Culture - The Word That Fucked Up Our Species

I have written so many times about how almost all atrocities committed against our fellow animal family members is not considered immoral since people take umbrage behind the fucked up excuses of “culture”. 

People use culture to macro bullshit and not focus on micro morality which is precious for life on earth. 

Alex Nowrasteh’s wonderful piece is looking at this monster at a different angle. Different angle but same monster. 

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

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If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

 

Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

- More Here

Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

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Ideas Of Slavery

Now a new book, John Samuel Harpham’s The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, asks us to reconsider that standard account of events. Harpham does not discount economic or imperial explanations for the rise of New World slavery; what he suggests, instead, is that those explanations can make sense only within a culture where “slavery was available as an option.” His goal, as he puts it, is to discover “the reasons for which slavery was understood to be a status about which narrow-minded men could make calculations.”

The result is ironic and tragic in the way of the best history. Initially, Harpham claims, the English hesitated to embrace African slavery. Then, when they did, their decision was not based on any perceived racial difference or inferiority. It was based, instead, on something even more troubling: Harpham believes that English people enslaved Africans not because they were seen as different but because they seemed so very similar.

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Harpham’s history reconsiders Jordan’s account of that “unthinking decision.” If the keynote of Jordan’s book was that early English observers saw Africans as different, the keynote of Harpham’s is that English people had a lot of different ideas: about Africa, about Africans, about skin color and about slavery. Nowhere was there broad agreement, he claims, except perhaps about the essence of slavery. But early English ideas about slavery were also different from what we might expect.

Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”

Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese.

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Robert Trivers on Evolutionary Biology & Math Of Honor Killings!

How Not To Save The Planet

Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:

Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”

I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.

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This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.

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The Irony Of American Righteousness - Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.

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At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

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Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.

The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.

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Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power. 

What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”

- More Here

No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Dhurandhar!

If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven.

If you are victorious, the world is yours.

So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.

- Bhagavad Gita 2.37

After a long, long time I have seen a Hindi movie completely engrossed for 3.25 hours!

Amazing casting, immaculate screenplay and complete awareness of every minute details. 

I hope this movie shifts the game of Hindi movies to be more like Malayalam movies. 

This is the first time I watched Aditya Dhar's movie. I need to catch up on his other movies. 

I didn't know the meaning of the Sanskrit word Dhurandhar, so had to look it up.

Dhurandhar means well I got two versions; I like the later version:

• An Expert, master A A top notch person In a specific field.
• A person built to carry unbearable responsibility and still move forward.

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

- More Here

Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.

 

Truth & Unearned Certainty - Søren Kierkegaard

And from here on, when we talk about “faith,” we’re using Kierkegaard’s meaning — not belief in a doctrine, but the inner stance required to live with unanswered questions. 

If that sounds narrowly religious, it’s a misread. 

Kierkegaard is describing a stance that shows up wherever people have to act without guarantees: in innovation, in design, in leadership, and many other forms of work.

This pandemic is not just related to religion but also has spread into politics, nationality, culture and even sports, to personal preference of a goddam LLM.

Wise minds observed how humans embrace this pandemic with wide arms - this is a timeless trait of humans. These priceless observations from one such wise mind:

People were comfortable with answers being given to them before questions were even asked. Faith was spoken about constantly, often with confidence, but this confidence felt rehearsed. Kierkegaard couldn’t tell if people ever wrestled with or questioned their beliefs.

Eventually, he realized there was nothing to question. The system had already done the hard part. The role of the individual was to nod in agreement. This created a kind of harmony, but a shallow one… a collective certainty that never had to prove itself against anything real.

As he grew older, Kierkegaard saw how quickly certainty had replaced belief. Whenever a group becomes too sure of itself, it stops producing individuals capable of doing the inward work that faith requires. People learn to perform conviction rather than develop it. Say something often enough and you can skip the part where you understand (or question) it.

He noticed another pattern: People spoke confidently about truths they had never encountered firsthand, truths they had never risked anything to understand. And inherited certainty revealed an uncomfortable vulnerability: Once you depend on a system to hand you your conclusions, you tend to move as the system moves… and you move with confidence.

Kierkegaard wasn’t worried about disbelief. He wasn’t even worried about people changing their minds. His concern was unearned belief. Conviction without scrutiny and identity without introspection. The key here, is that the desire for certainty often poses as a strength, but usually signals the opposite:

A lack of faith.

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Systems (institutions) depend on predictability, and certainty delivers. It keeps people aligned, keeps roles stable, and keeps operations smooth enough that no one has to confront the inner workings. Churches, governments, workplaces, even families in their more rigid forms, all learn to reward conviction that doesn’t ask questions. Call it clarity or discipline or commitment, but the effect is the same: the more certainty people perform, the less individual they become.

This creates a loop that’s hard to break. People adopt certainty because it makes them feel secure. Institutions reinforce certainty because it makes people easier to manage. And the more those two forces reinforce each other, the more faith becomes something referenced rather than lived.

Unearned certainty has consequences. As it takes over, faith has nothing left to do. The questions don’t disappear, but people learn to avoid them. Individuals learn to shrink to fit the expectations of the system… and the system rewards the shrinking.

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It’s a familiar pattern. You don’t have to comprehend the complexity. You only need to sound aligned with it. Certainty becomes a performance of being well-informed, and systems reward the performance because it keeps everything moving in one direction.

This creates a strange contradiction. We now have unprecedented access to the full picture, but we rarely use it. We reach for summaries, frameworks, pre-digested opinions, and the moral scaffolding provided by the groups we belong to. We inherit not just the conclusions, but the emotional stance that comes with them. We feel confident long before we comprehend anything.

Getting information hasn’t been the barrier. The part no system can automate for us is the effort needed to understand the full picture.

People stop wrestling with ideas because the system makes wrestling feel unnecessary. Certainty is faster. Certainty is cleaner. Certainty signals belonging.

The tragedy is this: certainty has never been easier to acquire, and understanding has never required more from us.

 

Perpetual Anger, Perpetual Grievance & Perpetual Need For Political Enemies

I have been writing about this for decades now... it started with talk radio and cable news. I observed friends, neighbors, and co-workers perpetually angry albeit most of them were better off than I was at that time. 

It was very weird to me since growing up in India, I lived around some of the poorest people on the planet but yet they weren't angry. They were content and most importantly were normal in perpetual penury. 

Around the same time, I started listening to talk radio and cable news, it was addictive to say the least. A simple pattern started emerging. They were angry all the goddamn time. 

How can someone live their life watching hours of spewing anger inside their living room. It was clearly unhealthy. I threw my TV away and the rest is history. 

The moron that I was, I started telling people that this stuff is not healthy and makes them sick. Of course, they didn't change but the right wing thought I was leftist looney and left wing that I was rightish madman. 

This was dangerous territory to embark on since what's lost to creative destruction never comes back. Plus add to this syndrome, the apt titles of some of Tyler Cowen books - average is over, stubborn attachments, and complacent class. Plus add to this a heavy dose of self delusion as if they are one step away from being millionaires or billionaires - a perpetual unattainable desire driven life.  

To make things even weirder, even people who attain an unattainable lifestyle are also angry! Go figure!

The younger generation with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex blissfully unaware of any of these; are sucked into their cell phones and waiting one day to join the perpetual angry force. 

One side offers a solution which is the exact reason a spark became a wild fire and the other side wants to be angry perpetually :-) 

It's a fucked up situation never seen in history and we are living now make an unique history. 

I have no idea where this is going to lead.. I have no goddamn idea. 

Ironically, there is so much more to learn, discover - knowledge we know now is minuscule and there is infinite knowledge out there for us to embrace with awe, wonder, and grow as living beings. 

We can create so many jobs, we already have enough shelter, food, water - all that is needed is masses to embrace this thirst for knowledge and drive.

But alas not many are addicted to perpetual need for awe and wonder.  

Paul Katsafanas's essay is the most important piece you will read this year and understanding this disease is crucial for humanity to survive this century. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

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Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

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As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action. Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values. And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’ But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake. Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point. That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations. Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better. Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

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But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation? Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

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With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

But grievance politics operates differently. It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame. Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Devotion is capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

How To Talk To Terrorists

When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”

[---]

And lastly, it is claimed that Sri Lanka shows a military solution can work. But Sri Lanka doesn’t demonstrate anything of the sort. President Rajapaksa managed to defeat the Tamil Tigers only because its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran – who had been considered a military genius for most of his life – turned out to be a military fool, in the words of one of the Norwegian negotiators who worked on the peace process. If he had stuck to a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to beat the Sri Lankan army in a conventional war, he would probably still be in the jungle fighting now. And the measures used by the Sri Lankan army to wipe out the Tigers are not methods that could be used by any western government that respects human rights and the rule of law. Finally, although the war is over and there is, thank goodness, no sign of the resurgence of a terrorist campaign, the political problem of Tamil rights still remains unresolved, and trouble will continue until it is.

[--]

The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.

It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

How Do The Pros Get Someone To Leave A Cult?

There are cults like we all "know" as cults. 

Then there is a toxic cocktail cults of ideology, culture, religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, free-market, communism, human centrism, binary thinking lens et al., This cocktail cult is not called cult since billions of sapiens fall into this bucket. Somehow, this has been rebranded as something else - tribes. 

Then there are very very few people who are open minded to see these two cults and they make the wheels of civilization, kindness, decency, progress over time. These human had an ability to change their minds with time and grow as a living being. 

Thanks to those unknown humans for what they did so that I am able to live a very comfortable life. 

I hope I am doing a little of the same for the future when I am gone. 

We should have a lot more Ryan's and Kelly's in our worlds to help the cocktail cults:

What Ryan and Kelly do is unusual: they help people leave cults. Over the past 40 years, they have handled hundreds of cases – some simple and local, others stretching across borders and decades. They have been hired by families of both modest and considerable means. They say they have even been hired by government agencies, and that some cults they have investigated have left them genuinely afraid for their lives.

Although many people are involved in cultic studies and education, fewer than 10 people in the US do anything like what Ryan and Kelly do. And among those, only Kelly and Ryan practice their strange and unique method: embedding themselves in families’ lives, pulling on threads like marionettists, sometimes for years.

Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.

Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.

[---]

One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. “I can’t get into all the details,” Ryan said. “He was horrible, a horrible man.” Ryan and Kelly had been flying regularly to Australia to work on the case. The client’s niece, a girl in the group, was beginning to fall out with the cult. The leader had been arrested and was on trial for crimes related to the cult’s activities.

In their process, Ryan and Kelly require what they call 50 things: “You have to find 50 things that you could agree with the person on.” Ryan gestured to a painting on the wall in their living room. It was a strange, surrealist-looking canvas with a big Tesla coil in the center and lightning shooting out at some pigeons. Ryan said, “If you look at this piece of art and say, ‘That’s really ugly,’ then we’re going to start off … not on the right page, right?”

But if I could appreciate what he found appealing, then, he said: “I think you have the right to criticize it.” The number may seem arbitrary, but their goal is to find 50 things a family can appreciate about a cult before discussing what they do not agree with.

I put this number to Lalich and she said the notion of having to find 50 things seemed a bit extreme. “ I certainly could never find 50 things about my cult that I thought were good.” The spirit of it seemed right to her though, at least: that the family needs to tone down their rhetoric, or they will just push the cult-involved member away.

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

[---]

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

Misusing Wisdom From Books via Motivated Misreading (a.ka. Using It As A How To Do Manual)

In a letter to investors earlier this year, he even approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington of “clash of civilisations” fame, highlighting his claim that the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.

- More Here review of the new book The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State by Michael Steinberger

And what does Palantir actually do? (hint: nada on innovation nor any ground breaking AI) 

What does Palantir actually do? 

It’s a question that comes up time and time again in social media. 

It’s also surprisingly easy to address, despite the company’s occult reputation: Palantir collates disparate sources of data and makes them easy to search. It is Google for chaotic organisations, whose software connects various databases and computer systems into a single unified platform. 

If the company’s services could be applied to your life, it would look like a team of specialists who arrive at your house and rifle through your desk, updating your to-do lists, contacts and calendars; syncing and sorting the files you have scattered across a half-dozen old phones and and hard drives, and generally Making Things Organised. Wouldn’t you pay good money for such a service? Of course you would. 

Now, imagine you’re a country and this pandemonium is not personal but institutionalised – encompassing not just a few email inboxes and old USBs, but, say, an entire healthcare system, including payroll, procurement, and insurance, or a medium-sized war. Wouldn’t you then pay a lot of money? Wouldn’t you in fact pay millions and millions and be extremely thankful to whoever sorted this mess on your behalf? Thus: Palantir’s rise.

 

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

[---]

They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.

The Evolution of Civilizationalism

In order to understand the civilizational turn, we need to look not only at the international political environment but also at domestic developments. Within the West and especially within Europe, the civilizational turn seems to be connected to a particular form of neoliberalism that seeks to “encase” the economy and protect it from democratic interference. As economic policy has been taken out of the space of democratic contestation in the last several decades, especially within the eurozone, political debate has shifted to cultural issues. Civilizationalism is a kind of identity politics produced by neoliberalism. 

In many non-Western countries, civilizational ideas have also become influential in the context of economic reform policies that opened up state-protected economies to the free flow of capital and market forces and drastically reworked the balance between public and private authority. Civilizationalism frequently serves as an idiom of legitimation for neoliberal reforms. For example, the Turkish state has used civilizational lessons about Ottoman practices of indigenous capitalism to justify neoliberal reforms while also championing civilization as a defense against the homogenizing effects of globalization. In China and India, civilizational assertions of power mirror the global aspirations of the new economic elites and middle classes and rationalize economic inequalities in terms of cultural reward. 

For all the differences among them, all cases of civilizationalism around the world are emerging in a context in which the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is increasingly blurred. Both within the West and outside it, democracies are showing authoritarian tendencies—often referred to as “democratic backsliding”—and producing hybrid regimes. Conversely, even authoritarian states like China feel the need to draw on democratic rhetoric to legitimate themselves. This is why the concept of civilization is so useful to political elites as a source of legitimacy. 

Civilizationalism is not a phenomenon that should be identified exclusively with illiberal forces within and outside the West, as many seem to imagine. Rather, the global civilizational turn should be understood as a product of the way in which the boundaries between liberalism and illiberalism are becoming unclear as the center-right mainstreams and normalizes far-right ideas. If neoliberalism tends to produce identity politics, civilizationalism may be the form that this identity politics takes in a world in which international politics is increasingly being imagined as a competition between continent-sized powers.

- More Here

Andrew Interview With Karen Hao - On AI

A long long time ago, Micheal Lewis in an interview said something very wise about his first book Liar's Poker. I am paraphrasing here: 

"I wrote Liars Poker to expose all the bad things Wall Street is doing but little did I realize, lot of people were using this book as a 'how to guide' ! " 

I personally have lived and worked in the same industries during the dot-com bubble, real estate crisis and irony has it - in AI. 

What I am seeing is deja vu with AI - millions are using it as a ‘how to guide' to make quick buck although most know this is pure snake oil and is going to come down sooner or later. 

Tulips to AI - human freaking beings never learn.. well actually they are freaking so good at self deception (hence, I love love Robert Trivers' work) 

Brilliant interview (albeit they missed an important technical stuff - none of these was pioneered by Open AI) with Karen Hao author the new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Not many people make this connection but Andrew is not like other people - He puts Thiel, Musk and Altman in the same bucket as troubled creatures without morals. 

It's not clear to me that scaling AI models aggressively somehow makes it more dangerous in terms of military applications. Like, to me, the things that are dangerous for military applications are actually extremely simple AI models. Like, the reporting on Lavender that the Israelis were using to identify targets in Palestine, that was, like, an extremely basic approach. machine learning model that was practically just linear algebra. And the other thing that people worry about is autonomous weapons, which you do not use large language models to develop autonomous weapons. You use things like computer vision for identifying a target and then autonomously operating the weapon.

[---]

A lot of the concerns that people have about AI and military is they're actually talking about totally different types of technologies than what these companies are building. But then the companies are using the confusion to their advantage to say, oh, yeah, like keep giving us all the resources to build this completely wholly unrelated AI technology.

[---]

I'm not that interested in boardroom struggles and all that stuff, I have to say. But the one thing that does... That I did get from that is that we forget these people are humans. They have, the very brilliant ones, the ones that are making a lot of these decisions, Altman, Susqueva, Mirata, Musk, Teal, they're all complicated, flawed people. human beings. And they don't, because they're working in this industry, doesn't mean they have some sort of super intelligence or super morality. They don't. Altman himself, and this brings us to another, sort of just upsetting thing, which is his sister, which is this other story that comes out later, which also begins to just create a general sense of unease about this guy, because she has claimed publicly on many occasions that she was abused sexually by her family, including her brother. for many years, she ended up in a pretty rough state. I mean, she was, she was, she basically reduced only fans to keep herself going.

And she's the sister of this person. And they, of course, anybody involved in other family dynamics is going to, is, is, is dumb. It's obviously something I can't understand. I don't want to stand, but nonetheless, the disparity between this poor woman's utter cutoff, utter isolation, despair in such a massive enterprise that her brother is undergoing is,

[---]

We need to focus on AI development in the future is moving away from large scale models that are intending to be some kind of general purpose tool. And we should really be focusing on small task specific models again, which is what used to be what AI actually was. And the reason is it's so much less energy intensive.

You can train, you know, a cancer detection AI model on something like a powerful computer. You do not actually need cities of iPhones, as you so eloquently put it. And, like, that's, you know, that's very little cost for an extraordinary benefit. We want more cancer-detecting AI.

We also want more AI that can reduce the energy consumption of a building. We want more AI that can help do more accurate weather prediction and climate crisis prediction so that we can evacuate people more accurately when climate disasters strike.

But what Altman might say in return is, but you don't understand, AGI will solve climate change. Of course, which she says all the time. Which we'll get nuclear fission within a few minutes once Big Brain comes on. What are we going to call this thing?

What the fuck are we going to call this giant bloody thing that we all have to worship or that has the supreme intelligence? But yeah, that is the ultimate win-all argument, which is that, look, what we're developing is so smart, it will solve all the problems it creates.

And I have a facetious answer and a more legitimate answer. My facetious answer is throughout history, there have been people that have promised some kind of thing that will solve all your problems. And they have always been charlatans. Like if someone knocked on your door in the medieval ages and was like, I have this potion that's going to solve all your problems, you just have to give me everything, like your firstborn child and everything. Like you would be like, wait a minute, something's not quite adding up here. And now fast forward to today, that is essentially what these AI companies are saying.

They're like, give us everything and then we will give you a solution to all of your problems. I mean, if you just abstract it to that level, it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious what's actually happening. This is entirely a scam. But the less facetious argument is like, they are telling us, ignore all of the current, real, present-day problems based on the promise of something potentially arriving in the future. They've never actually, you know, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to deliver all these things that they say they will. So how long are we willing to burn down our planet and run down our resources and gouge out our economy and do all of these things for the speculative payoff? Like, at what point do we decide, wait a minute, why don't we actually just reinvest all this capital in solutions that we know will pay off?

[---]

It needs to be dealt with by people who just live ordinary lives. And it needs to be brought back to the human. And what some of these individuals, I think of Thiel particularly, their aspirations are truly, truly important. beyond responsible in my my view and and inhuman and you see in their desire to live forever the obvious natural conclusion to where they go they want to be gods yeah and and ai and hei is really their pathway to become gods and and we're not And it is insane to do so. And we're going to destroy ourselves if we do it.

[---]

And the one possible solace, which is the people leading these companies, are actually solid, moral, sane people. It seems to be lacking. I mean, honestly, I mean... You just observe Elon Musk's tweets and you're like, I understand this man is obviously a genius in many ways, right? The evidence of his achievements are overwhelming.

But he's out of his fucking mind. And the things he's saying are just so loony. The story you tell of Sam Altman is of a deeply disturbed person. A really fucked up person. I'm sorry. I don't know where he's coming from. I feel... I feel kind of proud that a young gay man, openly gay man, has done this. But we gays, we often spend a lot of time in childhood alone looking at computers and things. I mean, it's not an accident that we're overrepresented in many ways at the top of many companies.

But at the same time, boy, are they not that well. And they don't have... values, structures, morals that most of us would understand as solid. I mean, Peter Thiel says he's a Christian because you've read René Girard, but I'm sorry, but no, I don't see it that way at all.