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First Snowfall 1 (2005)

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tbh this year has been a rough year for my personal relationships. Two people I've known for over 10 years have lost their minds and it has become very difficult to have any interaction without coming to blows. It's a real pity because I feel my internet friendships have always been more authentic than any irl friends. It's taking away my motivation to read because I have fewer and fewer people to discuss with. Maybe I should just delete my online presence and become a normie. Normies aren't so bad. Or maybe convert to Judaism. On the other hand my career is at least going somewhat well.

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Doonesbury and the Status Hallucination

Torbert Fahey on why American liberals are not Machiavellian Nietzschean psychopaths.

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Prediction markets and the need for “dumb money” as well as “smart money”

Andrew Gelman on the limitations of prediction markets.

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Unironically

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According to ancient DNA from central Italy, mean cognitive ability rose under the Roman Republic, but then fell sharply under the Roman Empire. It would then rise again from Late Antiquity to post-medieval times (Piffer et al., 2023). The sharp decline of the Imperial Era seems to have been confined to Roman territory, as it does not clearly show up in the first two studies of DNA from Europe as a whole (Kuijpers et al., 2022; Piffer & Kirkegaard, 2024), although it does show up in the latest study, which used a larger dataset (Akbar et al., 2024) There are likely three reasons for the cognitive decline of the Imperial Era: - A decrease in fertility and family formation among the elite (Caldwell, 2004; Hopkins, 1965; Roetzel, 2000, p. 234; Sullivan, 2009, pp. 27-28, 35-38). - Hypogamy between elite men and women of low status, often in the form of polygyny with slave women or newly freed women. The reproductive importance of elite women thus fell (Perry, 2013). - An increase in the slave population, particularly foreign slaves (Harris, 1999), and a resulting disruption of cognitive evolution. Previously, “surplus” elite offspring could always find niches farther down the social ladder. In this way, the lower classes (which had a negative natural increase) were continually replenished by the demographic surplus of the upper classes, as would happen in late medieval and post-medieval England (Clark, 2007; 2009; 2023). This was no longer possible in Imperial Rome because such niches were deemed unfit for upper-class offspring and filled normally by slaves (Frost, 2022). Thus ended the “rinse and repeat” cycle of cognitive evolution.

How Christianity rebooted cognitive evolution by Peter Frost

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Attention to all people negatively replying to my posts: none of you will ever be women

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You will never be a woman

Source

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Some impressive vagueposting

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The heyday of TV and radio meant that the lunatic variety of Tom Sawyer’s America was pasteurised away and a free people could now be made to feel anything at all… The ideal technological conditions for actual totalitarianism probably existed from around 1950 to 2000 – the peak of TV’s influence. This never came to pass, though stories of distant American relatives prone and raving before Rachel Maddow now give a slight tincture of what might have been. As others have pointed out, you can at least do something else while listening to the radio, and with a computer you are an active user… That the legacy network media is now so regularly conflated with ‘liberal norms’ shows that what’s being defended by people like Kamala Harris aren’t the old liberal freedoms, but rather those 20th century institutions originally created for mass mobilisation and total war: the broadcast media, an expanded bureaucracy and fixed international obligations. To people like Mrs. Harris success means the return of these ‘collective experiences’, where news anchors can once more move millions with a look. A return of the Cronkites, in which there will always be a little girl down the well to pull you away from real life.

J. Sorel, The BBC is a Relic of Mass Mobilisation and Total War, Sprawled Across the National Psyche Like a Huge Rusting Battleship

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Foundations

Great essay explaining Britain's economic malaise. A long read but very interesting.

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People digging up and sharing old cringe posts of mine.

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It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a "mental activity". We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your attention to the fact that you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in writing. If again we talk about the locality where thinking takes place we have a right to say that this locality is the paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as the locality of thought, this is using the expression "locality of thinking" in a different sense. Let us examine what are the reasons for calling the head the place of thinking. It is not our intention to criticize this form of expression, or to show that it is not appropriate. What we must do is: understand its working, its grammar, e.g. see what relation this grammar has to that of the expression "we think with our mouth", or "we think with a pencil on a piece of paper".

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 6-7

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Equality Act 2010

The overreach of British courts is genuinely astounding. No one can come away from this thinking that judges are intelligent.

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Lovecraft wrote down all the ideas that came to him to do something with later and there are some real bangers in there