Ben Lundy

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

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"When there are more women than men, such as when a recent war has killed off many men, sexual norms are relatively free...In contrast, when men outnumber women, such as due to selective abortions or migration, norms are much more prudish and restrained" https://t.co/VQGtjBawj7

[Ben Lundy @Benomtad]

The Specter of Rationalism Peeks Through the Looking Glass:

https://t.co/G2u4vqKMIS

[Ben Lundy @Benomtad]

And Now He Has Beautiful Eyes
https://t.co/ZaEwls1eKo
In the Grimm's story "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," a boy who cannot shudder is leaves home, convinced he needs to learn despite what others have in mind for his life.

Pushed Out by his Father, He is Taken On by Fate: the father and Sexton underestimate the developmental or even existential craving that the boy has, thinking they'll "soon put the polish on him" by scaring the bejeezus out of him, so he can then get on with taking on a normal trade and living a normal life.

But as soon as he sets out on his own, with his authentic intuition about his own fate, he begins to change, and everyone can see it.

Thank you for watching!  Please see below for the full conversation:

If you’re interested, please enjoy–by yourself or with your children–this comedic story with a powerful, yet light ending.

Full Texts of the Story:
https://t.co/yJWcqDIeDK
https://t.co/py4I1iZqpc

Wikipedia:
https://t.co/c72JCw0qyI

The full video episode:
https://t.co/vYDNXFPE7t

Audio episode:
https://t.co/9Cyv0L6gXz

The Podcast Playlist:
https://t.co/OQr2foe0ks

The Episode Playlist:
https://t.co/D7pVjmEOGZ

For more in this podcast, please go to:
Podbean:
https://t.co/cESnWyyhTr
Apple Podcasts:
https://t.co/X5z48QEBaE
YouTube:
https://t.co/gGK5oT77lk
Spotify:
https://t.co/bFdeDgoTnf
X:
https://t.co/JNEN2jr6Rh
Facebook:
https://t.co/FVdbKCrX3D

About our guest:
Ian Reclusado offers guidance services for those interested in facing and befriending their inner monsters:
https://t.co/On9sf9qeis

Image Source:
Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Originally from Grimm’s Household Tales (1910)

I plan to conduct more interviews with various guests, so please check back later for those.

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

She literally explained why complaining judging or criticizing others can actually change your brain !!

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

You're most likely to relapse when things go well:

For some people the trigger is loss and stress. For others it's success.

Usually it isn't the reward itself - it's the removal of the hypervigilant state required to keep their use in check.

Seeing that you're most vulnerable when things are going well is the valuable insight. That's when you put barriers in place or go to more meetings.

Dr. Anna Lembke on @hubermanlab

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed well over 100,000 people, yet no major human rights organization calls it genocide. Why? Because genocide is about intent: a project to eradicate a people. After Japan surrendered, America occupied it, helped rebuild it, and by 1952, it was an ally.

Compare that to Gaza, where “genocide” is now used freely.

Israel has not committed genocide in Gaza. Facilitating the transfer of food, humanitarian aid, and vaccinations is undeniable proof of that.

Changing the definition of genocide to mean “a lot of death in war” dishonors victims of actual genocides and erases the truth about the war against Hamas.

(via: Sam Harris on the @MakingSenseHQ Podcast)

[Anonymous @YourAnonCentral]

Russian bot traffic has dropped to nearly 0 after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia

[🇺🇸🍊🧡southerngalpal 🧡🍊🇺🇸 @belleofva]

'merica ...

[QThestorm @17QStorm]

Elizabeth Waffle is 88 years old. She lives in a trailer in Milan, Michigan. No computer. Spotty phone internet. Modest pension after her house burned down.

Federal records put her name on 14,696 ActBlue donations totaling nearly $150,000 over five years. Roughly eight a day. Average under ten bucks each. Forty-seven of them to Abdul El-Sayed.

When Charlie LeDuff showed her the paperwork, she said the only thing that fit.

“Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.”

Democrats spent years selling the country a “small-dollar grassroots” story. The machine that powered it is under House investigation for foreign donations, weakened fraud checks, passport “verification” that only counted characters, and a legal team that walked out after 2024. Their CEO took the Fifth.

The names stayed on the filings. The money still moved. El-Sayed is the nominee.
They call it small donors. She calls it impossible.

[Peterson Academy @petersonacademy]

“Life is time. And it's the one finite, precious thing you have. Can't get any second back, can't relive, can't rewind. Life is one way. Every minute that's gone is gone.”

— @yaronbrook, The History & Economics of Money

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Exclusive: Another prestigious award has gone to a writer who seems to have used AI as the crisis of trust in the literary world intensifies, @vauhinivara reports: https://t.co/UBJcQ7KIPw

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

Some advocacy groups want to keep homelessness and encampments in place. The argument is that they see these encampments as visible evidence of capitalism’s failures, so maintaining them serves their broader political goals.

Some of these groups support encampments by sending money, ordering pizzas, and providing infrastructure such as portable toilets.

1. Maintain visible eyesores that serve as evidence of the failures of capitalism

2. ???

3. Socialist revolution

[Brandon Luu, MD @BrandonLuuMD]

Still can’t believe this happened.

The sugar industry funded Harvard researchers to downplay evidence linking sugar to heart disease and point the finger at fat instead.

And the funding wasn’t disclosed.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

I highly recommend @NSesardic's book When Reason Goes on Holiday.

It's all about philosophers—often eminent guiding lights of their fields—having insane politics and making tons of unforced errors outside of their domain of expertise.

Geniuses are often wrong!

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Big Tech oligarchs are secretly preparing for a “catastrophic AI event” that could threaten our banking, healthcare, internet, electricity and water systems.

They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity.

CONGRESS MUST PAUSE ADVANCED AI DEVELOPMENT NOW.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Watch – Hamas’s “Friendly Fire”: rockets falling back into Gaza? Hamas’s rockets are a black box in the discourse. Over 4,000 were fired at Israel on October 7, and in the months that followed, not to mention thousands over the previous two decades of Hamas’s control of the Territory. Yet you almost never hear about the rockets’ failure rate or the Palestinians they inevitably hit. These are unguided, locally made artillery rockets: crude, inconsistent, produced without standards, and often assembled in workshops that barely qualify as factories. Even the United States and the Soviet Union, with billions of dollars, elite scientists, and world‑class facilities, saw constant rocket failures throughout the Cold War. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin still lose rocket vehicles despite unmatched engineering talent, hardware, and resources. Needless to say, of course Hamas’s tens of thousands of rockets had numerous failures (estimated at 15-20%) and fell onto Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during such flops.

So what do people think happens when Hamas stores and launches these rockets from and near densely populated civilian neighborhoods, markets, schools, clinics, farms, roads, and refugee camps? Over twenty years, how many rockets fell short, misfired, or detonated inside Gaza? How many Palestinians were killed by Hamas’s own fire (or to a lesser extent, that of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ), only for the casualties to be publicly attributed to Israel?

Hamas’s celebrated “resistance,” endlessly touted in many academic, journalistic, activist, and political circles, keeps escaping even the most basic scrutiny – despite how brutally it has damaged every dimension of Palestinians’ lives: their safety, aspirations, political space, and collective well‑being.

***In the video, you see a rocket clearly falling back into a residential neighborhood in Gaza, as hundreds did on October 7, and right as it falls, you see another rocket being fired nearby. This pattern played out thousands of times over the past two decades, yet almost no media, academic, or NGO entities has ever mounted a serious investigation.

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

I’m super excited this paper is finally out!

It’s an epic 210 page analysis of whether a durable pause on frontier AI training is feasible.

I think this will be the best plan by most people’s lights (although I’m still inclined to think we should get rid of the chips and fabs).

[Liza Libes @pensandpoison]

If you go on Reddit, you’ll find people calling Nabokov’s brilliant poem in Pale Fire corny, “cheesy,” and “melodramatic.” Meanwhile, these same sorts of people tend to praise minimalist Anne Carson poems.

Why is this? As a society, we’ve become so allergic to emotion and sincerity—especially in certain “highbrow” literary circles—that we’ve forgotten that literature is supposed to contain an outpouring of emotion.

Literature is supposed to make us feel something. It’s time we remembered that and abandoned the robotic minimalist slop.

[Li Mengbai @lvjin1993]

小孩问庄子，什么是诡辩。庄子反问：我家来了两个客人，一个很干净，一个很脏。我请他俩洗澡，你觉得谁会洗？
小孩脱口而出；肯定是脏的那个!
庄子摇摇头：不对。干净的人爱干净，脏的人不在乎脏，应该是干净的人洗。
小孩赶紧改口：那就是干净的洗。
庄子又笑了：又错了。干净的人没必要洗，脏的人才需要洗，是脏的洗。
小孩情了：那到底是谁洗？
庄子说：干净的人有习惯，脏的人有需要，两个人都洗。不等小孩反应，他又补了一句；其实俩人都不洗，干净的不用洗，脏的不爱洗。
小孩彻底迷糊。
庄子这才点明：这就是诡辩。逻辑都通顺，但答案却不一样，很多人跟你争论，逻辑听着都没问题，但结论可以随意变换。
绕来绕去，目的不是求真，只是把你绕晕。
遇到这种诡辩，不必争辩。