Nick Freiling

Is this app any good for startups/indie hackers? I'd like to find a community of fellow founders. Sadly, that doesn't exist anymore on X.

Good stuff!

Our Kingdom of Kitsch A guest post on Milan Kundera and political kitsch.

The emperor obviously has no clothes. So why does his Cabinet keep playing along?

Czech Communist-exile Milan Kundera had something to say about this kind of thing. My new essay on Donald Trump, political kitsch, and the "AI slop" administration 👇

www.readcontra.com/p/our-kingdo...

"Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility."

I shared this on the other app. I should probably share here, too.

I'm looking for a few writers with established audiences. This is for my startup, StampFans. Not for a salaried job, but for a paid partnership – $1,000/month (not kidding) for a year.

Know anyone? I'll consider any topic/genre.

People's social media accounts tell us a lot about the kind of things they wanted to share online, and not necessarily about the kind of things they actually like or believe.

A good thing to keep in mind when looking at the "online profiles" of aspiring Unabombers.

My Spotify algorithm will never recover from this. #dadlife

I doubt these two were the first (or only) people to say this. And it's a very sensible thought once you've seriously entertained it. But the sentiments are so similarly expressed that I wonder if Bulgakov (Bride of the Lamb, 1939) had read this in Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 1921).

It reminds me of something Wittgenstein once said, actually:

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

But at the end of the world, no one will remain to perceive it as an event of this time. The latter is extinguished, to flare up in another way, in a new way."

The end is like death: on this side, for those remaining in the world, death occurs in a given place and at a specific time, whereas for those who die it occurs not in this time but beyond it, beyond the grave, where there are other times and seasons.

On the contrary, this means that that day and that hour cannot, in general, be known, for they do not belong to the time and life of this age, but are beyond its limits.

Bulgakov on the "second coming."

"This does not mean that the second coming will nonetheless take place in one of the hours of life of this world, or on one of its calendar dates, even if an unknown one.

I think it's the same with "enchantment." Step one is just to start taking things seriously that the modern, "scientific" world says aren't real – your conscience, your dreams, your faith.

If you do it right, you'll quickly forget about the whole "re-enchantment" business.

Want to be cool? Stop trying to be cool.

Want to make real friends? Stop people-pleasing.

Want to get rich? Stop obsessing over money.

And I think most of us moderns completely lack the mythic imagination to make actual "enchantment" possible, anyways (especially insofar as that entails an unconsidered repudiation of all things "modern," without which we are, for better or worse, totally untethered).

You can't "re-enchant" the world by trying to "re-enchant" the world. Just like you can't be an actual "trad" by trying to be "trad."

I'm amenable to the idea of "re-enchanting" the world, but it's the sort of thing that will only be pushed further away so long as we make it some kind of goal.

"Only when you speak about another person in such a way that his angel could hear and approve of it, are you really telling the truth."

"Maybe, instead of redeeming us from sin, shouldn't Christ have redeemed us from confession?"

This is maybe the hardest question for a Christian to answer. And it's probably one that a serious inquirer should struggle to answer for as long as they take such questions seriously.

Want to know when someone is trying to brainwash you?

It's not always easy to tell. But one sure sign is if they start off by telling you that you've been brainwashed.

I was just thinking yesterday that I shouldn't have quit my coding class in 2019, when I decided I was (at age 28) too old to learn how to code.

But then today I realized I can "code" almost anything I want with ChatGPT. So I'm sort of glad I didn't waste my time?

(I don't actually like Chesterton very much, but the quote is good.)

The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases, no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could possibly say what was the matter with it."

GK Chesterton

"If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. (1/2)

Are people actually here? Can I get a sign of life?

Allen Drury - A God Against the Gods

Found at Goodwill. Anyone read this?

Almost every argument I see about daylight savings time insinuates that, somehow, there is actually daylight lost or saved.

Obviously people know this. But this ends up being a part of almost every argument about DST.

Yet another reason to get rid of the time change – it makes people stupid!

What's to keep me from going to IKEA, dropping my 4 kids off in Småland (the play-place), walking to the cafeteria, and enjoying a Swedish meatball dinner-date with my wife?

What's to keep me from doing this every other Friday?