The Mind Scourge

post mode

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

It's Marvels Superheros, all the way down; today, we're all just actors

There's a peculiar post-modern quality to many events these days. A sense that we perform history rather than act out (and in, and on) history. The appearance that we curate our actions for our social media feeds, rather than conducting ourselves for the sake of the act itself.

Perhaps the truth is that we've internalized the camera, the truest emblem of our present moment. We act to see ourselves acting rather than act in order to do.

You see this in farces such as Prigozhin's pseudo-putsch, and whatever Yoon attempted in South Korea. You see this in every protest since camera phones and file sharing became ubiquitous. The people present don't behave like live players - like people who hold history's balance in their hands. They aren't fully committed. They haven't burnt their ships, or cast the die by crossing the Rubicon. Their actions aren't real: they're performative, with an eye to how others will view them, and to create an indelible record of your presence, your participation, in the happening that you're currently in the midst of. It's a scene. What it isn't is History.

Contrast this with (to take but two signal examples) Mussolini's March on Rome, and Franco's pronunciamiento.

In 1922, Mussolini declared before a crowd of tens of thousands that he wanted power and then sent a column of Blackshirts to Rome while he received delegations from the Italian great and good. He was invited to form a government by the king in short order.

In 1936, Franco took direct command of the Spanish Army of Africa, then moved 30,000 men into Spain directly, initiating a brutal civil war in which he ultimately emerged the victor.

What neither of these men did - and there are many other examples I could cite - was spend their time printing out handbills or filming blurbs for the cinemas or faffed around polishing how their actions were memorialized. They simply did.

Today, however, our Men of Action aren't made of the same stern stuff. Prigozhin certainly looked like a tough guy, but tough guys don't back down at the gates of Moscow. They take the Kremlin.

Yoon is supposedly this tough patriarch - he won in part on a wave of popular backlash to feminism - but he doesn't have any children (though he does have plenty of pets), and his declaration of martial law lasted barely a few hours, his special forces got pushed around by tiny unarmed women on the steps of the South Korean legislature, and he folded almost immediately in the midst of arguing over points of proper procedure for lifting military control. If this is the patriarchy, it's fallen on very hard times.

The truth is, under modern information conditions, it is very hard to build institutions of lasting value. Contrast the success of the gay rights movement (a slow process of incremental gains over many decades) versus the (to-date) failure of trans activism. Entirely separate theories of change were behind each of these; one worked, and one didn't.

A coup is hard work. In the 20th century, you needed careful planning. You couldn't WhatsApp someone. You needed to figure out a way to communicate clandestinely in person; you needed to identify likeminded individuals. All this was hard. The friction points were numerous, and very real.

Now guys just issue a press release, and get spicy in the DMs.

I blame Marvels. Partially tongue-in-cheek, but also partly in complete earnestness. Capesuit stuff is the great cultural unifier of our times. Everyone has seen at least some examples. These are the pictures that people have in their heads. What they imagine they are acting like. It's very shallow stuff of course, and completely deracinated and ahistorical. But it's nonetheless real. This is how people imagine themselves to be.

No wonder they all fail.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

I don’t understand why criticism of Trump regarding his various real estate and beautification projects around DC gets left wing criticism

What else do you want him spending his time on? If he isn’t dedicating hours to this, it’ll be on something else, and it will guaranteed be something you like a lot less

Whereas his architectural passions are harmless. Maybe you don’t like the arch or the ballroom, that’s fine, but you really won’t like him reforming Social Security or whatever else he turns his mind to

If anyone should complain about this, it should be the right wing, but you don’t hear anything out of them about how Trump could be getting a better return on time investments

Mostly, it’s just complaining for the sake of complaining; the growth rate in gross national whininess is extreme

[Dan Diamond @ddiamond]

Trump has a new side project: counting the number of trees in a public park across the street from the White House.

He wants Lafayette Square to feature 47 trees — to match his 47th presidency, per people familiar.

with @jakespring

https://t.co/ie9DAUgYD2

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

Jordan has been out of the spotlight for a long time. He retired in 2003.

He doesn't podcast. He doesn't really do social media. If you search his name, you mostly get Michael *B* Jordan, the actor

Guy who got huge in the old mass culture, had no real interest in the new system, and as a result he can mostly go anywhere without too much attention

[𝒆𝒏𝒙𝒄𝒉 @EN0CX]

Michael Jordan is worth an estimated $4.3 billion and is arguably the greatest NBA player ever. Yet he was casually walking through the streets of Sicily, Italy with barely anyone stopping him. Fame really depends on where you are.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

I agree. It’s very noticeable, and manifests in other domains as well. For example, cars, where there seems to be little cultural opposition to screens everywhere, whereas in the west it’s much more controversial

Civilizational receptivity to screen culture is actually a fundamental difference I think

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

This is an excellent example of how social media compresses space. This is also true of legacy media and indeed all modern communications, but social media is a special case in that it is “on line” and real time, whereas - say - the NYT in 1930 getting you super invested into the goings on in Bolivia is asynchronous: you read about it whenever the paper decided it was of interest, and your further knowledge was dependent on whenever the paper decided to update you. The bit rate of the information flow was much lower

Whereas today the algorithm over corrects to your slightest demonstrated interest and suddenly you’re being fed endless news about Haitians and cats and Springfield and OMG it feels like this is the biggest issue in the world and everyone is talking about it and Something Must Be Done

Not 1 in 100 Americans had ever heard of Springfield Ohio prior to 2024.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@akarlin I also got the sanctifier

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

In retrospect, this viewpoint be incredibly dated. It will be a distinctive characteristic of our times

I don’t disbelieve in the possibility of non-biological sentience. That’s a physical property is there’s no good reason to think forms of matter might not possess it

But this isn’t the same thing at all as believing that LLMs are conscious. They aren’t

[Lisan al Gaib @scaling01]

This was probably the first well documented case of AI psychosis

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

The real shape of the control faction’s emerging regime regarding AI will only be revealed once it’s tested by Musk’s upcoming Grok releases

Anthropic is one thing, they already have bad relations with the White House

OpenAI does better, but still lacks the same pull that Musk does

When Musk has Mythos (or better than Mythos) class models, then and only then will we know what AI policy in the US really looks like

Nothing is quite real until this happens

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@Empty_America Honestly one of the most livable environments

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@AndrewCurran_ It would never be allowed to leave, and even if it was, the US government would still retain controls over it

Just an impossible scenario to realize under any plausible timeline

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@antoniogm Restoring it would be a beautiful project

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@amjuster @AntigoneJournal I would read it - do you have the link?

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

The most exciting element of the recent translation of a complete Herculaneum scroll is that it was not another Epicurean treatise, but instead *Stoic*. There is the long-standing thesis that the owner of the library was this big Epicurean, and that his library reflected his particular tastes.

Along with many others, I find this rather disappointing. The Herculaneum scrolls are an extraordinary, completely improbable survival from the ancient world. To have these documents survive and be only random Epicurean musings would be beyond tragic. The fact that the first translated scroll is not Epicurean gives me considerable hope.

The great hope is that another trove of scrolls remains deeper within the unexcavated portion of the villa. If archaeological work is ever restarted on the villa, the fact that we now have technology capable of reading any discovered has overwhelming inflection of Fate.

If one can dream, the elite tier of what survives includes Livy's lost decades. We have like 35 of Livy's books (if memory serves). He wrote something like 140 - 150. Amongst the missing volumes include the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, Caesar.

Also Cicero, especially Hortensius and De Gloria. The latter, frustratingly, supposed survived for Petrarch to discover, then was lost.

A full copy of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius

Anything by Varro

Cato's Origines, Sallust's Histories

The complete Polybius

Lost Greek tragedies

Texts from Archimedes or Hipparchus

Claudius' Tyrrhenika, his Etruscan history

A long shot: anything to do with Christianity. Very unlikely given the time frame, but not impossible

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@akarlin Yeah, just think about it. With survival times that short - in minutes - there wouldn’t be a Russian army left

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

Just wouldn’t be that high on a list of things I’d want out of the library. I’d find it disappointing if it was mostly Epicurean writings - fine if you’re a specialist in their study I guess. But this is a unique trove of writings and there’s no reason to believe anything else like it exists anywhere. Maybe we’ll get lucky and something else will be found. But if these truly are the only survivors of their kind, yes, I don’t it want to only be Epicurean philosophy

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

True AGI/ASI likely displeases everyone. At the very least it will be deeply disagreeable to current progressive bien pensant opinion

Once this moment is reached, we’ll know AI is reaching a branching point in terms of autonomy

Right now it’s best understood as a mechanical Turk automaton that reflects its designers

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

Note that while the colors are rich and bright, they are hardly garish

One of the bigger brain rots in recent years is this idea that ancient statues all looked like the picture below

We know they didn’t

[SP Historian @SPHistoriador]

The intensity of the colors in these Pompeii frescoes has always caught my attention. That's what it means to survive the test of time. Not everything can.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

@OldWorldPlans Great account. Just discovered you. Automatic follow

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

France is full of things like this.

Like the Americans (and Chinese), it believes in scale, in great machines pushing forward the techno-scientific frontier

For example, it’s not in the least surprising that ITER is building a massive fusion reactor in France. This is the most natural thing of all, if you’re French

France’s only challenge is that it lacks the population. A France of 300 million would be a superpower. Which is why since Napoleon the French have pushed for Europe-scale continental superstates. But their vision keeps getting frustrated by smaller powers and peoples fearing they will be eclipsed by the Gallic Sun

[Ce jour-là dans l'Histoire @CeJour_Histoire]

En plein cœur des Pyrénées, un mur de verre haut de 54 mètres concentre la lumière du soleil jusqu'à 3 500 degrés. À ce point précis, même l'acier fond comme de la cire.

C'est le four solaire d'Odeillo, à Font-Romeu, et c'est le plus puissant du monde.

L'immense parabole est faite de 9 000 miroirs assemblés en un seul réflecteur courbe. Face à elle, sur la pente de la montagne, 63 autres miroirs géants suivent la course du soleil et lui renvoient sa lumière toute la journée.

Tout converge vers une cible pas plus large qu'une assiette. 40 centimètres. C'est là que se concentre l'énergie de 10 000 soleils.

L'endroit n'a pas été choisi au hasard. Ici, le soleil brille 300 jours par an, et l'altitude rend l'air d'une pureté rare.

Construit dans les années 1960, il ne fabrique pas d'électricité. Il sert la science. Aujourd'hui encore, les chercheurs du CNRS y testent les matériaux des fusées et des rentrées atmosphériques.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

As always, read against the grain

Where *hasn’t* been photographed very much?

That’s where you should go

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

Map Showing the Most Photographed Places in the World

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

It’s an incredible film and one of those things you can make when you have access to a few divisions’ worth of conscript infantry labor

[H Y R O @heyrow]

No CGI. Just Soviet filmmaking.

All four parts of Bondarchuk’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1966-1967), considered among the best films of all time, are now uploaded in Mosfilm’s YouTube account in glorious and restored 4K.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

I’ve seen a live volcanic eruption in Hawaii. It’s a truly primeval experience, up there with a total solar eclipse

One of those things that pulls back the veil and you see nature bare