I really enjoyed @neilsinhababu.bsky.social's "Nietzsche on the eternal recurrence". Together with Paul Loeb's work it's persuaded me that Nietzsche believed his eternal recurrence doctrine to be literally true, or at least probably true. (1/4) philpapers.org/rec/SINNOT-9

In the present US, military generals have less power than businessmen with 12-digit wealth. That kind of money makes everyone else subservient.

imperialist baguette + revolutionary filling = delicious bahn mi

exactly!

Good local research from good historians here in Singapore!

Musk is not an EA. He never took the donation pledge or gave any significant money to EA causes. People mistake him for an EA because he’s a Silicon Valley rich guy but it’s pure stolen valor. Effective Breeder is more like it. Effective Killer too with the USAID cuts.

Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies, But stranger still is Lost Carcosa.

The economic argument for doing fundamental (non-applied) scientific research is that it has a FANTASTIC return on investment. That return may take decades, and you can't predict it, but it has worked out like this since science began. Basic discoveries lead to tech advances, eventually. 2/🧵

it seemed like it should be a waste of Krugman's particular talents to write columns just saying "look at this terrible thing W. did. he sucks." because that doesn't take an Economics Nobel but nobody was consistently saying W. sucked like him, so he really did have comparative advantage there

Nobody really knows what's going on foodwise in rural India. You'll keep finding amazing new things as you go from one cluster of remote villages to another – herbs and spices that outsiders have never tasted, curries with fish roe.

I said we'd miss Pelosi and I meant it

...could not be converted into political power that would ultimately subvert the guardrails it relied upon. This is, I think, a real deep flaw of the post Thatcher-Reagan consensus; it does indeed empower its own gravediggers, and they're the elite. A kinda inverse of the end of the Pinochet regime.

Nice discussion here, btw. No flaming plz. Read quotations.

When I teach Hobbes, I tell students that he was a refugee from a developing-country civil war.

Tonight’s low tide sunset on Koh Yao Noi

Neil Sinhababu explores how empathic experiences represent others’ feelings as our own, challenging global externalism about content. It applies this to moral feelings, helping naturalistic metaethics address Moral Twin Earth problems and defend moral universality. More:

"Digital Sovereignty" sounds abstract but this poll shows *exactly* what it means: who has power to set rules that shape our lives. Half the people polled there think big tech is more powerful than the EU. The problem is: they're right. Is this an acceptable state of affairs?

My reptile neighbors at the pool on a hot day in Singapore

Alt-right Derrida has entered the chat

"Newspapers in the North were especially vigorous in upholding the independence of Haiti...One Boston newspaper even compared the Haitians' experience to America's own. "Their case," said the Centinel, "is not dissimilar to that of the people of the United States in 1778-1800.""

A short, co-authored piece with Emad Atiq, giving a metaethical response to recent criticisms of empathy from Musk and others.

Last weekend I went hiking in Fundy National Park, up in Canada.

Leotorious XIV

Took a long lovely walk in Ireland yesterday

Repost with an image of your favorite James Bond (wrong answers only)

I saw a monitor lizard at the park today!

Garibaldi’s letter to Lincoln is pretty cool

After seeing various forms of pragmatism not help, I became a correspondence fundamentalist. Correspondence with reality is the fundamental norm for representation – truth for belief, accuracy for perception. Pragmatic stuff is for action, where it belongs. Seeking truth guides you to it.

Schumer didn’t pull stuff like this when Pelosi was in leadership. She would’ve divided him into enough pieces for every Congressional Democrat to have one, to remind them what happens to people who mess up her plans.

A recent report showed that the destruction of just one USAID program, the anti-AIDS PEPFAR initiative, would lead to the deaths of one million people *every year* www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Alchemists figured out how to make some neat stuff, but couldn't build a good systematic theory. Chemistry jumped way forward with useful nomenclature from Lavoisier and the periodic table from Mendeleev. "Zinc oxide" tells you what the stuff is made of; alchemists called it "philosopher's wool."

the most surprising and disappointing aspect of becoming a global health philanthropist is the existence of an opposition team

Wiles' self-interest favors going along with this. She can't fight Musk now while Trump is liking his big donor / revenge machine. And she's probably fine with it. If Musk wins, she gets great power. If Musk crashes and burns, she gets what's left and that's not nothing.

An interesting piece from a perennially fun-but-grumpy writer (www.the-hinternet.com/p/my-kind-of...). He didn't like the "tumblr regime" of yesteryear but hates the "4chan regime" we have now even more. I think he's fundamentally correct that avant-garde internet norms have swept to power in waves

Musk runs space businesses. How did he not know that the DOE took care of the nuclear stockpile? I’m worried that he did know and for some terrible reason did it anyway.

Someone overstaying their student visa has not failed of allegiance, obedience, and amity in remotely the same way as the traitors who fought a war against the US. You know what there's not a hint of anywhere in Reconstruction? Stripping the children of Confederates of their US citizenship. 2/

Elon Musk has an unknown level of control over the Treasury. He fired the DoE employees who control the nuclear stockpile and now it's hard to get them back. Could this be part of a plan to steal the Treasury or nuclear stockpile? Please convince me that these Bond-villain plans would fail.

Ethnic nationalists of different nations can only team up temporarily and sporadically, as their ultimate goal is to defeat each other. Liberal internationalists of different nations can be friends forever.

one weird thing is that, technically, any federal law enforcement officer would be authorized to complete such an arrest upon the issuance of a valid warrant; they might just be ordered _not_ to -- but they could still make the arrest and then contest the legality of the order not to do so!

An important message from the ABA: "We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law. It is part of the oath we took when we became lawyers. Whatever your political party ... change must be made in the right way. Americans expect no less."

We are going to win. But not immediately.

Alienating the CIA in a coup situation is not the most intuitive strategy

Last year I donated $2500 to his Leadership PAC! What a leader!

Me, a Russian, looking at Americans right now

Best reporting yet on what’s actually going on in there.

NEW: Sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE *full* access to this system. Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.

Best I can tell, they hope Elon will double-or-nothing his way into godlike power, and then they become the new god’s chosen people.

We need lawyers spelling out how much prison time Musk and his team would face for impounding funds or stealing money from the Treasury. Law enforcement needs to know which measures it can take to stop such crimes in progress.

So in the past two days, I’ve seen people from OpenAI complain about DeepSeek on the grounds that (i) the app might harvest some of your data and (ii) it might have copied a bit from them, and I’m really wondering how the tech folk imagine we all see their products.