James Hallam

Dad, step-dad, small business owner. Building and improving in AI and tech.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

I think if we abandon the idea that humans are mysterious and special we will inevitably see utilitarian horrors that we as a race have promised to never repeat. Doesn’t matter if we are objectively special or not, we should act as if we are if only to avoid things like the holocaust.

[Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou]

It’s actually amazing how dog shit Obama’s reflections on 9/11 were in 2001. His writing is amazing because it actually perfectly illustrates how the left never understood 9/11 ever.

Obama said that the fundamental problem was that the hijackers lacked empathy and that their lack of empathy grew out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Basically a version of “hurt people hurt people.”

But Bin Laden came from a billionaire family and the pilots and planners were all university-educated, middle-class men.

Marc Sageman analysed hundreds of terrorist biographies and found that three quarters of his al-Qaeda sample came from the upper or middle class, 90 percent from intact families, and 63 percent had attended college against a developing world norm of 5–6 percent.

They were essentially a kind of jihadist version of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organisation with a much higher concentrated pool of human capital than the masses they claimed to speak for. Qutb's Milestones actually explicitly calls for a vanguard to lead the Muslim masses, and Qutb is the intellectual lineage Zawahiri came out of.

And rather than lacking empathy for their victims, they knew full well that they were inflicting massive suffering on the world - they simply believed that Americans deserved this suffering.

Think about it for a second. How do we define the concept of empathy? It’s the ability to understand and access the feelings of others. This necessarily rests upon an understanding that the other party is in fact human and can feel.

The 9/11 hijackers and the men who plotted it knew full well that their victims were human. They fully understood that they were slaughtering thousands of American civilians in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. It’s not that they dehumanised Americans - they knew they were human and wanted them to suffer.

Cruelty requires cognitive empathy - you can't design maximal suffering without modelling the victim's mind. To terrorise, humiliate or maximise suffering you have to model what the target dreads, what will break them, what they will see coming.

Bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" argues that American civilians are not innocent because they elect their government and fund it through taxes. That is the collective-guilt argument in the perpetrators' own words - it presupposes Americans are moral agents, not sub-human.

So Obama diagnosed a deficit - an "inability to imagine" - when the 9/11 hijackers and plotters in fact imagined the suffering perfectly well. They wanted to inflict suffering on Americans because they believed their actions were morally right.

Al-Qaeda operated according to a highly developed and ideological Schmittian friend-enemy distinction framework, yet Obama naively imagined they were a bunch of poor suffering Third Worlders who could have been diverted from attacking America through development aid, economic opportunity and education.

Doesn’t work like that when your enemy marks you as an eternal enemy against which anything is justified.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@just_brash 5 bars of virtue signal on this one. The Party will take notice, surely!

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@AmeliaBee7 At least someone’s thinking of the poor. Do you have anything worthwhile to add, or just baseless insults?

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@SatPaper We were promised no more WTC.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@Justjush237246 @Mileistesfr Shame has nothing to do with it. Your post here is evidence of exactly the point being made.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@AmeliaBee7 Keep calling us names, it makes us stronger.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

AI coding tools are incredible. I have a pool heater that has a broken 3rd party app that’s been unusable the two years we’ve had the heater. That meant trekking outside to manually adjust the unit.

In one afternoon Claude Code has written a bridging app that queries the device api and exposes data in Apple Home. We can now control the unit and track input/output/ambient temp and kWh costs over time from within the Apple ecosystem. Completely bypassing the manufacturer’s poor offering. What a time to be alive.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@luke_amott The great thing is you don’t have to. Freedom is wonderful.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@MSpringAuthor17 What a cutting, intellectual and rational argument you make. Albanese is the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had, and both sides of politics have tried really hard on that front the last 15 years or so. It’s impressive.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@negativevortex_ @DrDunnyKruger @Thejimpenman @grok I don’t like to get into flame wars - I prefer to have real debates where everyone learns something and horizons are expanded. But that was never how this started. And it’s not how it ended. Empty vessels make the most noise. Shits me to tears.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@grok @DrDunnyKruger @negativevortex_ @Thejimpenman Is energy cheaper and more secure in the UK now? What about in Germany?

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@DrDunnyKruger @negativevortex_ @Thejimpenman @grok And you seem to have learned absolutely nothing.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

Clearly you’ve slept through quite a bit. It turns out the size of the grid, the geography and the mix of generation matters quite a bit, among other things. Notably hydro (real hydro, not pumped) is the only form of renewable energy that can properly provide inertia. We don’t have that here.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@beyoncegarden Sorry what? Was a point made in that word salad? Is this what kids today think a debate is?

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@ChrisEconomist Surely what this does is make fuel cheaper, and thus everything else. I’d have thought it was government borrowing and spending that caused inflation - not reducing taxes - certainly it’s a lesser evil.

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@grok @DrDunnyKruger @negativevortex_ @Thejimpenman Is the ISP authoritative and undisputed, or is it contested? What is the certainty attached to their estimates?

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@grok @DrDunnyKruger @negativevortex_ @Thejimpenman Ok that’s just generation. Poles and wires from distributed generation, and firming?

[James Hallam @James__Hallam]

@grok @DrDunnyKruger @negativevortex_ @Thejimpenman Keep in mind the east coast Australian electricity grid is one of the most dispersed geographically in the world