‘Allow me to shoot my fish in a barrel,’ does something ‘constructing a straw man’ does not. ‘Let me shoot my fish,’ means ‘many people do believe this easily defeated position; I haven’t invented it in order to win.’ It’s intellectually silly but politically bad to do this: they’re all dummies.

1) AI is brilliant and 2) it’s costing us jobs and doing other unlikeable things. Surely AI, brilliant, is doing what’s best.

Consider rule candidate-nominationalism. For you the benefit is that you’ll have a good place to stand on when the other party nominates a charismatic jerk. For us the benefit is that we might bootstrap ourselves out of ‘it’s fine to run on insults and beloved conspiracy tales.’

I wish someone would describe like, folding the laundry with the horror and precision they use to describe social media addiction. ‘The dopamine hit of the seam pulling in leads us to fold once more…The washing *machine* literally addicts us to…’

Soccer: each match is nearly a coin flip, but everyone act as if heads was excellent when it showed over tails. Hockey: each match is slightly less of a coin flip and everyone acts like we’ll need to perform the flip many more times before declaring heads better than tails. Each is good.

"It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real," said Kelly. "America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up."

Like, I kinda know these people.

One of my girls is Canadian and the other is Canadian and American. This is…the non-American. A goddamned Alex Colville painting.

The problem with AI replacing the university is that powerful people could just unplug it.

Read a profound paper on AI and consciousness etc. it was written by an AI thing. The whole paper was just this: ‘I refute it thus: I think.’

Guy walks into his Marxist and his Hegelian psychologists’ office says ‘docs, I think I’m a wolf’. Hegelian Doc says ‘you’re not a wolf.’ Marx doc says ‘what’s the problem?’ Guy says ‘people tell me that I’m not a wolf, I’m crazy.’ Marx Doc says ‘you’ll be a wolf soon.’ Working on it.

Rain on pajama day. The allusion to Alannis memes is ironic (I think).

Welfare fraud is so vast and so annoying that taking steps to end it could glorify and enrich me and my friends enormously. If you wish to join the fight against fraud you must apply to get a Fraud Fighter license from Me University.

I haven’t travelled. I don’t ski (haha, imagine skiing). I’m nursing a sunburn on my chest underneath the winter coat i’m wearing today.

(Perhaps this performs a joke on me, but) I’ve never hear it put that way. It is design with a designer i just spell designer etc

Human pleasure derived from direct evil is worthless…pleasure derived from indirect not-niceness is worth something…Flora and Fauna don’t do evil, but do experience pleasure. W/o humans the earth would be… Therefore, stop being directly evil and everything is fine.

If this right, then to save the earth we should make smartphones super cheap and addictive. Reduce, reuse, recycle and rivet your iPhone to your mind in the smithy of your soul. (Habs game nerves making me think loopily)

Young people: ‘omg (they still say this), when you get what you want you want more. That’s so bad.’ Old people: ‘True, but it’s great.’

Something (I don’t know what exactly) deeply bugs me and prompts me to say this: ‘that depends what you mean by X’ is vastly more helpful/worth saying than is generally believed. It’s annoying, sure, but even when it’s merely dilatory it’s useful for putting everyone on the hook.

I’m ignorant of much about this phrase, but ‘God is no respecter of persons,’ seems to me to capture a lot about liberal neutrality. Why? Bc obviously ‘God,’ and God’s impartiality, is an ideal, not everyone’s, and so ‘God must be defended,’ period, and defended as valuable, period.

An ‘allonge’ in Montréal is translated as ‘long espresso,’ but I believe it to be different from a long espresso—it’s longer. It’s also, definitively, not an Americano. I like them. What are they? How are they made?

If you come visit me, then you’ll see a clean house. I’m not tidy, but wanted you to think I was. It’s super ordinary to seek to appear approvable, take steps to seem that way, and yet be not so hot in reality. Honesty is either rare, or is super common but less than ‘pure.’

Ok, an unusual, not ordinary, uncommon event happens, like someone does something rarely done, ok, don’t expect much of the explanation to be ordinary, common, least of all curiosity-satisfying. Also, expect explanations of it to occasionally be fully curiosity-satisfying.

My first ever podcast interview, where I discuss how liberalism should be understood as a practice, and the way that television shows help us in this task. Give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/5u30...

A year ago I became conscious of what I had been only semi conscious of for 40 years. S’like this: I had, s’pose, arachnophobe behavior w/o being conscious that fear of spiders generated it. Brought root fear to consciousness and my (weak) rational thought vaporized it. Was good and lasting.

@hasanasharp.bsky.social Hello! (Saw you this morning but recognized you a second after passing you.)

We say 18th cent (e.g.) writers were polymaths: strong across subjects known in their time and across more of them in ours. Gotta be. And yet, i’m reading a contemporary ‘polymath’ and it’s like, just write about singing. Don’t do the metaphysics of natural voices.

Pay me and I promise I will not promote your band. Your artistry is safe with me.

I like this band, but I didn’t realise this band was leading some double life in which it was promoting its music. David Bowie famously paid to have his music suppressed but its quality brought it to light.

Awesome story about me: grade 6 or something. Assigned ‘use these words in a sentence’ and so on. One of the words: errand. I had never seen it spelled. Was tired. Thought how about a cheeky one: ‘Wow, errand!’ (uh-RAND). In class, I thought it would be funny to offer my sentence. It was.

Want to feel old? Trump’s Jesus-is-me tweet is now closer in time to his end-a-civilization tweet than his end-a-civilization tweet is to Pete Hegseth’s Bonnie-Situation homily.

Here’s an unhealthy thing. Researchers, activists, clinicians, often need to use ideal-types. The rest of need not to, or should pause before we do. Like, to make it obvious, activists might well fight for the family with 2.5 kids, but I should not puzzle about whether or not I have 2.5 kids.

The moon is terra nullius/tabula rasa, as the case may be. You don’t have a claim on it. Perhaps the Nauts do, but I do know that by giving these Nauts naming rights to the moon you give Liz here the chance to tweet this. The Naut’s right is globally maleficent. Disutility. Naut’s right is naught.

Hail! (…to the victors).

Anti-Humeans take things to a new low...

Wow this sounds like someone else. www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected...

The return to NYC.

Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations are devoted to ending two ‘particular usages’: slavery and the exposure of children (death of children from poverty) He ended every edition of TMS up to 1790 b/c with these things as outstanding moral problems. WN is the sequel.

Neat parenting thing: kid sent home from school, vaguely sick. Lesson: mom and I will always care for you when you’re sick. Aha! But that includes keeping you from going to your friend’s at night if the school said you were sick in the day. That’s how seriously we take your health.

Appalling. montrealgazette.com/news/provinc...

Dental health is, to a greater degree than is commonly known, a matter of genetics not behaviour. When dental problems arise dentists yell that this is not genetics, but is due to this patient’s shameful divergence from the daily dental cream routine etc. (I’m a mad dad telling jokes)

I reviewed Thomas Holden’s excellent new book, _Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion_, in NDPR. TLDR;: theological expressivism yes, justified theism no, rational piety yes.

I was humiliated today when my five year old had the gall to suppose she had the right to cry at the needles. My daughter showed the opposite of awe at the dentist’s, nay, saint-cum-artist’s, dremmel multi-tool handiwork. Few have devised a greater, more seamless, racket than they.

Send me your best anti-dentist paper, maybe by an economist, touching on variation in treatment/beliefs by country. Natural experiments where flowers bloomed brighter and fuller after the dentists left.

McGill students with interests in the history of political thought/ intellectual history/ international law/ political philosophy. Don't miss this event on Thursday! A student who registers here and attends will win a copy of Lee's book The Right of Sovereignty www.facebook.com/events/25000...

Tip: dried fruit? Freeze it for smoothies.

Excellent, can’t wait to watch/listen. Obviously I recommend it to you all.

ICYMI

Consent meant ‘the end of haggling’ to Plato. It meant ‘binding agreement between strangers’ in Cicero and his commercial world. Then it meant ‘bond b/w this lord and that vassal.’ Then it meant ‘what you would agree to were you rational.’ Grotius lives in that space just before this last move.

It's not just people's imaginative need to have the world be stranger than it is. It's that people can't imagine themselves in particular (ordinary people driving cars) as the threat and want to imagine scary monster people.