Butlerian Jihad Now.

To all who celebrate

Every week I see a post like “well, Silicon Valley has built a dick-breaking machine. No matter how you feel about getting your dick broken, it’s our responsibility to integrate mechanical dick-breaking into our schools.”

In space no one can hear you Teams.

Israel passes bill mandating death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terror The Bill's Wording Creates a Distinction Designating It Almost Exclusively for Palestinian Terror, While the Ideological Burden of Proof It Sets Is Expected to Make Its Application to Jewish Nationali...

The Knesset passed a bill today mandating the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terror - but not for Jews.

There is a word for a legal system where different legal standards apply to different categories of people.
www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

I was there at 6:30 for a 9:30 flight

Strangely I flew out of terminal seven Monday and was thru in fifteen minutes, regular line

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down.

But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

Northanger Abbey ROCKETING up my Austen rankings, can’t believe I’ve never read it before

Me when I don’t have a crush: I wish I had a crush

Me when I have a crush: literally nothing could be worse than this

kind of goes without saying but the punctuation in Cormac McCarthy is not a mistake

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his substack depends on his not understanding it".

The word you are looking for, Tom, is "bad." A demented authoritarian illegally and immorally bombing a foreign country is bad.

Lacy’s a great writer and doesn’t ignore the issues, but I find it impossible to untangle Fennell’s “big swings” from her class privilege, and what we need more of is filmmakers without the same background given the same opportunities. Without depth, a big swing is just a Gatsby party.

What’s most annoying about this is it assumes economic insecurity is a product of individual “skills gaps” as opposed to a structural condition of our political/economic systems.

So now Ss are trapped in a system obsessed with job prep at a time when every company is gutting their future jobs.

Eisenhower

Great piece by @jenniferberkshire.bsky.social that offers a reminder of how thoroughly test score data can blind people to the humanity of the children these scores represent. I understand exactly how predictably “progressive teacher” that sounds, but I’ve lived and seen this myself and it’s real.

happy 14th anniversary to all who observe

if you read nothing else from rodger sherman in your entire life please read these paragraphs from the end of his newsletter, possibly the most important paragraphs anyone has ever written about Team USA

I love that it never feels like it needs to explain or justify it creates logic around what’s happening. We’re caught up in the same whirlwind as the characters

NBC ran a piece where Mary Carrillo went to Norway to find out why they're so good at the Winter Olympics and i was yelling BECAUSE IT'S COLD THERE

then she went to a little tiny ski jump for kids and was like "it's free, equipment is provided, & they don't emphasize results"

and i was like.
oh!

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

and i think the example of washington — whose peer, in this regard, is frederick douglass — is a reminder that artifice and performance are important parts of democratic society, and that the contempt for virtue signaling is corrosive. virtue is meant to be signaled!

This has inspired a fun new game in my friend group where we decide who in every relationship is the bird, and who is the rhino. It’s also a lovely piece

Functionalist approaches measure intelligence by how closely its outputs resemble the human mind. If you constantly recalibrate its outputs to resemble a human mind, you're not creating a thinking machine. You are creating a machine to trick other functionalists.