Ben Lundy

Open-minded podcast discussions on culture, philosophy and religion.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Xi just invited 100,000 young Americans to “study” in China.

I wrote in @realDailyWire explaining why this is a Faustian bargain:

An “exchange” is premised on reciprocity but when it comes to China, it's always asymmetric.

A Chinese student at Yale can publish an essay criticizing the sitting American president; he can organize a protest criticizing US foreign policy without being detained. This is what academic freedom looks like.

Meanwhile, ask yourself whether an American student studying in China at the behest of Xi can interview an anti-CCP dissident? Publish a paper criticizing the social credit system? Investigate the finances of senior Party families? Could he walk into Xinjiang and talk to former detainees without a handler? The answer is no, and everyone involved in these programs knows it.

The “China” that Xi invites you to is a curated one; what's offer is the China story, told well - 讲好中国故事 - Xi’s own phrase for external propaganda.

Every deal with China is asymmetric because the entities on the other side of the table do not have the same relationship to their state that you do.

Whether it is trade, joint ventures, IPOs, student exchanges, immigration, you see the same structure every single time. You may be a private citizen or a private company. They are a private citizen plus the Party, plus the United Front, and are bound by statutes that says citizens must assist state intelligence work.

So the “exchange” is never an exchange and in this piece, I delve into original reporting on Yale's troubling ties to China, and how two Yale religion scholars, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim worked with a United Front official by the name of Pan Yue and went on a Potemkin tour of the region, praised the Communist Party for its policies there, and said absolutely nothing about the omnipresent surveillance, mass detention and human rights abuses. Effectively, they laundered CCP propaganda through Yale's prestigious name.

Extrapolate this to the 100,000 students and you will see why this is a very bad deal that America should not acquiesce to.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

I'm still writing my analysis of the propaganda film masquerading as a documentary in NAZA, but in the meantime, I recommend watching this documentary which (like a documentary should) explains in detail, with no gaps, lies by commission, or agenda the Hamas practice of human shielding in Gaza. https://t.co/HUh7wiPIXj

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

“If mathematicians have no reason to pursue the mysteries of their field, then the rest of us will stumble into a world run by machines whose workings nobody understands,” Konstantin Kakaes writes. https://t.co/GaWFKDDIXy

[alexei @alexeixbt]

i can't emphasize this enough: reading fiction is one of the most underrated tools for mental health.

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Sedentary behavior is a disease state:

Skeletal muscle is your glucose disposal unit, and the diseases of aging begin there long before any outward sign of obesity or poor health. Like osteoporosis, it's silent.

Pivotal work out of Yale paid young, lean, healthy college students to stay inactive. They developed skeletal muscle insulin resistance from the inactivity alone.

Inactivity is now defined as under 5,000 steps per day.

@drgabriellelyon on @hubermanlab

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

You may have noticed that the word for ‘night’ in many languages appears to be that language’s word for ‘eight’ with an ‘N' in front of it.

English: N + eight = Night
German: N + acht = Nacht
French: N + huit = Nuit
Spanish: N + ocho = Noche
Italian: N + otto = Notte
Portuguese: N + oito = Noite

⬇️

[AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ @AISafetyMemes]

We are SO fucking close to losing control.

[Rener Gracie @RenerGracie]

LL Cool J Trains BJJ

Say it in LL’s voice and it could easily be the hook for a new single. 😂

[Dan Crenshaw @DanCrenshawTX]

“I'm not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War.”

Watch Bill Maher absolutely decimate the Democrat Socialists of America, and their takeover of the Democratic Party.

Bill seems to be the only liberal willing to fight the necessary intra-party conflict in the Democratic Party. Republicans have been fighting our own version of this civil war, but *at least we are fighting it*. The problem with Democrats is that they are happily letting their craziest factions take control, without a fight.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

This is the FlyDubai copilot’s tweet

Notice the phenomenon where he becomes MORE religious and clings harder to his identity in the West than when he is back home.

It totally undercuts multiculturalism’s core premise - that exposure and coexistence will soften rather than harden incompatible group identities.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life--conservatives seem to be out with others at lot more while liberals stay home and doomscroll.

This study analyzed activity using smartphones to track college students and found that conservatives were more likely to be at parties, noisy places, fraternities and religious facilities. Liberals were at home, resting, doing chores, and browsing social media.

This helps explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

The behavioral differences were small but robust, not accounted for by other plausible factors (e.g., demographics), and most pronounced in the leisure domain. https://t.co/73xqgsJ8pg

[Andy Ngo @MrAndyNgo]

Britain’s diversity: British influencer Muhammad Saifullah shares how he’d like to see Shariah implemented in the UK to include executions of gays and the torturing of those who leave Islam.

Polling on British Muslims has shown that fundamentalism runs deep and support for Islamic terrorism is shockingly high. Despite that, the country continues to settle large numbers of Muslims every day.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

High schoolers aren't good survey respondents. They think it's funny to self-report that they're trans.

This makes estimating trans percentages very difficult.

Students who self-report being trans also often report being blind, deaf, armed, obese, 7-foot crackheads in gangs.

[Liza Libes @pensandpoison]

It’s no wonder that Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature—just take a look at the sort of writing being published today.

The literary establishment rewards short, clipped sentences that lack feeling and soul. We’ve become so accustomed to this stale, minimalist mode of writing that we’ve become convinced that this way is the best way. But this sort of easily digestible writing only reflects the demise of humanistic thought in our society.

That’s precisely what contemporary writing lacks—humanity!

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"the main thing that reading gives us (apart from pleasure and some wisdom) is an ability not to be subject only to ‘present-ism'...someone has been here before, felt what we have felt and managed to navigate this mysterious thing called life." https://t.co/fC5FERPI8u

[CNN @CNN]

Iranian operatives used OpenAI models and fake personas to help plant news articles critical of the US war against Iran in multiple US media outlets, OpenAI said. https://t.co/jp2IXe15U8

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Your mind will follow whatever you feed it.

Want better thoughts? Consume better things.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Remember when the Biden admin set up a $42.5bn dollar program for rural broadband?

Despite awarding over $18 billion, it hasn't even connected 1% of the people it was supposed to after more than 5 years.

Starlink is going to beat it to the punch for a fraction of the cost.

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

Yesterday I finished six weeks of teaching Homer’s Odyssey to some very bright freshmen using @DAMendelsohnNYC’s translation, and I have to say it was exhilarating. Basically all said they preferred Mendelsohn to Fagles, whose Iliad they read. I did not expect this, to be honest, but it came to make sense.

What struck me this time was the forthrightness of the Mendelsohn version: the remarkable inventiveness that shows off, not Mendelsohn’s own eloquence, but that of the original. If you read Greek you can feel Homer just under the surface of the English, and the students could trust that much of the clever detail they discovered in English was true to the Greek (pretty much every time we checked, it was). Excellent notes too.

Also fwiw I started out yesterday choking up over the reunion with Penelope, and ended up an emotional mess over the walk with Laertes through the orchard. What a great poem.

https://t.co/HXsmYlfLFi