forme of cornmudgin

stat crux, dum volvitur orbis

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Yeah I'm getting a little exhausted by people not sharing the denominator here. AI's resource consumption looks pretty normal if you just consider how many people are using it, it's just very concentrated in specific places. Coke has a much larger "resource consumption" than Moxie, but we don't consider this to be a mark against Coke because the reason is so many more people are buying it, not that each individual bottle is much worse.

I think a lot of readers are taking from this that their personal interactions with AI are somehow ridiculous, whereas they actually fade into the background of our normal lives. The reason data centers are building out so much new gas power is that so so many people are using them, not that each individual interaction is costly, and I think that changes the nature of the conversation a lot.

[Kyle Orton @KyleWOrton]

"The worse, the better", as was said by the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries, whose final form was the Bolsheviks. They operated in the name of humanity, while opposing anything that made the lives of actual humans better because such measures delayed their Revolution.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Excellent thread — made possible by capitalism.

I’ve long held the “capitalism makes work necessary” claim to be the strangest, most self-revealing, yet widespread criticism of capitalism. It just says so much about the baseline assumptions and values of some people.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Sophistic, demagogic, horseshit.

First: It’s not the General’s job to ask that (though I am sure many do).

Second: Generals aren’t asking to go to war, as far as I can tell.

Third, and most importantly, IT IS THE JOB of legislators to ask “how are WE going to pay for” things

And that’s the job Sayed is running for. Senators are supposed to ask how to pay for things and make choices based on the math of the money available. That’s literally it, that’s the job.

He wants to make low brow social media arguments as if they’re brilliant.

[Peachy Keenan @KeenanPeachy]

Charles Manson was clinically insane and his female followers were suffering from intense psychological delusions.

They were convicted of first degree murder and spent decades in prison.

[Dilan Esper @dilanesper]

one thing i think conservatives like Justice Thomas get right about race is how infantilizing this all is. If you reflexively defend every Black scholar accused of misconduct, you send a message that is completely unfair to all the competent and skilled Black scholars out there.

[Kyle Orton @KyleWOrton]

Bin Laden's remarks on Israel were almost exclusively after the mid-2000s, a populist gambit to recover from the political damage the Islamic State movement did to Al-Qaeda's brand. The pre-9/11 "grievances" were US soldiers in Saudi Arabia and actions against Saddam's Iraq.

[Jonathan Eric Lewis @LewisJonathanE]

Germany in 1945 was a wasteland of flattened cities and refugees, with extreme poverty and hunger/child malnutrition that lasted for several years

Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and German POWs languished in Soviet gulags

Germany was partitioned and occupied for decades and Nazism was made illegal

But Matt's right about least one Nazi: The Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestinian nationalist and Hitler ally, escaped justice

[David L. Bahnsen @DavidBahnsen]

History is clear - countries that never trade with other countries are really rich countries, huh?
I do believe he doesn’t actually believe this, but, it is worth noting just as far as basic economic sensibility goes, this is far dumber than anything I’ve heard a U.S. President say. The saving grace is that he’s lying???

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

A reminder that defenders of capitalism don’t actually accept:

Trickle-down economics

That the wealthy are entitled to their wealth because they’re morally better

That hard work alone is sufficient for success

That we’re atomistic individuals with no need for community

[Brad Polumbo @brad_polumbo]

No, the United States became an economic superpower *in spite of* slavery, which, setting aside its moral monstrosity, in crude economic terms, was a huge misallocation and destruction of human capital to enrich slaveowners at the expense of massive deadweight loss in terms of overall economic growth.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

This is simply not accurate. Cotton accounted for about 6% of GDP at its peak - a large output, but nowhere near enough to be the driver of US economic growth.

Before the Civil War, the south consistently lagged far behind the north in most economic indicators and in immigration inflows (note: immigrants generally settle where there are jobs).

The notion that "slavery built America" is not only empirically wrong - it's a hapless rehabilitation of the old "King Cotton" theory of economic development that was peddled by the plantation class before the Civil War...and then debunked in realtime by the war itself.

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

People should not face legal consequences because they are less exquisitely risk-averse than you are. Five-year-olds can do a bunch of stuff on their own.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Seeing lots of surprised reactions to the absurd Nature editorial on Jason Arday. Frankly, I'm surprised people are surprised.

Nature has been totally captured by wokeness for a while now. I've been trying to call attention to this for nearly a decade. There are no serious scholars left there in influential positions capable of rescuing it.

The people in charge of Nature today are brazenly hostile to the foundational principles that made Nature a highly respected and trustworthy institution in the first place. Today, activists have hijacked it and are using the prestige associated with the Nature brand to push an ideological agenda.

They don't care that they're quickly burning through the immense trust that was slowly and painstakingly built by generations of competent scholars and stewardship.

They're willing to burn through it all in a decade for power. It's an absolute tragedy.

Nature has gone all-in on decoloniality, which holds that academic rigor and scientific objectivity are forms of colonial oppression rooted in white supremacy. It seeks to elevate Indigenous "ways of knowing," which amount to tribal myths and forms of religious mysticism, as an equally valid system of producing knowledge.

And they don't want this absurd notion to remain theoretical; they want to implement these principles in areas that deal with life and death—medicine and nursing.

I know what I'm saying sounds absurd. People can't possibly believe that. Like, I must be exaggerating, right?

I promise you that I'm not. If anything, I'm dramatically understating the problem.

We are in the midst of a total academic crisis, and we need to stop acting surprised and start taking action to delegitimize these journals and root these fields out of our public and publicly-funded institutions.

If we don't, it's only going to get worse.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

If you get your news from the New York Times, you might believe the guy who publicly wrote about wanting to “annihilate Jews” actually just wanted “Peace in the Middle East”…

[Stuart Ritchie @StuartJRitchie]

It’s really important that society has institutions that can be trusted to tell the truth and to be fair and reasonable.

This editorial, which launders the reputation of an obvious conman, makes clear that Nature is no longer such an institution. What’s left?

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It’s true that Camp’s main points in her WSJ videos are not incredibly original but there’s enormous value in finding fresh ways to communicate timeless truths (rent control is bad, supermarkets are impressive) of liberalism to new audiences.

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

this is really, really, really, really bad. it's bad that there are no longer institutions that we can trust to at least try, a little, to stay above the fray. it's doubly bad when they are the most prestigious truthseeking institutions in the world. i want a different timeline

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Are you really trying this again—accusing us of partisanship and racism simply for declining to defend you in a case where, in my view, you seriously violated journalistic standards? I take those standards extremely seriously. You clearly do not.

We have defended the free speech rights of more left-leaning individuals than practically anyone in the country, and certainly more than you have. But we do also defend conservatives and people who count themselves as none of the above, something I couldn’t imagine you doing because you only like free speech when it belongs to people you agree with.

Furthermore, we have defended people of all races—a fact that is easily verifiable. Labeling everyone who disagrees with you as a racist is no longer going to cut it. This isn't 2021 anymore.

You simply dislike my conclusion: that the primary First Amendment right at stake was The Washington Post's right to terminate your employment.

[Seth Frantzman @sfrantzman]

What's interesting is that in the narrative underground in the tunnel he openly says that "we are told we are right by the border with Israel" and that it would be used in the "next war."

Everyone saw this...we all knew this...and yet it was all greeted as if "this is fine."

Let's be clear here...we saw the tunnels in reports like this, we knew they were there...Hamas openly bragged the tunnels were near the border...and yet the decision was made to have cash flow to Hamas and basically assume that this would all be fine.

It's impossible to forget that in 2021 there was a conflict and the public was told the Hamas "metro" was struck and Hamas was set back "years"...and then October 7, 2023 came

The tragedy is that all this was known, the extent of the tunnels was hinted at and to some extent known, the threat was known, the enemy bragged about it...media saw it...

And the mentality was "this is fine."