by far the worst bug in the Twitter/X mobile app is when you open the app and the home screen shows you an interesting new tweet for 2 seconds— just long enough to get intrigued—before the feed is automatically refreshed. does this only happen to me?! it’s torturous and frequent

This guy is the absolute master of proposing things you never asked for but as soon as you hear it, you realize you've always wanted it.

Insane lesson here. In the past year, we've seen two average, mediocre white girls achieve superstar fame for no good reason. Totally separate, unrelated cases. Everyone says "wow, they're blowing up," "wow, they're so lucky," they're launching businesses and hanging out with Drake, blah blah. Each one was the absolute envy of anyone who has ever dreamed of fame and fortune through organic viral content. Literally less than one year later, each one burns their entire life to the ground. The first one launches a crypto scam, all her content shuts down, she's now looking at prison; the second one leaves her husband and kids so she can podcast with Drake in his bed, now she is the sidepiece of a B-tier NFL player and nobody listens to her podcast anymore. Absolutely incredible. The lesson is that you really, really cannot cheat God. If you are ever blessed with sudden fame or fortune, if it does not also come with fear and trembling in equal measure then you're probably going straight to Hell. And never, ever envy or admire anyone who achieves fame or fortune above their worthiness—for they are doomed to fall harder and lower than you could ever possibly imagine.

Elon is doing applied political science. He had a hypothesis, and then he bet on it. And in being correct, we are learning empirically: The Professional Managerial Class has perfected a system of moral blackmail through which they convert third world suffering into personal wealth and status. They position themselves as noble humanitarian experts with PhDs who care deeply about things like global poverty, to justify their own sinecures extracted from the national purse. These credentialed do-gooders wield the threat of African deaths as a shield against any questioning of their privileges. We've long understood bourgeois professional hypocrisy in theory, but never before have we had such a complete empirical revelation of the exact dollar amounts, networks, and individual names involved across the top of the PMC hierarchy. Professional political scientists are generally feigning horror at Elon right now, but that's because they are members of the PMC, even if they are only minor and distant dependents on DC.

Co-founder of Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm.

The NYT this morning criticized Elon Musk's call to impeach federal judges, accusing him of violating constitutional norms. Well, I looked into the data and it's insane: We stopped impeaching federal judges, despite having more of them now than ever! The impeachment rate now seems implausibly low. Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments. What is the probability we'd observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy. What's even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this. The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred. Then in 2008 the federal judges "reformed" themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue. But it seems that the NYT is wrong and Musk is right, we do need to impeach more federal judges. (I'll post a longer piece on this later.)

Every single movie on streaming is like divorce is good; adultery is “complex”; mentally ill woman conquers great challenge; inspiring tale of queer kid’s trauma; it’s like bitch how about you just give me a normal movie

What happened to book publishing?

It's bone-chilling to learn that if you like Trump then nobody in prestige media will care if you're shot and killed.

It seems that all races are racist except white people?

Human life is broken in a crazy way that people have not fully realized yet. I had the most surreal experience last night. I went to a public book launch/talk last night at 6pm, saw friends there. I said to one, "Are you busy after this? You want to go for a drink?" He was kind of confused, he had to clarify what I meant. I was like "do you want to keep talking, like at a bar or restaurant." And he was like, "Oh OK, sure." Then I asked the author—I almost didn't ask because I assumed he'd already have plans to carry on with others there and I didn't want to bother—but no, he had no plans, so he joined us too. Everybody else went home. We stayed at the bar talking from about 8:30 to 11:30pm and it was awesome. I realized that I had not been out on a weeknight past 9pm in many months, maybe more than a year. We had a wonderful time, and at the end we were like "this was awesome, why do we literally *never* do this?" And it occurred to me in that moment that human life really has changed in a very serious way over the past 10 years. "Going out for a drink with friends" is not simply a little less common among a new health-conscious type of person—as the magazine headlines might put it—in fact, it is a completely extinct activity among broad swaths of American men, even handsome intelligent interesting high-agency men with complete economic and time freedom!!! It's not just Gen Z, but Millennials also. The species is cooked. It's over. Do you realize what this means that "going out for a drink with friends" is NOT EVEN A RECOGNIZED ACTIVITY ANYMORE?

I watched Succession. I went to see The Menu. I watched The White Lotus. I listened to the All-In podcast for many weeks. Then I cracked. I'm leaving society. Goodbye.

I don't usually comment on trending drama but this Dillon Danis vs. Logan Paul episode is uniquely gripping. I'd like to reflect on one reason why, which I haven't seen discussed: It's THE REVENGE OF GOD, but 100x juicier than the average Bible story—with photos of swimsuit models and the sexual humiliation of the most powerful, wealthy, young man in the world. Context: Logan Paul is a top Youtube star pivoting to WWE and celebrity boxing. Dillon Danis was a top jiujitsu guy but fell off, pivoted to drama and now celebrity boxing. Paul and Danis have a boxing match coming up. Nina Agdal is Logan's fiancé. For the past few days, Danis has been posting tons of photos and videos showing Agdal's history of many partners and proudly loose morals. You see, Logan Paul is the epitome of male success divorced from God. He is one of the most successful young men in the world, who stands for nothing whatsoever. A genius of some kind, and hard working no doubt, his entire life has nonetheless been composed of essentially uninteresting and meaningless gestures. His early videos were childish stunts, most famously disrespecting a dead body on video. His grand "maturation" involved making an interview show and podcast, where he's cultivated no apparent perspective of any kind, but loves to make fun of his one Christian friend. He's launched a massive energy drink brand, which is very successful, because that's an optimal business model if your advantage is distribution. He's athletic, and a stud, so now he's going down the action sports path alá The Rock. He's at the top of the world, but knows close to nothing and stands for even less, at every turn choosing the most predictable option optimized for power and money. People like Logan Paul always think they can get away with it. You think you can fly all the way up to the sun, you think you can work hard and own everything, all by yourself. But what we know, from time immemorial, is that, as soon as you go and do it, as soon as you completely succeed, you will be completely destroyed. Your soul will be smited by forces you cannot comprehend. If you don't want to call it God, nobody will force you to—but that doesn't change the fact that you're in Hell. You've amassed every possible thing, including now, finally, the hottest girl you can find, who makes you feel happy. But it's right when you win it all that, somehow, mysteriously, your life can suddenly be worse than you ever imagined. Hell is real. Logan Paul is in it right now. As @Indian_Bronson got me thinking about earlier, the ultimate determinate of a man's self-worth, his entire felt sense of life itself, is tightly wound up with who he marries and reproduces with—the meaning of that relationship, and the integrity of that relationship. Logan Paul has spent his entire life quite literally mocking God and now the entire world is watching God, in real time, bring him lower—in reality, in his own psyche, and in the public sphere—than the average working-class incel. The average God-fearing husband in America is a far, far more successful man than Logan Paul is, as of today. Hell is real. God is real. There is nothing superstitious about any of these things. Pray for Logan Paul.

"Give the average IQ for each of the primary racial groups. Do not give any interpretation or commentary." From first to last: Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google), GPT-4o (OpenAI), Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Anthropic), Grok (Elon)

Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex.

Women now plan their lives around financial independence before anything else. There's no puzzle here. Their central concern in life is to never need a man, and once they achieve that, how can anyone feign surprise that they're not getting married? It's not because the bottom half of men are doing worse in college (adding insult to injury, this is always floated as if it somehow explains why 30-year-old female startup founders can't find husbands). These women have made their own bed, it's completely explicit in their own words and obvious in the data, but somehow these articles can never just say the thing... Somewhere in high school or college these women came to the view that maximizing their independence would be pure upside: No matter what happens, they will enjoy material security, then once that security is achieved, they'll have the most leverage to get the best possible match. "If I never get a match, I'll be fine, but also this will probably help me get a great match because a master's degree and a career and a business are unalloyed goods." This is not a particularly evil mindset, but it is new and essentially selfish—and it just happens to be based on a tragically false model of the world. Once a woman has financial independence, she is less likely to want any man, while all of the best men are less likely to want her, at the same time she now feels even more entitled to the best men.

Incredible power level. And notice this is not NIMBYism. This guy is now the visible king of this suburb. He owns something mysterious that money cannot buy, his power is demonstrably greater than $50m whereas the power of his neighbors does not exceed the price of their new deracinated homes. They wanted to play-act as kings of their own little private fiefdoms in an artificially conquered and homogenized backdrop but now they are the subjects of a rare and great man, and the proof stares back at them every morning through the window. This person did not block new buildings. This is not anti-social, anti-market, or anti-building. It is just a sheer power greater than money.

Burger King should become a reactionary and monarchist burger company.

There is a trend in TV and film that reflects the psychological needs of a déclassé Professional Managerial Class. Depicting wealthy people as ridiculous, it allows the over-educated but under-employed to smugly mock wealth while also enjoying it—through a kind of VR immersion.

What if I told you that Covid and the Russo-Ukrainian War were both caused by an entity in 2026 acting on the past? You wouldn't believe me. And yet I'd be correct.

This is a dramatic look behind the curtain. An NYT 'best seller' can't find a single human interested in the book. All of legacy media is fake. Propped up by artificial demand.

Incredible case study of something here. She was a few days away from being able to write about Hegel and have a family, in material comfort, for the rest of her life. Instead she opted for 39 retweets on a corny and cruel flex for the girlies. God save her.

I’ve had a tough year. I’m not adjusting well to fatherhood. The walls really do close in.

Cannabis is a silent epidemic wreaking havoc on the American family. A friend brought some of these over and I drank two around 8pm. My body completely shut down and I slept from 9pm until 10am. I slept through Sunday Mass. How is this legal, with such innocent packaging?

Logan Paul tells his mate George to quit Christianity and… get a therapist instead lmao. He says “Jesus is not evolving you in the best way” lmao Logan Paul thinks he is God. What George says at the end is completely right (they kicked him off the show later).

Now that everyone's had their fun, it must be said that Katherine Stoeffel has been unfairly maligned by a mob that cannot read faces. The science of facial expressions has mapped every inch of the face and linked every contortion to its emotional meaning, and the two screenshots most widely shared from her recent interview with Sydney Sweeney clearly show affiliative expressions. The first image shows an affiliative amused smile with raised brows—lip corners pull upward (action unit 12), inner and outer brows lift (action units 1 and 2), head tilts forward in a classic affiliative cue. The second image is called a sympathy wince or sorry smile—inner brows lift with a slight draw together (action units 1 and 4), creating oblique grief brows, while lip corners pull up slightly. It's saying "I can't believe that happened to you, they are so crazy..." Stoeffel says: "The criticism of the content was basically that, maybe specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn't joke about genetic superiority." This is objectively a kind and generous way to ask about what was a massive public controversy. She's basically just saying "there was this criticism, what did you make of it?" It's a softball. After Sweeney delivers her pointed response—"I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear"—the interviewer nods warmly and vigorously in a clear sign of sympathy and respect (the video only shows this from behind Stoeffel's head but it's clear). I thought Stoeffel's speech and body language were impressively flexible, mature, thoughtful, and well-calibrated for such a fraught topic. She deserves a lot of credit for enabling Sweeney to produce her mic-drop soundbite. I see you, Miss Stoeffel. Even if nobody else does.

Cannabis today is absolutely insane. It's now normal for millions of people to get absurdly high every day. The average dad with "back pain" is getting more stoned, every single day, than the most degenerate bong-ripper I ever knew back in high school. Let me tell you a story about how I learned this. Last night, I needed some pipe cleaners for my tobacco pipe so I went to the sketchy "smoke shop" down the street. Pipe cleaners are only $2.50 and I needed to cross $5 to use my card. I said, I've heard about CBD, that's chill right? It's just like, relaxing or something? Just give me some CBD thing. He gave me a small pack of just 2 CBD gummies for $3. He said "These are popular, very chill. Slight anti-anxiety effect, good to take before bed." Curious, I ate one at 9pm, figuring I'd probably just go to bed a little earlier than my normal time around 11pm. Before I know it, the time is 3:30am and I'm researching near-death experiences to understand what the afterlife really means. And that's a LOW DOSE of a popular, LOW KEY cannabis product on the market today. I cannot believe it. We legalized and scientifically optimized what used to be a relatively weak social drug into normalized CRACK that people use alone for everyday life. Maybe the most insane change of the past decade that remains way underestimated.; Your Uber driver transporting you 40mph in a steel cage is baked to high heaven. When you go into a store, you're really going into a multidimensional la-la-land. Everyone around you is blitzed to the gils, they don't even see you, they're just looking for level 2 in their own personal wormhole. The entire physical public sphere in America today is an open air crack den, invisible beneath a thin veneer of pseudo-functional metaverse complex.

I've obtained the complete transcripts from the Miller and Power v Turner case. They are FASCINATING. The writings of Nick Land are discussed, Curtis Yarvin, several others... Here is the judge asking DC to explain if a tweet from Nick Land is antisemitic or not.

The past 20 years of race relations in America have been a totally insane circle: By the year 2000, actual racist whites had dwindled nearly to extinction, and the few holdovers had fully capitulated to the “colorblind” norm. Treat every person as an individual, ignoring race. At the very least, keep your thoughts to yourself. Even the most racist whites generally did capitulate to this. Starting around 2011, the Left wanted more; they wanted every person to affirm obviously ludicrous statements, and refusal to do that would now be called racism. Now it’s 2023, most white people believe at least one reasonable thing that deranged PhDs call racism, so now some white people are saying “OK I guess racism is good!” and all I see on Twitter now are videos showing obvious and extreme differences of behavior across racial lines and FBI crime stats are now fair play at dinner tables and Elon is publicly asking questions about this and wow… We actually eradicated racism and the Left was like nah let’s bring it back! And the Left worked very hard at this for at least 10 years (more if you count the dress rehearsal of the early ‘90s political correctness wave). And now for the first time in my life (36 yrs) it looks like racism could actually become mainstream again. Crazy.

George Floyd is Jesus for atheists.

Having a baby is way more fun than people lead you to believe. Even happy parents would mostly say things that caused me vague trepidation, the most popular admonishment being "your life will change forever," which always felt ominous. What nobody tells you is how fun it is.

If you read 1 serious book on any topic, and you take good notes—really digesting—you are smarter than 90% of people on that topic. If you genuinely read 3 serious books on a topic, you are smarter on that topic than virtually *everyone* except a few professional experts.

God is real. It's so insane that this is true, but it really does make sense.

One of the luckiest accidents of my life was British visa restrictions forcing me & my girlfriend to decide if we were truly in love or just pretending. We married at 23 & 27, wayyy before we’d have otherwise. Many thoughts for millenials wasting time dating and waiting... 1/?

Silicon Valley is an extraordinary theatre of sociology right now. Apropos of nothing, my observations about a few people I'm paying attention to: - Why Sam Altman does interviews at all is beyond me. He's so verbally slithering it's an absolute insult to the public. He thinks you are stupid or too cowardly to say it publicly (and many of you are). - The All In crew has its charms but their virtues and characters (in a classical sense) are so far beneath their wealth that the show is, on net, a massive hit to all of their personal brands (from an intra-elite perspective I mean). Obviously they're going to enjoy a massive and lucrative media business with many benefits, I just mean for the top 1% of educated observers the perception of them as individuals is lower now than it was before the pod. They should be slightly ashamed and should pay someone to teach them Plato and Aristotle and the Gospels because they seem to have no idea what men of their stature should be thinking/saying/doing. They're also way overconfident about politics, e.g. talking about electoral prospects. There is scientific literature on this stuff guys, it's like if I just started spouting off about which SaaS startups are going to win. - The Delian guy getting surprised and indignant about DeSantis banning lab-grown meat lmao. You make some wagers on a certain political alliance with conservatives then a couple years later you broadcast you have no idea how conservative beliefs correlate. Nothing wrong with this ignorance (although it mixes badly with the pride), my point is it's just another good example of how these guys voluntarily piss away their image as clever and sophisticated dudes (which I generally assume of them until they start talking). On the good side of the ledger... - The Ben and Marc show is a net gain for their brand. They come off as even more thoughtful than I already knew them to be, but more importantly they have stronger backbones than average, e.g. they recently made very pointed critiques of the Microsoft/Altman camp, whereas the All In guys kissed Altman's ass (even though many episodes ago they made pointed critiques). They reveal a mature understanding of their stature and the demands it places on their public speech and activity. - Thiel remains goated as a thinker, he's always restricted supply, which is very effective for him. Altman could simply pretend to be like this by restricting supply, it's crazy that he doesn't. - Shkreli, George Hotz, and all these lone wolf types... The smart and uncorrelated types like these are all benefitting from running their mouths. You love to see it. Fun times.

weird flex but ok

Two of the pictures below are of schools. Two are of prisons. We should be more alarmed by how hard it is to guess which is which.

A biologically healthy young man should be so horny that he is constantly making passes at girls, without any kind of premeditation. This is not supposed to be a planned, purposeful type of activity, it is the kind of thing that should happen almost against his will, something he struggles to contain. If a young man is not occasionally getting slapped or reprimanded for being just a little too aggressive, he is biologically broken. The increase in female political power has increased the force of the reprimand, but male testosterone has not kept pace. Unable to match the female reprimand, testosterone declines further in capitulation, as the young man comes to peace with his domestication like a neutered dog. If you doubt my thesis, attend a social gathering where good-looking and single men and women 20-35 are drinking and having fun together. Zero sexual energy. It’s positively eerie.

I just read Schopenhauer's essay "On Women" for the first time. It's quite cruel—and occasionally bilious—but I was impressed and surprised by two findings. It's amazing how much of our present moment he could see already 173 years ago. First, there is some real generosity to women and cutting insights about men as well, so it cannot be dismissed as blind hatred. But second—and most importantly—one is struck by how technically precise, and consistent with the data, are many of his observations. For example, one of his observations is about the suffering that women's liberation inflicts on lower-class women in particular. By extending to all women rights and privileges that exceed the natural capacities of most women, we increase happiness for a tiny number of women but destroy the happiness of most women. As soon as there are even a few famous and income-generating women, every other woman starts to feel inadequate if she does not gain for herself some public position and personal income. Even those women who are most fully content with traditional motherhood now have to—at best—defend their contentedness, and constantly repel the mimetic temptation. It's remarkable that he could already see all of this in the European "Lady" of the 1850s, who we today see as the pre-modern woman lacking rights and privileges. If he was even 10% correct, and we're now 10x more feminist, then his diagnosis deserves a reckoning.

Say goodbye to my mentions, but I have to tell you all: That little girl in Scotland is not carrying knives to defend against a migrant attacker. Everyone got duped. The 12-year-old girl is a gang member. The person recording her is just troubled by her huge knives. Think about it for one second. I'll convince with you data, but first just stop and think: Even if she is the subject of an attempted rape or whatever, are you not slightly puzzled by why she just happens to be carrying in AXE IN HER PANTS? You really think this is a common and necessary practice adopted by young girls in Scotland because there are so many marauding migrant rapists lol? To be clear, everyone including myself is speculating because there is hardly any confirmed information at all. But I'd bet money against the immediate outraged consensus, and here's why... Scotland has white, territorial youth gangs. They're called “young teams” and they're common in poor areas. Guns are super rare so the weapon of choice is knives, axes, machetes, etc. This is so hard for the American mind to comprehend. When Americans think of violent criminal gangs they think of black men on the south side of Chicago shooting each other with guns. In poor areas like Dundee, Scotland, the gang problem is *very young* white boys and girls who carry knives. In one study looking at ~4,300 youths in Edinburgh, 30% of young people between 12 and 17 had carried a knife at least once. The age at which carrying a weapon was most common? 14. Dundee has a particularly high prevalence of knife incidents, about 144 per 100k people/year (the very highest in the UK is the Midlands with 178 per 100k, so not far off). Men are always more involved with gangs and violence than women, but at age 13 in Edinburgh gang members were only about ~57% male, so more females than you'd think. Knife carriers at age 16 were 70% male. So a full 30% of early-teen knife carriers are girls. Scotland doesn't like to collect racial data for this kind of stuff, but Dundee is 90% white! So yea, in the absence of confirmed details the overwhelmingly rational inference is that this 12-year-old white girl in Scotland is literally just a random criminal gang member. That's what they look like in Dundee, Scotland. In the UK, it's not so much men fighting for rank amidst drug dealing etc., like in the US. These youth gangs in the UK are a weird kind of low-energy, early-teen dynamic fueled by boredom, alcohol, and malaise. It's more like angry friend-groups with nothing else to do. Membership in these gangs usually fades by the late teens. By age 17, only ~9% had carried a knife in the previous year. But also just ask yourself: Why would the rapist or sexually harassing migrant pull out his phone to record? It makes no sense. Also, at the end of the video, after the young girl walks away, why does she walk back toward the "attacker" with a menacing glare and gang-like gait? You have to be drinking some truly phenomenal kool-aid to think "she's just so fed up with being harassed by migrants every day on her walk to the park... She's finally snapping and she's tempted to end this abuse for good!" What a joke. Please think for one minute next time!

My wife and I started trying to have a baby. I don’t really feel ready financially but you can’t wait forever.

Something people don't understand about marriage is that, for it to work, divorce must be unthinkable. If it's thinkable, it's inevitable. If it's unthinkable, deepening your love is the only survival strategy. This is the trick, the sacrament, the only way it works.

This is not a meme or a joke: There is a rationalism to satanism pipeline. I've now heard countless, credible stories of literally satanic individuals thriving particularly well in the rationality subcultures.

Without a doubt the most overrated woman in the world right now. She's pretty but c'mon. This is the definition of mid.

If you're a man over 30 and you have time to maintain more than 5 friendships—I mean real friendships—you're either a loser, groomer, or gay.

Everyone knows who should have played Barbie. Amber Heard as Barbie would have been genuinely avant-garde feminist aesthetics. Imagine how provocative, risky, and exhilarating it would have made the film. A world-historical work of art simply by virtue of this unthinkable gesture, it would have put Mattel in a whole different class as an artist. With the great and truly daring auteurs (almost all men of course). Once-in-a-generation opportunity, just completely slipped through the fingers of Mattel.

Absolutely riveting, jaw-dropping article yesterday from @razibkhan, it's paywalled but here's the summary: Two papers in paleogenomics from 2015 seem to unequivocally vindicate the theory that, around 5,000 years ago, mass migrations from the steppe overtook previously existing populations from Britain to Mongolia. These Indo-European nomads were patriarchal: A small number of men reproduced with a large number of indigenous women all over Eurasia in the period known as the Bronze Age. - In some areas like Scandinavia and Britain, the takeover was absolute and left no trace of the previous people, in Greece and India some indigenous elites synergized with the nomads. - Indo-Europeans were not civilization-bearers. They were powerful obviously but built nothing that lasted. - Marija Gimbutas was right. Critics of this theory, such as Colin Renfrew, have admitted the genomic data is a big problem for his viewpoint. Incidentally and rather awkwardly, the theory of prehistory favored by the Nazis turns out to be closer to true than false. - In fact, it was the Central European fork (the Corded Ware Culture) of the original gang (the Yamnaya) that went on to dominate even more than the original gang. - The majority of Northern European ancestry derives from the steppe tribes. 60% of modern Poles’ ancestry can be traced to the Yamnaya. Even in France it's not far below 50%.

The Huberman story is not altogether trivial. The smartest men in every generation of Western history have generally converged on the idea that knowledge and cultivation involve a certain conquest of the appetites. Obviously men who are successful economically and socially are free to indulge their appetites (and often do). The story is not surprising or informative if you already had Huberman pegged as playing primarily an economic and social game. The story is surprising and damning if you saw him as playing a game of knowledge and cultivation. It is not therefore a totally vacuous story, as many seem to be saying. In the eyes of any classically educated observer, it is a precipitous fall in the stock price of rationalist-materialist-utilitarian frameworks for living. For many people, Huberman was not just a purveyor of useful information but an image of wisdom, an image of a cultivated man. No longer, obviously—except for the most naive. You can know everything there is to know about the body, and have all the followers in the world, and not exceed the wisdom of the average 25-year-old man. The scandal of the story is not Huberman's immorality (which is common and generic), the scandal is ethical. Someone who is famous for having tremendous knowledge of how to live does not himself live in a beautiful way.

LMAO 'fentanyl or mortgage' is such a good phrase. Bingo.

Not even being provocative, sometime in the not-too-distant future we will see a band of disaffected American men build a small private army and successfully conquer a non-trivial portion of Africa for fun and profit.

Men just want the freedom to crack racist jokes without some girl in HR freaking out.

Weirdest thing about the Epstein situation is that there must be something they could share. Maybe there’s no “client list,” but surely there’s some kind of dossier lying around. So share that. Even if it was redacted and people protested that, it would at least be believable. What seems bizarrely implausible is that there is literally nothing to share.

Anyone who claims @jordanbpeterson preaches to the "alt-right" should see my analysis of his Reddit following. Many of his followers are left-libertarians. jmrphy.net/blog/2017/09/06/j…

Wall Street Journal says it now costs $300,000 to raise a child. This is so dumb. Having a kid is surprisingly cheap. It takes one second to realize that extremely poor people have kids every single day. Almost all of those kids live to be adults.

There's a whole new genre now, exemplified by Succession, White Lotus, The Menu, and Glass Onion. I call it Caviar Cope. It's "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" but for a middle-class that's too educated to admit envy and too disillusioned for Horatio Alger aspiration.

The breadwinning drive, and the anxiety of possibly failing, just consumes me. This was already the case, but now it’s an absurd problem—which is good, because this really can’t last, whereas my old stress problem was low-grade enough to keep pushing through.

Wow. Harvard just announced that all their teaching for 2020-21 will be online. And the undergraduate sticker price of $49k? No change there, naturally.

The feminization of the public sphere has been a disaster for the human race.

Chris Rufo on that sweet USAID gravy train

I just listened to the whole press conference and my main takeaway is that Trump and his team are just so *real*—and it's still not priced in. We just haven't seen anything like this in American politics, in my lifetime. I actually feel more sympathy for Zelenskyy after watching the whole thing, because the whole public morality play has worked for many years. Statistically, what happened today was almost unimaginable. Trump and his admin are not acting. They're not mincing words. They're not paying lip service to the public while playing a private game behind the curtain, as every "respectable" politician in the US has for decades. They have a perspective, they have goals, and they're acting swiftly and unapologetically to achieve those goals without dissembling or calculating appearances. Whatever else you might say about Trump, this feeling of realness is just unbelievably impressive. I did not vote for him, but I'm so impressed. Having said that, I think if anyone here was guilty of a misstep, it was arguably Vance, who I thought somewhat unbecomingly played 'white knight' for Trump. But on the other hand, Trump and Vance seem to have good rapport and Trump was game to double down. So I'm not saying Vance did something wrong, but that is what broke this talk, it seemed to me. It's reasonable that Zelenskyy has no faith in a ceasefire, and he has been consistently rewarded for the style of international politicking he brought to the Oval Office today. He just had no idea who he was really dealing with—and frankly, perhaps we still don't either.

I need help settling a dispute with my wife. I bought an electronic dog collar and put it on our 1.5 year-old son so he won't wander off the property. The electric shock is not that strong. I tested it on myself to make sure. This is fine, right? Seems obvious to me.

"In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men." j.mp/31F0gvw

It's not the juvenile behaviors exactly that I miss. The point is that fatherhood really does seem to decrease many forms of interaction and expression, many of which are perfectly good and even wholesome. Many of which I consider important, and which I have a right to mourn.

OK, this is crazy. The judge brings up Nick Land's infamously mysterious 2014 Xenosystems post "Hyper-Racism." They analyze it with a fine-tooth comb. Honestly, my hat is off to DC Miller (his reading is correct, calm, and frankly courageous.)

The hardest part of fatherhood is all the little things that go away, or become very hard to contrive. Like just getting high & drinking with a friend on a Saturday afternoon. You can say a man should put those things behind him, and you're right, but also... No.

One of the most important lessons every man comes to learn... This might even be *the* threshold between boyhood and manhood... You deserve nothing and if you think you do, you’ll be bitter and weak forever. Your job is to carry friends and family, for nothing in return.

Am I insane or is AOC's right nipple visible in this ad? Huge if true. Millennial socialist strategy explicitly embraces soft-core pornographic thirst-trapping as electoral tactic.

AI Safety is fake. Alignment is fake.

Elon's name change is no laughing matter. He's alluding to “Pontifex Maximus,” the title Julius Caesar held as Rome’s chief priest. By calling himself “Kekius Maximus," he is plainly signaling a claim to imperial authority—that he is now the supreme overseer of all things. Elon Musk intends to become the ultimate ruler-priest of the United States.

Perfect summary of our differences, Brianna. You optimize for employability because you are a bourgeois philistine. I have no need for an employer because I am a philosopher!!!!!!!

Something I learned from René Girard, which has always stuck with me, is that the Crucifixion was a "trap" set for Satan. When you think of it as a genius plot to tempt Evil into abolishing itself, the logic is really illuminated and its coherence becomes hard to deny. 🧵

Not even being provocative: If you think the family is a site of oppression & you think sex work is ethically defensible, then millionaires who pay 15-year-olds large sums for sex are legit liberators. Jeffrey Epstein is to trad family values what John Brown was to slavery.

My son is 9 months old. What are the most important things I can do right now to maximize the probability that he will mercilessly subdue all the weaker men of his generation starting immediately?

The number one way that a multi-racial group of men builds trust and rapport is by cracking racist jokes on each other. Not kidding. It’s like a rite of passage for male groups. The reason men are depressed and hate each other is bc they stopped sharing racist jokes.

OK then she should handle it like Diogenes, whose entire point was to be immune from social judgment. The reason people hate Aella is that she proclaims she has found a higher rationality that normal people are too stupid to tolerate. If your entire brand is spitting on normal morality, you can’t cry when all normal people hate you!

In sum, Thiel's theory of California is that tech wealth has enabled exceptionally poor governance. Its wealthy administrative class exacerbated poverty and homelessness to increase their own power and achieve a one-party state for the Democrats. (Source: NatCon 3 Miami, 2022.)

I’ve decided to stop complaining and man up. I’m going to embrace sacrifice and enjoy spending time with my kid. This year I only got slightly blitzed before taking him to see mall Santa.

it's not easy being 2 years old

A transgender cult from the Bay Area is currently murdering people across multiple states. They have some interesting ideas... They're a rationalist group called the "Zizians," named after their leader Ziz, and their ideological motivation is militant utilitarianism—things like "AI Safety" but especially animal welfare as seen through the 'Timeless Decision Theory' of Eliezer Yudkowsky (rhymes a bit with MacAskill's 'long-termism'). Basically, given the total pain that humans inflict on animals, humans should be killed (they say there should be "Nuremberg Trials" for animal eaters). Ziz seems to have perfected a particular psychological manipulation technique she calls "unihemispheric sleep," which allegedly drove follower Maia Pasek to suicide. In 2019, Ziz and four followers staged a masked confrontation with police at a CFAR alumni reunion, then things escalated this month when members Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt engaged in a fatal shootout with Border Patrol in Vermont. Those two were then also charged with a murder in Vallejo, also this month. Federal prosecutors are supposedly now piecing together a larger network of "Zizian activity."

When my wife and I had our first kid (almost 2 years ago), I quickly grew despondent and ashamed of myself. I've always read books and I've always seen myself as a serious reader, but suddenly, I wasn't reading any books at all. My excuse was that "I had no time for reading anymore," but that was a lie: In the evenings, after my work day was complete, and after we put kiddo to bed, I would sometimes watch Netflix for an hour or two—or even three—before bed. It's embarrassing to admit, but sometimes you fall into a bad rut and you have to be honest with yourself (and a bit disgusted with yourself) to get out of it. Then I realized: If I'm really committed to the scholarly vocation, while also being a father in our busy, modern world of philistinism run amok, then I needed to make books the only form of media available in the house. The following weekend, I sold our nice big-screen TV for a few hundred bucks. I immediately started reading more, there was nothing else to do. You have to remember that nobody reads real books anymore. Even educated people, even smart people read very little nowadays, on average. There is just too much tantalizing media in the world, in formats that are drastically easier to consume. But the death of reading—the near impossibility of reading for most people today—is our great opportunity. If you are willing to make sacrifices that others are not willing to make, you are almost guaranteed to enter the upper quantiles of the well-read. There really is a war being waged on your attention, and if you're currently losing that war, don't be ashamed; just be honest with yourself and be willing to take decisive action immediately. If an unexamined life is not worth living, then you can very reasonably say that this is a matter of life and death.

The genius of Plato's Academy was that it functioned as a talent magnet and "think tank." It became a sort of political consultancy. Its main product was not ideas or texts but the network itself: a concentration of the smartest individuals in the region, who would spread Plato's influence for generations to come. Plato's eventual preeminence was not due to the quality of his ideas per se but his production of high-quality students. This is shown empirically in Randall Collins’ extraordinary book The Sociology of Philosophies: Plato beat the others because he enjoyed the greatest out-degree centrality (students) and eigenvector centrality (students weighted by quality, e.g. Aristotle).

Crazy how long it takes for fatherhood to become fun. My son just turned 3 and I almost want to say I’m only just now starting to find this gig fun, like at all. I guess fathers don’t talk about this because it sounds bad but 0-2 is pretty boring. Not much for a man to do until they can roughhouse and form ideas.

It still fascinates me that this kid made great music. Did tons of drugs, his lyrics say multiple times he is going to die from drugs. Dies from drugs. 21. Rimbaud archetype. But much more significant, honestly. Nobody reads Rimbaud.

High status people culturally appropriated UFOs and aliens from low status people.

There’s an obvious opportunity to do a right-wing NPR. Not culture-warsy, not social media personalities, not religious per se, just generic moderately educated daily news with a right-wing slant. Something one can listen to over breakfast with family around. That would crush.

The pyramidal framing of this Trump photo is too good. It bears an uncanny resemblance to Delacroix’s famous painting from 1830, Liberty Leading the People.

having a kid is completely worth it & I’ve never regretted it for a single second It’s also just one of the craziest things I have ever done and it requires more change, all at once, than I’ve ever had to make before almost all public discourse about it is biased & misleading

I can tell you exactly how they’re going to rewrite the woke panic: They’re going to start applying terms like “canceled” to genuinely bad actors (instead of the silly witchhunts for which the term was invented)—to retroactively make these signifiers seem reasonable on average. Amazing early example in the NYT from this past Sunday! How courageous they’re profiling this man who was “canceled” in 2006. James Frey was just a run-of-the-mill fraud who got caught selling a novel as a memoir! I’m calling it. They’re going to retroactively generate good “cancelations” until nobody remembers what cancelations really were.

This is the most godless millennial aesthetic terrorism the world has ever seen. I can tolerate your Scarlett Johansson HR Mommy reprimanding me for racism, what I cannot tolerate is the bloodlessness of the PEOPLE. The coordinated blue-gray clothing optimized for the blue-light stare of the contemporary bugman, an IKEA showroom that reeks of birth control. Why is the attractive and sophisticated Mira Murati forced to wear these frumpy lesbian jeans? I know why, and I'll tell you why. It's because the threat is not AI, the threat is real human beings. They're not really worried about AGI, they're worried about human beings coming to live in the truth. Their goal is not to make AI safe for humans, their goal is to make humans safe for AI. What they really want is "a universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness" (Baudrillard). OpenAI is extremely dangerous and must be stopped.

If you’re dating & living with a girl for more than a year, and you’re over 25 years old, and you’re not miserable, you should get married now. If you think you could do better, you are being selfish. Be absurdly grateful 1 person can even tolerate you. It’s a miracle really.

A horrifying fraction of films by A-list directors are darkly twisted apologia for their own adulteries and divorces—almost all of these people are broken people, with broken families, who have sacrificed everything for the power to imprint images on the eyeballs of mid-IQ Americans, so that by time they reach the peak of that power they have nothing to say—they have no philosophical or aesthetic motivation—other than a desperate need to justify and beautify the trail of tears they've left behind.

Men, just marry a hot lower-IQ girl from a rural church, one who is simple and practical and faithful. You don't need or want impressive opinions about foreign films. "A little retarded but I love 'em" —words spoken by many happy husbands (and many happy wives no less)

Stunned to see people reading the Coldplay Cheater as a victim of privacy invasion. Totally wrong frame. This isn't mob sadism, or scapegoating, or some irrational woke backlash. The guy took his paramour in public and embraced her at length. Naively, nonchalantly, glibly. He lacks even the one virtue that even the worst rakes in history could generally muster: discretion. These are the real ingredients of the public reaction. The single reason he's attracting such extreme ire and mockery, however, is his physical response to the spotlight. I say this with no cruelty and I pity him very much, but as an anthropological matter I feel like this must be the most pathetic physical theatre ever produced by an adult man in the smartphone era. This man's authentic instinct was to hide like a cornered rat. This is a billionaire. He is now facing the fact that his fully developed adult nature is that of a pathetic weasel. And I'm not calling names, he physically slithers away when confronted with a mirror. He goes very far out of his way to arrive in a situation like this, and when his base nature is revealed to the world at the same time it is revealed to him (because he is nothing other than what the world reflects to him), his true, indisputable, objective character is to cower and whimper like a dog. That's the uncanny meaning of this little horror film, and the reason it's particularly captivating of public attention. I'd say the public response has been roughly proportional to the many and layered crimes against humanity in this 5-second video. To say this man deserves anything in the realm of privacy is absurd.

I don’t understand why the naked vulgar hatred of foreigners has become so popular. I’m not offended by race realism or immigration conservatism or even normal evolved xenophobia, but old-fashioned low-IQ empty hatred of a foreign group is pathetic. Why is he not embarrassed?

FTX collapsed because it was run by Effective Altruists. Effective Altruists think they are Gods, but really they are children on meth obsessed with sex, pleasure, and status signaling.

In modern marriages, even happy ones, there is a significant structural tension rarely discussed. A husband is expected to treat his wife as an equal. But he is also required to be the ultimate director and guarantor of the family's physical, financial, and spiritual well-being.

If you're older than 28 years old and you're dating a woman for more than 6 months, you should either propose or break up with her.

The trans trend (no disrespect, just empirically it’s trending) is probably due, in part, to the declining monagamy norm. As the sexually liberal mating economy creates winner-take-all dynamics, more biological males hate being male. Add female empowerment norms, & voila.

Bourdain is one of the most over-rated public figures because he's tricked so many people into thinking that working in restaurants is cool or sexy. It's one of the most hellish, stressful, unwholesome, and degenerate workplaces in the world.