My Collected Writings on history, science fiction, philosophy, and women.
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats On the surface we appear to be living in dire times. Accelerating censorship, panicked pandemic lockdowns, the rush into authoritarian styles of government founded upon resentment with a strong desire for revenge – one would be naïve not to see the parallels to 1920s Russia. Yet in...
I wanted to write a follow-up to my last post, elaborating on why I take issue with people taking issue with WE Charity being corrupt, when they signed up for corruption as soon as they bought into the hype. And from the title of this post, you can correctly guess that I’m referring to the excellent documentary on fake charities Pink Ribbons, Inc. While I recommend watching the documentary for yourself, I’ll quickly sum up the story. In the 1970s a woman by the name of Charlotte Haley began a campaign to encourage the National Cancer Institute to increase its...
“We partnered with Dow Chemical to bring some new exciting programs to YOUR SCHOOL!”~Craig Kielburger, trying to win the “Most Alienating Corporate Slogan” award. There was a recent episode of The Fifth Estate which was purported to be the ‘smoking gun’ of corruption in Canada’s Trudeau administration. It involved allegations of collusion and graft between the Trudeau family, members of his cabinet, and the WE Charity of Marc and Craig Kielburger. And it was a smoking gun, alright – just not for what people think. People are all worked up because Margaret Trudeau got paid a speaker’s fee, while Justin...
In light of this recent news: “This is fine.” pic.twitter.com/fDJErtyzfu — Sophia (PICK ME) Narwitz (@SophNar0747) February 5, 2021 To be sung to the music of Jazz Police by Leonard Cohen. Can you tell me why the stores aren’t open?No-one’s died who’s less than 84We’ve been locked down all of 2020Two weeks somehow turned to 54 Mask police are sniffing ’round the airportMask police are hiding in muftiMask police operate their own courtTraveller, drop your bag, it’s mask police Biden taken seriously by the lawfulBiden taken joyously by the greenMask police are paid by Jerome PowellTravellers paid by J.’s printing...
Eliezer Yudkowsky once proposed an interesting through experiment. Imagine the most minor incidence of pain that a human being can experience, which is accretable over multiple people; that is to say, that it’s measurably worse for two people to experience it than just one person. He suggested a stinging dust mote in the eye. Now imagine the worst sort of pain somebody can experience – say, 50 years of torture. Then a hostile, God-like AI gives you a choice: either one person gets tortured for 50 years, or a googolplex of people suffer a dust mote in the eye. Which...
This is the first part in a series I am working on about what is happening during the current inflection. Numerous social trends and technologies have reached a point where reality as we knew it has shifted. Just as the cannon destroyed the city-state, and the rifle destroyed the medieval knight, we’re reaching a point where the assumptions of the past no longer apply. In this first article I’ll be looking at how our new forms of storytelling are altering our perception of reality. I am going to start with a premise which is so self-evident that it’s easy to...
“A King, a priest, a rich man and a sellsword are in a room. Those three man tell the sellsword to kill the other two.Who lives and who dies?”~Varys, A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin “You seem to have an interest in power, so let me educate you a little while I search for you. It’s sort of this thing I like to do sometimes, especially for learned wizards such as yourself. Power, it isn’t something that you put on or take off like a jacket. It’s something you just ARE. If you can lose it by...
We’ve all been reflecting on the state of political discourse in our nations of late, and this post by Bionic Mosquito about the Spanish Civil War seems particularly poignant. I’m hoping it doesn’t get that bad, but just in case it does, this post from Aidan MacLear is worth pondering. As for me, what stands out about the past couple centuries is the left-right paradigm which seems to be at the heart of every political struggle. In previous centuries we saw plenty of civil wars and revolutions, but to translate, say, the Blues versus the Greens in Constantinople requires a...
Now I’m going to warn you right off the bat, this is going to be a “silver lining on a dark cloud” kind of post. Normally I make a concerted effort to focus on the positive, because my innate disposition is to do the opposite: to identify all the problems that are likely to come up if we don’t do something about them. Past experience has taught me that focusing on the negative is unwise because a) it upsets most people, and b) the bulk of people whom it doesn’t upset are the sort of Negative Nellies who like to...
If you caught me on Millenniyule this year, you’ll know that I announced my retirement from the online crab-bucket. Well, if you’ve been following my blog, you might be wondering about that – and why is my Patreon still up? Let me start by saying – it’s entirely possible that I’ll never publish anything again, and you’re under no obligation to support me financially – thank you to all of you who have backed me over the years, but I make no promises going forward. Now, with that out of the way – let me explain exactly what I’m doing,...
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