omfalos
Nonexistent good post history.
User ID: 222
omfalos
6mo ago
I have read Sadly, Porn. The book is composed of meandering parables. They revolve around a central argument reiterated repeatedly in riddle form but never stated explicitly. Footnotes make up 50% of the book's total word count. Each footnote is an essay, mostly book reviews and movie reviews. I would maybe recommend reading the footnote essays for starters and circling back to reading main text of the book afterwards.
conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe
The expansion of the universe violates conservation of energy. Think of all that CMB radiation that has been redshifted by the expansion of space, thereby losing energy over time.
Relativistic effects may explain why CICO doesn't work for people with high mass.
Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance fits the bill. Cugel the Clever is a smarmy conman antihero who commits felonious crimes and treats women badly. The reader sympathizes with Cugel because he strives valiantly to survive in a hostile world. Cugel's Saga is set in the Dying Earth: a far-future setting where the Sun flickers weak and red, and the Earth is scarred with the ruins of millions of dead civilizations. The world is polluted with cursed artifacts and monsters. The powers-that-be are insane, malevolent wizards. It is a despondent, hopeless world inhabited by selfish, cynical people. Cugel victimizes many innocent people, but most of the people he tries to con are even worse than he is, and they usually get the better of him. After endless setbacks and frustrations, the novel ends in a hard-earned triumph for Cugel the Clever.
Matthew Colville dislikes Cugel's Saga because he thinks it is too mean-spirited. That's as good of an endorsement as you could ask for.
omfalos
10mo ago
The president is obligated to spend money appropriated by Congress. If Congress appropriates $1000 to buy a gay wedding cake, president Trump must go to the nearest bakery and buy a gay wedding cake.
omfalos
10mo ago
Historically, the check on monarchs' power was the need to convene parliament to raise new taxes. Now, the president must convene congress to beg permission to spend less money. Is it tyrannical for the executive branch to not spend money raised by congress? Is president Trump ushering in a Daoist dictatorship through unilateral inaction?
omfalos
11mo ago
Most people don't know that Braxton Bragg was a bad general. The default assumption of an uninformed person is that Fort Bragg must have been named after somebody cool. But a little digging reveals the man wasn't cool, not even by the standards of a Southern sympathizer.
omfalos
11mo ago
The general thrust is similar to his blog but with a focus on relationships. It centers around themes of self-deception, narcissism, performative virtue, revealed preference, cowardice, selfishness, and ultimately, dereliction of duty and the failure to be a good person. A book of cynicism in diametric opposition to nihilism.
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