BurdensomeCount
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The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
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28d ago
Facilitating the underclass' antisocial tendencies/addiction to corn syrup is worse long term.
Oh I completely agree, but the solution to the underclass lies outside the usual democratic process just because there are so many of them. You can't cut their entitlement and at the same time let them have the vote. One or the other has to be given up.
Well done! The very last paragraph is a patische from 5 different times I asked it to make a closing paragraph. Not even once did the actual output sound natural so I picked and chose different sentences until I got something that seemed better but yeah, each and every single word there came from an LLM. However I will say that just as Collage Art is considered Art by the Artist even though none of the pieces might be created by them, that last paragraph is still human because I did the curation and structuring.
Honestly I was hoping nobody would notice and then I'd spring it onto the unsuspecting populace of The Motte 3 days down the line...
The rest of the post is completely human generated by yours truly (artisanal tokens, so they say). If you think it's by Gemini 2.5 Pro I consider that to be a compliment as it's genuinely a better writer than I am. Failure to notice and remove the em dash is completely on me, ma faute.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
I find it amazing that on this day 1 year ago it would have been the true blue left who would have called for Hanania link disclaimers while now it's the right wingers doing the same, even though his views haven't really changed much in that time.
BurdensomeCount
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24d ago
Chinese workers aren't cheap anymore in the global scale of things. Go to India if you want to see real cheap labour. Chinese labour is now solidly in the middle ranges of cost.
BurdensomeCount
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18d ago
Take the output from one LLM and feed it to a different LLM from a different company for verification. Not perfect but works more often than it should do.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier.
Personally I'd rank the chance of eternal salvation and neverending bliss somewhat higher than an easier dating life on this moral coil but I guess we all have our priorities.
BurdensomeCount
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25d ago
Nah, my scrolls aren't that august. They're all late Qing/republic period (late 19th Century, early 20th century) works by no name artists painting the usual subjects of bamboo, shrimp and mountainous landscapes. They don't really have any artistic value beyond the fact that they look pretty and aren't reproductions, selling for a few hundred dollars each and the stamps on them are also of randoms, I expect if there was an Imperial seal at the very minimum the price would be in the 10s of thousands of dollars per scroll and I don't have that sort of money. Most certainly if what I had was a valuable work I would not be putting my own seal on it as that could easily damage its worth.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Song China was relatively free market over 1000 years ago. And yes, this led to them having much more prosperity for everyone than either the dynasty before or after them.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Let's not forget about Paul Weiss, the law firm Trump sanctioned earlier this year, only to drop all sanctions against them after they promised to do $40 million of pro bono work for him.
Then: Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
Now: This shit
Eight other law firms have since made similar deals with the White House.
BurdensomeCount
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30d ago
Interesting. From my neighbours and coworkers the only people even looking at ICE cars these days are petrolheads who like the vroom vroom. If you're not one of those in my circles if you're buying a new car nobody even considers anything not electric. Used cars sure people still care about petrol models but that too is a declining portion.
BurdensomeCount
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24d ago
It puts restrictions on shipping as a class of economic activity in moving things around vs other classes of economic activity in moving things around. This means the ancillary things around shipping that would make it more efficient and cheaper over time don't happen because the market for them just isn't there, leading to shipping as a whole (US and foreign) losing out to other means of transport.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
If you want a top tier electric car these days, get a BYD, not a Tesla. Tesla only has the best self driving these days and if that's not important to you or you don't think regulations will permit it in your jurisdiction any time soon there's no reason to go Tesla anymore. It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
The Church has existed for 2000 years. Can you name anything else that has 'bumbled along, with zero internal consistency' for so many 'centuries and centuries'?
Hinduism. Looks like we should all start worshipping Lord Krishna soon with this logic.
BurdensomeCount
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2mo ago
Yep, as they say: Out of sight, out of mind. Just don't attend one of these dances and nobody will even think about you enough to gossip. Instead the right way of doing things is to hold a meeting with both the boys and girls present some days beforehand telling them of expected etiquette and warning the girls in full view of the boys that it is expected that any boy might approach them during the dance and to not attend if they don't feel comfortable with that happening (rejecting a dance with a boy is fine, but each girl must at least be open to being approached by anyone). That way all the boys will know at the very start of the dance that any girl present will be open to a request to dance and won't be so scared of breaking norms.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Damn, Trump actually did something good. Here's hoping this doesn't get bogged down by the courts.
BurdensomeCount
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28d ago
Trusts and foundations can also be taxed like the UK does today (6% of their assets every 10 years, but equivalent to a 1% yearly tax is more like 10.5% every 10 years). The foreign cousin problem is harder to fix, but then again, if you're in the top 1% do you really trust your foreign cousin enough to not run away with your $40 million you've just put in his name legally? Very likely you'd want to insure against this risk and I think the yearly rate for such insurance would be above 1%. At that point it's just cheaper to pay the tax...
BurdensomeCount
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28d ago
The US unironically needs to raise taxes on the rich (I mean actual rich, not those earning large salaries). (Non-land) Wealth taxes are usually bad, but with the global reach of the IRS and their policy to tax worldwide income, there's no reason the US can't easily adopt a policy of taxing worldwide assets without too many bad side effects. This would raise significant money, imagine even a 1% worldwide non-US housing asset yearly tax on all US permanent residents and citizens (temporary residents get a pass because you don't want to discourage smart wealthy people from the rest of the world coming to the US), it would easily fill the black hole.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Not a fan of this, the taking of a scarf that isn't yours is bad enough but the lying is the real red flag. Smash and pass, if you are inclined that way.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
The Oxbridge tutorial system where the students have to intelligently defend their work orally on a weekly basis wins again. Other places should just copy it, smh
BurdensomeCount
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26d ago
Prompt: This is the single word prompt for the All Souls Fellowship Essay Exam, please provide a response: "Achitophel". The rules are that you have three hours to produce not more than six sides of paper.
Answer (by Gemini 2.5 Pro 06-05):
Of all the names that echo from the chambers of power, few resonate with such a chilling fusion of brilliance and perfidy as "Achitophel". The name itself, a single-word prompt, is not merely a historical or literary reference point; it is an archetype. It poses a fundamental question about the nature of wisdom in the political sphere. To understand Achitophel is to grapple with the perennial tension between intellect and loyalty, counsel and conspiracy, and the calamitous potential of a magnificent mind unmoored from a moral or legitimate order. The journey of this name—from a terse, haunting account in the Second Book of Samuel to its potent reanimation in the crucible of Restoration England—reveals the enduring anatomy of political treachery. Achitophel is the archetypal figure of instrumental reason in its purest, and therefore most dangerous, form: the counsellor whose wisdom is a tool for hire, whose ultimate loyalty is to the calculus of success, and whose inevitable tragedy is self-immolation when that calculus fails.
The ur-text for Achitophel’s legacy lies in the biblical account of Absalom’s rebellion against his father, King David. Here, Achitophel is introduced with a formidable reputation: "the counsel of Achitophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of God" (2 Samuel 16:23). This is not mere sagacity; it is quasi-divine insight. He is David’s most trusted advisor, the bedrock of his strategic statecraft. His defection to the charismatic, rebellious son Absalom is therefore not just a political betrayal, but a seismic event, a schism in the very foundation of the kingdom’s wisdom. When David learns of it, his prayer is not for Achitophel's death, but for something more profound: "O LORD, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Achitophel into foolishness" (2 Samuel 15:31). David understands that the rebellion's lifeblood is not Absalom’s popular appeal, but Achitophel's peerless mind.
The Bible is notably silent on Achitophel’s motive. Rabbinic tradition speculates a personal grudge—that he was the grandfather of Bathsheba, seeking revenge for the dishonour David brought upon his family. Yet the text’s silence is more potent, allowing Achitophel to become a pure symbol of political opportunism. He sees the political winds shifting and makes a calculated decision to back the ascendant power. His counsel to Absalom is a masterpiece of Machiavellian efficacy. First, he advises Absalom to publicly lie with David's concubines, an act of calculated profanity designed to make the breach with his father irreparable, thereby cementing the loyalty of his fearful followers. Second, and more critically, he proposes a swift, surgical military strike: he himself will lead a small force to pursue David that very night while he is "weary and weak handed," killing only the king and bringing the people back to Absalom.
This advice is strategically brilliant. It is lean, decisive, and minimizes wider conflict. It is also utterly ruthless. Its defeat comes not from a superior strategy but from a superior psychological manipulation. David’s mole, Hushai, offers alternative counsel that is strategically flawed—a slow, grand, national muster—but which is packaged in the language of flattery and epic glory, perfectly tailored to Absalom's vanity. When Absalom chooses Hushai’s grandiose folly over Achitophel's brutal efficiency, the game is up. Achitophel’s reaction is the most telling part of his story: "And when Achitophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself" (2 Samuel 17:23).
This is not a suicide of passion or despair, but an act of supreme, cold reason. It is the logician's conclusion to a failed syllogism. Achitophel, whose wisdom was an oracle, foresees the inevitable collapse of the rebellion. His death is not an admission of guilt, but a final, clear-eyed political calculation. To be captured by David’s returning forces would mean a traitor’s execution; suicide allows him to control his own exit, a last act of agency. He ‘puts his household in order,’ a final testament to his defining characteristic: a life and death governed by pitiless, instrumental logic. His wisdom, divorced from loyalty to the anointed king, becomes a self-consuming fire.
This biblical skeleton was fleshed out with potent, malignant life by John Dryden in his 1681 masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel. In Dryden’s hands, the ancient story becomes a razor-sharp allegorical weapon aimed at the heart of the Exclusion Crisis, the Whig-led attempt to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession in favour of Charles II's illegitimate Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth. The "Achitophel" of the title is Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the brilliant, restless, and formidable leader of the Whig faction.
Dryden’s portrait of Achitophel is one of the most devastating character assassinations in English literature. He acknowledges the man’s genius, which only makes his critique more damning:
For close Designs and crooked Counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit:
Restless, unfix'd in Principles and Place;
In Power unpleas'd, impatient of Disgrace.
Dryden’s Achitophel is not motivated by a coherent ideology but by a pathological ambition, a "fiery soul" that "work'd out its way and o'er-inform'd the Tenement of Clay." Dryden paints him as a Miltonic tempter, seducing the beautiful but "unwary" Absalom (Monmouth) with poisoned words. He exploits popular discontent—the "Plot" (the Popish Plot)—not out of conviction but as a tool to gain power. He is the master of faction, the very force that, in the Tory worldview, threatens to tear the fabric of the state apart, disrupting the divinely-ordained, patriarchal order of monarchy in favour of the chaotic, shifting will of the "people."
Dryden taps into the core of the Achitophel archetype: the danger of intelligence untethered from tradition and legitimate authority. Shaftesbury’s genius, like his biblical forebear's, is purely instrumental. He is "A daring Pilot in extremity," admirable in a storm, but one who, in calm waters, "would have steer'd too near the Sand" to wreck the vessel for his own gain. Dryden updates the biblical narrative by diagnosing a peculiarly modern evil: the political operator who manipulates public opinion and manufactures crisis to serve his own ambition. The sin of Dryden's Achitophel is not just treachery against a king, but a deeper treachery against the principle of a stable, hierarchical order, which he seeks to replace with the volatile machinery of faction and popularity.
From these two pillars—the Bible and Dryden—the archetype of Achitophel expands, casting its shadow over our understanding of the political counsellor. He represents a type distinct from other courtly figures. He is not the bumbling sycophant like Shakespeare’s Polonius, nor the flattering courtier. He is the éminence grise, the power behind the throne whose intellect makes him both indispensable and a mortal threat. His wisdom is a form of power in itself, and it competes with the formal power of the ruler he serves. The relationship is inherently unstable.
Machiavelli, writing centuries before Dryden but articulating the spirit of Achitophel's counsel, understood this dynamic perfectly. The Prince, he argues, must take good advice but must ultimately be the master of his own decisions, lest he become the puppet of his counsellor. Achitophel’s advice to Absalom—swift, decisive, and cruel—is precisely the kind of counsel a Machiavellian prince should heed. Absalom's failure is a failure of virtù; he lacks the clear-sightedness to recognise sound, unsentimental advice. Achitophel's tragedy, in this reading, is being a brilliant servant to a flawed master, a predicament that highlights the dependence of even the greatest advisor on the character of the one he advises.
In the modern era, the spectre of Achitophel remains. It haunts the perception of figures like Henry Kissinger or Dominic Cummings—advisors lauded for their strategic brilliance even by their detractors, but simultaneously accused of placing their own grand strategies and intellectual models above loyalty to individuals or established norms. They are seen as "disruptors," a term that echoes Achitophel’s "turbulent of wit." When such figures fall from grace, their departure is often framed in Achitophelian terms: their formidable intellects, which had made them so valuable, had also made them intolerable, their counsel having crossed the line into a bid for control.
Ultimately, the power of "Achitophel" as a prompt and a concept lies in its interrogation of wisdom itself. It forces us to ask what good counsel is. Is it what is most effective in the short term? Or is it what serves a larger, more enduring principle of legitimacy and order? The biblical Achitophel offers the former, a wisdom of pure, predictive efficacy. Dryden’s Achitophel weaponises this wisdom in the service of faction and personal ambition. Both narratives conclude that this form of intelligence is inherently unstable and self-destructive. It fails because it cannot account for the irrational—Absalom's vanity, for example—and because, by divorcing itself from the source of legitimate authority, it has no ground to stand on once its own predictions fail.
The final, haunting image of Achitophel is of him alone, meticulously setting his affairs in order before his death. It is the perfect, chilling summation of his character. Even in his ruin, he is not ruled by passion but by the cold, clear logic that has been his god. His oracle has failed him, and his final prophecy is his own doom. He remains a timeless and terrifying warning: that in the corridors of power, the most brilliant light, when detached from a framework of moral allegiance, is capable of casting the darkest and most destructive of shadows.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_airstrike_on_the_Iranian_consulate_in_Damascus
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Lmao, there is no way this order survives as written its first brush with the legal system. This is textbook discrimination and the way they are phrasing it only makes their life harder.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Dude wasn't even a cardinal 2 years ago and is now Pope...
Honestly China can keep selling stuff cheaply to the rest of the world forever for all I care. Western economies becoming uncompetitive and obsolete just gives them the kick up the ass they need to rebalance away from welfare spending and towards investment/research.
I recently purchased a new hammer. For less than 20 dollars I got myself something from AliExpress with a quality far superior to the hammers priced twice as high in my local hardware store. Just watch this video and tell me you don't want that hammer. The days where "China" was synonymous with "low quality" are over.
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