Man, he was so fucking rad. Haven’t thought about WW in years.

There’s a little cottage industry among philosophers of making versions of those “In this house” signs that feature all the weird arcane bullshit positions that philosophers have about weird inscrutable issues that professional philosophers care about and customizing them to whatever brain-melting combination of things the particular individual believes. That is 10,000 times less cringe than having an election sign. I’d rather have a yard sign that says “in this house we deny the analytic / synthetic distinction” than an election sign any day of the week.

Lich-King of Amerikkka

I teach a writing class for (aspiring) scientists, and it is so hard to train some smart people out of writing this way. Some people just think that using big words and complicated sentence structure is the best (or only) way to communicate important ideas. The idea that you should always use the simplest language that will do the job takes a lot of getting used to for certain folks. The way some academics write does not help.

brain

Wouldn’t it be cool for your job to be “say the dumbest, wrongest shit imaginable to millions of people once a month or so, and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing it?”

For Brooks, culture is something that’s out there, and which arises, fully formed, from some kind of pervasive but nebulous ether. Politics (and economics) is fully downstream of that, and is completely parasitic on this ex nihilo culture. This is pretty much a paradigm case of your brain on idealism : it’s the ideas–in the form of culture–that shape our political economy on this view, but not the other way around; politics and power never “act back” on culture, but are forever subservient to ideology. This gets the arrow of causal influence almost perfectly backward. As you say, the predominant beliefs of most Americans are shaped by decades of material conditions–propaganda, immiseration, austerity, and political capture by the richest of the rich. Even if we grant that he’s right in describing the views of most Americans (which I think is actually pretty suspect too), Brooks never thinks to interrogate why and how people come to have the views that he attributes to them; we just think what we think, and then shape our world in response to that bundle of ideas that God has placed into our minds. Politicians, on this view, are merely weathervanes whose job it is to act based on the ideological winds, forever hostage to their vagaries and totally unable to shift their direction.

The Atlantic: “Why Trees are Antisemitic”

Yeah it’s just bafflingly wrong. He says something a little later about how Kamala is sort of doing what he says, but she just doesn’t have time to swing the Democratic priesthood around, and anyway it’s all performative and she’s really a death to America commie like the rest of them. It’s almost breathtaking how incorrect this column is.

Volunteering

No, of course they’re not. This is made up bullshit to run cover from them just searching shit whenever they want to.

First they came for the arms dealers

This is why eggs in smaller diameter ovipositors are always going a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Every independent test that’s been done has shown absolutely no sign of this. Super mysterious!

Right. The specific scenario they’re concerned about is someone sending in a “tip” that a particular person or organization is mailing out abortion medication, then the cops intercepting all the mail from that person or organization and having a dog alert on it so they can get a warrant to open it and seize the contents. This works even if the dogs aren’t trained to sniff out any of those drugs, because handlers can “cue” the dog to alert on anything they want to (deliberately or not). This is also how lots of K9 traffic stops work.

Many such cases.

Mia Wallace/Vincent Vega 2024

The ocean in general is by far the largest carbon (and heat) sink. Some of that is from photosynthesis–about 70% of all the photosynthesis on the planet happens in the ocean --and some of it is just brute absorption of CO2. That system is showing signs of flagging also, as increased temperatures reduce water’s ability to hold CO2 and disruptions to thermohaline circulation hamper oceanic photosynthesis, but it was really land-based sinks that dramatically failed this year (partially because of all the wildfires).