Shakes
9d ago
If you combine the 1/3rd of Americans who believe in election fraud and the 2/5 Americans who believe trans women are women... aren't you the fringe here? Everyone is crazy but you?
If the argument is everyone else is a "lunatic with crazy beliefs," that's fine, I respect elitism. But the argument actually seems to be built on a consensus which doesn't exist. It's your opinions that are fringe. Maybe then we can start dissecting the "essential functions" your beliefs serve in your own psychology?
Shakes
9d ago
it's an opinion most people rightfully consider absurd
To sum up: "what is a woman?" and "who won the 2020 election?" can expose someone as a lunatic with crazy beliefs
We've had this discussion so many times at this point that I would hope for at least a little grace, but barring that... I would like to point out that at minimum ~1/3rd of Americans believe in 2020 fraud, so it's not really me trapped in here with you, it's you trapped in here with me.
Shakes
10d ago
We just banned someone in the last thread for doing this.
That ban also seems overzealous to me, although I can kind of squint and see a point. But I don't even really see it in this case, is the idea that /u/magicalkittycat isn't allowed to advance his own point of view?
I get that the rules of the Motte are aiming at something higher than courteous discussion, but sometimes I feel that they're choking out courteous discussion. Aren't we all adults?
Shakes
10d ago
Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.
This is a fantasy of the kind some liberals like to tell themselves. Politics is a team sport and it doesn't bother me that sometimes the people "on my team" are "bad people". Sometimes they're real scumbags. But I'm not attached to the idea that my politicians all have to be good people. They might represent me politically, but they don't "represent me".
A lot of liberals seem to live in this moral universe where they do need to think of their politicians as The Good Guys. It's seemingly very important to them. I still hear repetitions of Michelle Obama's line that "when they go low we go high," as though liberals are too noble and pure to stoop to the evil politicking the right so distastefully abuses. It's as if they feel that they actually are "represented" by their politicians, parasocially. It's a personal affront.
In reality I don't see any evidence that Democratic politicians are more moral than Republican politicians. Why would it be the case?
(I know some will say that conservatives have the same problem and that it's unfair of me to describe this as a liberal issue. I will add that I think the conservative equivalent of this is tendency to relish in perceived "cruelty" -- conservatives having already accepted that their ideas are considered immoral by polite liberal society, so they choose to double-down.)
Shakes
13d ago
Leftists (and Reddit is a leftist space) have a very elaborate sense of unspoken norms. An unspoken etiquette. I often find that when people have problems talking with leftists, it’s because they’re violating those unspoken norms in all sorts of ways. It’s a bit like being autistic and finding normal social mores complicated and inexplicable. It might seem to you rude and strangely coordinated, but to them it’s because you trivially violated some basic norm.
I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. Charitably, every group polices norms, leftists are just generally hostile about explaining them to outsiders. Uncharitably, this is what Kaczynski meant when he called them “oversocialized”. Either way I don’t intend to insult our leftist posters here and I hope they can even agree with me.
For a very broad example consider what leftists mean by “empathy”. They have all sorts of phrases for it I’m sure you’ve heard before. “Being a good person,” “basic human decency,” etc. This sounds simple on the surface (putting aside that it smuggles in certain assumptions about what it means to be a good person). Don’t be racist, sexist, bigoted, etc. etc. A lot of people who aren’t leftists probably agree with this premise.
The unspoken norm comes in here. You have to imagine, at any time, whether your actions could be offensive to somebody. It doesn’t matter if they were in fact. That you failed to imagine the offense you could have caused it itself the offense.
Take dating. You’re in a library, you see a cute girl, you walk up and ask for her number, she turns you down. This used to be fairly uncontroversial. And maybe she wasn’t offended. But, in fact, how did you even know she was open to being approached? How do you know you wouldn’t make her uncomfortable? You couldn’t have known that. Therefore, in fact, you did do something wrong, because you took a risk without her consent. You have actually failed to act with the full complement of empathy.
The same logic applies in other situations. You make a joke that isn’t racist, but that someone could perceive as racist. Or sexist. You make a negative comment about your own height to a coworker, which she imagines isn’t appropriate in a work context.
Why can’t you use the n-word? There are lots of contexts where it’s objectively just a word, you’re reading dialogue or repeating lyrics from a song. You’re not using it as a slur, right? But someone could still reasonably be offended by the word itself. Better not to use the word at all then. In fact, if you then insist that it’s just a word, isn’t it?, that’s suspicious, because you’ve clearly failed to understand empathy.
Maybe you’re just not a good person.
Again I don’t say this to criticize leftists but to simply explain the unstated social norms they operate on. They can tell when you don’t understand these norms or reject them, and will begin to treat you suspiciously, even if you feel like you’ve been perfectly civil. It’s something that catches a lot of my right-wing friends when they try to pass the Turing test and fail.
So to my mind when you post on Reddit and are immediately met with hostility, it’s probably because you’re violating a similar unspoken liberal norm. Maybe you’re even polite and reasonable by other standards. But probably not like theirs.
Let me tease out another unspoken norm. I think leftists have highly-developed ideas about how to accept and receive criticism or correction. I feel somewhat confidently that this is in fact your problem.
What I mean is, leftists have an unspoken expectation that you are going to apologize. If you make a mistake, say something wrong, accidentally offend someone, it’s not actually really a cancellable offense. The problem is when you make it clear that you are unwilling to be corrected.
It doesn’t matter if you are in fact right. The fact that you are unwilling to be corrected is your sin. After all, can’t you imagine that you could be wrong? We’re all wrong about something. It’s actually toxic that you can’t admit you could be wrong. It’s immaterial if you’re right or wrong.
Your offense isn’t at the object level, it’s at the meta-level.
So you post about your rusty pans, and the community decides you’re wrong. So you reply on speech-and-debate norms and you argue for your position. Ok, now not only are you “wrong” but you’re clearly unwilling to accept criticism.
You’re an asshole! No wonder you’re getting downvoted!
In my experience, leftists are constantly applying these unspoken norms in all their interactions. It becomes second-nature for them. They’re very logical outgrowths of the simple things liberals believe. The fact that conservatives don’t understand them fuels their belief that the right-wing is actively dumb. How could you not understand basic human decency?
Then, because you’re too “dumb” to understand them it becomes their active duty to purge you. HThey can’t have any halfway intelligent conversation (as they see it) explaining their basic suppositions over and over again. It’s not just that you disagree with them. It’s that you have somehow signaled that you reject basic foundational norms, or are incapable of understanding them.
Yes, these norms operate even at the level of dissecting your rusty pans. It’s not strictly even a political thing. It’s a spiritual foundation. It’s an ethical difference. Two peoples separated by a common language.
Shakes
15d ago
Greenhouse gases exist. It's easy to verify that certain gases absorb wavelengths of light that would normally reflect off the earth and go back into space. Absorbing this light causes the gas to heat up.
We've been pumping greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, into the atmosphere.
Therefore the planet will heat up.
- Selling copper makes money.
- I've been stripping down the copper wires in my house to sell.
- Therefore, I will make money.
This is the major problem with climate theories. They reduce a very complex system down to the simple pieces we are capable of observing, then, arrogantly, assume that this means we understand them. You can prove that greenhouse gases raise temperatures in a greenhouse, but is the Earth a greenhouse? Who is to say what proportion of warming is caused by greenhouse gases? What role is played by oceanic variation, by subterranean thermal forces, solar forces, Milankovitch cycles? We don't have a second control earth, we aren't running controlled experiments, we are simply asserting that the rise in measured global temperatures* is caused by the Greenhouse Effect, because that's the one part we seem to understand.
Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce because I didn't clean my room and I know that makes them angry.
You said that "the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy". This topic works me up a little bit, so I don't want to be too animated, but maybe I can convince you that this is a very dubious statement to be making.
It's an ontological mess. Pig's breakfast. We have no idea what we're talking about. Vineyards were maintained in Greenland for hundreds of years, Mesopotamia used to be the Fertile Crescent. We have no idea what reasonable historical averages really look like. The infamous hockey stick graph is basically a work of fiction, when you look at the methods scientists use to estimate past temperatures they don't match we can read on a thermometer. The entire field of climatology is subsidized by governments and runs into perverse status incentives. The whole field is ripe with the same conditions that feed the Replication Crisis, except that climate papers can't even fail to replicate because there's nothing to replicate. There are precious few actual experiments being done. We don't have a second earth to run controlled experiments on. We have complicated instruments and theories, sure, the scientists all get degrees and wear labcoats. I will grant that it's all done in some seriousness. But ontologically it's not the same as hard, replicable science. It's elaborated wumbology. And you have to believe in wumbo to be allowed to practice. This more closely mirrors the conditions of Roman sacerdotes performing auguries than actual science, which is maybe why climate scientists consistently fail to predict anything.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe fossil fuel use goes down and we did it Patrick, we saved the whole town. The earth doesn't burn up, I pitched a perfect game, it must be because I wore my lucky socks. This is fairly basic to the human condition. If climate change goes out of fashion it won't be considered that maybe it didn't matter at all, it will be taken as proof that we understood everything, we solved it. That doesn't really bother me. But I do think that actually this was mostly all a waste of time.
* Let's not even get into all the problems with measuring temperature.
Shakes
24d ago
“Bed without suppers”? You can’t follow your own rules while you enforce them, you want to insult me and then hide behind your jannie hat. Go fuck yourself. Nobody cares about your AAQCs or your bans, and I’ll happily eat one to tell you off. We don’t need to be tone-policed by someone who can’t even police himself, a rude and nasty person.
Shakes
24d ago
The later statements are this contradictory mix of “Regime change was never our goal, but also it if was we achieved it”, somewhat akin to “It’s not happening and if it is it’s good”.
Yes, that’s how war works, do you even hear yourself? We win if Iran surrenders and one of the ways that can happen is if their government falls.
Shakes
24d ago
Now we’re just debating the semantics of the word “belief”. But I hope you understand, that when I say that I “believe” the Donald Trump is a hero, I am not purporting a religious or irrational thought. Rather, that word communicates an extremely high level of confidence.
Shakes
24d ago
I'll add also because it occurred to me during lunch:
I'm also a Christian and I believe in Jesus. And I can actually marshal lots of arguments and reasons for why I believe in Christ, but I ultimately can't stop somebody from sneering that, well, that's a belief, belief can't be justified, every argument is only a rationalization. Fair enough. So let me at least state outright exactly what I believe, because I think everybody believes in something. And I do think my beliefs are better, and I also think my reasons are better. So "belief" is the exact idea I want to evoke.
Shakes
24d ago
This was after Trump already bombed and killed Iran's leaders and they were in the process of selecting new ones. When actually speaking on the subject of regime change, Trump made it clear in his address launching the war that the Iranian people had the opportunity to overthrow the regime, and that he hoped that they would take it, but that it was not essential. The line about "no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" is actually the more inflexible line if I have to explain anything away, but I don't think there's very much to explain. All wars aim for surrender and most end with settlement instead. I have argued before that the MOU was an Iranian surrender, if adhered to.
Shakes
24d ago
America is good, Iran is evil, the violence America inflicts on Iran is justified and the violence Iran inflicts on America is unjustified.
"Based." What else am I supposed to believe?
Nevermind that both these states include many people who have pretty much nothing to do with the regime in question, and the regime falling apart often means power vacuums, significant instability in the region, massive civil war and other super moral outcomes.
This is just the problem of war, there were lots of nice civilians in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union too, a lot of bystanders and innocents are made to suffer and that's unfortunate and we all hope the suffering can be minimized. So what's your point? Warmed-over pacifism does not actually stress me. I still believe that Iran acquiring nukes would be evil, and it's good for America to stop this.
the Iranian regime is Evil and therefore Evil must be destroyed. Nevermind that the Iranian regime might be the best of the options currently available to the Iranians
I have never argued that regime change is necessary and neither has Trump. I think it causes great confusion for war critics when they imagine that the Iranian regime surviving is proof that Iran is winning.
causing instability and destruction in a region which isn't even in your immediate geopolitical sphere that frankly you shouldn't even be involved in
See, there we are. This isn't an impassionate debate about whether America is winning the war or not, it's just a debate about good and evil. You have your views and I have mine. So don't criticize me for proclaiming on good and evil when your argument just as fundamentally rests on your own morals.
That being said interceptors have been burned through hugely whereas Iranian missile stockpiles as of May were estimated to be approximately still 70% of their prewar total, and they have regained access to 90% of their underground missile storage and launch facilities.
It sounds like your assessment of the war is just believing pro-IRGC sources and doubting pro-America sources.
Only six ships went through the strait on Sunday, and I don't know about you but that doesn't sound anywhere close to a lot to me.
Once upon a time it was asserted that Iran controlled the strait and no ships were passing through at all. I consider this pretty decent progress toward accepting my views. Give it time for America to wipe out the last of Iran's capabilities and even more ships will start making the transit.
Shakes
24d ago
The problem is that Trump really is an astonishingly low quality leader, in virtually every specific respect, a singularity of INTENSE BADNESS OF LEADERSHIP, as has been demonstrated through his entire career in more meritocratic contexts (shitty developer, shitty entrepreneur… unfortunately American politics is not meritocratic, you don't need any qualifications to rule at all); so every specific reason to disapprove of his actions kind of melds with every other reason, and you end up with the ur-reason "this kind of thing should not have any power at all", which is easy for followers to dismiss as "derangement". But it can also be just… objective assessment. Which it is.
You could write a top-level if you want, but I don't know if we're going to get very far. I disagree in the strongest terms that Trump is a bad leader and I severely question many of your assessments: Shitty developer? Shitty entrepreneur? Moreover, Trump has shown intense leadership of both the Republican Party and America using qualities you have not named: his loyalty to people who are loyal to him; his loyalty to the base; his willingness to sacrifice his private comfort for a life of public politics; his flexibility on things that don't matter; his refusal to back down on things that do matter; and, yes, we agree at last, his bravery. Because Trump has lead the way on a dozen major issues that have gone from outside serious political consideration to mainstream. He has turned the world.
So when you call America a cretinous nation and justify that with your assessment of Trump, yeah, I call that TDS. It doesn't matter if you can articulate it at length in measured ways. I don't use "TDS" to compare you to the incomprehensible rage of a leftist full of hate. I simply think your assessment is so wrong that it can only come through a kind of reality-distortion field.
Shakes
24d ago
*P.S. That's another reason I get so triggered by Patriotism of @Shakes. It seems there's no consistent belief behind it, it's pure "Let's go Dodgers!" loyal cheerleading for America or even personally for Trump; no matter what Trump/America do it's good and based, even if it's contradictory.
"Based."
My consistent belief is American Exceptionalism, that America is the greatest nation on Earth, and that Donald Trump is the avatar of American Exceptionalism. I'm willing to take criticism as it comes and I know that sometimes I look ridiculous. I don't mind. I think it's a necessary position to take. I'm even happy to criticize America and it's failures (which is, after all, the entire reason for supporting Donald Trump). But I'm not interested in criticizing America simply so that everyone knows that I'm reasonable -- I may as well as just get to the point and tell you what I really believe and not worry about how it comes across to people who will never agree with me anyways.
Shakes
24d ago
This is far more true of Shakes regarding America, who talks about the war in cartoon-villain ways like "Now I advance the argument that Bestern Civilization is better than the Third world, and better than Iran, so I support our moral claims against theirs etc. etc. etc. etc."
This was in response to an argument that America isn't part of Western Civilization, so it can't credibly claim any moral superiority over Iran. The point I was making is that this is snobby provincialism, call America "Western" call it "Bestern" call it whatever it doesn't matter.
"It's good to destroy evil and it's evil to destroy good"
This was in response to a claim of moral relativism that criticized American attempts to be moral in war as a pretention. My argument is that this is not a mere pretention, America has a righteous claim to morality over Iran, it's actually ridiculous to put America and a terrorist Islamic regime on the same moral plane.
(In fairness to @quiet_NaN I believe his argument was more in the vein that justifying war as moral causes a problem in practical geopolitics. I chose to surface this facet of his argument for criticism because we have already argued extensively about whether America is winning. And I consider it far more pernicious that many are treating America and Iran as equally just. I think this is ridiculous and deserves ridicule: we live in the free world, we can only have these debates because of the freedoms we have in the West, and too many people have bought into IRGC propaganda or, worse, a lukewarm indifference to any notion of good and evil.)
I make no apologies for actually believing in good and evil and using my sense of them to advance my arguments. I think anyone not doing this, out of a misguided sense of sophistication, is kidding themselves.
Shakes keeps proclaiming victory every time there is any shadow of an agreement and when these agreements fall apart he predicts victory any time soon.
No my argument has been and remains that America won the war already in every meaningful sense. We destroyed Iran's military-industrial complex, we destroyed their nuclear program, we alienated them from their neighbors and potential allies, we won. And everyone keeps proclaiming that Iran has actually won because they refuse to surrender and they can still control the straits. To me this is like proclaiming that the Super Bowl isn't over when the Packers are up 50 points at halftime because the opposing team of George Bailey High still has the heart of the cards. It's over. So I keep repeating, every time it comes up, that Iran lost in every meaningful way, and this final trump card that they can control the strait keeps turning out to not be true.
I feel increasingly vindicated. The goalposts of the war critics keep moving. It was once confidently predicted that Iran would sink American ships, and toll the strait, and never give up its nuclear program. It was confidently predicted that at least Iran would threaten the strait, and significant concessions would have to be made. Now it's clear that a lot of traffic can still transit the strait, because the American military is that much more powerful than the Iranian military, and I'm starting to hear that maybe the Americans started winning recently, who can really say?
I know you think I've taken leave of my senses. But I think it's you who have taken leave of your senses. America is justified to fight Iran and America is winning against Iran. I have made the same argument, consistently, for months, because I believe I am right and I fully expect to be vindicated.
Shakes
24d ago
I think that's right but a lot of the credulity in conspiracy theories came about because so many of them turned out to be true. I remember when Hillary was caught on camera having a seizure and was thrown into her limosine "like a side of beef," then they said it was just a minor case of pneumonia but not the contagious kind that would have put anyone in danger during the photo-op she did to explain she was alright. Looking back on it, ten years later, maybe it was all fine, Hillary doesn't appear to have died. But how do you live through that and not start to wonder if the conspiracies are true?
Shakes
24d ago
Respectfully, this is just TDS. Your rebuttal is that you don’t like Donald Trump.
Shakes
25d ago
The idea that Mitch was near-death was plausible. In fact, it’s still possible that this happened and he recovered and that’s why they’re posting about it now. Pneumonia, right?
Other conspiracy theories were much more far-fetched, but not anywhere close tot he worst. Didn’t Twitter have a national freak-out when Donald Trump wasn’t seen in public for three days?
I don’t think conspiracy theories are a sign of decline as such. A lot of them turned out to be true, or events justified immense skepticism. Off the top of my head: Hillary rigged the 2016 primary, Russiagate was a hoax, Corona was probably man-made, the government lied about masks, Snowden, Assange, Twitter Files, Kavanaugh rape hoax, Duke Lacrosse Team rape hoax, Rolling Stone UVA Rape hoax, Trump assassination attempts. The largest mass shooting in American history happened at Mandalay Bay and the investigation went nowhere and odd details went totally unexplained and Trump got up on TV and basically said, wow that was crazy don’t worry about it. Etc etc etc.
In a way conspiracies are just a natural product of society. Any time a small coordinated group is acting in secret against a larger group, that’s a conspiracy. But we wouldn’t really call the journalists who sit around lying to you a conspiracy, even though it’s quite natural for people to feel distrust in that reality.
My theory is that the conspiracy theories used to be smart but are getting dumber. There was a lot of alpha in conspiracy theories when a generation of smart young Americans were posting online because they were locked out of power and party jobs. A lot of those posters are being assimilated now into high-profile jobs (the Trump admin is full of posters), but there’s still this meme floating around that conspiracies are true. So now you have Tucker and Candace and BlueAnon and all sorts of nonsense grifting lowbies. Same as it ever was, not different in some respect from the medieval mob.
Shakes
25d ago
Thank you for presenting my most based beliefs, but this doesn’t defend Dasein’s statement at all
Shakes
25d ago
This is a cartoonish, almost ghoulish understanding of the United States of America. It would be absurd to say about almost any country, let alone the country that has made possible the most flourishing in human history. I get criticized for grandiosity but this is far more extreme than anything I’ve ever said.
Shakes
25d ago
Ok I am willing to concede that I have not been speaking without specifying any particular timelines but I consider this immaterial because: 1) The American Military facilitated many ships transiting the straits 2) This is all extremely public knowledge and comes directly from the mouths of the American Military and is not simply something Trump said casually at a rally. It doesn’t actually matter if they stopped for a week or a month around the ceasefire or MOU or whatever else. Iran doesn’t control the straits. They have never really controlled the straits. Worse, what threat they do pose is declining, because they are getting weaker, because they are losing. America can contain Iran, and is in the dominant position, because America is winning.
That America is winning isn’t a fiction from Trump’s brain or cope from MAGA shills, this is the plain obvious interpretation of events. Iran’s factories are bombed-out, the regime’s leadership is divided, inflation is high and the people are starving, they cannot control the strait and they are running out of cards to play. Iran alienated all their potential allies. Global supply chains adjusted. New pipes to avoid the straits are being built, and Iran can’t stop them. Iran can’t stop anything. They are going to run out of food and money far faster than America is going to run out of oil and ships.
Iran is irrelevant. Nobody even cares anymore. It took days for this thread to even be posted because everyone’s attention is on other things now. It’s over.
Shakes
25d ago
Guy who can’t face the inconsistency of his predictions telling me to self-reflect
CENTCOM five hours ago affirming that Iran does not control the strait:
https://x.com/centcom/status/2076278945993888116?s=46
Here is CENTCOM validating my earlier claim:
https://x.com/centcom/status/2075325424591044956?s=46
What you have posted is cherry-picked from a day when the US military was not actively safeguarding ships and used that as proof that they never did at all. (Which in fact that tweet in tacitly confirms as a real operation.)
Anthropic is destroying old books to build AI.
This is an old story that has been picking up on twitter this week. Here's the Washington Post from January:
Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books
It turns out that destroying old books is one of the cheapest ways to build an AI dataset. Old books are well-structured texts and (generally) contain quality information; digital archives incur tremendous legal fees and liabilities; copyright risks, in fact, are unsettled and could threaten the entire AI buildout. There's no such problem with maintaining a private library of books: the problem is how to scan them. Physical books have an awkward, blocky shape if your goal is to lay them flat on a reader and extract all the text. The simplest solution is to rip the spine out, lay the pages flat, and run them through a scanner:
"Completed books" is such an interesting euphemism, isn't it? You cut the books "neatly," let's not elaborate on that too much, scan them on "high speed, high quality" scanners, narrative detail, narrative detail, then you "schedule with the recycling company". For "the completed books". It's kind of gorgeous.
Ars Technica goes into other details in their article from June 2025, here:
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
So Anthropic is really just copying what Google did before, except that Google didn't have to "schedule" the "completed books":
But it was a good deal for Anthropic nonetheless. Destroying books saved them from billions in copyright disputes:
Before continuing, I would like to introduce here one other critical detail I will come back to later:
So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.
This old story has been all over my twitter this week with a spate of discussion. Maybe this is a clever marketing ploy by Big Elon, because when I went searching for a recent article to corroborate this post I found this PR puff piece from today:
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will preserve rare books instead of destroying them for AI training
There you have it: Anthropic destroyed millions of books, one of the greatest evils we can imagine, to save a few bucks. And now that the public has been informed the great AI companies are going to behave much more responsibly and treasure our collective heritage. Happy, happy!
I would now like to argue that Anthropic was right.
I know that this strikes many as a priori evil. Destroying books for many evokes (or is even the same as) book-burning. And many consider destroying books to be one of the greatest evils imaginable.
So I would like to start by asserting that, before Anthropic destroyed these books, they were basically worthless.
I think people are living in a fantasy. These unread books are not sitting in a warehouse vault somewhere, pristine, untouched, waiting for their future destiny forever home. A wise scholar is not going to stumble across these books in a stony brook and find exactly the wisdom he was seeking. Your future wife is not a perfect passive virgin waiting for you to find her, however long that takes. No, it doesn't work like that. These books are constantly decaying. Everything is constantly decaying. Everything is constantly being destroyed.
By destroying books Anthropic put them to a better use. Destruction is, in fact, the only way anything is ever created.
The Odyssey is current now because of Nolan's latest film. The Odyssey is a beautiful poem that reached us across thousands of years of preservation. One imagines Orthodox monks painstakingly copying everything by hand, vellum and inkwells, Gregorian chants and prayers. It's beautiful. But the less-remembered half is that there were other poems in the Epic Cycle besides The Odyssey (and The Iliad) that did not make it to us. Another six poems are lost. Why? Because readers found them boring. They were not, apparently, beautiful. At least, nobody found them important enough to dedicate their life to saving them. They were never burned or actively destroyed. They just decayed and, though disuse, were lost.
That is the only way anything is ever saved. Art is either alive and part of a vital culture, or it is dead and decays. "Anything not saved will be lost."
And it is necessary to destroy in order to create. The world is choked up with lots of preserved junk. Museums are full of it. Forests burn when you let it pile up too high. Cultures stagnate when too many idols become sacred cows. And it is very easy to make it difficult to build. Every "historic neighborhood" designation and preserved building makes it more difficult to build new homes. Every regulation is an assertion that we would rather curtail some forms of life, that not everything is equal.
I love going to local rinky-dink museums, it's a guilty pleasure of mine, and you know what I invariably find when I go? Old books, lots of them, sitting behind glass shelves where no one is allowed to read them. It's a minor industry. You can go to Mount Vernon or Monticello or the Henry Ford house and everywhere you'll find old dirty books just sitting there. There are companies you can place orders to if you want to open your own old house museum. Books sit there rotting, decor, not used by anyone, nobody minds.
The balance, I think, is that the new has to justify itself as better than the old. It was wrong to destroy old Penn Station in New York, because what replaced it was far less beautiful. It was wrong to let Cleveland and Detroit rot and some of the most beautiful house neighborhoods in America go to grass. I think it was wrong to destroy all the Confederate Statues, because nobody erected a better set of heroes. I remember when ISIS rampaged through Syria and they destroyed the Assyrian Lions. For what, nothing beautiful, and for what.
But I don't think destruction is inherently bad. I think New York is beautiful, London is beautiful, the built environments surpass the natural landscape that preceded them. And I consider what Anthropic is doing to be inherently more worthwhile than a few million burned books, especially if they didn't even destroy anything rare.
There is a load-bearing thought I have been trying to get at that came to me from Loren Eiseley through John Donne -- I believe, forgive me, the reference is not in front of me as I write. It goes like this: "Nature is not all that natural." The world is not in a wild state of nature. I believe in Genesis, I think everything is like a garden, there is no default state of nature that precedes our intervention. Yellowstone is beautiful, it's "natural," but it's made more beautiful because we maintain it. We assert that Yellowstone is more beautiful than the oil pipelines we could build there instead. Tomatoes are beautiful to me, I assert the right to pluck weeds out of the garden, not everything is equal. I eat meat, I think my life is worth more than a cow's, however beautiful a heifer may be. I don't take this destruction casually either, I don't mean this to be glib, I think I have a responsibility to life up to the value of what has been destroyed to give me life. How could it be otherwise? I think any other answer is self-abnegation, the first step toward a kind of selfish selflessness that leads to a suicidal bend.
My argument is that it's right for Anthropic to burn books because they are creating something higher than what they've destroyed. This argument is not reciprocal. It would be wrong if what Anthropic was creating was worse. I think this is just what it means to be alive. This is Genesis, this is the Parable of the Talents, this is the basis of civilization.
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