Charles Beckett
@charlesbeckett.bsky.social
830 followers 370 following 5.2K posts
'These musings are as inadequately supported as they are gratuitous.' (borrowed from: Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, JJ.: Concurrence in Trump vs. Anderson, SCOTUS 23-719. March 4th, 2024.) Londoner in Barcelona
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charlesbeckett.bsky.social
‘What could my mother be to yours?
What kin is my father to yours anyway?
And how did you and I meet ever?
But in love
Our hearts have mingled
Like red earth and pouring rain.’

What he said, from Kurontokai, trans. AK Ramanujan
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
My most unhinged literary opinion, eh? Ok: literature is a category that both does and does not exist, in that it is essentially indefinable except by a mass, constant process of re-definition based on instinctive subjective reactions to texts - but we all know what we mean by the term ‘literature’.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
It’s all a bit of fun, really, but I can’t help feeling a little bit of pressure to do well for the team.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
My team-mate Vicenç told me: ‘T’has portat com un home.’ (You played like a man) which made me smile.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
So far, I’ve performed very badly. But last night in the final game I started to find my rhythm and got a decent score.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Well, bowling in a league is *hard*. The level is very high. Most players averaging 180,190, 200. Some even higher. My team ‘Yellow Power’ are near the bottom of the table. But even then, my team-mates rarely score below 160.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Anyway, thankfully as I say she’s out of danger and recovering. But it’s been a lot. Forgive me if I am more than usually cranky on here. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Partly because they have been so lucky my parents are not very good at managing their health and my Mum is far too stoical and didn’t want to seek medical help - or tell us kids - until it was nearly too late. So we’re having some tricky conversations.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
It’s a moment I have been dreading for years. My parents have both enjoyed really very good health for most of their lives and we’ve been *extremely* fortunate, but this moment had to come and now it has it … er … does not disappoint.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
We had an extremely touch-and-go situation with my Mum’s health this weekend so that’s really the only headline in my world for the time being. Fortunately, she’s okay now and being well cared for, but it was a close call and it has been a pretty humbling experience.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
It is right to celebrate the release of hostages and the signing of a ceasefire agreement, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
From the photobook 'On Listening to Trees/Escuchando A Los Árboles' by Albarrán Cabrera (Anna Cabrera and Ángel Albarrán)
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
I’ve met Alan Moore (not a man who suffers fools gladly, at all!) and heard him talk about his work and not only would he not recognise this interpretation but he would be absolutely horrified by it, and he would make *extremely* short shrift of Peter Thiel.
sharonk.bsky.social
thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Forgive me for being a little sceptical about the full implentation of the peace plan.

It is incredible, and unforgivable, how many innocent people had to die before we reached this point.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Life is cheap, energy resources are expensive.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
The ‘war’ could have been ended eighteen months ago. As it is, what forced Trump’s hand was the attack on Hamas leadership in Doha, which made US security guarantees to Gulf states look worthless. A huge miscalculation by Netanyahu.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
Percebes (in Spain) - delicious! In Galicia they abseil down the cliffs at low tide to take them off the rocks - a very dangerous business! Hence the price.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
I’ve had the great fortune and pleasure to work with George a few times and he is just a lovely, lovely man and a great champion of literature.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
A spectacular autumn day in the little town of Martinet and Montellà, where I am now, officially as of this morning, one of the 622 residents.
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
PoliSci guy: ‘… and so, in the future, we could end up with a form of competitive authoritarianism …’

Trump: ‘Arrest my political opponents. Send the troops in.’
charlesbeckett.bsky.social
There clearly will be many discrete use cases where LLMs can have great value, but the AI industry in its current form *should* die. We should kill it, deliberately.