kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

every single thing is to explain how your dad beating your ass for laughing at the dinner table was actually good and smart and something only someone who really loves you would do

I remember working in silicon valley around 2015, and looking at Uber, & thinking about how weird it was that I could triple my salary if I went to work there, that Uber was really treating its engineers like kings and queens, when its whole business model was creating a sub-minimum-wage underclass…

Every article about the inevitability of AGI

you (tiny, small of brain): this fantasy setting is unrealistic because women have rights

me (large): this fantasy setting is unrealistic because it treats the military as a coherent professional organization with low social status

People still: Look, we can't read history through a contemporary lens. There wasn't a consensus that slavery was wrong.

Every 18th c. pamphlet: How can they do this? Are we SLAVES? In SLAVERY? The worst things you can be? Are they gonna put us IN CHAINS? Like in SLAVERY? Which is EVIL? Like SLAV-

Schumer keeps talking about how the public needs to “rise up.” We live in a representative democracy, Chuck. We elected you with the understanding that you would be the first line of defense here, not the guy hanging out in the back waiting for the mob to storm the castle.

reading Ian Toll's series on the Pacific war and was struck by the portrait of Admiral Spruance. dude delegated as much work as possible, read paperbacks during long voyages, was fanatical about lots of exercise & 8-9 hours of sleep a night, and prob the best naval commander of the war

YOUNG MAN, there's no need to feel down
i said YOUNG MAN, pagliacci the clown
you can SEE HIM
he is playing in town
you should go
and
have
a
good time

one thing this demonstrates is the extent to which racial, gender, and sexual discrimination has been an important cause and substance of worker organizing, rather than (as is too often claimed) some kind of HR-driven distraction

Never underestimate the hatred of the resentful rich. Years ago I caught up with some people I’d known at uni and the thing they were most passionate about was the EU forcing “globalism” on them. They discussed it at greater length and with greater animation than they discussed their own children.

I know the material reasons for the rise of fascism. I also think another reason - which doesn’t get talked about as much because it’s embarrassing that humans can be that naive - is that when you are financially comfortable but bored, abstract cruelty can give you a sense of purpose.

Coming around to the view that a certain kind of narcissist simply needs Musk to be a genius rather than a fraud, because they want to believe there’s a hereditary Brahmin class of accomplished, beautiful minds—and that they’re a part of that class.

The new racket, AI, is counterfeitting and knockoff products. And even the things that are potentially useful there have been made possible with illegally obtained content.

Nursing a take that the major Silicon Valley firms can be understood as organized crime syndicates and perform some of the same functions as the old ones used to — money laundering, feeding addictions, skirting regulations, political influence.

Because, at the end of the day, professionals are just a kind of workers. Relatively privileged workers, yes - but it's the relatively privileged workers who the owners hate most. And if you see someone complaining about the "professional managerial class"? Well, they're on the side of the bosses.

This is pretty clearly the project that Musk is carrying out with DOGE - an attack on the professionals and managers of government, and on the rules and structures and institutions that organize their activity around some autonomous goal rather than just carrying out orders from above.

These people don't want to be rich per se, they want to be the surpreme tyrants of their personal kingdoms. How dare workers have voice? How dare the government impose limits on how they can rule their employees?