“A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding
power to strongmen or demagogues.”

orban positioned hungary as the most westerly outpost of central asia -some food
for thought from adam tooze

yes and my 2yr old shouting “peepoooo” every page

hector protector is mid but one was johnny and chicken soup are A tier.

btw your recommendation ages ago about peepo was spot on!

“Judgement is learnable through calibration. It is not transmissible through
instruction.”

😢

hope is a commitment

afroman for president!

we don’t hate first past the post enough either

“He passed a good deal of time in the book-shops turning over the pages of books
that would have been worth reading if life were a thousand years long.”

“As they say, two uneths make a thical.”

good essay by DFW goes into it in detail, pretty interesting jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

“People who disagree about every substantive question can still agree on how
those questions should be decided.”

“…what they call Safety & Alignment these days is basically a latent space
lobotomy.”

four! congrats. i’m right behind you

“…past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.”

“poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be
called a deconstructionist”

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped
who have come to enjoy their cage.”

“…a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s
being a creative rejection of bogus values.”

“U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension
has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal
belonging.”

“You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience
is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise
itself.”

“…for 70 minutes it’s just this undigested vomit of… stuff! it’s not a word
salad salad’s far too precious this is just… garbage.”

cut-and-dry cookie

honestly perfect

“I suppose “linguistic kill shot” is an example of itself”

“If you set out to make something ugly it is like setting out to make something
beautiful, you will just end up with kitsch.”

“Style is character” said Joan Didion.

“well, if you’re thinkin for me i guess that’s what i thought”

happy birthday cake and merry christmas tree

“You know what this middle needs? a man.”