homerus heresy

yeah i mean we are living in an authoritarian nightmare, but it actually is kind of fascinating just how weird the ride is. you can sort of see how the very stupid and the very not-paying-attention could have voted for this

DOLAN?!

excuse me what the fuck

i think he does because most voters understand a candidate’s ideology as a function of their sex, race, and region of origin. aoc is a brown (coded) woman from a coastal state, pritzker is a white man from the midwest. bing bong so simple!

that choice makes it clear that everything preceding was equally a choice, not an inevitability, and could have been made differently

i think the final message of the book is that it’s *not* an inevitability and “big strong men” are unique incapable of handling that. the characters at the end of death’s end choose to reject the “dark forest” worldview - they choose to trust the universe.

it’s quite coherent; the first half explains that this way of living is purely logical and rational and the second half explains that’s not enough - without moral intuition, pure logic and rationality will lead to utter calamity. it’s a devastating takedown of the “hard men create good times” idea

it’s just impossible for me to read death’s end and think “the author thinks that this is the way the world should work” because the entire back half of that book is an incredibly heavy-handed and unsubtle depiction of how the attitudes presented in the first half are literally destroying reality

i’ve read the interview and i think it’s a bit more nuanced - i think that, like his characters, he sees certain configurations of power and authority as “natural” or maybe even, in context, “necessary,” but he also sees clearly how destructive they are long term, and the need for an alternative.

it’s not coincidental that the trisolarans’ decision to maintain their warlike and xenophobic stance ends horribly for both humanity and trisolaranity, with both subject to genocide

let’s see Liao Lin’s business card

think about what forces or processes, internal or external, cause a person who was liberal/leftist (or at least apolitical) for much of their career to suddenly turn right

the second book and much of the third are dedicated to setting up the idea that a paranoid, xenophobic, omni-aggressive society is the “logical” way to live, and then Word of God comes down that this structure is *literally destroying all of existence.* it is not subtle!

the book is heavy-handed but i don’t see any remotely reasonable reading where it’s endorsing the idea that a feminized society is a problem. every attempt to solve problems the “masculine” way either fails or makes things worse.

in the end the characters make the brave and heroic choice to give up their fortress existence, without any confirmation that anyone else will reciprocate. they choose to trust strangers at great risk, for the benefit of uncountable strangers they will never meet

more broadly, other cultures’ selfish, paranoid aggression has not just ruined a galaxy that used to be much larger and more beautiful; it is explicitly dooming all of existence to permanent oblivion!

much is made of the decision to make Chang Xin Swordholder, but if they hadn’t, the book would be 1/3 as long and end with the total extinction of humanity.

my takeaway from the third book was “if you believe hard masculine manly men make tough decisions and women are too frail and emotional, and you structure your society around those beliefs, you will end up incredibly dead and so will everyone you love.”

you have to be shaking your head the entire time so the other people on the bus know you disagree with it

i don’t know why people assume that “preventing iran from having a bomb forever” is a thing that can be done, especially given iran’s massive and poorly controlled border with a nuclear-armed basket case of a state

whiplash is about how cool it is to be good at drums

the reason to support these ideas is the transgressive thrill of it; the reason to support this particular messenger of these ideas is the same

1. what he says
2. what he signs
3. what gets enforced at the end of the day

1 is at least somewhat correlated with 2, though to a lesser degree than in most administrations. 3 is completely uncorrelated, to an unprecedented degree relative to prior administrations

also i think that one contributing factor is that islamophobia is so normalized and accepted among dem electeds and pundits, there are a bunch of liberals whose commitment to empathy, solidarity, and human rights has a Muslim Exception. pavlou and wu are both rank bigots.

at least two prominent ones!

he is basically like brianna wu: relatively normal lib with weak ideological grounding, negatively polarized by zionism into full-on MAGA

the interests of the american right are served by promoting anti-zionist content that is also anti-semitic in order to conflate the two

what’s the WL cite? i gotta read this

i love this because there’s a very senior attorney at my firm with the same name (different middle initial) who would skin you alive if you suggested letting AI draft a brief

the way i can tell this is landing is that 50% of the replies to this video on the nazi bar are saying “what a weak pussy fat kid, pathetic” and the other 50% are saying “sO mUcH fOr ThE tOlErAnT lEfT”