission, kissing up to authority, and rigid adherence to official dogma no matter how crazy it might obviously be (指鹿為馬). At least outwardly. Inwardly, they're primed for subtle deception and the manipulation of institutions such that they can advance themselves without attracting ire.
Not so in Hajnal, where even the greatest (and here shall I use three quotes) '''empire''' is deeply balkanized and faces much internal competition. City-states and small collections of islands face centuries of internecine warfare, where innovation is seized upon readily even as the (comparative) impulse to mass-self-rule comes into its own. A series of terrible wars is fought, ostensibly over religious differences, but actually over this precise issue: To what degree should a man in a society, from the King all the way down to the head of a family, submit to overarching authority (whether religious or legal) versus piloting his own path? And it's the northwestern fringe which lands on the latter side and so becomes Hajnal. In these societies, the most perceptive, ambitious, industrious, inventive, iconoclastic, etc. people become selected for as nowhere else on Tidus, and such traits proliferate.
Some of them specialize so hard into this path that their own societies kick them out and they sail across the vast ocean to the other side of the planet to found even more extremely-liberal societies on another, distant archipelago, where they exterminate or displace the extant primitive natives in a staggeringly one-sided process. We'll come back to them (these winners) later.
All of this general liberalism is perhaps understandable: Have not these men grow up in the shadow of hereditary nobility and religious institutions which insist to the last that there's a fundamental difference between types of people, and that one must above all else know one’s place? The servants, it had been said, were as dependent upon their masters as the masters were upon the servants. But hadn’t recent developments just disproven that? And if it hadn’t been true for the Hajnalis, why should they think it true for anyone else?
Even their lower classes are ruthlessly selected for noble traits due to a shift to an industrial economy, e.g. being capable of showing up on time and staying at one job. Those who can't do such things fail to make the cut and are replaced by those who can. And centuries go by where the most violently-impulsive of each generation are culled by incarceration and/or execution. Before long the Hajnali middle classes have several notable traits which are mostly- if not entirely-unique to them compared to the Slope-dwellers of other civilizations, taken generally. Allow me to offer a few for illustrative purposes.
- Punctuality
- Self-criticism
- Strong work ethic
- Emphasis on the nuclear family
- Low time preference, i.e. delayed gratification for greater gains later
- (Ergo) Long-term planning
- Prone to giving the benefit of the doubt
- Belief in the fundamental equality of man
- General honesty and willingness to contradict authority
- Willingness to make small-scale personal sacrifices for the greater good; ingrained desire to stop at crosswalks, rewind their video cassettes, return their shopping carts, and wait politely in line, e.g.
These are tremendous advantages and Hajnali society undergoes innumerable rapid changes. Individual rights, limited states, representative government, and so much else. The process kicks on and on into ever-higher gear. Unbelievable technological advancements are made and pretty soon the Hajnalis own the entire planet, fly through the air like gods, even walk on the moons. If any non-Hajnali peoples are under attack by Hajnalis, their only hope is that some other group of Hajnalis tries to stop them.
They start draining Tidus' ocean! They build titanic sea-walls to keep the water out, expanding their islands to hitherto-unprecedented sizes, capable of supporting unbelievable numbers of souls on these great new plains, haunted as they are by the threat of breakdown in wall-maintenance-capability (honestly English I must insist that this should be but one word).
They set up colonies pretty much everywhere. Their religious belief that all men are fundamentally equal gets uncomfortable at times in the face of apparent evidence to the contrary, and so they tell themselves that the solution is to spread their religion; or at least we may observe that they use this as the pretext for gainfully organizing the primitives encountered in far-off lands. For centuries they stand astride the world as a colossus, in many senses uniting it for the first time, and the idea that anyone might ever dislodge them from this position is nigh-unthinkable.
This story probably sounds triumphant, jubilant, perhaps even glowing! But it does not have a happy ending.
These Hajnalis become so affluent, so intoxicated by the fruits of their insistence that all men are created equal, that they lose sight of certain absolutely vital truths, which in time proves to be their very undoing. Some Hajnali nations had imported large numbers of tropical slaves to work their fields, managing the obvious social conflicts with what amounts to segregation. (The tropicals cannot generally organize and execute modern agriculture for reasons we have seen, but they can perform the labour well-enough provided that someone smarter puts them to it.) Others controlled large overseas colonies with non-Hajnali populations numbering into the hundreds of millions. This was in many ways a great deal for both sides, as those areas were rapidly brought into modernity with all its blessings, but the Hajnalis, ever self-critical, cannot seem to help but ask themselves: Given that everyone else is just like us except for circumstance, don't they deserve to be free, too? (For whatever reason as I type this I am visited upon by the mental image of a little blonde girl crying as her balloon escapes into the sky. And no, I'm actually not making fun of her. I feel it in my chest.)
To be sure there are any number of cynical motivations for pushing this narrative — by this point most of Hajnal consists of democracies, and championing the rights of the downtrodden proves to be an amazing platform for turning out the vote — but I feel the need to emphasize how much of it is nakedly sincere. Hajnalis are not only being crafty when they react in horror against the idea that some people can just be worse; can even be born that way; contemplation of the notion sincerely breaks their hearts. (Those who didn’t to at least some approximation evolve this instinct didn’t make as good use of Hajnali hypercoördination and so missed the boat.) Part of being a good Hajnali is the instinct that merely believing the best of others, simply giving them a chance, will be enough to fix them and make them a valuable member of society. Questioning the matter is severely frowned upon and must be trained out of children. And, again, this has been working just fine for many generations, while surrounded by fellow Hajnalis. Indeed, these feelings are most prevalent among the descendants of the farthest, remotest Northern fringe — those people as geographically insulated from non-Hajnalis as possible.
Hajnalis, you see, develop a sort of cognitive, phenomenological blind spot here perforce! It can be worked around, but only by great labour, say at book-length, and even then I have to imagine that about 80% of them still can't quite bring themselves to connect the dots — but I digress.
Rather.
Finally — and look I am admittedly being cavalier in the extreme about the actual chronology here — Hajnal ends up fighting not one, but two cataclysmic civil wars which by implication engulf the entire planet. Fueled by their titanic social coördination and unprecedented industrial and technological capacities, up to and including world-ending wunderwaffen, these leave the Hajnali elite just absolutely thoroughly traumatized and in doubt of their own virtue. "If we did this," the thinking seems to run, "Who are we to rule?" Which impression is not helped by the grim reality that many of the greatest, bravest, most noble men and sons of the aristocracy lose their lives in the process and are no longer around to push back. Which does manage to accomplish quite the ripple in the gene pool.
The technological process culminates: Human warfare is no longer beneficial for both parties involved. Arguably, for any party involved! And, so, as with one of the great bomber-planes of that conflict, packed as it is with beautiful, brave young men yet nevertheless shattered by flak cannons, Hajnali society suddenly finds itself in the most dizzying, terrifying, tail-spin of human history...
More-rapidly than would have been conceivable even a generation or two previously, Hajnalis abdicate their role as the leaders and custodians of mankind. Colonies are released to self-rule with many descending into post-apocalyptic famine and barbarism, even cannibalistic horror, especially when they eject their local Hajnali elites. In the Hajnali homelands, local populations of tropicals are fully enfranchised. And among Hajnali elites, an obsession develops with tearing down their own cultural heritage and replacing it with something more universal; less 'ethnocentric'.
But allow me to reverse and change course a little. A bit before those wars, the Hajnali nation which was soon to become preëminent fought its own disastrous civil war when the elite of the industrialized north sought to cement its dominance over the agrarian south. Naturally enough this war was fought in the name of safeguarding the rights and dignity of all men, e.g., the imported tropicals. Again, particularly with Hajnalis, this never fails to be an effective rallying cry, even if many of the elites behind the war demonstrably didn't believe it and thought the tropicals should all be sent back. Regardless the political ramifications of the northern victory spread across all of Hajnal and indeed the globe. The message to world elites was clear: Either you agree that all people are the same, or else we have the moral right, and perhaps not-so-subtly even the obligation, to replace you with someone who does.
Let's stick with that same (enormous) island for a bit. Segregation is phased out. The previously-captive tropicals are released from their containment zones and soon they have spread all over the place. Unfortunately for all involved, this does not result in the happy, integrated society which was ostensibly the goal. Instead it plays out in myriad horrible ways, of which I will, even as my heart is hammering against its cage, restrain myself to enumerating only a few.
The first of these can't genuinely be called the tropicals' fault. As we have seen, a man is happy in, and contributes to, his society only insofar as he understands that society to be the sort which generates a man like himself. The brute fact is that the more genetically-diverse a society becomes, the less a man will invest himself in it. People stop talking to their neighbours; stop frequenting social clubs; stop or greatly reduce volunteering and charitable giving; participate less in civic functions and organizations, up to and including voting. Social cohesion declines precipitously. This is sad, but inevitable in any racially-diverse society without a very strong shared ideology to bind all members, which was in this case absent and perhaps even infeasible.
But as to the rest, well, it's a matter of empirical fact that on average the tropicals differ greatly from the Hajnalis when it comes to:
- Intelligence
- Impulse control
- Aesthetic preferences
- Aggression
- Promiscuity
- Sexual fidelity
- Parental investment
- Punctuality
- Industriousness
- Long-term planning
- Honesty
- Far too many more things to mention
And look this is obviously going to lead to problems. But the Hajnalis, self-critical to a fault and committed to the belief that there are no substantial evolutionary differences among populations, invent a new way of making sense of it. "We weren't discriminating against them because they're worse," they decide; "They're worse because we discriminated against them."
This Lie is beautiful and soothes their painèd souls, but so oft does even a beautiful lie produce ugly outcomes. Most Hajnalis can perhaps be forgiven for overlooking the matter up until now; the simple fact is that most of them would only rarely have encountered tropicals, and those tropicals mostly would have been exceptional by default. (The defeated faction in the south, on the other hand, had a lot more exposure to tropicals and is very well-aware of these differences, which is rather one reason they were willing to fight that war. In other words, they already know what everyone else is about to discover!)
General social breakdown is the order of the day anywhere that substantial numbers of Tropicals settle. Whole neighbourhoods and even cities plummet into bleak dysfunction.
The Tropicals, being vastly more prone to both violent and property crime, radically reduce public safety. People become afraid to walk home at night or to let their children play in the street. Elderly widows live in fear of home invasions. Businesses are robbed much more often and have to invest in all sorts of new security measures, including plexiglass barriers between the customers and staff. Stores suffer greatly-increased theft and many shut down entirely. The police force is overwhelmed and often afraid to intervene. Public amenities such as bathrooms, mass transit, and libraries become filthy if not outright hazardous. Those non-Tropicals who can, flee. Tax revenue plummets. Infrastructure fails and cannot be repaired.
Nor is spared the education system. It is simply the on-average case that Tropical children can't keep up with Hajnalis, resulting in 'disparate outcomes'. This is intolerable to Hajnali society, which throws unbelievable amounts of resources at heavily-tropical schools (while maintaining a false narrative that the opposite is happening). When that doesn't work, the curriculum is dumbed down again and again, trying to find some level where tropicals can reach parity. Pretty soon the IQ needed to graduate university is lower than it had been to graduate secondary school only a generation before, and both diplomas rapidly lose signaling value. Special programs for talented children, designed to boost the best and brightest that they might shine harder and benefit society, fail to find enough qualified tropical children and so are canceled as 'inequitable'. The Hajnalis just cannot bring themselves to admit the problem. The only acceptable explanation is that 'we evil racist Hajnalis must be holding the tropicals back in other ways'. Do Tropicals do worse on tests? WELL then, the tests are obviously the problem and must be 'fixed' or else eliminated entirely.
Tropical children disrupt classes far more often and make schools far less safe. They reach puberty earlier and are greatly more prone to violent confrontations, including with teachers. Those teachers are caught up in a bind: Tropical children are more often in need of discipline, but that will show up in the numbers, and any teacher with a record of disproportionately-disciplining Tropical kids is likely to end up facing disciplinary measures themselves, if not forced into retirement or reassignment. Educational districts also panic about test scores and failure rates. If disproportionate numbers of Tropical children don't graduate, that will look very bad indeed. Therefore grade inflation and an attitude of 'just pass them' becomes standard. In any event both students and teachers begin to fear for their personal safety when showing up, and those who can surely do jump ship for private education. Which causes the state schools do even worse, &c.
Now as to academia, (and don't ask me how I know), early research initially more than confirms all of the above problems, but political capture by egalitarian forces puts a stop to that almost immediately, and pretty soon no one is willing to touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. (Coming up with plausible ways to blame Hajnalis instead is, of course, entirely-kosher; actually even mandatory, arguably.) Entire departments spring up, the sole purpose of which is to perpetuate anti-Hajnali grievance narratives and concoct explanations for the 'disparities' which, no matter what is tried, simply refuse to go away. Did giving Tropicals every resource and advantage under the sun manage to bring them up to Hajnali levels? No? Clearly this is evidence for pervasive systemic racism. Admissions are rigged too, and pretty soon Hajnali children find their path to higher education blocked, having been displaced by the children of Tropicals and the Tropically-admixed.
Genetic research, a field with truly transformative potential to shed light on and solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges, shoots itself in the foot at least three times and with both barrels because any results which might challenge the Lie will be radioactive to the career of anyone who gets too close. Indeed, whole databases of genetic knowledge are partitioned off from the public, with access allowed only to researchers who will first swear in writing that they will under no circumstances use the information therein to compare the outcomes of different ‘ancestral groups’. A few do persist, often mining the work of others to find their data, but these are ignored. After all, no institution of higher education will bear them, so logically they must be fringe pseudoscientists.
Politics is even worse. The only publicly-acceptable answer to why everything is going off the rails is that the Hajnalis, themselves, must be the problem. So hateful, and bigoted, and selfish, those Hajnalis! Diversity is strength, everyone seems to agree, though can only ever give the vaguest explanations as to how in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Those in any sort of position to do something about these problems get there, and only remain there, by dint of their willingness to insist that nothing of the sort is going on at all. "A good person wants to believe intrinsic differences aren’t real and goes out of his way to avoid noticing them. You seem eager to point them out, therefore you want to believe in them, therefore you are a bad person. Why should anyone even associate with you, let alone vote for you?”
All Hajnali society becomes reöriented around serving the Lie. It has become their first god. Authorities in some places first begin to hide crime statistics — despite a certain subset of Tropical men only being something like 6% of the population they commit the majority of murders; so if to a lesser degree rape, violent crime, theft, reckless driving, you name it — and then in many cases stop collecting stats entirely. Such ‘hate facts’ could after all fall into the hands of those who might attempt to challenge the Lie, i.e., those perceived as the greatest threat to the foundation of Hajnali civilization itself. And after all, what could be more hateful, more sinister, more despicable, than a Hajnali nationalist? And naturally enough any political movement which starts sounding too much that way will swiftly find itself frozen out by the rest, even including those which should ostensibly be its allies.
Government institutes a sweeping array of legislation and regulation to the effect that any public or private institution which generates disparate results between Hajnalis and tropicals had better shape up or face severe punishment. And since that's ... all of them ... you know it's going to be a real problem. Hajnali institutions fed with Tropicals are as petrol engines filled with kerosene. The entire thing begins to choke and shudder as the tipping point ratio is achieved. Pretty soon every level of society and government simultaneously starts shaking itself to pieces even as it predicates its policies on the assumption that none of the above is happening.
The social safety net, designed to work with highly-productive, highly-trustworthy Hajnalis in mind, becomes bent instead toward penalizing the productive and trustworthy in order to massively subsidize the behaviours and reproduction of the Tropicals. It takes many Hajnalis to pay into the system to cover the cost of even one Tropical, and rare indeed is the Tropical who ever manages to contribute more than he has taken. And this is before the externalities of reduced social trust, high crime, and property damage. The solution proffered by the managerial élite (in this case I am picturing her hair), of course, is to import more tropicals to pump numbers those numbers up! This is rather like replacing tired rowers on a galley with stone statues of rowers; each fails to contribute, makes the whole ship heavier, and generally compounds the problem. But so long as mentioning the issue is a great way to get thrown overboard...?
The entire society begins to slide. Forgive my wholesale slaughter of such metaphors, but as the pelican which lays the golden eggs steadily works its hardest to murder itself that it might be fed to the ‘less fortunate’ there is less and less to go around. Tensions start to rise as never before. Hajnali shoals are by now positively teeming with Tropical life, and due to institutional collapse the now-outnumbered Hajnalis suddenly find it difficult bordering on impossible to maintain those lovely sea-walls of theirs. The Tropicals have been raised on Hajnali rhetoric about how every single one of their problems is the fault of their hosts, and don't you just know that the very instant the government handouts stall out for the first time-
Perhaps better to leave off telling the story at this point.
For my money this is, in aggregate and by a very wide margin, the single most preposterous thing ever to transpire under the many moons of Tidus. Only, somehow, I'm not laughing. At any rate the metaphor is wearing thin and I'd like to take a step back and come at it from another angle in the next chapter. Oh, and the Hajnalis? No, I'm not about to recommend they start putting people in camps. Forget about the Hajnali homelands. They're toast. Any good man left there had better set his sights a whole lot higher if he would look for salvation, or else at least start working out.
No, I won't elaborate, yet. I do have some ideas about comparatively-amicable solutions, but look guys, the ship is by now dropping below the horizon. Okay maybe, but, I really don't think so. This isn't necessarily the terrible news you might think it is, but it is guaranteed to be nothing else if not extraordinarily terrible. Possibly the literal worst thing that has ever happened, or could. And it was all inevitable before you were even born.
Well now. Despite how I’ve been going on and on about differences between ancestral groups, this is only because it is necessary to establish before moving on, and because my heart hurts for those caught in this terrible genocidal trap who spend their entire lives being told they're the problem, and are good enough people to believe it and to feel guilty all the time. But, you know, what initially turned me from a good Tropical-lover to falling down the rabbit hole which eventually resulted in the production of this book is that I have always been far more interested in the unfolding of differences between the sexes. Yes that's right, next week we're going there, and yes I'm probably going to say exactly what you imagine I would. Or perhaps should? Either way I promise at least that I shall do it well, and with the entirety of my increasingly tachycardia-prone heart. Why, and even how else speak at all? <3
Next week: Gendered Politics
To end this chapter I’d like to propose that there are actually several mitigating circumstances which might allow us to excuse the blindness of the average Hajnali caught in this predicament.
For one, in the largest and most massively influential of Hajnali societies, there was a lot of early admixture, very frequently between masters and slaves, though at least in public all agreed that this was incredibly distasteful and a massive disservice to any offspring, who must find themselves phenomenologically unsuitable for either mode. As such, the Tropicals in that society have on average about twenty percent Hajnali genetics, which means that it's not uncommon to find some few at the high end of the quality distribution who are basically-capable of functioning at normal Hajnali levels. These, of course, also tend to have disproportionately-Hajnali ancestry, not that almost anyone is aware of, or discusses this. It's actually kind of funny; on any list of 'Tropicals' with major accomplishments, the vast majority of them can be counted upon to have at least one Hajnali grandparent, and just as often two or even three! Alas, as usual no one notices.
In that same vein, when well-to-do Hajnalis do encounter Tropicals in daily life, a heavy selection effect is at work. These are the Tropicals who have managed to rise above their fellows, up the slope, and make a living for themselves in better Hajnali neighbourhoods and places of business. So it's neither uncommon nor unreasonable for a Hajnali faced with the sort of realities enumerated above to react in disgust and think something like “But that’s not true! My friend so-and-so is a Tropical, and he’s just like me!” Well, yes. Or close enough to it, agreed. He's also not in any way representative of the average Tropical, either because he has high Hajnali admixture or because he was descended from the Ring class of some tropical society which, yes, can often approximate the Hajnali slope-dwellers and are more-likely to immigrate. Whereas Hajnalis who manage to end up in true-tropical areas often cannot even make sense of what they are seeing before their faces. So shockingly-cruel, so barbaric are the sights then before them set that they are liable to fall back on stock narratives about how it got so bad, such that they can perchance sleep at night.
Also, as mass media becomes a larger and larger influence on the Hajnali view of the world — more on this in another chapter — it has a tendency to only ever portray tropicals as long-suffering paragons of unfairly disadvantaged nobility. This is a symptom of the greater Hajnali commitment to believing the best of others, under the misguided conviction that doing so is all that will be required to bring out their inner Hajnali. And so, in practice, the overwhelming majority of tropicals ‘encountered’ by well-to-do Hajnalis are fictional constructs played by extremely-narrowly-selected actors with what we might call flattering and unrepresentative physiognomy (if I suppose I did say 'actors'). With these as the baseline image of what tropicals are like, what Hajnali could stoop to such a disgusting act as imagining that there are in fact enormous intrinsic differences? Indeed, to the degree that anyone does this in fiction, he may most-reliably be counted upon to occupy the role of the villain. (The joke here in French is that 'villain' equates to 'peasant' or 'country bumpkin', think 'village', which in our current cultural context works back around to 'white man'. Cannot make this stuff up.)
In all these ways and many more, a truly stupendous amount of resources is expended upon every Hajnali child from before his birth to ensure that he simply cannot see the world in any other way, and that he must look upon anyone who might with utmost contempt, loathing, and revulsion. Is it such a surprise that this works? Smarter dogs, it has been noted, are easier to train.
But still, it's right there all the time; why can't they see it?!
So here's my thought. Remember those peacocks? The Hajnalis who can only afford to live in Tropicalized areas are in a tough spot. They can’t do anything about the problem without going to ridiculously-circuitous lengths to talk about it, and then only under the most elaborate euphemisms ('I want to live somewhere with good schools'), or else be frozen out of the polite society of their betters. Meanwhile, those who can afford to live in nice gated communities higher up on the Slopes have no such problem. Despite what they profess even to themselves, they'll pay whatever it takes to make their home somewhere far removed from Tropicals. Even so it pleases them to gush on about how wonderful the tropicals are and how really it must be the fault of those lower-status Hajnalis that such differences persist.
And so it is that insisting upon the inherent equality of men is a signal of high status. Indeed, the more vociferously one argues for this, the more economically-secure he must be. It is the less-fortunate, after all, whose stores go under, whose children’s schools fail, whose homes are vandalized and ransacked, whom are mugged on their way home from an anniversary dinner with their spouses. Anyone who complains about such things only puts a giant sign on his back reading “I AM LOW STATUS AND MORALLY EVIL TO BOOT.” Smart money makes a point of doing the opposite, even extolling the virtue of, e.g., violent riots. Right up until the specific point that the mob comes for him next. And the really sick part here is that the worse the situation gets, the more-powerful the signal becomes! I have certain specific background qualifications which allow me to assure you that may indeed be classified as a potentially extinction-level death spiral. What a sad thing to turn out to be an evolutionary dead end. How tragic that we, we sapiens, should be best remembered for how blind we were to our own selves.
At that, consider the following hypothetical. For peacocking political reasons it becomes fashionable to profess that the sky is green, actually. Pretty soon anyone who wants a good job or an education had better be prepared to recite a Green Sky Statement before meetings and at dinner parties, and not appear too slow to rabidly condemn any other who slips up and says the B word. For several generations now access to power and status have been gatekept in favor of those who thrive in such an environment which we know means those phenomenological traits are proliferating.
Now, obviously, this is selecting for people who can fool themselves into believing anything advantageous and never feel the slightest shred of doubt or guilt about that, which is a problem, and also those who know exactly what's going on but have no concern lying about it to people's faces and laughing all the way to the bank, and that's a problem too — but what I'd really like you to appreciate, here, is that this system is also selecting for people who actually see a green sky. (Be careful sharing this book. You might be surprised at who will execute their socio-genetic programming and disown you; even try to ruin you. Even physically harm. The last party at which I was a guest had a name list and lethally-armed security checking IDs for this exact reason. Yes it's getting that bad. Aren't you paying attention?)
In closing, for what it’s worth, and for all that has been said, I am myself at least somewhat the product of such a race as Hajnalis, even if very admixed, and as a child and a younger, I think I may say happier man, bought into the Lie big time. Bigger than you, probably. I'm the sort to really commit to something, you know?
And so it has come to pass that, even having seen her for what she is, I cannot help but love her still, and weep for her beauty. But I can no longer serve her.
Et tu?
Let's chat about the National Football League: This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-10-31 8:15PM Houston Texans @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Dallas Cowboys @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Denver Broncos @ Baltimore Ravens
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM New Orleans Saints @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM New England Patriots @ Tennessee Titans
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Los Angeles Chargers @ Cleveland Browns
Sun 2024-11-03 1:00PM Washington Commanders @ New York Giants
Sun 2024-11-03 4:05PM Chicago Bears @ Arizona Cardinals
Sun 2024-11-03 4:05PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Philadelphia Eagles
Sun 2024-11-03 4:25PM Detroit Lions @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-11-03 4:25PM Los Angeles Rams @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-11-03 8:20PM Indianapolis Colts @ Minnesota Vikings
Mon 2024-11-04 8:15PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ Kansas City Chiefs
Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-11-21 8:15PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Cleveland Browns
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Dallas Cowboys @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Detroit Lions @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM New England Patriots @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ New York Giants
Sun 2024-11-24 4:05PM Denver Broncos @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-11-24 4:25PM Arizona Cardinals @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-11-24 4:25PM San Francisco 49ers @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-11-24 8:20PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Los Angeles Rams
Mon 2024-11-25 8:15PM Baltimore Ravens @ Los Angeles Chargers
Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-10-06 9:30AM New York Jets @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Buffalo Bills @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Carolina Panthers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Cleveland Browns @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Arizona Cardinals @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM Green Bay Packers @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM New York Giants @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-10-06 8:20PM Dallas Cowboys @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Mon 2024-10-07 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Kansas City Chiefs
Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Wed 2024-12-25 1:00PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Wed 2024-12-25 4:30PM Baltimore Ravens @ Houston Texans
Thu 2024-12-26 8:15PM Seattle Seahawks @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Atlanta Falcons @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Carolina Panthers @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ New York Giants
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Arizona Cardinals @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Denver Broncos @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Green Bay Packers @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM New York Jets @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ New Orleans Saints
Sun 2024-12-29 1:00PM Los Angeles Chargers @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-12-29 4:25PM Dallas Cowboys @ Philadelphia Eagles
Sun 2024-12-29 8:20PM Miami Dolphins @ Cleveland Browns
Mon 2024-12-30 8:15PM Detroit Lions @ San Francisco 49ers
Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-09-19 8:15PM New England Patriots @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Chicago Bears @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Denver Broncos @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Green Bay Packers @ Tennessee Titans
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Houston Texans @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM New York Giants @ Cleveland Browns
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ New Orleans Saints
Sun 2024-09-22 1:00PM Los Angeles Chargers @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Sun 2024-09-22 4:05PM Carolina Panthers @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-09-22 4:05PM Miami Dolphins @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-09-22 4:25PM Detroit Lions @ Arizona Cardinals
Sun 2024-09-22 4:25PM Baltimore Ravens @ Dallas Cowboys
Sun 2024-09-22 4:25PM San Francisco 49ers @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-09-22 8:20PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Atlanta Falcons
Mon 2024-09-23 7:30PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Buffalo Bills
Mon 2024-09-23 8:15PM Washington Commanders @ Cincinnati Bengals
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Green Bay Packers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Detroit Lions
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Tennessee Titans
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Atlanta Falcons @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Seattle Seahawks @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-11-17 8:20PM Indianapolis Colts @ New York Jets
Mon 2024-11-18 8:15PM Houston Texans @ Dallas Cowboys
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Just wanted to wish you guys luck despite any little growing pains you're having! Have fun over here guys!
I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?